The Cangin () languages are spoken by 200,000 people (as of 2007) in a small area east of
Dakar
Dakar ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Senegal, largest city of Senegal. The Departments of Senegal, department of Dakar has a population of 1,278,469, and the population of the Dakar metropolitan area was at 4.0 mill ...
,
Senegal
Senegal, officially the Republic of Senegal, is the westernmost country in West Africa, situated on the Atlantic Ocean coastline. It borders Mauritania to Mauritania–Senegal border, the north, Mali to Mali–Senegal border, the east, Guinea t ...
. They are the languages spoken by the
Serer people
The Serer people (''Serer language, Serer proper'': Seereer or Sereer) are a West African ethnoreligious groupGastellu, Jean-Marc, ''Petit traité de matrilinarité. L'accumulation dans deux sociétés rurales d'Afrique de l'Ouest'', Cahiers ORST ...
who do not speak the
Serer language
Serer, often broken into differing regional dialects such as Serer-Sine and Serer-Saloum, is a language of the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo family spoken by 1.2 million people in Senegal and 30,000 in the Gambia as of 2009. It is the ...
(''Serer-Sine''). Because the people are ethnically Serer, the Cangin languages are commonly thought to be dialects of the Serer language. However, they are not closely related; Serer is closer to
Fulani than it is to Cangin.
Languages
The Cangin languages are:
Lehar and Noon are particularly close, as are Ndut and Palor, though not quite to the point of easy intelligibility. Safen is transparently closer to Lehar–Noon than to Palor–Ndut.
Reconstruction
Merrill (2018: 451) reconstructs Proto-Cangin as follows.
[Merrill, John Thomas Mayfield. 2018. ]
The Historical Origin of Consonant Mutation in the Atlantic Languages
'. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
See also
*
Serer language
Serer, often broken into differing regional dialects such as Serer-Sine and Serer-Saloum, is a language of the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo family spoken by 1.2 million people in Senegal and 30,000 in the Gambia as of 2009. It is the ...
*
List of Proto-Cangin reconstructions (Wiktionary)
Footnotes
References
*Walter Pichl, ''The Cangin Group: A Language Group in Northern Senegal'', Pittsburgh, PA : Institute of African Affairs, Duquesne University, Coll. African Reprint Series, 1966, vol. 20
*
Guillaume Segerer & Florian Lionnet 2010
"'Isolates' in 'Atlantic'" ''Language Isolates in Africa'' workshop, Lyon, Dec. 4
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cangin Languages
languages
Languages of Senegal
Languages of the Gambia
Languages of Mauritania