Daatsʼiin is a B'aga language of western

Ethiopia Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

. There are two communities of speakers in western Ethiopia, one in Mahadid, on the northeast border of Alitash National Park, and one in Inashemsh on the

Sudan Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northeast Africa. It borders the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west, Libya to the northwest, Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the east, Eritrea and Ethiopi ...

border, south of the park where the

Rahad River The Rahad is a river that flows in Ethiopia and eastern Sudan. The sources of this river are in Ethiopia, where it is called Shinfa, and a tributary of the Abay (Blue Nile) on the right side. The river has its origins in the Ethiopian Highlands ( ...

crosses from Ethiopia into Sudan. Daatsʼiin was first reported in 2013 and described by Colleen Ahland in 2014. Ahland has described it further in 2016. A comparative word list of Daatsʼiin, Northern Gumuz, and Southern Gumuz is available in Ahland & Kelly (2014).Ahland, Colleen and Eliza Kelly. 2014.
Daatsʼíin-Gumuz Comparative Word list
'. Of the other B'aga languages, Daatsʼíin has the greatest lexical similarity to Southern Gumuz, but the two groups communicate in

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

Amharic Amharic is an Ethio-Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. It is spoken as a first language by the Amhara people, and also serves as a lingua franca for all other metropolitan populati ...

Phonology

The consonant inventory of Daatsʼíin: The palatal stops , , can be also realized as palatalized velar stops , , in

free variation In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers. Sociolinguists argue that describing such ...

. and are rare, both recorded only from one word so far. The former appears to be phonemic, but the latter might be an

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...

of . The

voiced pharyngeal fricative The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\. Epiglot ...

only occurs when following or and preceding , and it can be analyzed as an allophone of the glottal stop . Daatsʼíin has eight vowel phonemes: Ahland analyzes , , , , as phonemically

long Long may refer to: Measurement * Long, characteristic of something of great duration * Long, characteristic of something of great length * Longitude (abbreviation: long.), a geographic coordinate * Longa (music), note value in early music mens ...

, and , , as phonemically short , , respectively. Daatsʼíin is also a

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasi ...

: vowels can bear high and low tone. Some examples of

downstep Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first. Two main kinds of downstep can be distin ...

occur.

Grammar

Daatsʼíin has several grammatical differences from other Gumuz languages. Verbs inflect for aspect ( perfective–imperfective) rather than for tense (future–non-future). Verbs are

polysynthetic In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...

in all languages, but the order of the morphemes differs in Daatsʼiin, and some morphemes that occur in one language do not occur in the other(s). "The major constituent order in Daatsʼíin clauses tend to be AVO/SV."

Notes

Literature

* {{Languages of Ethiopia Languages of Ethiopia Bʼaga languages