Day (also spelled Daye) is an
Adamawa language
The Adamawa languages are a putative family of 80–90 languages scattered across the Adamawa Plateau in Central Africa, in northern Cameroon, north-western Central African Republic, southern Chad, and eastern Nigeria, spoken altogether by on ...
of southern
Chad
Chad, officially the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of North Africa, North and Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to Chad–Libya border, the north, Sudan to Chad–Sudan border, the east, the Central Afric ...
, spoken by 50,000 or so people southeast of
Sarh
Semi-active radar homing (SARH) is a common type of missile guidance system, perhaps the most common type for longer-range air-to-air and surface-to-air missile systems. The name refers to the fact that the missile itself is only a passive dete ...
. ''Ethnologue'' reports that its dialects are mutually intelligible, but Blench (2004) lists ''Ndanga, Njira, Yani, Takawa'' as apparently separate languages.
Pierre Nougayrol's publications and field notes of Day from the 1970s constitute almost all of the available materials on the Day language.
[Nougayrol, Pierre. 1979. Le day de Bouna (Tchad), I: phonologie, syntagmatique nominale, synthématique. (Bibl. de la SELAF (Société des Etudes Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France), 71-72.) Paris: Paris. 174pp.][Nougayrol, Pierre. 1980. Le Day de Bouna (Tchad), II: Lexique Day-Français, Index Français-Day. (Société d'Études Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France, 77-78.) Paris: Centre National de la Récherche Sciéntifique. 176pp.][Nougayrol, P. 1977. Éléments de phonologie du day de Bouna. In Caprile, J.-P. (ed.), Études phonologiques tchadiennes, 213-231. Paris: SELAF.]
Güldemann (2018) notes that Day has few morphological and lexical features that are typical of
Niger-Congo, and hence cannot be classified with certainty.
Phonology
There are three tones: high, low, and mid.
Lexicon
Some fish names in Day:
[
Other animal names:
*kòŋní ʔólò ('' Pila wernei''), a gastropod
Plant names in Day:]
References
*Roger Blench, 2004
List of Adamawa languages
(ms)
{{Authority control
Languages of Chad
Mbum–Day languages