An insatiable appetite for ancient and modern tongues
An insatiable appetite for ancient and modern tongues
Overview and Distribution. Chadic languages constitute one of six branches of the Afro-Asiatic family (or phylum). There are about 140 or 150 of them, and they are spoken by about 40 million people to the west, south and east of Lake Chad in West Africa, particularly in Chad, northern Cameroon, southern Niger and northern Nigeria.
Hausa has, by far, the greatest number of native speakers of any Chadic language and is also one of the major lingua francas of Africa. The other Chadic languages range from 0.5 million speakers to a few hundred and several are endangered.
Internal Classification. Chadic is divided into four sub-branches: Western, Central, Eastern, and Masa.
a) Western. West of Lake Chad, in northern Nigeria and southern Niger and northeastern Benin, including 60 languages with more than 36 million speakers in total, of which Hausa is the most prominent.
b) Central or Biu-Mandara. South of Lake Chad, in eastern Nigeria, northern Cameroon and southwest Chad, including 45 languages spoken by more than 2 million people.
c) Eastern. In central and south Chad, including 25 languages with less than 100,000 speakers each.
d) Masa. In northern Cameroon and southwest Chad, including five closely related languages spoken by about 700,000 people in total.
Major Languages and Speakers. Below, we show the most important Chadic languages with their approximate number of speakers:
Western Central Eastern Masa
Hausa
Angas
Bade
Karekare
Ron
Bole
Warji
Saya
35,000,000
500,000
250,000
150,000
115,000
100,000
78,000
50,000
Marghi
Kamwe (Higi)
Bura
Mandara
Huba (Kilba)
Bacama
Bata
Mafa
Cibak
Tera
Musgu
Gidar
Buduma
Kotoko
Sukur
350,000
300,000
250,000
200,000
175,000
150,000
150,000
140,000
100,000
100,000
90,000
66,000
55,000
40,000 15,000
Nancere
Dangaléat
Kera
Mubi
Gabri
Tobanga
Tumak
Lele
Masmaje
81,000
60,000
50,000
36,000
35,000
30,000
26,000
26,000
26,000
Masana
Musey
Marba
Pévé
Mesme
240,000
240,000
150,000
36,000
21,000
SHARED FEATURES
✦ Phonology
Vowels
-The vowel system can vary from two vowels (a, ə) as in Bacama, Bata and Mandara to five vowels in Hausa and seven in Dangaléat (Dangla).
-Typically, certain vowels are restricted to specific positions within the word. In many languages, vowel length is distinctive but it may be limited to certain positions or to open syllables (like in Hausa).
Consonants. Chadic languages have some distinctive consonantal sounds:
-Implosive stops (ɓ, ɗ). They require movement of the glottis during pronunciation to inhale air. They are widespread within Chadic.
-Ejective stops. Sounds produced using the glottis to push air out. They are found in Hausa and other languages.
-Prenasalized stops (mb, nd). When producing the sound it occurs first a short nasal stop and then an oral stop. They are commonplace in Chadic.
-Labio-velar stops (kp, gb). Sounds produced with two simultaneous closures, labial and velar. They are found in a few Chadic languages like Bacama, Daba, Mofu-Gudur, Gidar and Kotoko.
-Voiceless and voiced lateral fricatives are common sounds in Central Chadic languages and in some Western ones.
-Labial flap. This is a, comparatively rare, voiced sound produced with the lower lip flapped downwards behind the upper teeth. It is found in some languages of the four Chadic groups, e.g. Ron, Tera, Kera and Pévé (belonging to Western, Central, Eastern and Masa, respectively).
Tones
-All Chadic languages have tones which convey different meanings to morphologically identical words or mark grammatical features. They usually have two or three tones. For example, Hausa has two level tones (high/low) and Angas three (high/mid/low).
✦ Morphology
Nominal
-Many Chadic languages have masculine and feminine genders, but only in the singular. Pronouns are marked for gender except in the first person (an Afro-Asiatic feature). Some languages have lost the gender distinction altogether.
-Plural formation is complex, a characteristic of Afro-Asiatic. Some languages restrict plural marking to human and animal nouns.
-Chadic languages have no case system. They use, instead, prepositions (besides word order) to establish syntactical relations.
Verbal
-Tense, mood and aspect (perfective, imperfective) can be indicated by tone and/or markers. Mood may be coded separately from tense and aspect.
-New meanings may be added to the verb by means of verbal extensions (a derivational process). They may express location or direction of an action, perfective aspect (completed action), transitivity or voice (benefactive, causative). In some languages, extensions are suffixes included in the verb while in others they are independent particles.
-Chadic languages have plural verbs (pluractional) to express repeated action or an action performed by several subjects or affecting several objects. Pluractional stems are formed by the insertion of the infix a in the stem, or by syllable reduplication or by doubling of consonants (gemination).
✦ Syntax
-In Chadic, word order is, generally, Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) with the adjectival modifier following the head noun, and possessor following possessed. In some Biu-Mandara languages VSO is predominant but this seems to be an innovation. Negative particles occupy the final position in the clause.
Lexicon
A number of words that seem to derive from Proto-Chadic (meaning ‘baobab, crocodile, fish’, etc) suggest a savannah landscape close to a large water surface (probably Lake Chad) as the Chadic homeland. Chadic languages have lexical borrowings from English, Arabic (especially in Hausa), Fula, and East Sudanic.
Scripts
Hausa uses a modified Latin alphabet (bóokòo) which has replaced (partially) the Arabic script (àjàmí) of former times. Most other Chadic languages are unwritten though some have also adopted the Latin script.
© 2013 Alejandro Gutman and Beatriz Avanzati
Further Reading
-A Linguistic Geography of Africa. B. Heine & D. Nurse (eds). Cambridge University Press (2008).
-Handbook of African Languages, Part II: Languages of West Africa. D. Westermann & M. A. Bryan. Oxford University Press (1952).
-'Hausa and the Chadic Languages'. P. Newman. In The World's Major Languages, 618-634. B. Comrie (ed). Routledge (2009).
-'Chadic Overview'. R. G. Schuh. In Selected Comparative-Historical Afrasian Linguistic Studies, pp. 55–60. M. Lionel Bender, G. Takács, and D. L. Appleyard (eds.). Lincom Europa (2003). Available online at:
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/downloadable_papers.html
-'Chadic Languages'. P. J. Jaggar. In Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World, 206-208. K. Brown & S. Oglivie (eds). Elsevier (2009).
Chadic Languages
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