Dahalo language
Dahalo | |
---|---|
numma guhooni | |
Native to | Coast Province |
Native speakers | 580 (2019)[1] |
| |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | dal |
Glottolog | daha1245 |
ELP | Dahalo |
Dahalo is an endangered Cushitic language spoken by around 500–600 Dahalo people on the coast of Kenya, near the mouth of the Tana River. Dahalo is unusual among the world's languages in using all four airstream mechanisms found in human language: clicks, implosives, ejectives, and pulmonic consonants.
While the language is known primarily as “Dahalo” to linguists, the term itself is an exonym supposedly used by Aweer speakers that itself essentially means “stupid” or “worthless.”[2] The speakers themselves refer to the language as numma guhooni.
Overview
The Dahalo, former elephant hunters, are dispersed among
Dahalo has a highly diverse sound system using all four
In addition, Dahalo makes a number of uncommon distinctions. It contrasts
It is suspected that the Dahalo may have once spoken a Sandawe- or Hadza-like language, and that they retained clicks in some words when they shifted to Cushitic, because many of the words with clicks are basic vocabulary. If so, the clicks represent a substratum.
Dahalo is also called Sanye, a name shared with neighboring Waata, also spoken by former hunter-gatherers. The Waata may once have spoken a language more like Dahalo before shifting to Oromo.
The classification of Dahalo is obscure. Traditionally included in
Phonology
Consonants
Dahalo has, by all accounts, a large consonant inventory. 62 consonants are reported by Maddieson et al. (1993),[5] whereas Tosco (1991) recognizes 50.[3] The inventory according to the former is presented below:
Labial | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Epiglottal
|
Glottal | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
laminal | apical | labial
|
plain | labial
| ||||||||
Nasal | m | n
|
ɲ | |||||||||
Nasalized click (1) |
plain | ᵑʇ
|
ᵑʇʷ | |||||||||
glottalized
|
ᵑʇˀ
|
ᵑʇˀʷ | ||||||||||
Stop
|
plain | voiceless
|
p | t̪
|
t͇
|
k | kʷ | ʡ | ʔ | |||
voiced | b | d̪
|
d͇
|
ɡ | ɡʷ | |||||||
ejective | pʼ | t̪ʼ
|
t͇ʼ
|
kʼ | kʷʼ | |||||||
implosive | ɓ | ɗ | ||||||||||
prenasalized | voiceless
|
ᵐp | ⁿt̪ | ⁿt͇ | ᵑk | ᵑkʷ | ||||||
voiced | ᵐb | ⁿd̪ | ⁿd͇ | ⁿd͇ʷ | ᵑɡ | ᵑɡʷ | ||||||
Affricate
|
plain | voiceless
|
ts | tʃ | ||||||||
voiced | dz | dzʷ | dʒ | |||||||||
ejective | tsʼ | tʃʼ | ||||||||||
lateral | ejective | tɬʼ | c𝼆ʼ | |||||||||
prenasalized | voiceless
|
ⁿts | ᶮtʃ | |||||||||
voiced | ⁿdz | ᶮdʒ | ||||||||||
Fricative
|
central | f | s z | ʃ | ʜ | h | ||||||
lateral | ɬ͇
|
ɬʷ | 𝼆 | |||||||||
Approximant
|
l
|
j | w̜ | |||||||||
Trill | r
|
- 1 The dental clicks are most commonly written ⟨ǀ⟩, but that can be misread as ⟨l⟩. Thus, for legibility, the alternative letter ⟨ʇ⟩ is used here; this is found in a few sources such as Elderkin. They may freely vary as lateral clicks.
Tosco's account differs in not including the labialized clicks, the palatal laterals, and the voiceless prenasalized consonants (on which see below), analyzing /t͇ʼ/ as /tsʼ/, and adding /dɮ/, /ʄ/ and /v/ (which Maddieson et al. believe to be an allophone of /w/).
This typologically extraordinary inventory appears to result from extended contact influence from substratal and superstratal languages, due to long-running bilinguality. Only 27 consonants (shown in bold) are found in the final position of verbal stems, which Tosco suggests represents the inherited Cushitic component of the consonant inventory.
Several phonemes can be shown to be recent intrusions into the language through loanwords:[3]
- /z/ is only found in recent loans from Bantu and can be nativized as /d̪/.
- /tʃʼ/ is only found in loanwords from Swahili.
- /ʃ/ is only found in loanwords from Swahili and Somali.
Additionally, several consonants are marginal in their occurrence. Five are only attested in a single root:
- /ⁿd͇ʷ/
- /ᶮdʒ/, in /kípuᶮdʒu/ 'place where maize is seasoned'
- /ᵑɡʷ/, in /háᵑɡʷaraᵑɡʷára/ 'centipede'
- /ɬʷ/, in /ɬʷaʜ-/ 'to pinch'.
- /j/, in /jáːjo/ 'mother'.
Less than five examples each are known of /ᵑʇˀʷ, tʃ, tsʼ, tʃʼ, kʷʼ, dɮ, ʄ, ⁿd͇, ⁿdz/.
The prenasalized voiceless stops have been analyzed as syllabic nasals plus stops by some researchers. However, one would expect this additional syllable to give Dahalo words additional
Allophony
The laminal coronals are
When geminate, the epiglottals are a voiceless stop and fricative. In utterance-initial position they may be a partially voiced (negative
/b d̪ d͇/ are often opened to approximants [
There is a lot of variability in the voicing of clicks, so this distinction may be being lost. The nasal clicks are nasalized prior to the click release and are voiced throughout; the voiceless clicks usually have about 30ms of voice onset time, but sometimes less. There is no voiceless nasal airflow, but following vowels may have a slightly nasalized onset. Thus these clicks are similar to glottalized nasal clicks in other languages. Voiceless clicks are much more common than voiced clicks.
Vowels
Dahalo has a symmetric 5-vowel system of pairs of short and long vowels, totaling 10 vowels:
Front | Back | |
---|---|---|
High | i / iː | u / uː |
Mid | e / eː | o / oː |
Low | a / aː |
Phonotactics
Dahalo words are commonly 2–4 syllables long. Syllables are exclusively of the
The consonants /b/ and /d̠/ are systematically excluded from the word-initial position.
(It is likely that the glottals and clicks do not occur as geminates, although only a few words with intervocalic clicks are known, such as /ʜáŋ̊|ana/.)
Dahalo has
Status of clicks
Dahalo is one of very few languages outside southern Africa to have phonemic clicks (the others being Sandawe and Hadza in Tanzania and Damin, a ceremonial register of Lardil formerly spoken on Mornington Island in Australia). The clicks in Dahalo are not Cushitic in origin, and may be a remnant of a shift from a non-Cushitic language. Ten Raa shows some slight evidence that speakers of Dahalo once spoke a language similar to Sandawe, which does have clicks.[6] This might explain why clicks are only present in about 40 lexical items, some of which are basic (e.g. "breast," "saliva," and "forest").[7]
Ehret reported that different words had either dental and lateral clicks, while Elderkin reported that these were allophones. It's not clear if an old distinction has merged, or if the place of articulation is variable because there is no distinction to maintain.
References
- ^ a b Dahalo at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)
- ^ STILES, D. (1982). A HISTORY OF THE HUNTING PEOPLES OF THE NORTHERN EAST AFRICA COAST: Ecological and Socio-Economic Considerations. Paideuma, 28, 165-174. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/41409881
- ^ a b c d Tosco, Mauro (1991). A Grammatical Sketch of Dahalo (including texts and a glossary). Kuschitische Sprachstudien. Vol. 8. Hamburg, Germany: Helmut Buske Verlag.
- ^ Kießling, Roland (2001). "South Cushitic links to East Cushitic". In Zaborski, Andrzej (ed.). New Data and New Methods in Afroasiatic Linguistics.
- ^ Maddieson, Ian; Spajić, Siniša; Sands, Bonny; Ladefoged, Peter (1993), "Phonetic structures of Dahalo", in Maddieson, Ian (ed.), UCLA working papers in phonetics: Fieldwork studies of targeted languages, vol. 84, Los Angeles: The UCLA Phonetics Laboratory Group, pp. 25–65
- ^ Ten Raa, E. (1969). "Sanye and Sandawe: A common substratum?" African Language Review 8, 148–155.
- ^ Sands, Bonny & Tom Güldemann (2009). "What click languages can and can't tell us about language origins". In Botha, Rudolf & Chris Knight (Eds.), The Cradle of Language, pp. 213–15. Oxford.