Dahalo language

Dahalo is an endangered South Cushitic language spoken by about 400 people in Kenya.

It is largely spoken in the area of the Tana River. Many, if not all, of its speakers are bilingual, their other language being Swahili.

It is distinguished by the use of clicks as phonemes. It is suspected that the Dahalo may have once spoken a Sandawe-like language, and that they retained clicks in some words when they shifted to a Cushitic language. If so, the clicks represent a substratum.

Sounds

Consonants

Dahalo has 62 consonants:

			Labial	Dental/Alveolar			Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar		Epiglottal	Glottal
				dental	alveolar	labial			plain	labial
Stop	plain	voiceless	p	t̪	t̠				k	kʷ	ʡ	�"
		voiced	b	d̪	d̠				ɡ	ɡʷ
	pre- nasalized	voiceless	mp	ⁿt̪	ⁿt̠				ŋk	ŋkʷ
		voiced	mb	ⁿd̪	ⁿd̠	ⁿd̠ʷ			ŋg	ŋgʷ
	nasal		m	n				ɲ
	ejective		p'	t̪'	t̠'				k'	k'ʷ
	implosive		�"	ɗ
Affricate	plain	voiceless		ʦ			ʧ
		voiced			ʣ	ʣʷ	ʤ
	pre- nasalized	voiceless		ⁿʦ			ⁿʧ
		voiced		ⁿʣ			ⁿʤ
	nasalized click	voiceless		>		>ʷ
		voiced		>		>ʷ
	ejective	central					ʧ'
		lateral		tɬ'				cʎ̥'
Fricative		central	f	s   (z)			ʃ				ʜ	h
		lateral			ɬ	ɬʷ		ʎ̥
Approximant		central						(j)		w
		lateral		l
Trill				r

The prenasalized voiceless stops have been analysed as syllabic nasals plus stops by some researchers. However, one would expect this additional syllable to give Dahalo words additional tonic possibilities, as Dahalo pitch accent is syllable-dependent (see below), and Ladefoged reports that this does not seem to be the case.

When geminate, the epiglottals are a voiceless stop and fricative. (Thus is not pharyngeal as sometimes reported, since pharyngeal stops are not believed to be possible.) In utterance-initial position they may be a partially voiced (negative voice onset time) stop and fricative. However, as singletons between vowels, is a flap or even an approximant with weak voicing, while is a fully voiced approximant. Other obstruents are similarly affected intervocalically, though not to the same degree.

Vowels

Dahalo has 10 vowels:

	Front		Back
High	i / iː		u / uː
Mid	e / eː		o / oː
Low	a / aː

Dahalo has both long and short vowels.

Syllable and phonotactics

Dahalo words are commonly 2-4 syllables long. Syllables are exclusively of the CV pattern, except that consonants may be geminate between vowels. As with many other Afro-Asiatic languages, gemination is grammatically productive. Voiced consonants partially devoice, and prenasalized stops denasalize when geminated as part of a grammitical function. However, lexical prenasalised geminate stops also occur.

(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 .)

Dahalo has pitch accent, normally with zero to one high-pitched syllables (rarely more) per root word. If there is a high pitch, it is most frequently on the first syllable; in the case of disyllabic words, this is the only possibility: e.g. head, pierce.

Grammar

External links

* Ethnologue entry for Dahalo

Bibliography

* Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (15th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. ISBN 1-55671-159-X. (Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com).
* Maddieson, Ian; Spajić, Siniša; Sands, Bonny; & Ladefoged, Peter. (1993). Phonetic structures of Dahalo. In I. Maddieson (Ed.), UCLA working papers in phonetics: Fieldwork studies of targeted languages (No. 84, pp. 25-65). Los Angeles: The UCLA Phonetics Laboratory Group.