Bozo (language)

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Bozo
Linguistic
classification

Niger Congo

  • Mande
    • West Mande
      • northwest
        • Soninke – Bobo
          • Soninke – Bozo
    Bozo
Language codes
ISO 639-3

bzx (Hainyaxo)
boo (Tiemacèwè)
boz (Tiéyaxo)
bze (Jenaama)

Bozo (sometimes Boso , 'house of the bamboo') is a language spoken by the Bozo people , the main fishing people of the Massina in Mali .

According to the 2000 census, the number of Bozo native speakers is 132,100. The Bozo dialect continuum is often viewed as one language, but there is great diversity within it. Four languages ​​are recognized based on literacy materials requirements . Bozo is part of the north-eastern group of the Mande languages ; the closest linguistic relative is Soninke , a main language spoken in the north-western section of southern Malis, eastern Senegal and southern Mauritania . The Bozo often speak one or more regional languages ​​such as Bamana , Maasina-Fulfulde , West Songhay and, increasingly, recently, French . Bozo itself is a tonal language , with three lexical tones.

The Bozo cluster is divided into the following varieties:

  • Hainyaxo (Hainyaho) (a few thousand speakers)
  • Tiɛma Cɛwɛ (Tièma cièwe) (2,500 speakers 1991)
  • Tiéyaxo (Tigemaxo) (only a few thousand speakers left)
  • Sorogaama (Jenaama, Sorko) (200,000 speakers 2005)

Hainyaho, spoken by the Hain (so-called Xan), is the most western dialect, spoken in two respects Niger. It is most closely related to the Tigemaxo, its eastern neighbor which is spoken around Diafarabe . The central and most widely spoken Bozo language is Sorogama, which actually consists of four dialects: Pondori (south of Mopti ), Kotya, Korondugu (north of Mopti) and Debo (around Lake Débo ). Tièma Cièwè is the northeasternmost of the Bozo cluster, spoken near Lake Debo.

literature

  • Blecke, Thomas (1998) Lexical structures and grammatical categories in the Tigemaxo (Bozo, Mande) . Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. ISBN 3-89645-070-0
  • Daget, Jacques & Konipo, M. & Sanakoua, M. (1953) 'La langue bozo' (Études soudaniennes, 1). Koulouba: Institut français d'Afrique Noire , Gouvernement du Soudan, Center Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Ethnologue (15th edition) reports for both Hainyaho and Tigemaxo identical speaker counts: 117,696, from the 1987 census. In the fourteenth edition, this number was noted to be the number of 'all mother tongue Boso speakers'. ( [1] , [2] ) In the light of the 200,000 reported speakers of Sorogama, by far the most widely spoken Bozo variety, speaker numbers for Hainyaho and Tigemaxo are put at 'a few thousand' here.