Dahalik

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Dahalik (dahālík)

Spoken in

Eritrea
speaker 2500 (2012)
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

-

ISO 639-3

dlk

Dahalik language (even Dahlik or Dahaalik ; own name: [haka (na)] Dahalik language "[Language (s)] people from Dahlak") is a äthio- Semitic language on three islands of Dahlak archipelago before Eritrea is spoken.

Dahlak Archipelago (Eritrea)
Dahlak Archipelago
Dahlak Archipelago
Location of the Dahlak archipelago in front of Eritrea

Dahalik is spoken by around 2500 to 3000 people on the islands of Dahlak Kebir , Norah and Dehil in the Dahlak Archipelago belonging to Eritrea. In linguistics, it was classified as a dialect of the Tigre until the French linguists Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle and Martine Vanhove came across it in 1996 and classified it as a separate language. Simeone-Senelle carried out further research from 2002.

Dahalik has similarities to the Tigre and Tigrinya and belongs genetically to the same subgroup of the Ethiosemitic languages. However, communication between Dahalik speakers and Tigre speakers from the port city of Massaua is difficult. Dahalik was also influenced by Arabic and the Cushitic language Afar , because a number of Dahalik speakers also use these two languages, some of them also speak Tigre. Some Eritreans also considered Dahalik to be an Arabic dialect, and many speakers of the language viewed it themselves as a mixed language of Tigre, Afar and Arabic.

There are several varieties of language on Dahlak Kebir, which differ in phonetics , morphology and vocabulary. Stories and poems on Dahalik have been passed down orally, there is no written tradition. Because Dahalik was not yet known as its own language when Eritrea became independent in 1993 and established its language policy, it is not one of the nine officially recognized national languages. Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle worked out a script for Dahalik with the Latin alphabet and a dictionary. The authorities want to introduce Dahalik to schools in the Dahlak Archipelago, where classes are currently taught in Arabic.

The sound system comprises 24 consonants and seven vowels (a, ɛ, e, i, o, u, ə). The usual sentence structure is subject-object-verb (SOV). There are two grammatical genders (masculine and feminine) and two numbers ( singular and plural ). The gender of adjectives is often differentiated by ablaut , for example with ellim / ellam "black" and nūš / nīš "small, young". The personal pronouns are ana (I), enta / enti (you, m / f), itu / ita (he / she), neḥna (we), intum / intun ( hers , m / f) and itun / itan (she, m / f).

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Individual evidence:

  1. ↑ a b c d e Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle: Dahālík, a newly discovered Afro-Semitic language spoken exclusively in Eritrea (PDF; 126 kB), in: shaebia.org, 2005
  2. ↑ a b Lost Eritrean language put on record ( Memento from August 16, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), in: al Jazeera English, June 1, 2005

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