Damakawa
| Damakawa | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Nigeria ( Kebbi State ) | |
| speaker | <10 | |
| Linguistic classification |
Niger-Congo
|
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-3 |
dam |
|
The Damakawa is an almost extinct Platoid language in northwestern Nigeria .
There are currently no speakers of the language to be found, although the oldest people can still remember a few words. About 80 words and phrases were recorded, with difficulty, by April 2008. The language seems to have been unknown to linguists by then.
The Damakawa gradually adopted English as the official language, but some can also speak C'Lela , and it is the case that all or almost all of them used to be able to speak the lingua franca , Hausa . The Hausa name for the ethnic group is also Damakawa.
classification
The language belongs to the northwestern group of the West Kainji subgroup of the Benue Congo languages , which in turn belong to the Niger-Congo language family . The words that have been collected show similarities with both the C'Lela and the Kambari languages, and the Kambari words are mostly loanwords or mis-rememberings .
Alternative names
The neighboring Cicipu speakers refer to the Demakawa language as 'Tidama'un'. In the Hausa language of trade , the name of the language Damakanci is given to the people called Damakawa. However, the Demakawa themselves prefer the word Damakawa.
Geographical distribution
The Damakawa people have a total of around 500-1,000 members who live in three villages near Maganda in the Sakaba Local Government Area in the Nigerian state of Kebbi State .
Web links
- ISO 639-3 Request for new language code (PDF; 112 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ McGill, Stuart. 2008. The Damakawa language. Unpublished manuscript. (PDF; 308 kB).