Duala (language)
| Duala | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Cameroon | |
| speaker | 88,000 | |
| Linguistic classification |
||
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
dua |
|
| ISO 639-3 | ||
Duala (own name Duálá ; also Diwala, Dualla, Dwala, Dwela ; French Douala ) is a Bantu language in Cameroon . It is spoken by around 88,000 people.
classification
Duala is a Northwest Bantu language and belongs to the Duala group , which is classified as the Guthrie Zone A20.
It has the dialects Bodiman, Mungo (also Mungu and Muungo), Oli (also Ewodi, Ouri, Uli, Wuri, Wouri and Koli) and Pongo.
history
Almost nothing is known about the beginnings of the Duala. It is relatively certain that the Duala people settled at the present-day location from around 1600 at the latest. According to their own tradition, the Duala first immigrated from present-day Gabon or Congo, but their language is more closely related to Cameroonian languages such as Basaa or Bakoko than to Gabonese or Congolese languages - although the Basaa were in the Wouri area before the Duala - Estuars lived.
From the beginning of the 16th century the Duala, who began to dominate local trade with the Europeans, undertook many trade trips inland and as far as Calabar , which gave their language the function of a lingua franca . It only lost its importance as a commercial language when Cameroon became a German colony and the Kamtok gained more and more influence. At the same time, however, it was used in schools and churches and was the first Cameroonian language with a Bible translation. The British Baptist missionary Alfred Saker , who came to Fernando Póo in 1844 , translated the New Testament by 1862 and the Old Testament in 1872 , thus completing the entire Bible .
Today, the Duala is again a commercial language in the west of the country, also due to the increasing population of the city of Douala . The language is also spoken in the districts of Moungo , Nkam and Wouri in the province of Littoral and the district of Fako in the province of Sud-Ouest . Around 25–50% of the bilingual speakers can read and write Duala.
grammar
As is usual with Bantu languages, the Duala is also an agglutinating language and has a so-called nominal class system , which divides the nouns into classes, which are each identified with different class prefixes. It is also typical for his affiliation with Bantu that the Duala is a tonal language .
phonetics
The vowel inventory of the Duala is relatively simple, but Ittmann mentions in his grammar of the Duala, in addition to the / i / and / u / specified in the table, also a 'wide i' and a 'wide u', which presumably correspond to the almost closed / ɪ / and / ʊ / correspond. These sounds and the consonant / ɾ /, which is a pronunciation variant of / l / or / d /, are not listed in the official general alphabet of the Cameroonian languages .
The duala therefore has seven vowels, which are usually short. It has no diphthongs .
| Vowels | front | back |
|---|---|---|
| closed | i | u |
| half closed | e | O |
| half open | ɛ | ɔ |
| open | a | . |
The Duala has some of the characteristic sounds of the Protobantu, in particular a large number of prenasalized plosives and affricates . Some sounds occur almost exclusively in foreign and loan words (/ g /, / tʃ / and / f /), others can only appear at the beginning of a word: the crackling sound before vowel-like words, / h / with some interjections , / dʒ / with Class 5 nouns .
| Consonants | bilabial | labiodental | alveolar | palatal | velar | glottal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasals | m | . | n | ɲ | ŋ | . |
| Plosives | p / b | . | t / d | . | k / g | ʔ |
| Prenasal plosives | mp / mb | . | - / nd | . | ŋk / ŋg | . |
| voiced implosives | ɓ | . | ɗ | . | . | . |
| Fricatives | . | f / - | s / - | . | . | h / - |
| Approximants | . | . | l | . | w | . |
| Taps / flaps | . | . | ɾ | . | . | . |
| Affricates | . | . | . | tʃ / dʒ | . | . |
| Prenasalized affricates | . | . | ntʃ / ndʒ | . | . |
The Duala has various rules of assimilation and vowel harmony , which, among other things, trigger the occurrence of prenasalized plosives and affricates at the beginning of a word.
Syllable structure
In the duala, nasals can form the syllable core in addition to vowels . A nasal can occur in the approach, provided the word begins with a prenasal consonant. Most of the syllables in Duala are open ((N) CV or N), closed syllables ((N) CVC) are rare.
Sounds
The Duala has a whole range of tones, including some that arise solely from the coincidence of existing tones. The following tones are available in the Duala:
- high ◌́
- deep ◌̀
- medium ◌̄
- increasing ◌̌
- falling ◌̂
- high-falling ◌᷇
- high-rising ◌᷄
- deep-falling ◌᷆
- low-rising ◌᷅
- rising-falling ◌᷉
- falling-rising ◌᷈
The compound tones are created not only by the meeting of simple tones at morphemic and word boundaries, but also by global rules that cause the tones to gradually decrease over the course of the sentence.
Spelling
There are essentially two different ways of writing the Duala, each based on the Latin script . The older spelling goes back to an alphabet developed by the Basel Mission with the help of Carl Meinhof in 1901, which only uses Latin letters, some of which are provided with diacritics. The newer spelling was established in 1978 in the general alphabet of the Cameroonian languages (English GACL). Some of the letters are taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet .
| The alphabets in comparison | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meinhof | Aa | Port | Cc | Dd | Ee | E̱e̱ | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Yy | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Ṅṅ | Ńń | Oo | O̱o̱ | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Ww | Yy | |
| GACL | Aa | Port | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ɛɛ | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Yy | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | NYny | Ŋŋ | Oo | Ɔɔ | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Ww | Yy | |
| Phonemes | a | b, ɓ | c | d, ɗ | e | ɛ | f | ɡ | H | i | dʒ | k | l | m | n | ŋ | ɲ | O | ɔ | p | ɾ | s | t | u | w | j | |
literature
- Ralph A. Austen, Jonathan Derrick: Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers . The Duala and their Hinterland, c. 1600-c. 1960. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999.
- Theodor Christaller: Handbook of the Duala language . Mission bookshop, Basel 1892.
- Bernd Heine: African lingua franca . Infratest, Cologne 1968.
- Johannes Ittmann : Grammar of Duala (Cameroon) . Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1939.
- Paul Helmlinger: Dictionnaire duala-français . Suivi d'un lexique français-duala (Cameroun). Klincksieck, Paris 1972.
- Johannes Ittmann: Dictionary of the Duala language (Cameroon). Dictionnaire de la langue duala / Dictionary of the Duala Language . Ed .: E. Kähler-Meyer. Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1976, ISBN 978-3-496-00624-4 .
- August Seidel: The Duala language in Cameroon . Systematic dictionary and introduction to grammar. Julius Groos' Verlag, Heidelberg 1904 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive [accessed December 20, 2011]).
- Maurice Tadadjeu & Étienne Sadembouo (eds.): Proposition d'un alphabet général des langues camerounaises . ONAREST, Yaoundé 1978.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Láŋga na tila lá duálá 1: Syllabaire 1 en langue duala /. (No longer available online.) Département des Langues Africaines et Linguistique, FLSH, Université de Yaoundé, 1985, formerly the original ; Retrieved December 20, 2011 (French). ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b Duala. A language of Cameroon. www.ethnologue.com, accessed December 20, 2011 .
- ↑ Austen and Derrick 8.
- ↑ Heine 133-35.
- ↑ Ittmann 1939, 6.
- ↑ Ype Schaaf: L'histoire et le rôle de la Bible en Afrique , CETA, HAHO et CLE, Lavigny 2000, ISBN 9-966-886-72-9 , pp. 60-63
- ↑ Ittmann 1939, 15.
- ↑ Ittmann 1939, 15-17.25.
- ↑ Ittmann 1939, 17–30.
- ↑ Ittmann 1939, 31.
- ↑ Ittmann 1939, 37-48.
- ^ Helmlinger ix.
