Kemant (language)

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Kemat

Spoken in

EthiopiaEthiopia Ethiopia
speaker 4.830
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

-

ISO 639-3

ahg

Kemant (own name Kemantney, other name Qimant) is an endangered language that is only spoken by a few older members of the Kemant ethnic group in northern Ethiopia , especially in Chilga ( Woreda ) in the Semien-Gondar region between Gonder and Metemma .

classification

The language belongs to the western branch of the Central Kushitic languages, which also includes the now extinct languages ​​Kwara and Kayla. As a Cushitic language , Qimant belongs to the family of Afro-Asian languages .

Geographical and social distribution

The Kemant is the original language of the Kemant ethnic group from the Semien-Gondar region in Ethiopia . Although this ethnic group still belonged to 172,327 people according to the 1994 census, the language is now only spoken by a small proportion of them. The number of native speakers is 1625, Kemant is used as a second language by a further 3450 speakers. All speakers live in either Chilga or Lay Armachiho and are over 30 years old, with over 75% being over 50 years old. The language is no longer passed on to the next generation of speakers, as most of the Kemant speak Amharic . Language is not used as an ordinary means of communication, either in public or at home, but is only used as a kind of secret code.

Phonology

Consonants

Consonant phonemes
labial Alveolar Palatal Velar
easy labialized
nasal m n   ŋ ŋʷ
Plosive unvoiced   t tʃ k kʷ
voiced b d dʒ ɡ ɡʷ
Fricative unvoiced f s ʃ χ χʷ
voiced   z   ɣ ɣʷ
Flap   r      
Approximant l j   w

Consonants (with the exception of plosives and nasals) can be geminated within the word.

Vowels

Vowel phonemes
  Front tongue vowels Central vowels Back vowels
closed ​i​ ​ɨ​ ​u​
medium   ​ə​ ​O​
open   ​a​  

Phonotactics

The maximum syllable structure is consonant-vowel-consonant. Consonant clusters are therefore only possible inside a word, but in loanwords from Amharic they can occur within a syllable. Vowel clusters are not possible. Consonant cluster with more than two consonants going through Epenthesis (According inset) of the vowel / ⁠ ɨ ⁠ / broken.

grammar

morphology

With regard to the person , a distinction is made between 1st person singular / plural, 2nd person singular / polite / plural and 3rd person male / female / plural. The inflected categories are marked by suffixes on the verb . Zelealem (2003, p. 192) names three different aspects : perfect , imperfect and progressive .

syntax

The basic form of the sentence order in Kemant, as in all other Afro-Asian languages ​​of Ethiopia, is subject-object-verb. Due to the presence of a case declination , other, marked sentence positions are also possible. While noun phrases are generally legal , numerals can also be placed after the noun. Subordinate clauses come before the main verb of the sentence.

Dictionary

As the language becomes extinct, many words have already been replaced by Amharic words.

literature

  • Zelealem Leyew. 2003. The Kemantney Language - A Sociolinguistic and Grammatical Study of Language Replacement . Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
  • David L. Appleyard. 1975. "A descriptive outline of Kemant," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 38: 316-350.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Qimant. In: Ethnologue . Accessed July 11, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Zelealem 2003, p. 30
  3. ↑ Zelealem 2003, p. 62
  4. ↑ cf. the map in Zelealem 2003, p. 31
  5. ↑ Zelealem 2003, p. 63
  6. ↑ Zelealem 2003, p. 75
  7. ↑ a b Zelealem 2003, p. 158
  8. ↑ Zelealem 2003, pp. 160f
  9. ↑ Zelealem 2003, pp. 252-262