Kiyaka
| Kiyaka | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Angola , Democratic Republic of the Congo | |
| speaker | 900,000 | |
| Linguistic classification |
|
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-3 | ||
Yaka is a Bantu language and is spoken by approximately 900,000 people in northern Angola and in the province of Bandundu ( Democratic Republic of the Congo ).
Alternative names are Iyaka , Kiyaka, and Yiyaka .
classification
Kiyaka belongs to the Niger-Congo family , within which it belongs to the branch of the Benue-Congo languages and there to the Bantoid languages . The language is located in Guthrie Zone H31 and is related to Kintandu , Umbundu and Kiyombe , among others .
Phonology
Vowel inventory
Kiyaka has an inventory of five short and five long vowels .
| front | central | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| high | i | u | |
| central | e | O | |
| deep | a |
| front | central | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| high | iː | uː | |
| central | eː | O | |
| deep | aː |
The vowels follow a vowel harmony .
Consonant inventory
Kiyaka has simple and compound consonants at the phonemic level.
| labial | alveolar , dental | palatal | velar | glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives | b, p, pʰ | t, tʰ | k, kʰ | ||
| Nasals | m, mb | n, nd | ŋ | ||
| Fricatives | v | z | |||
| f | s | H | |||
| Affricates | mbv | ndz | |||
| pf | ts | ||||
| Lateral | l | ||||
| Sliding sounds | w | y |
The composite sequences in the table should be viewed as complex segments rather than underlying units. They are derived from phonological rules. So the table is more of a phone inventory.
Syllable structure
The typical ( canonical ) syllable in Yaka language takes the form of CV. (Where C = consonant and V = vowel.)
However, there are also other syllable structures:
| Syllable structure | example | translation |
|---|---|---|
| V | a bwe | What happened? |
| CV | ha.ta | Village |
| CVV | taː.ta | father |
| CGV | kya taa.ta | dad's |
| CGVV | mwaːna | child |
| N | n.ta | beat him / her |
(Where G = sliding sound, N = nasal and. = Syllable boundary)
V-syllables are very rare and can be found mainly in vocatives and interjections . Syllables that contain a sliding sound are often created through a phonological process of devocalization, which changes high and back into the corresponding sliding sound if they were placed in front of the final vowels / a /, / e / and / o /.
Although the vowel length has a different meaning, CVV syllables (= CVː) do not occur unpredictably, but preferentially as stem initial syllables. If CVV syllables occur within a word, this is often the result of suffixation , stem or word final they only appear in loan words (from French ).
volume
Kiyaka is a tonal language , which means that the pitch of a vowel is meaningful. Phonetically , three tones can be distinguished: H (high), L (low) and R (extra high , R = raised).
Tone is distinctive both lexically and grammatically . ndóòngò (HLL) means "needle", while ndòóngò (LHL) means "palm wine".
morphology
Like most Bantu languages, Kiyaka has an “agglutinative” morphology, which means that morphemes only express one grammatical category and the connection is (predominantly) concatenative . The existence of nominal classes is also typical for Bantu languages.
Bibliography and web links
Individual evidence
swell
- Kiyaka in the Ethnologue
- Kidima, L. (1991). Tone and accent in KiYaka. Dissertation, University of California. Los Angeles. (PDF; 5.0 MB)
- Haspelmath, Martin; Dryer, Matthew S .; Gil, David, et al. (Ed.) (2005): The World Atlas of Language Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further literature
- Kidima, L. (1990). Tone and Syntax in Kiyaka. In Inkelas, S. and Zec, D., eds., The Phonology-Syntax Connection , pp. 195-217. The University of Chicago Press. ( Link to Google Books )