Koromfe
| Koromfe | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Burkina Faso , Mali | |
| speaker | maximum 10,000, according to Ethnologue: 196,100 | |
| Linguistic classification |
|
|
| Official status | ||
| Official language in | nowhere official language | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-3 | ||
Koromfe (phonetically [koromfe]), also written with "u" instead of "o" or with "é" instead of "e", is a Gur language that is mainly spoken in northern Burkina Faso .
The distribution area of the language consists of rural areas that extend in a crescent shape to the west, south and east of the city of Djibo ; a few speakers live in neighboring Mali .
Koromfe is - very unusual for a Gur language - not a tonal language and is threatened with extinction due to the more dominant languages Mòoré and Fulfulde . Koromfe can be divided into an eastern and a western dialect, which was described in the grammar of John Rennison in 1997 and on which the presentation in this article is based.
Phonology
Vowels
Koromfe has 20 phonemic vowels: five full vowels, each with an advanced tongue root (ATR) equivalent . All full vowels also appear in a nasalized form.
There is also a variable, weak Schwa that can only appear between two consonants. Schwas disappear as the speech increases.
| front | central | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| closed | ɪ , i | ʊ , u | |
| medium | ɛ , e | ( ə ) | ɔ , o |
| open | a , ʌ |
Consonants
Koromfe has 17 phonemic consonants. There are also the following allophones :
- the tap / ɾ / is (except in foreign words) an allophone of / d / that appears only at the beginning of the word and after nasal consonants as [d],
- the fricative / ɣ / is an allophone of / g / which appears at the beginning of the word, after nasal consonants and near a high vowel with advanced tongue root as [g],
- the consonants / j, w, h / also appear in the nasalized forms [ĵ, ŵ, ĥ].
| bilabial | labiodental | alveolar | palatal | velar | glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives | p , b | t , d | k , ɡ | |||
| Nasals | m | n | ŋ | |||
| Taps | ɾ | |||||
| Fricatives | f , v | s , z | ɣ | H | ||
| Approximants | j | w | ||||
| Lateral | l |
literature
- Rennison, John: Koromfe . Routledge, London 1997, ISBN 0-415-15257-7 .
- Prost, André: La langue des Kouroumba ou akurumfe . A. Schendl, Vienna 1980, ISBN 3-852-68068-9 .
Web link
Individual evidence
- ↑ John Rennison: Koromfe. London: Routledge 1997, p. 2
- ↑ entry to Kurumfe to ethnologue.com