Laal
| Laal | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Chad | |
| speaker | 749 (as of: 2000) | |
| Linguistic classification |
Unclassified language
|
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
- |
|
| ISO 639-3 |
gdm |
|
Laal is a still unclassified language that is spoken by approx. 750 inhabitants (as of 2000) of three villages in the Moyen-Chari prefecture in Chad . It is likely an isolated language , so it would represent an isolated holdover from an extinct Central African language family. It is (with the exception of linguistic transcriptions ) unwritten, purely orally transmitted language. According to David Faris, a member of SIL Chad, Laal is threatened with extinction as more and more speakers under 25 are making use of the locally more strongly represented Baguirmi .
Language first moved into the focus of linguistic considerations in 1977 through Pascal Boyeldieu's field work on a single speaker from Damtar from 1975 to 1978.
Speaker and status
Most of the speakers are river fishermen and farmers who sell salt as an additional income , which they gain from the ashes of burned palm trees. Like their neighbors, the Niellim , they were originally cattle herders who lost their herds around the turn of the century . The majority belong to Islam , although they practiced the Yondo religion of the Niellim until the second half of the 20th century . The area is pretty undeveloped; There are Koran schools in Gori and Damtar, but the nearest state school is 7 km away and there is no pharmacy in the entire region (as of 1995).
The village of Damtar used to have its own dialect, Laabe ( la: bé ), which was spoken by only two or three villagers in 1977; it was replaced by the Gori dialect after two families fled a war to Damtar in the late 19th century. No other dialects of the Laal are known.
According to Chadian law, Laal - like all languages of Chad except French and Arabic - has the status of a national language . Although the 1996 constitution stipulates that "the funding and development conditions for all national languages are to be guaranteed by law", no Chadian national language is used in education or for official purposes; only some of the more widely used languages have their own radio stations.
Classification
Laal could not be classified so far, although there are strong influences of the Adamawa-Ubangi languages (mainly Bua ) and, to a lesser extent, the Chad languages . Therefore, Laal is sometimes assigned to one of these two language families , but is far more often treated as an isolated language . Roger Blench (2003) assumes that "his vocabulary and morphology come partly from the Chadian, partly from the Adamawa languages - and the rest from an unknown source, perhaps the extinct language family of the Laal."
There are many loan words from the Baguirmi in Laal , as the region formed part of the Baguirmi Empire for several centuries ; the local capital was Korbol . In addition, most of the residents of the area speak Niellim as a second language, and at least 20% -30% of the Laal vocabulary has similarities with that of this language. In addition, with the spread of Islam, some Arabic loanwords came up.
literature
- Ernst Kausen: The language families of the world. Part 2: Africa - Indo-Pacific - Australia - America. Buske, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-87548-656-8 , pp. 471-474.