Songhai languages

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Expansion of the Songhai languages

The Songhai languages , also known as Songhai-Djerma as a language group , is a group of closely related languages and dialects that are concentrated around Niger and, due to the great importance of the Songhai Empire, it was widely used as Lingua Franca from the 15th to the 17th centuries Find.

Main branches

The Songhai (native pronunciation: 'sõʀai̯ , the gh corresponds to the Arabic ghain ) is divided into two main branches:

Southern Songhai is mainly spoken around the Niger River . The largest representative is Zarma (Djerma), one of the main languages ​​in Niger with 2 million speakers mainly in the south of the country, including the capital Niamey . To the south of it is the Dendi spoken in northern Benin , which is strongly influenced by Bariba . West thereof to the borders of Mali is Kaado spoken. In Mali, around 400,000 people speak Koyra Senni , in addition to which there are Koyra Chiini on the banks of the Niger in the west and Humburi Senni in the south of the country as an isolated linguistic island around the city of Hombori . "Tondi Songway Kiini" ("Songhai language of the mountain people"), which was discovered in several villages around 120 kilometers west of Hombori, is also assigned to the southern Songhai. The subdivision of Southern Songhai is controversial. If one orientates oneself on the distinction between western, central and eastern Songhai, the following scheme results:

Northern Songhai is a significantly smaller group of dialects in the Sahara that are heavily influenced by Berber languages , especially Tamascheq . Tihishit is spoken by nomads in central Niger in the Mazababou area in two sub-dialects, Tagdal and Tabarog, and Tadaksahak in northern Mali around Ménaka . By sedentary peoples is Tasawaq Language in northern Niger, which is in the order Ingall spoken Ingelsi and the now extinct language of Agadez splits, as well as on the Algerian - Moroccan border at Tabelbala spoken Korandje Language used. This results in the following scheme for northern Songhai:

classification

Before Joseph Greenberg, it was unclear how the Songhai languages ​​were to be classified. Diedrich Hermann Westermann was unsure whether he should classify the language as isolated or place it among the Gur languages , and Maurice Delafosse grouped them into the Mande languages . At present, the Songhai languages ​​are counted among the Nilo-Saharan languages ​​after Greenberg's 1963 reclassification of African languages . Greenberg relies on 70 words, including pronouns , whose relationship with Nilo-Saharan he postulated. This argument was continued in particular by Lionel Bender and Christopher Ehret. Bender regards Songhai as an independent subfamily of Nilosaharan. On the other hand, based on 565 words he classified as related, Ehret sees Songhai as part of the Western Sahelian branch to which u. a. include the Maba languages of western Sudan and eastern Chad .

However, this classification is still controversial. Greenberg's work was heavily criticized by Lacroix (1969, pp. 91 f.), Who recognized only 30 of the related words identified by Greenberg as such. The fact that almost all of them can be found in Nigerian Zarma and are related to words from the neighboring Saharan languages suggests that they are classified as loan words . Certain similarities between Songhai and Mande have long been known. The possibility of a relationship between the two language families was considered by Hans Günther Mukarovsky (1966), Denis Creissels (1981) and Robert Nicolaï (1977, 1984). Creissels found about 50 points of comparison, including many body parts and suffixes (e.g. the causative suffix -endi ). Nicolaï found not only about 450 similar words, but also suspicious typological matches. Ultimately, however, Nicolaï came to the conclusion that this approach was unsuitable and in 1990 proposed the fundamentally new hypothesis that Songhai was a Berber-based Creole language whose structure was influenced by Mande. He substantiated this hypothesis with 412 possible similarities, ranging from basic vocabulary ( tasa "liver") to obvious borrowings ( ansad "violin", alkaadi " kadi "). Others, such as B. Gerrit Dimmendaal, however, were not convinced, and Nicolaï (2003) seems to continue to regard the question of the origin of the Songhai as open, but argues vehemently against the etymologies proposed by Ehret and Bender.

For example, Greenberg postulated the pronouns ai "I" (e.g. Zaghawa ai ), ni "du" (e.g. Kanuri nyi ), yer "we" (e.g. Kanuri -ye ) as morphological correspondences with Nilo-Saharan , wor "their" (z. B. Kan -wi ), the adjectives and relative pronouns forming suffixes -ma (z. B. Kan -ma ) and ko (z. B. Maba -ko ), the plural-forming suffix -an , the -a indicating intransitivity / passivity (e.g. Teso -o ) and the hypothetical plural suffix -r , (e.g. Teso -r ) postulated by him , which he also sees in the pronouns yer and wor .

The most striking correspondences with Mande that Creissels lists are the third-person singular pronouns a (Pan-Mande a ) and plural i (Pan-Mande i or e ), the demonstrative pronouns wo (Manding o , wo “this”) and no (Soninke no , other Mande na "there"), the negation na , which also occurs in a number of Manding dialects , the negative perfect mana (cf. Manding má , máŋ ), the subjunctive ma (Manding máa ), the copula ti ( Bisa ti , Manding de / le ), the verbal conjunction ka (Manding kà ), the resultative suffix -ri (Mandinka -ri , Bambara -li for progressive nouns), the ethnonymic suffix -ncè (Soninka -nke , Madinka -nka ), the Ordinary suffix -anta (Soninke -nte ), the causal suffix -endi (Soninke, Madinka -ndi ) and the postposition ra "in" (Manding lá , Soso ra ).

Web links

Wictionaire, Dictionary Songhai Koyraboro Senni - French,> 3000 words

bibliography

Lexicons, grammars and monographs

  • MC Charles & JM Ducroz, 1976. Lexique songay-français, parler kaado du Gorouol . Paris.
  • Auguste Dupuis-Yacouba , 1917. Essai pratique de méthode pour l'étude de la langue songoï . Paris.
  • Jeffrey Heath , 1999. Grammar of Koyraboro (Koroboro) Senni, the Songhay of Gao . Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
  • Jeffrey Heath , 2005. Tondi Songway Kiini (Songhay, Mali) . Stanford: CSLI
  • Robert Nicolaï , 1981. Les dialectes du songhay . Paris.
  • Robert Nicolaï & Petr Zima, 1997. Songhay . Munich - Newcastle: Lincom Europe.
  • A. Prost, 1956. La langue soney et ses dialectes , Dakar.

For the classification of the Songhai languages

  • Lionel Bender , 1997. The Nilo-Saharan Languages: A Comparative Essay . Munich.
  • D. Creissels, De la possibilité de rapprochements entre le songhay et les langues Niger-Congo (en particulier Mandé) . In: Nilo-Saharan , Th. Schadeberg, ML Bender eds., Pp. 185-199.
  • Christopher Ehret , 2001. A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan . Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
  • Joseph Greenberg , 1963 . The Languages ​​of Africa (International Journal of American Linguistics 29.1). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
  • Pierre-Francis Lacroix, 1969. The songhay-jerma ensemble: problemes et thèmes de travail . Actes du 8e Congrès SLAO , Abidjan. pp. 87-99.
  • Hans Günther Mukarovsky . On the position of the Mandes languages . Anthropos 61: 679-88, 1966.
  • Robert Nicolaï , 1977. Sur l'appartenance du songhay . Annales de la faculté des lettres de Nice , 28, pp. 129-145.
  • Robert Nicolaï , 1984. Préliminaires su l'origine du songhay (matériaux, probématique et hypothèses) , Berlin.
  • Robert Nicolaï , Parentés linguistiques (à propos du songhay) , Paris: CNRS 1999. ISBN 2-222-04425-1 .
  • Robert Nicolaï , La force des choses ou l'épreuve 'nilo-saharienne': questions sur les reconstructions archéologique et l'évolution des langues , SUGIA 13, Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag 2003, ISBN 3-89645-099-9

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Jeffrey Heath: Tondi Songway Kiini. Reference Grammar and TSK-English-French Dictionary. Stanford 2005, ISBN 9781575865058 .
  2. ↑ See Michael J. Rueck / Niels Christiansen: Northern Songhay Languages ​​in Mali and Niger. A Sociolinguistic Survey at http://www.sil.org/silesr/1999/008/nsonghay.html