Sidaama (Sidaamu Afoo)

Anbessa Teferra
Tel Aviv University

This book presents a descriptive grammatical sketch of Sidaama, a Highland East Cushitic language spoken in south-central Ethiopia. It deals with phonology, lexical categories, phrasal categories, and sentence structure of the language.

The introduction deals with classification of Sidaama, geographical and cultural information, present status of the language and a review of previous studies. The second chapter is devoted to phonology and covers segmental phonemes, syllable structure, consonant sequences, stress and major phonological processes such as epenthesis, metathesis and various assimilatory processes. The third chapter covers lexical categories. The major lexical categories are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The minor ones are conjunctions and postpositions. This is followed by morphological processes such as inflection, derivation and compounding.

In the fourth chapter simple and complex phrasal categories are discussed. The phrasal categories are noun phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase, adverbial phrase and postpositional phrase. Furthermore complements selected by phrases and specifiers which accompany them are treated.

The fifth chapter deals with sentence structure. The first portion covers the structure of simple sentences while the second portion deals with complex sentence types. At the end of the book two short texts are included.

ISBN 9783862885701. Languages of the World/Materials 501. 116pp. 2014.

A Descriptive Grammar of Bə̀mbələ̀

Gabriel Delmon Djomeni
University of Cape Town

This book is the first and a detailed descriptive grammar of Bə̀mbələ̀, a Bantu Equatorial language spoken in Cameroon. It covers its phonology, morphology and syntax. It also includes some basic information on its writing system. The book is divided into seven chapters. It begins with the presentation of the language, its geographic location and the socioeconomic background of the community.

The first chapter analyses the phonology of the language with focus on its sound system and tone patterns. Chapter 2 addresses its noun morphology with focus on noun classes. Chapter 3 accounts for the modifiers of the noun. Chapter 4 tackles the elements of the verb group with attention on the verb and its satellites. Chapter 5 addresses the study of tense, aspect and mood and then negation in the language. Chapter 6 analyses the syntax of Bә̀mbәlә̀, bringing out its sentence constituents structure. Chapter 7 presents the alphabet and the orthography rules of the language.

The reader will be struck by the wealth of data provided and the detail of the analysis. Furthermore, the presentation of the data in three levels at the level of the noun and verb morphology gives the book a pedagogic and self-relying character.

ISBN 9783862885732. Languages of the World/Materials 502. 230pp. EUR 72.80. 2014.

A Grammar of Onondaga

Michael Barrie
Sogang University

Onondaga is a member of the Northern branch of the Iroquoian family. It is spoken in Ontario, Canada and New York State in the United States. It is a highly endangered language with only a small handful of speakers, mostly over 60. Like other Iroquoian languages, Onondaga has a small phonemic inventory, but a rich inflectional and derivational morphology. It is a polysynthetic language with noun incorporation, subject and object agreement, and numerous morphological resources expressing both compositional and non-compositional meanings. Word order is rather free, but certain regularities are noted.

The grammar aims to be theoretically neutral and draws data as much as possible from naturalistic data as possible. As Northern Iroquoian languages are closely related, comparisons to other Northern Iroquoian languages are made periodically. This grammar is the result of 8 years of fieldwork at Six Nations in Ontario, Canada.

ISBN 9783862886005. Languages of the World/Materials 503. 102pp. 2015.

Zaniza Zapotec

Natalie Operstein

University of California, Fullerton

Zaniza Zapotec, known to its speakers as /ɾiʐ ziniz/ ‘the word/language of Zaniza’ or simply /ɾiʐ-n/ ‘our word/language’, is an Otomanguean language spoken in the town of Santa María Zaniza in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The language is endangered and presently undocumented. The grammar outline presented in this book is based on the author’s fieldwork carried out in Mexico between 1999 and 2009, and is the first grammatical sketch of Zaniza Zapotec to appear in print.

Typical of Zapotec languages, Zaniza Zapotec has tones, stress, five vowel qualities, contrastive vowel phonations, and consonantal fortis-lenis contrast that comprises most of its twenty-seven consonant sounds. Its verbal system marks aspect and mood by prefixes; there is no overt morphological marking of tense. Most Zaniza Zapotec verbs come in opposite-valence pairs. In contrast to many related languages, there is a productive anti-causative/passive morpheme and an intricate system of interaction between negation and mood/aspect markers. Zaniza Zapotec has suppletion in both nouns and verbs, including with respect to the person of the recipient in the verb give.

ISBN 9783862886593. Languages of the World/Materials 504. 123pp.  2015.

A Grammar of Haro

Hirut Wolde-Mariam

Addis Ababa University

Haro is an endangered language spoken by less than 200 people who live on the eastern shore of an island in Lake Abaya.  Lake Abaya is located in the southwestern part of Ethiopia. Genetically, the language belongs to the Ometo linguistic group of the Omotic language family within the Afro-Asiatic super-family.  This study provides description of the phonological, morphological and syntactic structures of the language.  The structures of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, deictics, numerals, simple sentences and complex sentences are described and analyzed. Haro has a largely suffixal, transparent, agglutinative morphology that allows concatenation of up to four suffixes in a word stem.  It is common for inflectional categories to be expressed cumulatively by the use of portmanteau morphemes in contrast to derivational categories expressed by separate morphemes.  Haro is an interesting language from typological and historical perspectives. For instance, unlike the situation with related languages, the case system in Haro involves three core cases, and employs ‘differential case marking’ that exempts certain nouns from case marking. The three-way number marking in nouns is also attested uncommon among the Ometo languages.  Haro exhibits an intricate system of focus marking that affects the morpho-syntactic properties and categorization of a verb.   

9783862886661. Languages of the World/Materials 505. 248pp. 2015.

Kisangani Swahili

Choices and Variation in a Multilingual Urban Space

Nico Nassenstein

University of Cologne

The emergence of complex language practices in multilingual settings of urban Africa and the study of speakers’ broad linguistic repertoires have increasingly moved into the academic focus of linguists over the past couple of years. Kisangani Swahili constitutes a fluid urban practice spoken in the convergence area of Lingala and Swahili in the city of Kisangani, but also throughout Tshopo District (Province Orientale, DR Congo) by more than a million people. Swahili as spoken in Kisangani has developed into a variety marked by speakers’ linguistic choices, indexing speakers’ potential underlying knowledge of Lingala and French. While the influence from French has mainly affected Kisangani Swahili at a lexical level, Lingala and to a minor extent also non-Bantu languages such as Zande have significantly contributed to morphosyntactic variation in the variety. The complementary geographical distribution of the two languages, Lingala and Swahili, in different neighborhoods of the same city, has led to fluid phonological, morphological and syntactic pools of choices in today’s Swahili that display speakers’ ideological concepts of self-revelation and orientation.

The present grammar of Kisangani Swahili can be considered the first grammatical description of this urban variety, focusing predominantly on language convergence, metatypy and irregularity in language, analyzed from a variationist sociolinguistic angle, and pursuing an emic approach in the documentation of Swahili. Phenomena such as conscious structural adaptability toward either ‘standardized’ Swahili or Lingala and calquing as strategies of linguistic agency are particularly dealt with in the present sketch, marking speakers’ linguistic identity. Besides the sociolinguistic setting, the phonological inventory and morphosyntactic structure of the language, a pragmatic analysis as well as a selection of texts and a word list conclude the description of this urban Congo Swahili regiolect.

Languages of the World/Materials 506. 261pp. 2015.

ISBN 9783862886678 (print).

ISBN 9783862887859 (e-book, pdf).

Kisangani Swahili

Choices and Variation in a Multilingual Urban Space

Nico Nassenstein

University of Cologne

The emergence of complex language practices in multilingual settings of urban Africa and the study of speakers’ broad linguistic repertoires have increasingly moved into the academic focus of linguists over the past couple of years. Kisangani Swahili constitutes a fluid urban practice spoken in the convergence area of Lingala and Swahili in the city of Kisangani, but also throughout Tshopo District (Province Orientale, DR Congo) by more than a million people. Swahili as spoken in Kisangani has developed into a variety marked by speakers’ linguistic choices, indexing speakers’ potential underlying knowledge of Lingala and French. While the influence from French has mainly affected Kisangani Swahili at a lexical level, Lingala and to a minor extent also non-Bantu languages such as Zande have significantly contributed to morphosyntactic variation in the variety. The complementary geographical distribution of the two languages, Lingala and Swahili, in different neighborhoods of the same city, has led to fluid phonological, morphological and syntactic pools of choices in today’s Swahili that display speakers’ ideological concepts of self-revelation and orientation.

The present grammar of Kisangani Swahili can be considered the first grammatical description of this urban variety, focusing predominantly on language convergence, metatypy and irregularity in language, analyzed from a variationist sociolinguistic angle, and pursuing an emic approach in the documentation of Swahili. Phenomena such as conscious structural adaptability toward either ‘standardized’ Swahili or Lingala and calquing as strategies of linguistic agency are particularly dealt with in the present sketch, marking speakers’ linguistic identity. Besides the sociolinguistic setting, the phonological inventory and morphosyntactic structure of the language, a pragmatic analysis as well as a selection of texts and a word list conclude the description of this urban Congo Swahili regiolect.

Languages of the World/Materials 506. 261pp. 2015.

ISBN 9783862886678 (print).

ISBN 9783862887859 (e-book, pdf).