Chadic

An insatiable appetite for ancient and modern tongues

Overview and Distribution. Chadic languages constitute one of six branches of the Afro-Asiatic family (or phylum). There are about 140 or 150 of them, and they are spoken by about 40 million people to the west, south and east of Lake Chad in West Africa, particularly in Chad, northern Cameroon, southern Niger and northern Nigeria.

Hausa has, by far, the greatest number of native speakers of any Chadic language and is also one of the major lingua francas of Africa. The other Chadic languages range from 0.5 million speakers to a few hundred and several are endangered.

Internal Classification. Chadic is divided into four sub-branches: Western, Central, Eastern, and Masa.

a) Western. West of Lake Chad, in northern Nigeria and southern Niger and northeastern Benin, including 60 languages with more than 36 million speakers in total, of which Hausa is the most prominent.

b) Central or Biu-Mandara. South of Lake Chad, in eastern Nigeria, northern Cameroon and southwest Chad, including 45 languages spoken by more than 2 million people.

c) Eastern. In central and south Chad, including 25 languages with less than 100,000 speakers each.

d) Masa. In northern Cameroon and southwest Chad, including five closely related languages spoken by about 700,000 people in total.

Major Languages and Speakers. Below, we show the most important Chadic languages with their approximate number of speakers:

Western Central Eastern Masa

Hausa

Angas

Bade

Karekare

Ron

Bole

Warji

Saya

35,000,000

500,000

250,000

150,000

115,000

100,000

78,000

50,000

Marghi

Kamwe (Higi)

Bura

Mandara

Huba (Kilba)

Bacama

Bata

Mafa

Cibak

Tera

Musgu

Gidar

Buduma

Kotoko

Sukur

350,000

300,000

250,000

200,000

175,000

150,000

140,000

100,000

90,000

66,000

55,000

40,000 15,000

Nancere

Dangaléat

Kera

Mubi

Gabri

Tobanga

Tumak

Lele

Masmaje

81,000

60,000

50,000

36,000

35,000

30,000

26,000

Masana

Musey

Marba

Pévé

Mesme

240,000

150,000

36,000

21,000

SHARED FEATURES

✦ Phonology

Vowels
-The vowel system can vary from two vowels (a, ə) as in Bacama, Bata and Mandara to five vowels in Hausa and seven in Dangaléat (Dangla).

-Typically, certain vowels are restricted to specific positions within the word. In many languages, vowel length is distinctive but it may be limited to certain positions or to open syllables (like in Hausa).

Consonants. Chadic languages have some distinctive consonantal sounds:
-Implosive stops (ɓ, ɗ). They require movement of the glottis during pronunciation to inhale air. They are widespread within Chadic.

-Ejective stops. Sounds produced using the glottis to push air out. They are found in Hausa and other languages.

-Prenasalized stops (mb, nd). When producing the sound it occurs first a short nasal stop and then an oral stop. They are commonplace in Chadic.

-Labio-velar stops (kp, gb). Sounds produced with two simultaneous closures, labial and velar. They are found in a few Chadic languages like Bacama, Daba, Mofu-Gudur, Gidar and Kotoko.

-Voiceless and voiced lateral fricatives are common sounds in Central Chadic languages and in some Western ones.

-Labial flap. This is a, comparatively rare, voiced sound produced with the lower lip flapped downwards behind the upper teeth. It is found in some languages of the four Chadic groups, e.g. Ron, Tera, Kera and Pévé (belonging to Western, Central, Eastern and Masa, respectively).

Tones
-All Chadic languages have tones which convey different meanings to morphologically identical words or mark grammatical features. They usually have two or three tones. For example, Hausa has two level tones (high/low) and Angas three (high/mid/low).

✦ Morphology

Nominal
-Many Chadic languages have masculine and feminine genders, but only in the singular. Pronouns are marked for gender except in the first person (an Afro-Asiatic feature). Some languages have lost the gender distinction altogether.

-Plural formation is complex, a characteristic of Afro-Asiatic. Some languages restrict plural marking to human and animal nouns.

-Chadic languages have no case system. They use, instead, prepositions (besides word order) to establish syntactical relations.

Verbal
-Tense, mood and aspect (perfective, imperfective) can be indicated by tone and/or markers. Mood may be coded separately from tense and aspect.

-New meanings may be added to the verb by means of verbal extensions (a derivational process). They may express location or direction of an action, perfective aspect (completed action), transitivity or voice (benefactive, causative). In some languages, extensions are suffixes included in the verb while in others they are independent particles.

-Chadic languages have plural verbs (pluractional) to express repeated action or an action performed by several subjects or affecting several objects. Pluractional stems are formed by the insertion of the infix a in the stem, or by syllable reduplication or by doubling of consonants (gemination).

✦ Syntax
-In Chadic, word order is, generally, Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) with the adjectival modifier following the head noun, and possessor following possessed. In some Biu-Mandara languages VSO is predominant but this seems to be an innovation. Negative particles occupy the final position in the clause.

Lexicon

A number of words that seem to derive from Proto-Chadic (meaning ‘baobab, crocodile, fish’, etc) suggest a savannah landscape close to a large water surface (probably Lake Chad) as the Chadic homeland. Chadic languages have lexical borrowings from English, Arabic (especially in Hausa), Fula, and East Sudanic.

Scripts

Hausa uses a modified Latin alphabet (bóokòo) which has replaced (partially) the Arabic script (àjàmí) of former times. Most other Chadic languages are unwritten though some have also adopted the Latin script.