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- The East Kainji languages are a poorly studied group of some 26
languages spoken north and west of the Jos Plateau in Central Nigeria. A
wordlist of Takaya (Taura) is included in Gowers (1907) but the first
extensive listing is in Meek (1925:137), where the classification
(contributed by N.W. Thomas) lists them under ‘Nigerian Semi-Bantu’
along with Plateau and Jukunoid.
- Meek (1931, II: 125-218) collected wordlists of Piti, Atsam, Kurama,
Janji, Gbiri and Niragu which have remained the basis for many later
analyses. Westermann and Bryan (1952:106-108) list these languages
(Atsam, Kurama, Janji, Piti, Jere) as ‘isolated language groups’ but
classify them together with other ‘class languages’, although noting
that Chawai has ‘no noun classes’.
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- Greenberg (1955) originally identified the group as Plateau 1b, where
Plateau 1a was the now geographically separate West Kainji, which
includes such languages as cLela and Kambari. Rowlands (1962) seems to
have rediscovered this without
reference to Greenberg, arguing that East Kainji should be treated as
distinct from Plateau.
- The idea that Kainji languages were co-ordinate with Plateau rather than
simply to be included within it seems to have surfaced in the
Benue-Congo Working Group in the 1970s. The informal use of the name Kainji, followed
the creation of Lake Kainji in 1974.
- Hofmann’s (1976) listing in the Index of Nigerian Languages still calls
them ‘Western Plateau’ and the term ‘Kainji’ seems to have only been
formally recognised in print by Gerhardt (1989).
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- Published evidence for the unity of East Kainji as a group and for its
subclassification is non-existent, as is any coherent account of its
relation to West Kainji. Scattered wordlists, some very short, were
published in the Benue-Congo Comparative Wordlist (BCCW) (Williamson
& Shimizu 1968; Williamson 1972) and in Shimizu (1968, 1979, 1982).
- Many languages, especially of the Kauru group, appear to have no
material available at all. Di Luzio (1972) is the only published grammar
sketch of an East Kainji language, tiMap, while Anderson (1981)
presented a more complete account of the noun classes of the same
language.
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- No reliable, or even unreliable, figures available for the number of
speakers of East Kainji languages today, but most groups are very small
and language competence is declining. It is unlikely that there are more
than 100,000 speakers of all East Kainji languages.
- As a consequence, from 2003, a survey of East Kainji communities has
been undertaken especially in the Jos area, focusing on languages
reported by Shimizu as severely threatened. So far data has been
collected on the Boze [=Buji], Loro, Panawa, Sheni, Tunzu, Ziriya and
Zora [=Cokobo] languages and the programme will try and visit all the
remainder in the coming years.
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- A. Southern
- Piti
- Atsam
- B. Jos group
- a. Northern
- i. Ningi cluster
- Kudu-Camo (almost extinct)
- Gamo-Ningi (Butu-Ningi†)
- ii. Lame cluster
- Gyem (almost extinct)
- Shau (almost extinct)
- iii. Lere cluster
- Si (almost extinct)
- Gana (almost extinct)
- Takaya (almost extinct)
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- Almost all East Kainji languages are threatened, except perhaps Amo and
Chawai, and many reported to exist may well now be extinct. The main
source of endangerment is the spread of Hausa and the small size of
their communities. East Kainji languages abut the Hausa-speaking area to
the north and their speakers tend to be fluent in Hausa. Many languages
are threatened by the declining competence of the younger generation.
- Although there is now some energy to protect larger languages like Boze,
Tunzu and Amo, isolated lects encapsulated among the Hausa such as
Kuda-Chamo are virtually gone. Ziriya is completely dead, Sheni has just
six speakers and Zora is clearly in decline.
- It is unlikely the trend will be easily reversed for moribund languages,
but larger speech communities such as the Boze, where there is an
articulate older generation with an interest in language development,
are a more realistic proposition.
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- All East Kainji languages so far studied have a relatively simple
phonology and broadly resemble one another. The system of εBoze is
given below as an example. εBoze has eight phonemic vowels;
- Front Central Back
- Close i
u
- Close-Mid e ə o
- Open-Mid ε ɔ
- Open a
- All vowels have contrastive length and there are no nasalised vowels.
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- Tones
- ɛBoze has four level tones as well as rising and falling tones.
Some of the glide tones arise from long vowels and diphthongs, but
others occur on single vowels. Level tones are as follows;
- SUPERHIGH double acute accent above the syllable ̋
- HIGH acute accent above
the syllable ´
- MID unmarked
- LOW grave accent over
the syllable `
- The superhigh tones arise from a tone rule which requires all the tones
in singular noun forms to be raised one level in the plural.
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- εBoze verbs have pluralising extensions
- These typically refer to;
- Plural subjects
- Plural objects
- Iteratives
- Ca. 50% of εBoze verbs appear to have these extensions, although
the existence of an extension appears to be unpredictable. They are not
well-known and it often takes time to recall them during elicitation
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- Broadly speaking, in transitive verbs the plural extension refers to
multiple objects and with intransitives to plural subjects
- The use of iteratives is not predictable
- Singular/plural stems are always cognate, there are no suppletive
plurals presently recorded, although these occur in Plateau languages
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- Of the ca. 150 or so sg./pl. pairings so far recorded, almost no two are
exactly similar although they are clearly related
- From this I assume a general template for plural verbs exists in the
language, but that it has been applied intermittently and inconsistently
to individual lexical items leading to the present pattern.
- This is also the case for many neighbouring Plateau languages.
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- All of these appear to derive from an original affix, either ZYV- or -SV
where ZY is a palatal affricate and S is an unspecified fricative and
the V is either –a/ə or copies the stem.
- The suffix -SV can either follow the stem, or replace the final –CV
syllable.
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- There is considerable evidence that the earlier form of the affix was
something like dʒV- or zV-which still persists in certain verbs but
is also retained as an unproductive morpheme. For example;
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- It is hard to determine the reasons for choice of s- or z- in this
position. However;
- 1. Where the stem ends in a consonant or nasal, -s is chosen. Thus
rumsa, wursi
- 2. Where C2 is –s-, the affix will have z-
- 3. Where the C2 is –r-, the affix will have S-
- 4. Where the stem is CVV, the affix will have S-
- 5. Where C2 is –j-, the affix will have j-
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- At a guess;
- 1. The primary affix was -dʒV where –V was a back vowel which did not show
harmony with the stem vowel
- 2. This was followed with -dʒV with an underspecified vowel,
typically centralised, accounting for the dʒa- forms
- 3. Subsequently, affrication was lost, yielding both -ZV and –SV affixes
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- Finally, a stem harmonisation
rule was introduced, so that the underspecified vowel of the affix
agreed with the stem vowel; hence forms such as
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- The rule appears to be that there are many rules, most of low frequency.
All the affixes appear to be underlyingly the same, but have evolved in
phonological content over time, in consort with constant affix renewal.
As a consequence almost every verb is in a different stage, of renewal,
making the outlining of any simply rules impossible
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