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This study examined perceptions on the effectiveness, attendant challenges and remedies of community media for effective acculturation in Nigerian languages. The qualitative survey design was adopted with focus group discussions and key informant interviews of 50 purposively chosen informants. It was perceived that community media could serve as veritable platform for effective acculturation in Nigerian languages since they would engender the setting of acculturation in Nigerian languages as national objective or goal. It was further held that the strengths of community media for acculturation were in being goal-defined, ensuring local content and diversification. The study identified that as palatable as the proposal for community media for effective acculturation in Nigerian languages is, it would be fraught with some set-backs or challenges that were very much surmountable. Perceptions pointed towards transient nature of community media and funding as challenges as well as multibased funding as one remedy. Immediate establishment of community media for the purpose of acculturation in Nigerian languages was recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a typological survey of Mano, a Mande language of Guinea and Liberia. It sketches a linguistic portrait of Mano as a representative member of the Southern branch of the Mande family. The family features shared by Mano include S-Aux-O-V-X word order, the parallelism between nominal and verbal syntax, and the ubiquity of passive lability. The branch features include rich tonal morphology, the unstable character of nasal consonants, and rich pronominal paradigms, including auxiliaries that index the person and number of the subject. Some of the features presented here have not been sufficiently analyzed in the Mandeist literature, so it is unclear how unusual Mano is in comparison to other Mande languages in terms of the large class of inalienably possessed nouns, or the clause-level nominalization that may include another clause as its constituent. Finally, some properties are almost certainly specific to Mano, such as the dedicated tonal forms used in conditional clauses. This paper puts Mano in its typological context, elaborating on those features which are cross linguistically well attested versus those which are cross linguistically rare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Akan is one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in Ghana, very little is known about children's phonological development. This paper investigates the development of consonants in Akan among typically developing children aged 3–5 years. A list of 103 Akan words was compiled, sampling the full range of prosodic structures, sound positions, features and segments, and controlling for word familiarity. A native Akan speaker audio-recorded the 103 single-word productions from each of nine typically developing children aged 3–5 years. The child productions were transcribed and analysed following procedures used in a larger cross-linguistic study. The current study presents results on the acquisition of consonants across the various ages. Preliminary results indicate that most consonants in Akan are mastered by age 4 or 5, similar to reports for other languages, although /w/ and /l/ showed late mastery, contrary to cross-linguistic observations. The rhotic /ɹ/ and consonants with secondary articulation were still developing at age 4 and showing a variety of mismatch patterns across children. The findings provide preliminary information for developmentalists and speech-language pathologists on typical phonological development in Akan and contribute to a growing database on language acquisition in Niger-Congo languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contact of the Batonu people with Arab traders and Islamic missionaries back in the 16th century resulted in the Batonu people’s embrace of Islam which has brought profound effects on most of the traditional practices of the Batonu people. Before the Batonu people converted to Islam, every Batonu child had been given a Batonu name at birth based on order of birth, gentility, circumstance of birth, parents’ occupation, natural phenomena, etc. Such child was expected to be known and addressed by that name both within and outside the community. Today, this custom seems endangered as most Batonu people now bear Muslim names given to them at birth. Thus, this paper examines the shift in the personal naming practices of the Batonu people of Nigeria. The study identifi es religious inclination, the rigid personal naming practices of the people, tendency to mask identity and political/socio-economic drives as remote causes of the shift. This shift has led to a drastic decline of traditional Batonu personal names, reflecting the cultural uprooting and the loss of indigenous vocabulary. Recognizing that restoration of traditional Batonu personal naming practices would be almost impossible, the authors propose two onomastic cultural reclamation strategies: the “weak-open reversal” and the “reversal by syncretism” — to provide for appreciable revival and sustenance of these.

This paper presents a detailed analysis of nasality in Dagbani, a Gur language of Ghana, and the role it plays in Dagbani prosody. It demonstrates that the nasal is at the centre of defining the range of what is possible in Dagbani prosodic patterns. Nasals provide the basis for determining the full range of syllable types and the tone bearing unit of Dagbani; nasals are the only coda consonants that licence vowel lengthening; and nasals provide the only cases of phonological non-vocalic geminates. The overall effects of the influence of nasality is the emergence of complex prosodic structures. Contrary to the crosslinguistically acclaimed marked position of the coda, the CVN syllable is the default, unmarked syllable in Dagbani. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages differ in their number of basic verbs that describe perceptual experience. Some languages have only two such verbs: one for visual perception and another for non-visual perception. How do speakers of these languages conceptualize sensory perception? To shed light on this question, this paper investigates the perception verbs mɔ̀ 'see' and nu 'hear/feel/taste/smell' in Avatime (Kwa, Niger-Congo). These verbs are studied together with the constructions in which they occur, using both translated data and spontaneous discourse. Both perception meanings and meanings outside the domain of perception are taken into account. The detailed picture that emerges shows some previously undocumented patterns of perception encoding and enriches our understanding of the conceptualization of the senses more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the treatment of gender systems in Niger-Congo languages. Our discussion is based on a consistent methodological approach, to be presented in §1, which employs four analytical concepts, namely agreement class, gender, nominal form class, and deriflection and which, as we argue, are applicable within Niger- Congo and beyond. Due to the strong bias toward the reconstruction of Bantu and wider Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo gender systems tend to be analyzed by means of a philologically biased and partly inadequate approach that is outlined in §2. This framework assumes in particular a consistent alliterative one-to-one mapping of agreement and nominal form classes conflated under the philological concept of "noun class". One result of this is that gender systems are recurrently deduced merely from the number-mapping of nominal form classes in the nominal deriflection system rather than from the agreement behavior of noun lexemes. We show, however, that gender and deriflection systems are in principle different, illustrating this in §3 with data from such Niger-Congo subgroups as Potou-Akanic and Ghana-Togo-Mountain. Our conclusions given in §4 are not only relevant for the historical-comparative and typological assessment of Niger-Congo systems but also for the general approach to grammatical gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of noun class systems in a sample of 20 Kwa languages. It focuses on the synchronic productivity of noun classification in Kwa as opposed to the full-fledged class system assumed for Proto-Kwa and for the general "Niger-Congo prototype" (Good, Jeff. 2012. How to become a "Kwa" noun." Morphology 22(2). 293–335; Creissels, Denis. Forthcoming. Noun class systems in Atlantic languages. To appear. In Friederike Lüpke (ed.), The Oxford guide to the Atlantic languages of West Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press). The productivity of class morphology on nouns is studied by exploring class marker alternations as exponents of other grammatical phenomena: the formation of the plural, diminutive derivation and nominalization. We also discuss class indexation on nominal modifiers (adjectives, numerals, demonstratives and indefinite markers) as well as subject and object pronominals. We demonstrate that Kwa languages tend to follow the typological tendencies pertaining to class marking on nouns and class indexation, e.g. the Agreement hierarchy (Corbett, Greville G. 1979. The agreement hierarchy. Journal of Linguistics 15. 203–224), as established for world languages in general and Niger-Congo family in particular (Good, Jeff. 2012. How to become a "Kwa" noun." Morphology 22(2). 293–335). However, some intriguing discrepancies, e.g. different patterning of indexation on adjectives vs. on numerals in Kwa as opposed to some other Niger-Congo branches, were also attested. In diachronic perspective, our findings suggest that noun class systems are flexible as they show high intragenetic variation and are easily degradable, but they almost never disappear completely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of diminutivity is mentioned only in passing in the major contemporary works devoted to describing Susu (e.g., Houis, 1963; Touré, 1994, 2004). It has yet to be given the careful attention that this topic has received in other Mande languages (e.g., Nikitina in press), through some uses of the word díí 'child' from which the Susu diminutive is derived, are explored in work by Diané & Vydrine (2012) on the language's kinship system. This paper has the modest goal of adding to what is currently known about Susu diminutivity by reporting on and considering the use of several morphemes, both affixal and free, that figure into the expression of diminutivity in the language. Key to our discussion will be the behavior of Susu's suffixal diminutive marker, -di which is cognate to similar morphemes found in other Mande languages; we also discuss additional ways in which diminutivity is encoded in the language. Lastly, we consider similarities and differences between the encoding of diminutivity in Susu and certain other Mande languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-linguistically, statements tend to be pronounced with low or falling pitch and questions with high or rising pitch, a form–meaning pairing which has been attributed to the frequency code (Ohala, 1984). In many West African languages, however, questions are marked with a ‘lax’ prosody comprising falling intonation, low tones, lengthening, breathy termination, and open vowels (Rialland, 2007). This paper presents prosody findings from Ikaan (Niger-Congo; ISO 639-3: kcf) and proposes a re-analysis of the West African lax question prosody to integrate it with the frequency code model. The paper shows that the pragmatic functions of statement and polar question are expressed prosodically in Ikaan. Audio recordings of statements and morphosyntactically identical polar questions by six speakers were annotated segmentally, tonally, and for the presence of prosodic question markers. Speakers mark questions by using higher onset pitch, wider drops to final low tones, final breathy voice and voicelessness, final vowel lengthening, vowel insertion, and increased intensity. Breathiness may further contrast with creaky voice and glottal stops in statements. Phonation mode, and the accompanying vowel lengthening and insertion, are argued to indicate friendliness and appeals for collaboration, linking phonation mode to similar functions of higher pitch in the frequency code.

This paper investigates serial verb constructions (SVC) in Ibibio, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Nigeria

This paper is concerned with defining the genetic position of the Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages, formerly known as the Togorestsprachen, later the Central Togo languages, in relation to what are currently known as the Kwa languages. It explores the possible genetic relationship of the languages now referred to as 'Ghana-Togo Mountain' languages to the Potou-Tano languages, as an initial step towards defining their relationship towards all the languages of the area. Probably nobody today questions that the languages are all related, all being classifiable as Niger-Congo, but the problem is, how are they related? The paper does not conclusively prove that GTM languages belong to the family denoted by the node label 'Potou-Tano', but evidence adduced makes it seem very likely. It also shows that on the basis of several sound shifts it is reasonable to regard GTM as a genetic group within Potou-Tano. There is no clear evidence that the NA group of GTM is any more closely related to Tano than the KA group. An obvious next step is a proper comparison of the Tano and GTM noun class systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linguistic history of the Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages, spoken in southeastern Ghana and the southern half of Togo, has been the subject of detailed research for more than a century. Nevertheless, there are still problems both with the external and the internal classification of the group. The present paper provides a state of the art overview of this research field. It is argued that linguistic reconstructions that can claim to provide credible hypotheses on genetic relationship patterns among languages are best based on the application of the comparative method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serial verb constructions have often been said to refer to single conceptual events. However, evidence to support this claim has been elusive. This article introduces co-speech gestures as a new way of investigating the relationship. The alignment patterns of gestures with serial verb constructions and other complex clauses were compared in Avatime (Ka-Togo, Kwa, Niger-Congo). Serial verb constructions tended to occur with single gestures overlapping the entire construction. In contrast, other complex clauses were more likely to be accompanied by distinct gestures overlapping individual verbs. This pattern of alignment suggests that serial verb constructions are in fact used to describe single events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the historical underpinnings of Ebonics as a product of linguistic influence of Bantu languages spoken in West Africa today. Many teacher educators preparing White pre-service teachers for linguistic diversity in public schools tend to focus mostly on respecting culturally different students’ home languages without employing historical, lexical, grammatical, and phonological evidence to challenge students’ deficit thinking about Ebonics, which is often associated in the mainstream with a physiological deficiency. Thus, the study uses several Niger-Congo languages to explain the origin of Ebonics and the influences of the Niger-Congo languages on the grammatical and phonological structures of Ebonics, and concludes by defining it as a respectable variety of English with its own sophisticated grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Volta-Comoe languages¹ belonging to Greenberg's (1963) Niger-Congo undergo a historical change in which underlying labial /b/ is reflexed as velar [g] and labio-palatal [...] in their Central members and as [b] in their Eastern and Western subgroups. We maintain that this process can be accounted for naturally by positing the feature Grave proposed by Jakobson, Fant and Halle (1956) in their early work on distinctive-feature phonology. This permits one to say that a non-back grave segment changed to a back one in specified linguistic contexts. Other processes which help explain the change are palatalisation, vowel-labialisation, consonant-labialisation and velar fronting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the linguistic phenomenon of grammaticalization in relation to the development of the future tense marker kϵ´ in Kaakyi (Kwa, Niger Congo). Focusing on some characteristic features of grammaticalization such as metaphorical extension, phonetic reduction, morphosyntactic reduction and the fusion of elements, the paper examines the paths along which the future tense marker has developed. First, it shows the extension of the meaning of the time adverbial ɔ̀kϵ´ ‘tomorrow’, to the functional morpheme, kϵ´-, expressing future time. Second, it demonstrates the loss in the morphological and syntactic properties of ɔ̀kϵ´ and a gain in some properties characteristic of its use as a functional morpheme. Third, two of Hopper's (1991) principles of grammaticalization, divergence and de-categorization, are shown to be applicable in the development of the marker. Kaakyi appears to be the only Kwa language to have so far been identified as deriving its future tense marker from a temporal adverb. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The expansion of the Bantu-speaking people (EBSP) during the past 3000-5000 years is an event of great importance in the history of humanity. Anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and, in recent decades, genetics have been used to elucidate some of the events and processes involved. Although it is generally accepted that the EBSP has its origin in the so-called Bantu Homeland situated in the area of the border between Nigeria and the Grassfields of Cameroon, and that it followed both western and eastern routes, much less is known about the number and dates of those expansions, if more than one. Mitochondrial, Y-chromosome and autosomal DNA analyses have been carried out in attempts to understand the demographic events that have taken place. There is an increasing evidence that the expansion was a more complex process than originally thought and that neither a single demographic event nor an early split between western and eastern groups occurred. In this study, we analysed unique event polymorphism and short tandem repeat variation in non-recombining Y-chromosome haplogroups contained within the E1b1a haplogroup, which is exclusive to individuals of recent African ancestry, in a large, geographically widely distributed, set of sub-Saharan Africans (groups=43, n=2757), all of whom, except one Nilo-Saharan-speaking group, spoke a Niger-Congo language and most a Bantu tongue. Analysis of diversity and rough estimates of times to the most recent common ancestors of haplogroups provide evidence of multiple expansions along eastern and western routes and a late, exclusively eastern route, expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the semantic bases of class membership in the noun class system of Gújjolaay Eegimaa (Eegimaa henceforth), a Niger-Congo and Atlantic language of the BAK group spoken in Southern Senegal. The question of whether semantic principles underlie the overt classification of nouns in Niger-Congo languages is a controversial one. There is a common perception of Niger-Congo noun class systems as being mainly semantically arbitrary. The goal of the present paper is to show that physical properties and culture-specific factors are central principles of semantic categorisation in the Eegimaa noun class system. I argue that the Eegimaa overt grammatical classification of nouns into classes is a semantic categorisation system whereby categories are structured according to prototypicality, family resemblance, metaphorical and metonymic extensions and chaining processes, as argued within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. I show that the categorisation of entities in the Eegimaa nominal classification system productively makes use of physical properties such as shape as well as using culture-specific, less productive parameters for the semantic categorisation of entities denoted by nouns. The analysis proposed here also shows that the cases of multiple morphosyntactic classifications of nouns reflect multiple conceptual categorisation strategies. A detailed examination of the formal and semantic instances of multiple classification reveals the existence of conceptual correlations between the physical properties and the culture-specific semantic parameters of categorisation used in the Eegimaa noun class system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article examines in detail the syntax of relativization in Dàgáárè, a Mabia (Oti-Volta) language of the Gur branch in the Niger-Congo family. The main aims of our investigation are twofold. The first is to describe a cluster of typologically interesting syntactic features of relativization in Dàgáárè in the light of the fact that no detailed description exists in the literature. The second is to demonstrate that relative clauses in Dàgáárè are head-internal relative clauses (HIRCs), even though they are, on the surface, postnominal relative clauses, like those in English. Thus, they are not of the in-situ type of HIRC that is well known in the literature. We call this type of relative clause a left-headed HIRC. This type of relativization has rarely been noticed cross-linguistically in the previous literature and therefore is of considerable significance for general linguistics, linguistic typology, as well as theoretical linguistics. Evidence comes from coordination in possessor relativization and PP relativization. Our discovery shows that Universal Grammar allows left-headed HIRCs as an option in addition to the more familiar types: in-situ HIRCs and head-external relative clauses (HERCs). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper shows the processes that loanwords undergo when they are adapted from Arabic into Kiwahili. The data used is from Bosha (1993) and a constraint-based analysis is used in this paper. Although a number of studies have been carried out on Kiswahili loanwords, none that I know of has used Optimality Theory. This therefore makes the paper different from the others. Issues tackled herein include pitting the faithfulness of Kiswahili's open syllabicity (NOCODA) against the markedness of the sonority hierarchy (SON-SEQ) in borrowed words. For example, the paper discusses whether to maintain NOCODA when syllabifying "sultani" (chief, ruler, king) as /su.lta.ni/ or whether to look at the sonority of /l/ and /t/ vis-a-vis syllable margin (SONSEQ) and thus syllabify it as /sul.ta.ni/. Occasionally in casual speech this is resolved by inserting a vowel between the consonants thus producing /su.lu.ta.ni/, but at other times prestige overrides well-formedness. Furthermore, this paper also shows that Kiswahili mainly uses vowel epenthesis to repair syllables but other procedures like consonant deletion, cluster tolerance and feature change are also used. It has also been confirmed that Kiswahili is susceptible to consonant clusters within syllables because of its long association with non-Bantu languages, mainly Arabic and English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eleme locative-applicative = is a non-canonical applicative that demonstrates morphosyntactic properties commonly associated with clitics. It is employed in one of two functions: (i) to indicate an increase in the transitivity of a clause and (typically) to introduce an otherwise oblique function as a core argument of a base verb, or (ii) to indicate the presence of an atypical verbal complement. It is usually found in constructions containing a verb stem that expresses location, directed motion or transfer, but also functions as an obligatory component of the Eleme progressive construction. While locative and comitative expressions are common source-constructions for progressives in Niger-Congo languages, Eleme is apparently unique within the literature in that it includes an applicative with comitative function that must be enclitic to a verb of location to express progressive aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper identifies the different types of qualifiers in ÒRo?-Ó?sànyén, one of the endangered African languages spoken in Ògòrì-Màgóngò Local Government in Nigeria. It also examines and explains in detail the sequential co-occurrence of the qualifiers within the noun phrases. The paper believes that the language still retains the relics of the old patterning of the Qualifier-Qualified sequence of the Proto-language to the African languages under the sub-phylum of West-Benue-Congo which it belongs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kabiye is a Gur (Voltaic) language that belongs to the Eastern Grusi (also Gurunsi) sub-branch of Central Gur, which in turn sub-branches from Gur that is part of the greater Niger-Congo language family (Naden 1989: 147). The number of native Kabiye speakers is estimated at 730,000, with approximately 700,000 speakers living in Togo, 30,000 in Benin, and a very small number in Ghana (Grimes 2000: 242). The original homeland of the Kabiye people is in Northeastern Togo, with the region of Kozah serving as the community's cultural center. From the early 20th century, however, the community began to spread southward and now encompasses locations in the central and southern parts of Togo, as well as in the neighboring countries (Ali-Napo 1997: 20). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jumjum, a Western Nilotic language, has an eight-vowel system divided into two sets by the feature [ATR] (Advanced Tongue Root), which is the basis of vowel harmony. A comparison with other Western Nilotic languages shows that (i) this vowel system goes back to a ten-vowel system in Proto-Western Nilotic (PWN), (ii) PWN high [−ATR] vowels have become high [+ATR] vowels in Jumjum, and (iii) conversely, PWN high [+ATR] vowels have become high [−ATR] vowels in Jumjum. The sequence of changes that resulted in this [ATR] reversal in Jumjum relative to PWN provides a historical explanation of synchronically odd, grammatically conditioned vowel-quality alternations in this language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the reduplication of monosyllabic verbs in the Kwa languages of Côte d’Ivoire. The study reveals two options: the total reduplication (in which the reduplicated syllable is identical to the radical) and the partial reduplication (in which the vowel of the reduplicated syllable is prespecified [+HIGH]). This phenomenon is well spreaded in Niger-Congo languages (cf. Faraclas and Williamson 1984; Capo 1989). This study claims (for the case of the partial reduplication) there is a constraint on the vowel (of the radical): the reduplication of this vowel is prohibited. In order to acquire the other features, the nucleus of the reduplicated syllable is submitted to the government of the nucleus of the radical (by projection). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether specific reduplication processes in the English-lexified Creole languages of Jamaica and Suriname are due to substrate transfer by exploring the extent to which their formal, functional and selectional characteristics in those languages can be related to Niger-Congo (NC). The issue is discussed in the context of a theory of markedness and we propose that formal and semantic iconicity are among the criteria for evaluating markedness in reduplication. According to markedness criteria, we identify deverbal noun reduplication and deverbal attribute formation, as they occur in Jamaican and the Suriname Creoles, and Jamaican X-like reduplication, as marked processes. Assuming that marked processes provide better evidence for substrate transfer, we searched for parallels for these specific processes in likely NC source languages. The best evidence for substrate transfer is found in stative adjective reduplication in the Suriname Creole languages, which finds a parallel in Gbe. The evidence for transfer from Gbe in the deverbal adjectives of Jamaican is less convincing, but merits consideration. Deverbal nominalizations of the Suriname Creoles and Jamaican echo an Igbo source that needs to be investigated, notably with respect to Jamaican. As for X-like reduplication, we found no convincing argument to attribute it to substrate transfer from any likely NC source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Amazonian systems of nominal classification have been perceived as constituting a descriptive and typological challenge. The proposal presented here is to consider many of them as emerging noun class systems rather than as a-typical systems that defy integration within an overall typology of nominal classification, at the opposite end from the Niger-Congo systems on a continuum of grammaticalization. First the African noun class systems are reviewed, with an emphasis on the sociolinguistic context of their descriptions and on their common deviations from a prototypical image of them projected in the general linguistic literature. Then a recapitulation of various proposals of a-typicality of the Amazonian systems is given, followed by the presentation of a typology of nominal classification systems that integrates the dynamic dimension of grammaticalization. The application of this typological framework is illustrated with a case study from the Miraña language of Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical priming of picture naming was investigated in Kiswahili, which has a complex grammatical noun class system (a system like grammatical gender), with up to 15 noun classes that have obligatory agreements on adjectives, verbs, pronouns and other parts of speech. Participants heard a grammatically agreeing (concordant), nonagreeing (discordant) or neutral prime before seeing a picture of a common object and being asked to name the object. Priming was found, with naming following concordant primes being faster than naming following the neutral prime ('say'). However, more interestingly, effects were found such that where two noun classes share a prefix, the grammatical prime from each of these two noun classes also primed words that have the same prefix but are not in the same noun class, and hence for which the prime was not grammatical. It is concluded that the prime appears to be facilitating the phonological form of the prefix rather than the syntacto-semantic group of words that are known as a noun class, and that the phonological form associated with a grammatical entity may be more significant in its processing than has previously been supposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]