Daatsʼiin language

B'aga language spoken in Ethiopia
Daatsʼiin
Native toEthiopia
RegionBenishangul-Gumuz Region
EthnicityDaats'iin
Native speakers
300-1000 (2015)[1]
Language family
Nilo-Saharan?
Language codes
ISO 639-3dtn
Glottologdaat1234

Daatsʼiin is a B'aga language of western Ethiopia. There are two communities of speakers in western Ethiopia, one in Mahadid, on the northeast border of Alitash National Park, and one in Inashemsh on the Sudan border, south of the park where the Rahad River crosses from Ethiopia into Sudan.[2]

Daatsʼiin was first reported in 2013 and described by Colleen Ahland in 2014. Ahland has described it further in 2016. A comparative word list of Daatsʼiin, Northern Gumuz, and Southern Gumuz is available in Ahland & Kelly (2014).[3]

Of the other B'aga languages, Daatsʼíin has the greatest lexical similarity to Southern Gumuz, but the two groups communicate in Arabic or Amharic.[4]

Phonology

The consonant inventory of Daatsʼíin:[5]

Labial Alveolar Postalveolar
/ palatal		 Velar Glottal /
pharyngeal
Stops voiceless p t c k ʔ
voiced b d ɟ g
ejective pʼ t' cʼ kʼ
implosive ɓ ɗ
Affricates voiceless ts tʃ
ejective tsʼ tʃʼ
Fricatives voiceless f s ʃ h
voiced v z (ʒ) (ʕ)
Nasals m n ŋ
Approximants w l j
Rhotic r

The palatal stops /c/, /ɟ/, /cʼ/ can be also realized as palatalized velar stops [kʲ], [gʲ], [kʲʼ] in free variation.

[v] and [ʒ] are rare, both recorded only from one word so far. The former appears to be phonemic, but the latter might be an allophone of /z/.

The voiced pharyngeal fricative [ʕ] only occurs when following /l/ or /r/ and preceding /a/, and it can be analyzed as an allophone of the glottal stop /ʔ/.

Daatsʼíin has eight vowel phonemes:[6]

front central back diphthong
close i(ː) ɨ u(ː) u ~ wɨ
mid e(ː) ə o(ː)
open a(ː)

Ahland analyzes [i], [e], [a], [o], [u] as phonemically long, and [ɨ], [wɨ], [ə] as phonemically short /i/, /u/, /a/ respectively.

Daatsʼíin is also a tonal language: vowels can bear high and low tone. Some examples of downstep occur.

Grammar

Daatsʼíin has several grammatical differences from other Gumuz languages. Verbs inflect for aspect (perfective–imperfective) rather than for tense (future–non-future). Verbs are polysynthetic in all languages, but the order of the morphemes differs in Daatsʼiin, and some morphemes that occur in one language do not occur in the other(s).[4] "The major constituent order in Daatsʼíin clauses tend to be AVO/SV."[7]

Notes

  1. ^ Daatsʼiin at Ethnologue (19th ed., 2016) Closed access icon
  2. ^ Ahland 2016, p. 419.
  3. ^ Ahland, Colleen and Eliza Kelly. 2014. Daatsʼíin-Gumuz Comparative Word list.
  4. ^ a b "Request for Change to ISO 639-3 Language Code" (PDF). ISO 639-3 Registration Authority. 2015. Retrieved 31 December 2022.
  5. ^ Ahland 2016, p. 422.
  6. ^ Ahland 2016, pp. 422–423.
  7. ^ Ahland 2016, p. 440.

Literature

  • Ahland, Colleen (2016). "Daatsʼíin, a newly identified undocumented language of western Ethiopia: A preliminary examination". In Payne, Doris L.; Pacchiarotti, Sara; Bosire, Mokaya (eds.). Diversity in African languages. Berlin: Language Science Press. pp. 417–449.