Koromfe is a

Gur language The Gur languages, also known as Central Gur or Mabia, belong to the Niger–Congo languages. They are spoken in the Sahelian and savanna regions of West Africa, namely: in most areas of Burkina Faso, and in south-central Mali, northeastern Iv ...

spoken in a U-shaped area around the town of

Djibo ''Djibo'' is a town in northern Burkina Faso and the capital city of Soum Province. It is situated north of Ouagadougou and from the frontier with Mali. It was founded in the 16th century and became the capital of Djilgodji, before becoming do ...

, in the north of

Burkina Faso Burkina Faso (, ; , ff, 𞤄𞤵𞤪𞤳𞤭𞤲𞤢 𞤊𞤢𞤧𞤮, italic=no) is a landlocked country in West Africa with an area of , bordered by Mali to the northwest, Niger to the northeast, Benin to the southeast, Togo and Ghana t ...

and southeastern

Mali Mali (; ), officially the Republic of Mali,, , ff, 𞤈𞤫𞤲𞥆𞤣𞤢𞥄𞤲𞤣𞤭 𞤃𞤢𞥄𞤤𞤭, Renndaandi Maali, italics=no, ar, جمهورية مالي, Jumhūriyyāt Mālī is a landlocked country in West Africa. Ma ...

, bordering

Dogon Dogon may refer to: *Dogon people, an ethnic group living in the central plateau region of Mali, in West Africa *Dogon languages, a small, close-knit language family spoken by the Dogon people of Mali *'' Dogon A.D.'', an album by saxophonist Juliu ...

Country.

Dialects

There are two major dialect areas, most conveniently termed East and West. The traditional centre of the Eastern area is Aribinda and of the Western area Pobé-Mengao. The western area is also known as Lorom (with two short close mid vowels), which should not be confused with the recently created province of Loroum centred on Titao. (Titao is ethnically Koromba, but Koromfe is no longer spoken there.) The grammar of Rennison (1997) describes the Western dialect.

Phonology

The alveolar flap is an allophone of , which occurs as only word-initially and after nasal consonants. There also exists a spirantised allophone of , i.e. ; phonetic only occurs word-initially, after a nasal consonant, or between two ATR high vowels. Before nasal vowels the approximants and are nasalised, and the nasalised in slow, careful speech can even harden to . However, there is no phonemic palatal series of consonants in Koromfe. The vowel system comprises 5 ATRvowels and their ATRcounterparts . All vowels occur both orally and (context-free) nasally, and long and short, giving 40 full vowels. There is also a schwa which alternates with zero and disappears in faster, casual speech. Koromfe is the only

, and one of only five Niger-Congo languages, listed in the

World Atlas of Language Structures The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural ( phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-R ...

that is not tonal.

Writing system

Koromfe has no written form. A 2007 dictionary uses a IPA based orthography with "y" replacing "j".John R. Rennison; Micaïlou Konfé
''Dictionnaire Lorom koromfe – anglais / français / allemand''
2007.01.17

References

* {{Gur languages Gur languages