Laal is an endangered

language isolate A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. Basque in Europe, Ainu and Burushaski in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America, and Tiwi ...

spoken by 749 people () in three villages in the Moyen-Chari prefecture of

Chad Chad, officially the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of North Africa, North and Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to Chad–Libya border, the north, Sudan to Chad–Sudan border, the east, the Central Afric ...

on opposite banks of the

Chari River The Chari River, or Shari River, is a long river, flowing in Central Africa. It is the main source of water of Lake Chad, which is located at the junction of four countries: Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. Geography The Chari River flows f ...

, called Gori (''lá''), Damtar (''ɓual''), and Mailao. It represents an isolated survival of an earlier language group of

Central Africa Central Africa (French language, French: ''Afrique centrale''; Spanish language, Spanish: ''África central''; Portuguese language, Portuguese: ''África Central'') is a subregion of the African continent comprising various countries accordin ...

. It is unwritten except in transcription by linguists. According to former Summer Institute of Linguistics-Chad member David Faris, it is in danger of extinction, with most people under 25 shifting to the locally more widespread Bagirmi. This language first came to the attention of academic linguists in 1977 through Pascal Boyeldieu's fieldwork in 1975 and 1978. His fieldwork was based, for the most part, on a single speaker, Djouam Kadi of Damtar.

Speakers and status

The language's speakers are mainly

river A river is a natural stream of fresh water that flows on land or inside Subterranean river, caves towards another body of water at a lower elevation, such as an ocean, lake, or another river. A river may run dry before reaching the end of ...

fishermen and

farmer A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer ...

s, who also sell

salt In common usage, salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl). When used in food, especially in granulated form, it is more formally called table salt. In the form of a natural crystalline mineral, salt is also known as r ...

extracted from the ashes of doum palms and '' Vossia cuspidata''. Like their neighbours, the Niellim, they were formerly cattle herders but lost their herds around the turn of the 19th century. They are mainly

Muslim Muslims () are people who adhere to Islam, a Monotheism, monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God ...

s, but until the latter half of the 20th century, they followed the traditional ''Yondo'' religion of the Niellim. The area is fairly undeveloped; while there are Qur'anic schools in Gori and Damtar, the nearest government school is 7 km away, and there is no medical dispensary in the region (). The village of Damtar formerly had a distinct dialect, called Laabe (''la:bé''), with two or three speakers remaining in 1977; it was replaced by the dialect of Gori after two Gori families fled there at the end of the 19th century to escape a

war War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organi ...

. No other dialects of Laal are known. Under Chadian law, Laal, like all languages of Chad other than French and

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

, is regarded as a

national language '' '' A national language is a language (or language variant, e.g. dialect) that has some connection— de facto or de jure—with a nation. The term is applied quite differently in various contexts. One or more languages spoken as first languag ...

. Although the 1996 Constitution stipulates that "the law shall fix the conditions of promotion and development of national languages", national languages are not used for education, for official purposes, or usually for written media, but some of the larger ones (but not Laal) are used on the radio.

Classification

Laal remains unclassified, although extensive Adamawa (specifically Bua) and to a lesser extent Chadic influence is found. It is sometimes grouped with one of those two

language families A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ana ...

, and sometimes seen as a

. Boyeldieu (1982) summarizes his view as "Its classification remains problematic; while it shows certain lexical, and no doubt morphological, traits with the Bua languages (Adamawa-13, Niger–Congo family of Joseph H. Greenberg), it differs from them radically in many ways of which some, ''a priori'', make one think of geographically nearby Chadic languages."

Roger Blench Roger Marsh Blench (born August 1, 1953) is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and work ...

(2003), similarly, considers that "its vocabulary and morphology seem to be partly drawn from Chadic (i.e.

Afro-Asiatic The Afroasiatic languages (also known as Afro-Asiatic, Afrasian, Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic) are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of th ...

), partly from Adamawa (i.e. Niger–Congo) and partly from an unknown source, perhaps its original phylum, a now-vanished grouping from

." It is the last possibility which attracts particular interest; if this proves true, Laal may be the only remaining window on the linguistic state of Central Africa before the expansion of the main

African language African language may refer to: * languages of Africa * African Romance language * Afrikaans Afrikaans is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language spoken in South Africa, Namibia and to a lesser extent Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe ...

families—Afro-Asiatic,

Nilo-Saharan The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210 African languages spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributari ...

, and Niger–Congo—into it. Their immediate neighbors speak Bua, Niellim, and Ndam. Laal contains a number of

loanword A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

s from Baguirmi, which for several centuries was the lingua franca of the region under the Baguirmi Empire, and perhaps a dozen Chadic roots, which are not similar to the Chadic languages that currently neighbor Laal. In addition, almost all Laal speak Niellim as a second language, and 20%–30% of their vocabulary is cognate with Niellim, especially agricultural vocabulary (Boyeldieu 1977, Lionnet 2010). Like the Baguirmi, the Laal are

s; partly because of this, some

loanwords are also found. However some 60% of the vocabulary, including most core vocabulary, cannot be identified with any known language family (Lionnet 2010). Indeed, some of the words cognate with Niellim, including some basic vocabulary, is not cognate with closely related Bua, suggesting that these are not Adamawa roots but loans in Niellim from the Laal substrate (Lionnet 2010). Pozdniakov (2010) believes Laal is a distinct branch of Niger–Congo with part of its pronominal system borrowed from a Chadic language like Kera. Laal is grouped with the

Chadic languages The Chadic languages form a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken in parts of the Sahel. They include 196 languages spoken across northern Nigeria, southern Niger, southern Chad, and northern Cameroon. By far the most widely ...

in an automated computational analysis ( ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013), suggesting early contact with Chadic.Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013.
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'.

Phonology

The sounds of Laal are transcribed here using

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

symbols.

Consonants

Implosives and prenasalised stops as well as /h/ are found only word-initially. Voiceless stops as well as /s/ cannot occur at the end of a syllable. occurs only intervocalically and word-finally. appears exclusively in

s and certain numbers. Prenasalized stops as well as the implosive are extremely rare.

Vowels

The vowel system for non-initial syllables is and the

diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

, with no length distinction. is heard as a glide in the vowel sequences as . For initial syllables, however, it is much more complicated, allowing length distinctions and distinguishing the following additional diphthongs: (but the latter two appear only as morphologically conditioned forms of and and so are perhaps better seen as allophonic). In addition, may occur very occasionally; Boyeldieu quotes the example of ''mỳlùg'' "red (pl.)". There are three level tones: high (á), middle (a), low (à). Combinations may occur on a single vowel, resulting in phonetic rising and falling tone, and which are phonemically sequences of level tones. Such cases are transcribed here by repeating the vowel (e.g. àá); long vowels are indicated only by a colon (e.g. a:). Suffixes may force any of four kinds of

ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut ( , from German ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its relate ...

on the vowels of preceding words: raising (takes to ), lowering (takes to ), low rounding (takes and to ; and to ; , and to ), and high rounding (takes and to ; and to ; , and to ). They are transcribed in the suffix section as ↑, ↓, ↗, ↘ respectively. In some verbs, a/ə is "raised" to rather than, as expected, to . In suffixes, ə and o undergo

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...

: they become and u respectively if the preceding vowel is one of . Likewise, r undergoes consonant harmony, becoming l after words containing l. Suffixes with a neutral tone copy the final tone of the word to which they are suffixe

Morphology

Syntax

The typical

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlatio ...

can be summarised as subject–(verbal

particle In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscle in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...

)–

verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...

–

object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an a ...

–

adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by ...

;

preposition Adpositions are a part of speech, class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various thematic relations, semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositi ...

–

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

; possessed–possessor;

–

adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

. Nouns can be fronted when topicalized. See the sample sentences below for examples and the conjunctions for clause syntax.

Nouns

Nouns have plural and singular forms (the latter are perhaps better viewed as singulative in some cases), with plural formation hard to predict: ''kò:g'' "bone" > ''kuagmi'' "bones", ''tuà:r'' "chicken" > ''tò:rò'' "chickens", ''ɲaw'' "hunger" > ''ɲə̀wə́r'' "hungers". Nouns do not have arbitrary gender, but three natural genders (male, female, non-human) are distinguished by pronouns. The possessive is expressed in two ways: * " inalienable", or direct, possession: by following the possessed with the possessor (and modifying the tone or ending of the possessed in some cases): ''piá:r no'' "person's leg" ("leg person"); * alienable possession: by putting a connecting word, conjugated according to number and gender, between the possessed and the possessor: : The connecting word is sometimes abbreviated to a simple high tone. However, if the possessor is a pronoun, it is suffixed with extensive vowel

(in the first case) or prepositional forms with "at" and optionally the connector as well, are used (in the second case): ''na:ra ɟá ɗe:'' "my man" ("man CONN. at-me"), ''mùlù'' "her eye" ("eye-her", from ''mɨla'' "eye"). Some nouns (''páw-'' "friend") occur only with bound pronouns and have no independent form. That is called obligatory possession and is found in many other language, usually for words referring to personal relationships. See

pronouns In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not con ...

for the relevant suffixes. A noun indicating someone who does, is, or has something can be formed with the prefix ''màr'', meaning roughly "he/she/it who/of": ''màr jùgòr'' "landowner", ''màr ce'' "farmer" (''ce'' = cultivate), ''màr pál'' "fisherman" (''pál'' = to fish), ''màr pàlà ta:'' "a fisher of fish". Laal does show traces of an old Adamawa-type noun-class system, but apart from loans, the forms do not appear to be cognate with the Adamawa system (Lionnet 2010). Some singular and plural nouns in Laal (Blench (2017):

Pronouns

Personal

In the following tables, note the distinction between

inclusive and exclusive we In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between ''inclusive'' and ''exclusive'' Grammatical person, first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called ''inclusive "we"'' and ''exclusive "we"''. Inclusive "we" specifically inc ...

, found in many other languages but not English, and the gender differentiation of "I" in certain forms. The inanimate plural has been dropped by most popular younger speakers in favour of the animate plural, but both are given below. The object paradigm for verbs is quite complex; only two of its several sets of

allomorph In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or in other words, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning. The term ''allomorph'' describes the realization of phonological variatio ...

s are given in the table below. "He" and "she" are used only for human referents; other nouns take the neuter pronoun. That is quite distinct from the languages with which Laal shares vocabulary, but Laal has traces of an old Adamawa-type noun-class system (Lionnet 2010). The first- and second-person plural forms are quite similar to Chadic languages (specifically, Kera) which are currently quite distant from the Laal-speaking region, but they have no similarities to Adamawa. (The arrows indicate

triggered in by the suffix by the root.)

Relative and indefinite pronouns

Interrogative

''jé'' "what?", ''ɟè'' "who?", ''ɗé'' "where?", ''sɨ̀g'' "how much?".

Prepositions

Preposition Adpositions are a part of speech, class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various thematic relations, semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositi ...

s precede their objects: ''gɨ̀ pə:l'' "in(to) the village", ''kɨ́ jà:ná'' "to his body" (="to near him").

Verbs

The verb does not vary according to the person or gender of the subject, but some verbs (about a quarter of the verbs attested) vary according to its number: ''no kaw'' "the person eats", ''mùáŋ kɨw'' "the people eat". The plural form of the verb is hard to predict, but is often formed by ablaut (typically raising the vowel height) with or without a suffix ''-i(ɲ)'' or ''-ɨɲ'' and tonal change. The verb, however, changes according to the

direct object In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but ...

. It takes personal suffixes to indicate a pronominal

, and it commonly changes when a non-pronominal direct object is added to a transitive form with final low tone (formed similarly to the "centripetal", for which see below): ''ʔà ná ká'' "he will do"; ''ʔà ná kàrà mɨ́ná'' "he will do something"; ''ʔà kú na:ra'' "he sees the man"; ''ʔà kúù:rùúŋ'' "he sees you (pl.)". The verb has three basic forms: simple, "centripetal", and "participative" to

calque In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language ...

Boyeldieu's terminology. The simple form is used in the simple present tense or the imperative: ''ʔà duàg jə́w gə̀m'' "he goes down the riverbank" (lit. "he descend mouth riverbank"). The "centripetal" indicates action "hither", either spatially, motion towards the speaker, or temporally, action up to the present moment; it is formed mainly by suffixing a vowel (often, but not always, identical to the last vowel in the word): ''ʔà duàgà jə́w gə̀m'' "he comes down the riverbank (towards me)". The "participative", generally formed like the centripetal but with final high tone, generally indicates an omitted object or instrument: Immediately before the verb, a particle may be placed to indicate forms other than a simple present tense; such particles include ''ná'' (pl. ''ní'') marking future tense, ''taá:/teé:'' (pl. ''tií:'') marking continuous action, ''wáa:'' (pl. ''wíi:'') marking motion, ''náa:'' (pl. ''níi:'') being apparently a combination of ''ná'' and ''wáa:'', ''mà'' (pl. ''mì'') meaning "must", ''mɨ́'' marking reported speech (apparently an evidential), ''mɨ́nà'' (pl. ''mínì'') expressing intention, ''kò'' marking habitual action, ''ɓə́l'' or ''ga'' (pl. ''gi'') marking incomplete action, and ''wó'' (always accompanied by ''ʔàle'' after the verb) meaning "maybe". Mediopassives (see

passive voice A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the ''theme'' or ''patient'' of the main verb – that is, the person or thing ...

middle voice In grammar, the voice (aka diathesis) of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the agent or doer of ...

) can be formed from

transitive verbs A transitive verb is a verb that entails one or more transitive objects, for example, 'enjoys' in ''Amadeus enjoys music''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not entail transitive objects, for example, 'arose' in ''Beatrice arose' ...

by adding a suffix ''-↑ɨ́ɲ'': ''no siár sà:b'' "someone ripped the cloth" > ''sà:b sérɨ́ɲ'' "the cloth ripped". For the inverse, forming transitive verbs from

intransitive In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb, aside from an auxiliary verb, whose context does not entail a transitive object. That lack of an object distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additi ...

s, changes in tone or to the plural sometimes occur.

Verbal noun Historically, grammarians have described a verbal noun or gerundial noun as a verb form that functions as a noun. An example of a verbal noun in English is 'sacking' as in the sentence "The ''sacking'' of the city was an epochal event" (wherein ...

s can sometimes be formed, mainly from intransitives, by the addition of a suffix -(vowel)''l'', sometimes with

and tone change: ''wal'' "fall" > ''wàlál'' "a fall", ''sùbá'' "lie" > ''sɨ́blál'' (pl. ''súbɨ̀r'') "a lie". The ''l'' becomes ''n'' near a nasal and ''r'' near ''r'': ''man'' "taste good", ''manan'' "a good taste".

Adjectives

Adjectives do not seem to constitute an independent category in Laal; to all intents and purposes, they behave just like verbs: ''gò: ʔì:r'' "the goat is black". Attributively, they are typically linked as a

relative clause A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments in the relative clause refers to the noun or noun phrase. For example, in the sentence ''I met a man who wasn ...

Numbers

Adverbs

Adverbs generally come at the end of the clause. Here are some important adverbs: Adverbs of location: * "here": ''ɗágàl, núŋú'' * "there": ''ɗaŋ'' * "over there, yonder": ''ɗàŋá'' Temporal adverbs: * "day before yesterday": ''tá:r'' * "yesterday": ''ʔiè:n'' * "today": ''cicam'', ''tari-màá'' * "recently": ''bèrè'' * "soon": ''sugo'' * "tomorrow": ''jìlí-kà:rì'' * "day after tomorrow": ''miàlgà''

Modals

Here are the most important modals: *Before the verb: ''mɨ́'' "(say) that", ''gàná'' "then" *After the verb: ''wó'' "not", ''(ʔà)le'' "maybe", ''ɓə́l'' "again", ''ʔá'' or ''gà'' "already", ''à''

interrogative An interrogative clause is a clause whose form is typically associated with question-like meanings. For instance, the English sentence (linguistics), sentence "Is Hannah sick?" has interrogative syntax which distinguishes it from its Declarative ...

, ''wá'' exclamatory, ''ta'' "now", ''cám'' "again, anew".

Conjunctions

Conjunctions can be divided into five types: * only ( main clause - conjunction - subordinate clause}: ''mɨ́'' "(say) that", ''ɓə'' "because" * either or : ''ɟò'' "if", ''dànngà'' (possibly from Baguirmian) "when" * circumposed: either or : ''ɟò... gàná'' "if" *

coordinate clause In grammar, a conjunction ( abbreviated or ) is a part of speech that connects words, phrases, or clauses'','' which are called its conjuncts. That description is vague enough to overlap with those of other parts of speech because what consti ...

- conjunction - coordinate clause: ''ní'' "then afterwards", ''ku'' "then", ''kó'' "nonetheless", ''á'' or ''ná'' "and", ''ɓe:'' "or", ''ʔàmá'' (from Arabic or Baguirmian) "but". * circumposed: conjunction - coordinate clause - conjunction - coordinate clause: ''ku... ku'' "then", ''jàn... jàn'' "both... and".

Sample sentences

References

* Roger Blench. ''Archaeology, Language, and the African Past.'' Altamira Press forthcoming. * Pascal Boyeldieu. 1977. "Eléments pour une phonologie du laal de Gori (Moyen-Chari), ''Etudes phonologiques tchadiennes'', Paris, SELAF (Bibliothèque, 63–64), p. 186–198. * Pascal Boyeldieu. 1982. ''Deux études laal (Moyen-Chari, Tchad)'', in ''Verbindung mit SELAF, Paris''. Berlin: Reimer. Marburger Studien zur Afrika- und Asienkunde: Ser. A, Afrika; Bd. 29. . * Pascal Boyeldieu. 1982. "Quelques questions portant sur la classification du laal (Tchad)". in JUNGRAITHMAYR, H., ''The Chad languages in the Hamitosemitic-Nigritic Border Area (Papers of the Marburg Symposium, 1979)''. Berlin : Reimer, p. 80–93. Coll. Marburger Studien zur Afrika- und Asienkunde, Serie A : Afrika. * Pascal Boyeldieu. 1987. "Détermination directe/indirecte en laal". in BOYELDIEU, P., ''La maison du chef et la tête du cabri : des degrés de la détermination nominale dans les langues d'Afrique centrale''. Paris : Geuthner, p. 77–87. * David Faris, 19 September 1994. "In-House Summary: Laal/Gori language". SIL/

Survey Team. (Unpublished.) * Florian Lionnet & Konstantin Pozdniakov, "Laal: an isolate language?

in ''Language Isolates in Africa'' workshop, Lyons, December 4, 2010

External links

Laal
at LLACAN

including two recordings of the Laal recordings online
Laal Swadesh list
(from Florian Lionnet) {{DEFAULTSORT:Laal (Language) Endangered languages of Africa Languages of Chad Language isolates of Africa Endangered language isolates