The Qimant language is a highly

endangered language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...

spoken by a small and elderly fraction of the

Qemant The Qemant (also known as western Agaws) are a small ethnic group in northwestern Ethiopia specifically in Gondar, Amhara Region. The Qemant people traditionally practiced an early Pagan-Hebraic religion, however most members of the Qemant are ...

people in northern

Ethiopia Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...

, mainly in the

Chilga Chilga (Amharic: ጭልጋ ''č̣ilgā'') also Chelga, Ch'ilga is a woreda in Amhara Region, Ethiopia. It is named after its chief town Chilga (also known as Ayikel), an important stopping point on the historic Gondar-Sudan trade route. Part of th ...

woreda Districts of Ethiopia, also called woredas ( am, ወረዳ; ''woreda''), are the third level of the administrative divisions of Ethiopia – after ''zones'' and the '' regional states''. These districts are further subdivided into a number of ...

Semien Gondar Zone North Gondar (Amharic: ሰሜን ጎንደር; or Semien Gondar) is a zone in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia. This zone is named for the city of Gondar, the capital of Ethiopia until the mid-19th century. Geography North Gondar is bordered on the ...

between

Gondar Gondar, also spelled Gonder (Amharic: ጎንደር, ''Gonder'' or ''Gondär''; formerly , ''Gʷandar'' or ''Gʷender''), is a city and woreda in Ethiopia. Located in the North Gondar Zone of the Amhara Region, Gondar is north of Lake Tana on t ...

and

Metemma Metemma (Amharic: መተማ), also known as Metemma Yohannes is a town in northwestern Ethiopia, on the border with Sudan. Located in the Semien Gondar Zone of the Amhara Region, Metemma has a latitude and longitude of with an elevation of 685 ...

Classifications

The language belongs to the western branch of the Agaw or

Central Cushitic languages The Agaw or Central Cushitic languages are Afro-Asiatic languages spoken by several groups in Ethiopia and, in one case, Eritrea. They form the main substratum influence on Amharic and other Ethiopian Semitic languages. Classification The Centr ...

. Other (extinct) members of this branch are Qwara and Kayla. Along with all other

Cushitic languages The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and the Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As ...

, Qimant belongs to the

Afro-Asiatic The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic su ...

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hist ...

Geographic distribution and sociolinguistic situation

Qimant is the original language of the

people of

and

. Although the ethnic population of the Qemant was 172,327 at the 1994 census, only a very small fraction of these speak the language nowadays. All speakers live either in

woreda or in

Lay Armachiho Lay Armachiho ( am, ላይ አርማጭሆ, lāy ārmāčihō, lit=Upper Armachiho) is a woreda in Amhara Region, Ethiopia. This woreda is named after "Armachiho", a province in northwestern Ethiopia along the border with Sudan and south of the ...

woreda. The number of first-language speakers is 1625, the number of second language speakers 3450. All speakers of the language are older than 30 years, and more than 75% are older than 50 years. The language is no longer passed on to the next generation of speakers. Most ethnic Qemant people speak

Amharic Amharic ( or ; (Amharic: ), ', ) is an Ethiopian Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. It is spoken as a first language by the Amharas, and also serves as a lingua franca for all oth ...

. Qimant is not spoken in public or even at house as a means of day communication any more, but is reduced to a secret code.

Dialects/Varieties

It is not clear to what extent Kayla, Qwara and Qimant have been dialects of the same Western Agaw language, or were languages distinct from each other.

Phonology

Consonants

Continuant In phonetics, a continuant is a speech sound produced without a complete closure in the oral cavity, namely fricatives, approximants, vowels, and trills. While vowels are included in continuants, the term is often reserved for consonant sounds. ...

s can be geminated word-medially.

Vowels

Phonotactics

The maximum

syllable structure A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

in Qimant is CVC, which implies that

consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...

s are only allowed word-medially. In loanwords from Amharic there may also be consonant-clusters within a syllable. Vowel clusters are not allowed.

Phonological processes

Consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...

s with more than two consonants are broken up by inserting the

epenthetic vowel In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable ('' prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The word ''epenth ...

. Other phonological processes are nasal assimilation and

devoicing In phonology, voicing (or sonorization) is a sound change where a voiceless consonant becomes voiced due to the influence of its phonological environment; shift in the opposite direction is referred to as devoicing or desonorization. Most commo ...

of at word boundaries.

Prosody

The prosodic features of Qimant have not been studied yet.

Grammar

Morphology

The personal marking system distinguishes between first person singular and plural, second person singular, polite, and plural, and third person masculine, feminine and plural. On the verb, all inflectional categories are marked by suffixes. Zelealem (2003, p. 192) identifies three different aspect forms in Qimant: Perfective, Imperfective and Progressive. Like in other

, the numbers one to nine go back to an ancient

quinary Quinary (base-5 or pental) is a numeral system with five as the base. A possible origination of a quinary system is that there are five digits on either hand. In the quinary place system, five numerals, from 0 to 4, are used to represent an ...

system, where the suffix added to the numbers two to four results in the numbers six to nine (2-4 are three numbers, 6-9 are four numbers).

SyntaxZelealem 2003, p. 252-262

The basic constituent order in Qimant, like in all other Afro-Asiatic languages of Ethiopia, is SOV. The presence of a case marking system allows for other, more marked orders. In the

noun phrase In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently oc ...

the

head A head is the part of an organism which usually includes the ears, brain, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, each of which aid in various sensory functions such as sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Some very simple animals may ...

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...

follows its modifiers. Numbers, however, can also follow the head noun. All kind of

subordinate clause A subordinate clause, dependent clause, subclause, or embedded clause is a clause that is embedded within a complex sentence. For instance, in the English sentence "I know that Bette is a dolphin", the clause "that Bette is a dolphin" occurs as t ...

s precede the

main verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual desc ...

of the sentence.

Vocabulary

As a consequence of the looming language death, many items of the vocabulary are already replaced by

words.

References

* Zelealem Leyew. 2003. ''The Kemantney Language – A Sociolinguistic and Grammatical Study of Language Replacement''. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. * David L. Appleyard. 1975. "A descriptive outline of Kemant," ''Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies'' 38:316-350.

Notes

External links

Qimant phonology and grammar
*

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-ROM i ...

information o
Kemant
{{Authority control Central Cushitic languages Languages of Ethiopia Amhara Region Endangered languages of Africa