Koyra Chiini (, figuratively "town language"), or Western Songhay, is a member of the
Songhay languages
The Songhay, Songhai or Ayneha languages (, or ) are a group of closely related languages/dialects centred on the middle stretches of the Niger River in the West African countries of Mali, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. In particular, ...
spoken in
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. Mal ...
by about 200,000 people (in 1999) along the
Niger River
The Niger River ( ; ) is the main river of West Africa, extending about . Its drainage basin is in area. Its source is in the Guinea Highlands in south-eastern Guinea near the Sierra Leone border. It runs in a crescent shape through ...
in
Timbuktu
Timbuktu ( ; french: Tombouctou;
Koyra Chiini: ); tmh, label=Tuareg, script=Tfng, ⵜⵏⴱⴾⵜ, Tin Buqt a city in Mali, situated north of the Niger River. The town is the capital of the Tombouctou Region, one of the eight administrativ ...
and upriver from it in the towns of
Diré
Diré is a town and commune on the left bank of the Niger River in the Tombouctou Region of Mali. In the 2009 census the population of the commune was 22,365. The town is the administrative center of the Diré Cercle. There are several languag ...
,
Tonka
Tonka is an American producer of toy trucks. The company is known for making steel toy models of construction type trucks and machinery. Maisto International, which makes diecast vehicles, acquired the rights to use the Tonka name in a line of ...
,
Goundam and
Niafunké
Niafunké is a small town on the Niger River in central Mali. The town is the administrative center ('' chef-lieu'') of the commune of Soboundou in the Niafunké Cercle of the Tombouctou Region
Tombouctou Region ( Bambara: ߕߎߡߎߕߎ ߘ ...
as well as in the
Saharan town of
Araouane
Araouane or Arawan is a small village in the Malian part of the Sahara Desert, lying north of Timbuktu on the caravan route to the salt-mining centre of Taoudenni. The village once served as an entrepôt in the trans-Saharan trade.
History
Betw ...
to its north. In this area, Koyra Chiini is the dominant language and the ''
lingua franca'', although minorities speaking
Hassaniya Arabic,
Tamasheq
Tamashek or Tamasheq is a variety of Tuareg, a Berber macro-language widely spoken by nomadic tribes across North Africa in Algeria, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Tamasheq is one of the three main varieties of Tuareg, the others being Ta ...
and
Fulfulde
Fula ,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh also known as Fulani or Fulah (, , ; Adlam: , , ), is a Senegambian language spoken by around 30 million people as a set of various dialects in a continuum that st ...
are found. Djenné Chiini , the dialect spoken in
Djenné, is
mutually comprehensible
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as a ...
, but has noticeable differences, in particular two extra vowels ( and ) and syntactic differences related to
focalisation.
East of Timbuktu, Koyra Chiini gives way relatively abruptly to another Songhay language,
Koyraboro Senni.
Unlike most Songhai languages, Koyra Chiini has no phonemic
tones and has
subject–verb–object word order rather than
subject–object–verb. It has changed the original Songhay ''z'' to ''j''.
Phonology
All vowels have lengthened counterparts.
References
* ed. Jeffrey Heath, Wilhelm J. Möhlig, 1998. ''Texts in Koyra Chiini Songhay of Timbuktu, Mali''. Ruediger Koeppe. .
* Jeffrey Heath, ''Dictionnaire Songhay-Anglais-Français: Tome 1 - Koyra Chiini, ou "songhay de Tombouctou", Tome 2 - Djenné Chiini, ou "songhay de Djenné"''. L'Harmattan:Paris 1998. .
Songhay languages
Languages of Mali
Non-tonal languages in tonal families
Subject–verb–object languages
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