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Serer Language
Serer, often broken into differing regional dialects such as Serer-Sine and Serer-Saloum, is a language of the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo family spoken by 1.2 million people in Senegal and 30,000 in the Gambia as of 2009. It is the principal language of the Serer people, and was the language of the early modern kingdoms of Sine, Saloum, and Baol. Serer is primarily written in the Latin alphabet. Classification Serer is one of the Senegambian languages, which are characterized by consonant mutation. The traditional classification of Atlantic languages is that of Sapir (1971), which found that Serer was closest to Fulani. However, a widely cited misreading of the data by Wilson (1989) inadvertently exchanged Serer for Wolof. Dialects of Serer are Serer Sine (the prestige dialect), Segum, Fadyut-Palmerin, Dyegueme (Gyegem), and Niominka. They are mutually intelligible except for the Sereer spoken in some of the areas surrounding the city of Thiès. Not all ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Senegal
Senegal, officially the Republic of Senegal, is the westernmost country in West Africa, situated on the Atlantic Ocean coastline. It borders Mauritania to Mauritania–Senegal border, the north, Mali to Mali–Senegal border, the east, Guinea to Guinea–Senegal border, the southeast and Guinea-Bissau to Guinea-Bissau–Senegal border, the southwest. Senegal nearly surrounds The Gambia, a country occupying a narrow sliver of land along the banks of the Gambia River, which separates Senegal's southern region of Casamance from the rest of the country. It also shares a maritime border with Cape Verde. Senegal's capital is Dakar. Senegal is the westernmost country in the mainland of the Old World, or Afro-Eurasia. It owes its name to the Senegal River, which borders it to the east and north. The climate is typically Sahelian, though there is a wet season, rainy season. Senegal covers a land area of almost and has a population of around 18 million. The state is a Presidential system ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Fula Language
Fula ( ),Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student's Handbook'', Edinburgh also known as Fulani ( ) or Fulah (, , ; Adlam script, Adlam: , , ; Ajami script, Ajami: , , ), is a Senegambian languages, Senegambian language spoken by around 36.8 million people as a set of various dialects in a Dialect continuum, continuum that stretches across some 18 countries in West Africa, West and Central Africa. Along with other related languages such as Serer language, Serer and Wolof language, Wolof, it belongs to the Atlantic languages, Atlantic geographic group within Niger–Congo languages, Niger–Congo, and more specifically to the Senegambian languages, Senegambian branch. Unlike most Niger-Congo languages, Fula does not have Tone (linguistics), tones. It is spoken as a first language by the Fula people ("Fulani", ) from the Senegambia, Senegambia region and Guinea to Cameroon, Nigeria, and Sudan and by related groups such as the Toucouleur people in the Senegal River Valley ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Glottal Consonant
Glottal consonants are consonants using the glottis as their primary articulation. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the glottal fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have, while some do not consider them to be consonants at all. However, glottal consonants behave as typical consonants in many languages. For example, in Literary Arabic, most words are formed from a root ''C-C-C'' consisting of three consonants, which are inserted into templates such as or . The glottal consonants and can occupy any of the three root consonant slots, just like "normal" consonants such as or . The glottal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet are as follows: Characteristics In many languages, the "fricatives" are not true fricatives. This is a historical usage of the word. They instead represent transitional states of the glottis (phonation) without a specific place of articulation, and may behave as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Uvular Consonant
Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and the symbol for the voiced fricative is used instead. Uvular affricates can certainly be made but are rare: they occur in most Turkic languages, most Persian languages, most Arabic languages, in some southern High-German dialects, as well as a few African and Native American languages. (Ejective uvular affricates occur as realizations of uvular stops in Kazakh, Bashkir, Arabic dialects, Lillooet, or as allophonic realizations of the ejective uvular fricative in Georgian.) Uvular consonants are typically incompatible with advanced tongue root, and they often cause retraction of neighboring vowels. Uvular consonants in IPA The uvular consonants identified by the International Phoneti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Velar Consonant
Velar consonants are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (also known as the "velum"). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive and the movements of the dorsum are not very precise, velars easily undergo assimilation, shifting their articulation back or to the front depending on the quality of adjacent vowels. They often become automatically ''fronted'', that is partly or completely palatal before a following front vowel, and ''retracted'', that is partly or completely uvular before back vowels. Palatalised velars (like English in ''keen'' or ''cube'') are sometimes referred to as palatovelars. Many languages also have labialized velars, such as , in which the articulation is accompanied by rounding of the lips. There are also labial–velar consonants, which are doubly articulated at the velum and at the lips, such as . This distinction disappea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Palatal Consonant
Palatals are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex. Characteristics The most common type of palatal consonant is the extremely common approximant , which ranks among the ten most common sounds in the world's languages. The nasal is also common, occurring in around 35 percent of the world's languages, in most of which its equivalent obstruent is not the stop , but the affricate . Only a few languages in northern Eurasia, the Americas and central Africa contrast palatal stops with postalveolar affricates—as in Hungarian, Czech, Latvian, Macedonian, Slovak, Turkish and Albanian. Consonants with other primary articulations may be palatalized, that is, accompanied by the raising of the tongue surface towards the hard palate. For example, English (spelled ''sh'') has such a palatal componen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Alveolar Consonant
Alveolar consonants (; UK also ) are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli (the sockets) of the upper teeth. Alveolar consonants may be articulated with the tip of the tongue (the apical consonants), as in English, or with the flat of the tongue just above the tip (the "blade" of the tongue; called laminal consonants), as in French and Spanish. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) does not have separate symbols for the alveolar consonants. Rather, the same symbol is used for all coronal places of articulation that are not palatalized like English palato-alveolar ''sh'', or retroflex. To disambiguate, the ''bridge'' (, ''etc.'') may be used for a dental consonant, or the under-bar (, ''etc.'') may be used for the postalveolars. differs from dental in that the former is a sibilant and the latter is not. differs from postalveolar in being unpalatalized. The bare letter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Labial Consonant
Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. The two common labial articulations are bilabials, articulated using both lips, and labiodentals, articulated with the lower lip against the upper teeth, both of which are present in English. A third labial articulation is dentolabials, articulated with the upper lip against the lower teeth (the reverse of labiodental), normally only found in pathological speech. Generally precluded are linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue contacts the posterior side of the upper lip, making them coronals, though sometimes, they behave as labial consonants. The most common distribution between bilabials and labiodentals is the English one, in which the nasal and the stops, , , and , are bilabial and the fricatives, , and , are labiodental. The voiceless bilabial fricative, voiced bilabial fricative, and the bilabial approximant do not exist as the primary realizations of any sounds in E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Voiceless Implosive
Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants (and possibly also some affricates) with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs. Therefore, unlike the purely glottalic ejective consonants, implosives can be modified by phonation. Contrastive implosives are found in approximately 13% of the world's languages. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, implosives are indicated by modifying the top of a letter (voiced stop) with a rightward-facing hook: . Articulation During the occlusion of the stop, pulling the glottis downward rarefies the air in the vocal tract. The stop is then released. In languages whose implosives are particularly salient, that may result in air rushing into the mouth before it flows out again with the next vowel. To take in air sharply in that way is to implode a sound. However, probably more typically, there i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Cangin Languages
The Cangin () languages are spoken by 200,000 people (as of 2007) in a small area east of Dakar, Senegal. They are the languages spoken by the Serer people who do not speak the Serer language (''Serer-Sine''). Because the people are ethnically Serer, the Cangin languages are commonly thought to be dialects of the Serer language. However, they are not closely related; Serer is closer to Fulani than it is to Cangin. Languages The Cangin languages are: Lehar and Noon are particularly close, as are Ndut and Palor, though not quite to the point of easy intelligibility. Safen is transparently closer to Lehar–Noon than to Palor–Ndut. Reconstruction Merrill (2018: 451) reconstructs Proto-Cangin as follows.Merrill, John Thomas Mayfield. 2018. The Historical Origin of Consonant Mutation in the Atlantic Languages'. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. See also *Serer language Serer, often broken into differing regional dialects such as Serer-Sine and Ser ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Thiès
Thiès (; ; Noon language, Noon: ''Chess'') is the third largest city in Senegal with a population of 391,253 in 2023. It lies east of Dakar on the N2 road (Senegal), N2 road and at the junction of railway lines to Dakar, Bamako and Saint-Louis, Senegal, St-Louis. It is the capital of Thiès Region and is a major industrial city. History Before French conquest of Senegal, colonization, the Thiès Plateau was a wooded frontier between the kingdoms of Cayor and Baol inhabited by the Serer-Noon, an ethnic sub-group of the Serer people. The Serer-Noon still inhabit the Thiès-Nones neighborhood of the south-west city today. They speak the Noon language, one of the Cangin languages. The village of Dianxene, belonging to the kingdom of Cayor, was founded on the strategically important plateau in the 17th century. In 1860, it had only 75 inhabitants. The France, French founded a military post there in 1864, becoming an important force in the city's development ever since. The Congreg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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Mutually Intelligible
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelligibility is sometimes used to distinguish languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used. Intelligibility between varieties can be asymmetric; that is, speakers of one variety may be able to better understand another than vice versa. An example of this is the case between Afrikaans and Dutch. It is generally easier for Dutch speakers to understand Afrikaans than for Afrikaans speakers to understand Dutch. In a dialect continuum, neighbouring varieties are mutually intelligible, but differences mount with distance, so that more widely separated varieties may not be mutually intelligible. Intelligibility can be partial, as is the case with Azerbaijani and Turkish, or significant, as is the case with Bulg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |