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Fwe Language
FV:final vowel The Fwe language, also known as Chifwe, is a Bantu language spoken by the Fwe people ( Mafwe or Bafwe) in Namibia and Zambia. It is closely related to the Subia language, Chisubia, and is one of several Bantu languages that feature click consonants. Classification Fwe is part of the Bantu language family, a sub-branch of the Niger-Congo family. Maho (2009) classifies it as K.402, sharing the K.40 category with Ikuhane and Totela. Bohoe (2009) classifies it as Bantu Botatwe, along with Toka, Leya, Ila, Tonga, Sala, Lenje, Lundwe, and Soli.Bostoen, Koen. 2009. "Shanjo and Fwe as part of Bantu Botatwe: a diachronic phonological approach". ''Selected proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of African Linguistics'' ed. by Akinloye Ojo & Lioba Moshi, 110-130. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Regional variation Main phonological differences between Zambian and Namibian Fwe, as noted by both the speakers and seen in the data: Morphologic ...
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Zambezi Region
The Zambezi Region, known as the Caprivi Region until 2013, is one of Namibia's fourteen regions, situated in the north-eastern part of the country along the Zambezi River. The region's capital is Katima Mulilo. The Katima Mulilo Airport is 18 kilometres south-west of the town, while the village of Bukalo is located 43 kilometres south-east of Katima Mulilo. The region has eight electoral constituencies and a population of 142,373 according to the 2023 census. Politics Constituencies The region comprises eight electoral constituencies: * Judea Lyaboloma (created 2013) * Kabbe North (created 2013) * Kabbe South (created 2013) * Katima Mulilo Rural * Katima Mulilo Urban * Kongola * Linyanti * Sibbinda Regional elections Electorally, Zambezi is consistently dominated by the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO). In the 2004 regional election for the National Assembly of Namibia, SWAPO won all constituencies, and mostly by a landslide. In the 2015 r ...
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Sala Language
Ila (''Chiila'') is a language of Zambia. Maho (2009) lists Lundwe (''Shukulumbwe'') and Sala as distinct languages most closely related to Ila. Ila is one of the languages of the Earth included on the Voyager Golden Record. Orthography Edwin Smith & Andrew Murray Dale, ''The Ila-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia'', 1919, reprinted by University Books Inc., New York, 1968. * ch in fact varies from "k" to a "weak" version of English "ch", to a "strong" "ch" to "ty". * j as the voiced sound corresponding to this therefore varies "g"/English "j"/ "dy" / and "y". * v is reportedly a voiced labiodental fricative /v/ as in English , and vh the same labialised and aspirated /vʷʰ/ ("lips more rounded with a more distinct emission of breath"). * zh is the voiced post-alveolar fricative /ʒ/; French as in ''bonjour''. * ng is the voiced velar nasal followed by a voiced velar plosive, /ŋg/ as in RP English "finger", while ng' is a plain voiced velar nasal /ŋ/ as in "singer" - a ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Postalveolar Consonant
Postalveolar (post-alveolar) consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the ''back'' of the alveolar ridge. Articulation is farther back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate, the place of articulation for palatal consonants. Examples of postalveolar consonants are the English palato-alveolar consonants , as in the words "ship", "'chill", "vision", and "jump", respectively. There are many types of postalveolar sounds—especially among the sibilants. The three primary types are ''palato-alveolar'' (such as , weakly palatalized; also ''alveopalatal''), ''alveolo-palatal'' (such as , strongly palatalized), and ''retroflex'' (such as , unpalatalized). The palato-alveolar and alveolo-palatal subtypes are commonly counted as "palatals" in phonology since they rarely contrast with true palatal consonants. Postalveolar sibilants For most sounds involving the tongue, the place of ar ...
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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 ...
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Labiodental Consonant
In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth, such as and . In English, labiodentalized /s/, /z/ and /r/ are characteristic of some individuals; these may be written . Labiodental consonants in the IPA The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are: The IPA chart shades out ''labiodental lateral consonants''. This is sometimes read as indicating that such sounds are not possible. In fact, the fricatives and often have lateral airflow, but no language makes a distinction for centrality, and the allophony is not noticeable. The IPA symbol refers to a sound occurring in Swedish, officially described as similar to the velar fricative but one dialectal variant is a rounded, velarized labiodental, less ambiguously rendered as . The labiodental click is an allophonic variant of the (bi)labial click. Occurrence The only common labiodental sounds to occur phonemically are the fricatives and th ...
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Dental Consonant
A dental consonant is a consonant articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth, such as , . In some languages, dentals are distinguished from other groups, such as alveolar consonants, in which the tongue contacts the gum ridge. Dental consonants share acoustic similarity and in the Latin script are generally written with consistent symbols (e.g. ''t'', ''d'', ''n''). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic for dental consonant is . When there is no room under the letter, it may be placed above, using the character , such as in / p͆/. Cross-linguistically Languages, such as Albanian, Irish and Russian, velarization is generally associated with more dental articulations of coronal consonants. Thus, velarized consonants, such as Albanian , tend to be dental or denti-alveolar, and non-velarized consonants tend to be retracted to an alveolar position. Sanskrit, Hindustani and all other Indo-Aryan languages have an entire set of dental stops that occu ...
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Bilabial Consonant
In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips. Frequency Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tlingit, Chipewyan, Oneida, and Wichita, though all of these have a labial–velar approximant /w/. Varieties The bilabial consonants identified by the 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 ... (IPA) are: Owere Igbo has a six-way contrast among bilabial stops: . Other varieties The extensions to the IPA also define a () for smacking the lips together. A lip-smack in the non-percussive sense of the lips audibly parting would be . The IPA chart shades out ''bilabial lateral consonants'', wh ...
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Semivowel
In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are ''y'' and ''w'' in ''yes'' and ''west'', respectively. Written in IPA, ''y'' and ''w'' are near to the vowels ''ee'' and ''oo'' in ''seen'' and ''moon,'' written in IPA. The term ''glide'' may alternatively refer to any type of transitional sound, not necessarily a semivowel. Classification Semivowels form a subclass of approximants. Although "semivowel" and "approximant" are sometimes treated as synonymous, most authors use the term "semivowel" for a more restricted set; there is no universally agreed-upon definition, and the exact details may vary from author to author. For example, do not consider the labiodental approximant to be a semivowel. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic attached to non-syllabic vowel lett ...
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Epenthesis
In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the first syllable ('' prothesis''), the last syllable ('' paragoge''), or between two syllabic sounds in a word. The opposite process in which one or more sounds are removed is referred to as syncope or elision. Etymology The word ''epenthesis'' comes from and ''en-'' and ''thesis'' . Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence for the addition of a consonant, and for the addition of a vowel, svarabhakti (in Sanskrit) or alternatively anaptyxis (). Uses Epenthesis arises for a variety of reasons. The phonotactics of a given language may discourage vowels in hiatus or consonant clusters, and a consonant or vowel may be added to help pronunciation. Epenthesis may be represented in writing, or it may be a feature only of the spoken language. Separating vowels A consonant may be added to separate vowels in hiatus, as is the case with linking and intrusive R in ...
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