Bijago or Bidyogo is the language of the
Bissagos Archipelago of
Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau, officially the Republic of Guinea-Bissau, is a country in West Africa that covers with an estimated population of 2,026,778. It borders Senegal to Guinea-Bissau–Senegal border, its north and Guinea to Guinea–Guinea-Bissau b ...
. Bidyogo is the "dominant mother tongue of the archipelago population", though it is not used in schooling there, a role that has been taken on
Kriol since the 1990s.
Feytor Pinto , Paulo. 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384074386_Bilingual_education_in_the_Bissagos_islands_of_Guinea-Bissau
p. 53 There are some difficulties of grammar and intelligibility between dialects, with the Kamona dialect being unintelligible to the others.
Dialects are as follows:
* Anhaki on Canhabaque ( Roxa) Island
* Kagbaaga on Bubaque Island
* Kajoko on Orango and Uno Islands
* Kamona on the northern Caravela
Caravela is the northernmost island of the Bissagos Islands of Guinea-Bissau, part of the Sector of Caravela, which also includes the islands Carache, Maio, Ponta and Formosa. The population of the sector is 4,263, the population of the island i ...
and Carache
Carache is an island in the northwestern part of the Bissagos Islands group, Guinea-Bissau
Guinea-Bissau, officially the Republic of Guinea-Bissau, is a country in West Africa that covers with an estimated population of 2,026,778. It bor ...
Islands
Characteristics
The Kajoko dialect is one of the few in the world known to use a linguolabial consonant
Linguolabials or apicolabials are consonants articulated by placing the tongue tip or blade against the upper lip, which is drawn downward to meet the tongue. They represent one extreme of a coronal articulatory continuum which extends from lin ...
, the voiced stop to tap , in its basic sound system.
Classification
Bijago is highly divergent. Sapir (1971) classified it as an isolate within the West Atlantic family. However, Segerer showed that this is primarily due to unrecognized sound changes, and that Bijago is in fact close to the Bak languages
The Bak languages are a group of typologically Atlantic languages of Senegal and Guinea-Bissau linked in 2010 to the erstwhile Atlantic isolate Bijago language, Bijago. Bak languages are non-tone (linguistics), tonal.
Name
David Dalby coined the ...
. For example, the following cognates in Bijago and Joola Kasa (a Bak language) are completely regular, but had not previously been identified:
See also
* Bijogo word list (Wiktionary)
References
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Bak languages
Languages of Guinea-Bissau