The Majang language is spoken by the Majangir people of

Ethiopia Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

. Although it is a member of the Surmic language cluster, it is the most isolated one in the group (Fleming 1983). A language survey has shown that dialect variation from north to south is minor and does not seriously impede communication. The 2007 Ethiopian Census lists 6,433 speakers for Majang (Messengo), but also reports that the ethnic group consists of 32,822 individuals (Messengo and Mejengir). According to the census, almost no speakers can be found in

Mezhenger Zone The Mezhenger Zone or Majang Zone is a zone in Gambela Region of Ethiopia. It is named for one of the three largest indigenous groups in Gambela, the Majangir. This zone is bordered on the south and east by the Southern Nations, Nationalities an ...

Gambela Region The Gambela Region, also spelled Gambella, and officially the Gambela Peoples' Region (), is a regional state in western Ethiopia. Previously known as Region 12, its capital and largest city is Gambela. It is bordered by the Oromia Region to t ...

; a total of eleven speakers are listed for the zone, but almost 10,000 ethnic Mejenger or Messengo people. Majang NT title page

Phonology

The vowel inventory below is taken from Joswig (2012) and Getachew (2014, p. 65). Vowel length is distinctive in Majang, so meanings change depending on whether a vowel is long or short, such as ''goopan'' 'punishment' and ''gopan'' 'road'. Unseth (2007) posed a 9-vowel system with a row of -ATR closed vowels ɪ and ʊ. Moges claims a tenth vowel ɐ, whereas Bender (1983) was only ready to confirm six vowels. All authors agree that there is no ATR

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...

in the language. Bender also claims that the glottal stop needs to be treated as a phoneme of Majang though Unseth refutes this. Majang has two

implosives 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 additio ...

, bilabial and coronal, which Moges Yigezu has studied acoustically and distributionally.

Prosodic Features

Tones distinguish meaning in Majang, on both the word level and the grammatical level: ''táŋ'' (higher tone) 'cow', ''tàŋ'' (lower tone) 'abscess'. The tonal inventory consists of two tone levels, with falling and rising contour tones possible at the end of phonological words, plus automatic and non-automatic downstep.

Morphology

The language has markers to indicate three different past tenses (close, mid, far past) and two future tenses (near and farther). The language has a wide variety of suffixes, but almost no prefixes. Though its use is limited to a handful of roots, there are a few words that preserve vestiges of the archaic causative prefix ''i-'', a prefix found in other Surmic languages and also

Nilotic The Nilotic peoples are peoples Indigenous people of Africa, indigenous to South Sudan and the Nile Valley who speak Nilotic languages. They inhabit South Sudan and the Gambela Region of Ethiopia, while also being a large minority in Kenya, Uga ...

. The counting system is a modified

vigesimal A vigesimal ( ) or base-20 (base-score) numeral system is based on 20 (number), twenty (in the same way in which the decimal, decimal numeral system is based on 10 (number), ten). ''wikt:vigesimal#English, Vigesimal'' is derived from the Latin a ...

system, based on 5, 10, and 20. "Twenty" is 'one complete person' (all fingers and toes), so 40 is 'two complete people', 100 is 'five complete people'. However, today, under the influence of schools and increased bilingualism, people generally use the

Amharic Amharic is an Ethio-Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. It is spoken as a first language by the Amhara people, and also serves as a lingua franca for all other metropolitan populati ...

or Oromo words for 100. The person and number marking system does not mark the

inclusive and exclusive we In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between ''inclusive'' and ''exclusive'' Grammatical person, first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called ''inclusive "we"'' and ''exclusive "we"''. Inclusive "we" specifically inc ...

distinction, a morphological category that is found in nearby and related languages.

Syntax

Majang has a basic VSO word order, though allowing some flexibility for focus, etc. The language makes extensive use of

relative clause A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments in the relative clause refers to the noun or noun phrase. For example, in the sentence ''I met a man who wasn ...

s, including for circumstances where English would use

adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

s. A recent study states that Majang is characterized by a strong morphological ergative-absolutive system, and a conjoint-disjoint distinction which is based on the presence or absence of an

absolutive In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative� ...

noun phrase A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently ...

directly following the

verb A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...

. Many of these distinctions are coded by tonal differences. Majang, and some related Surmic languages, has been shown to be exceptional to some syntactic typological predictions for languages with verb-subject-object word order.Jon Arensen, Nicky de Jong, Scott Randal, Peter Unseth. 1997. Interrogatives in Surmic Languages and Greenberg's Universals. ''Occasional Papers in the Study of Sudanese Languages'' 7:71-90. Majang has postpositions and question words sentence-finally, two properties that had been predicted to not occur in languages with VSO word order.

References

Bibliography

* Bender, M. Lionel. 1983. "Majang Phonology and Morphology," in M. Lionel Bender, (ed.), ''Nilo-Saharan Language Studies'', pp. 114–47. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University, African Studies Center. * Fleming, Harold. 1983. "Surmic etymologies" in Rainer Vossen and Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst (eds.),''Nilotic Studies: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Languages and History of the Nilotic Peoples''. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. pp. 524–555. * Getachew Anteneh Yigzaw. 2014
''Grammatical Description and Documentation of Majang''
Ph.D. Thesis. Addis Ababa University. * Joswig, Andreas. 2012
"The Vowels of Majang"
in Brenzinger, Matthias and Anne-Maria Fehn (eds.), ''Proceedings of the 6th World Congress of African Linguistics, Cologne 2009''. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. pp. 263–267. * Joswig, Andreas. 2015a
"Syntactic Sensitivity and Preferred Clause Structure in Majang"
in Angelika Mietzner, Anne Storch (eds.): ''Nilo-Saharan: Models and Descriptions''. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, pp. 169–176. * Joswig, Andreas. 2015b
''The Basics of Majang Tone''
SIL International. * Joswig, Andreas. 2019
The Majang Language
Ph.D. Thesis. Leiden University. published by Amsterdam: LOT Publications. * Moges Yigezu. 2007. "The Phonetics and Phonology of Majang Vowels: A Historical-Comparative Perspective” in Doris Payne and Mechthild Reh (eds.), ''Advances in Nilo-Saharan Linguistics''. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. pp. 255–265. * Unseth, Peter. 1988. "Majang Nominal Plurals: With Comparative Notes," ''Studies in African Linguistics'' 19.1:75-91. * Unseth, Peter. 1989. "Sketch of Majang Syntax," in M. Lionel Bender (ed.), ''Topics in Nilo-Saharan Linguistics''. (Nilo-Saharan: Linguistic Analyses and Documentation, vol. 3. Series editor Franz Rottland.) Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag. pp. 97–127. * Unseth, Peter. 1991. "Consonant Sequences and Morphophonemics in Majang" in Richard Pankhurst, Ahmed Zekaria and Taddese Beyene (eds.), ''Proceedings of the First National Conference of Ethiopian Studies''. Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies. pp. 525–534. * Unseth, Peter. 1998. "Two Old Causative Affixes in Surmic," in Gerrit Dimmendaal (ed.), ''Surmic Languages and Cultures''. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. pp. 113–126. * Unseth, Peter. 2007. "Mağaŋgir language" in ed. by Siegbert Uhlig (ed.) ''Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, Vol 3''. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. pp. 627–629.

External links

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-RO ...

information o
Majang

Majang basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
{{Eastern Sudanic languages Languages of Ethiopia Surmic languages Verb–subject–object languages