Wandala, also known as Mandara or Mura', is a language in the

Chadic The Chadic languages form a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken in parts of the Sahel. They include 196 languages spoken across northern Nigeria, southern Niger, southern Chad, and northern Cameroon. By far the most widely ...

branch of the

Afro-Asiatic language The Afroasiatic languages (also known as Afro-Asiatic, Afrasian, Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic) are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the ...

family, spoken in

Cameroon Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the R ...

and

Nigeria Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...

Geographic distribution

Wandara has 23,500 speakers in Northern Cameroon and 20,000 speakers in Nigeria. In Cameroon, Wandala is spoken in

Mora Mora may refer to: People * José Maria Mora (1847–1926), Cuban-American photographer, often credited as "Mora" * Mora (singer) (born 1996), a Puerto Rican singer * Mora (surname), a Spanish name (includes a list of people with the name) Plac ...

and surroundings (in the Mora massif and surrounding plains) by about 23,500 speakers. It is also the lingua franca of the entire department of

Mayo-Sava Mayo-Sava is a department of Extreme-Nord Province in Cameroon. The department covers an area of 2,736 km and at the 2005 Census had a total population of 348,890. The capital of the department is at Mora. Subdivisions The department is div ...

, by ethnic groups of the northern

Mandara Mountains The Mandara Mountains are a volcanic range extending about 190 km (about 120 mi) along the northern part of the Cameroon–Nigeria border, from the Benue River in the south () to the north-west of Maroua in the north (). The highest ...

Dialects

The Mura dialect represents an archaic form of the Wandala language. It is the language of the non-Islamic "Kirdi-Mora" people who live in the Mora massif. The Malgwa dialect is distinct. It is spoken in the plain north of Mora (in

Kolofata Kolofata is a town and commune in Cameroon. Boko Haram Attacks On January 12, 2015 a military base in Kolofata was assaulted by Boko Haram. The Islamist group had attacked towns in Northern Cameroon in December 2014 The attack was repelled wit ...

district) by a mixture of Kanuri, Fula, and Arab populations.

Phonology

Consonants

Wandala has a rich consonant inventory, with more than forty consonantal segments. Sounds in parentheses are

allophones In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosi ...

. The glottalized plosives are voiceless.

Vowels

Wandala has been reported to have no phonemic vowels. An alternative analysis posits three underlying and six phonetic vowels, as well as two underlying tones.

Syllable structure

Some possible syllable structures are V, N (nasal consonant), CV, Glide V, VC, CVC. Consonant clusters are not permitted in the coda. To avoid breaking this constraint, a central vowel may be inserted in word-final position. The consonant ''r'' may act as a syllabic peak, meaning the structure Cr is a possible syllable structure.

Grammar

Lexical categories

Wandala has the

lexical categories In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ass ...

of noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and predicator.

Morphology

Reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a Morphology (linguistics), morphological process in which the Root (linguistics), root or Stem (linguistics), stem of a word, part of that, or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The cla ...

is a major morphological process in Wandala, with different forms and functions that may be limited to one lexical category or shared across lexical categories. Partial reduplication gives the plural form of verbs and adjectives, while complete reduplication gives aspectual and modal forms of verbs, or derives adverbs from other lexical categories. Phrases can also be reduplicated. All lexical categories can have

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

es. On verbs, suffixes have many functions, such as marking semantic and

grammatical relation In linguistics, grammatical relations (also called grammatical functions, grammatical roles, or syntactic functions) are functional relationships between constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical functions from traditional g ...

s, directionality and point of view. Suffixes on nouns mark plural number, genitive relation and pronominal possession. Nouns can be derived by adding suffixes to numerals and adjectives. Wandala also has limited

prefix A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the word to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can b ...

es for nouns and one

infix An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word or the core of a family of words). It contrasts with '' adfix,'' a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix. When marking text for ...

. The vowel ''a'' acts as an infix in the verbal system to encode verb plurality.

Syntax

In the noun phrase, the head precedes modifiers, determiners and quantifiers. The grammatical relations

subject Subject ( "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness, or ...

and

object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an a ...

are distinguished, with distinct pronouns. However, lexical properties of verbs determine how the grammatical roles of nominal arguments are coded, with some verbs taking the controller as the unmarked argument, and others the affected entity. A nominal object or nominal subject can occur after the verb, but cannot both occupy this position, so if they co-occur, one must be fronted. This encodes

information structure In linguistics, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is Formal semantics (natural language), formally packaged within a Sentence (linguistics), sentence.Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. ''Informati ...

such as

topicalization Topicalization is a mechanism of syntax that establishes an expression as the sentence or clause topic (linguistics), topic by having it appear at the front of the sentence or clause (as opposed to in a canonical position later in the sentence). T ...

focus Focus (: foci or focuses) may refer to: Arts * Focus or Focus Festival, former name of the Adelaide Fringe arts festival in East Australia Film *Focus (2001 film), ''Focus'' (2001 film), a 2001 film based on the Arthur Miller novel *Focus (2015 ...

switch-reference In linguistics, switch-reference (SR) describes any clause-level morpheme that signals whether certain prominent arguments in 'adjacent' clauses are reference, coreferential. In most cases, it marks whether the subject (grammar), subject of the v ...

References

{{Authority control Biu-Mandara languages Languages of Nigeria