Samwé (samoe), also known as Wara (ouara, ouala), is a

Gur language The Gur languages, also known as Central Gur or Mabia, belong to the Niger–Congo languages. They are spoken in the Sahelian and savanna regions of West Africa, namely: in most areas of Burkina Faso, and in south-central Mali, northeastern Ivor ...

of Burkina. Dialects are Negueni-Klani, Ouatourou-Niasogoni, and Soulani. Niasogoni speakers have difficulty with Negueni, but not vice versa.

Phonology

Consonants

* can be lenited to between vowels. * has a free variant after nasals, vowels, and other consonants. * is voiced after nasals and between vowels. * is often or between vowels. It tends to stay voiceless at morpheme boundaries. * becomes voiced between vowels or after nasals. is not allowed before . * , which is not phonemic, occurs intervocalically between the same vowel. * is always voiceless. * is voiced intervocalically and after nasals, before and , and elsewhere. can be lenited to , which Ouattara represents as . As with stops, voicing and lenition are in free variation. * can also be realized as or . is also in free variation with in some words. Sometimes, becomes or . * and are contrastive, but roughly 20 words have in free variation.

Vowels

Samwe has 20 vowels: 7 short oral vowels, 7 long oral vowels, 3 short nasal vowels, and 3 long nasal vowels. Samwe has two types of vowel harmony:

ATR ATR may refer to: Medicine * Acute transfusion reaction * Ataxia telangiectasia and Rad3 related, a protein involved in DNA damage repair Science and mathematics * Advanced Test Reactor, nuclear research reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory, ...

harmony and front-back harmony. do not occur in stems with . Front and back vowels ( and ) do not co-occur in disyllabic imperative verb stems, but this rule is not followed in other verb forms. is neutral in both types.

Notes

References

* Wara–Natyoro languages Languages of Burkina Faso {{gur-lang-stub