Tyap is a regionally important

dialect cluster A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated vari ...

Plateau languages The forty or so Plateau languages are a tentative group of Benue–Congo languages spoken by 15 million people on the Jos Plateau, Southern Kaduna, Nasarawa State and in adjacent areas in central Nigeria. Berom and Eggon have the most speak ...

Nigeria Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya 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 G ...

Middle Belt The Middle Belt (also spelt Middle-Belt or Central Nigeria) is a term used in human geography to designate a belt region stretching across central Nigeria longitudinally and forming a transition zone between Northern and Southern Nigeria. It ...

, named after its

prestige dialect Prestige refers to a good reputation or high esteem; in earlier usage, ''prestige'' meant "showiness". (19th c.) Prestige may also refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Films * ''Prestige'' (film), a 1932 American film directed by Tay Garnett ...

. It is also known by its ''

Hausa Hausa may refer to: * Hausa people, an ethnic group of West Africa * Hausa language, spoken in West Africa * Hausa Kingdoms, a historical collection of Hausa city-states * Hausa (horse) or Dongola horse, an African breed of riding horse See also ...

exonym An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, o ...

'' as Katab or Kataf.McKinney, N. P. (April 1990), p. 255. It is also known by the names of its dialectical varieties including Sholyio, Fantswam, Gworok, Takad, "Mabatado" (Tyap 'proper'), Tyeca̱rak and Tyuku (Tuku). According to Blench (2008), Jju—with more speakers—appears to be a form of Tyap (although its speakers are ethnically distinct).

Central Plateau languages The twenty Central Plateau languages are a residual branch of the Plateau family spoken in central Nigeria. Tyap (or Katab) has 130,000 speakers, and the closely related Jju (or Kaje) has well over 300,000. Hyam (or Jabba) has another 100,000 ...

Distribution

Native Tyap speakers are primarily found in the local government areas of

Jema'a Jema'a (also written ''Ajemaa'' and ''Jama'a'') is a Local Government Area in southern Kaduna State, Nigeria with headquarters at Kafanchan. The Local Government Council is chaired by Yunana Barde. It has an area of 1,384 km2 and a populatio ...

, Kaura and Zangon Kataf, although pockets of speakers are also found in Kachia and Kauru in southern

Kaduna Kaduna is the capital city of Kaduna State, and the former political capital of Northern Nigeria. It is located in north-western Nigeria, on the Kaduna River. It is a trade Centre and a major transportation hub as the gateway to northern Nig ...

state of

. There are also large speaking communities in Kaduna South and

Chikun Chikun is a Local Government Area in central Kaduna State, Nigeria. It has an area of 4,466 km, and had a population of 372,272 as at the 2006 census. Its headquarters is in the town of Kujama. The postal code of the area is 2438000. Boundari ...

Local Government Areas of the state. Skoggard (2014) presented the distribution of the Atyap (Katab) people in Nigeria to include:

Niger ) , official_languages = , languages_type = National languagesNasarawa,

states and the FCT.

Classification and dialects

Meek (1931:2) suggested that the Katab (Atyap), Morwa (Asholyio), Ataka (Atakad) and Kagoro (Agworok) speak a common tongue and may be regarded as one; and later on, McKinney (1983:290) commented that the Kaje ( Bajju) should likewise be included with the above, due to the linguistic and cultural similarities shared by them. Murdock (1959) classified ''Kagoro'' (Gworok) and other dialects comprising the current Tyap language group as "Plateau Nigerian", in his "Semi-Bantu" branch of "Bantoid subfamily" of "Negritic Stock". Tyap and Jju were placed by Greenberg (1963) under the "Plateau II" branch of the Benue-Congo language family. Later on, Gerhardt (1974) made a reconstruction of the branch, assigning it as "proto-Plateau". Again in 1989, Gerhardt placed Tyap and Jju under the South-Central subgroup, Central group, Plateau branch of Platoid, a division of the Benue-Congo languages. Achi (2005) stated that the Atyap speak a language in the Kwa group of the Benue-Congo language family. However, according to Bitiyong, Y. I., in Achi et al. (2019:44), the Kataf Group (an old classification) to which Tyap language belongs, is a member of the eastern Plateau. He went further to suggest that by utilizing a glotochronological time scale established for

Yoruba The Yoruba people (, , ) are a West African ethnic group that mainly inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The areas of these countries primarily inhabited by Yoruba are often collectively referred to as Yorubaland. The Yoruba consti ...

and

Edo Edo ( ja, , , "bay-entrance" or "estuary"), also romanized as Jedo, Yedo or Yeddo, is the former name of Tokyo. Edo, formerly a ''jōkamachi'' (castle town) centered on Edo Castle located in Musashi Province, became the ''de facto'' capital of ...

languages Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...

and their neighbours, the separation of the Kataf Group into distinguishable dialects and dialect clusters would require thousands of years. Also mentioned was that, , noting further that this indicates that He thereafter summarized that the implication for Tyap is that it has taken thousands of years to separate, in the same general geographical location from its about six most closely related dialects and stated that as a sub-unit, they required probably more thousands of years earlier to separate from other members of the "Kataf group" like Gyong, Hyam, Duya and Ashe (Koro) who are little intelligible to them. The stability of language and other culture traits in this region of

has been recognized.

Dialects

Tyap has a number of dialects, including:

Phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

The Tyap

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a s ...

(''Zwunzwuo A̱lyem Tyap ji'') had 39 letters, as drafted by the Tyap Literacy Committee (TLC) during the early 1990s: However, a current development as of 2018, has the Tyap Basic Alphabetical Chart reduced to 24, as follows: The letter "ch" would henceforth be represented by the symbol "c", without the "h". All others remain the same.

Vowels

The seven vowels of Tyap may either be short or long

monophthong A monophthong ( ; , ) is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation. The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, w ...

s sounds. The language has five (or six)

diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...

s: .

Consonants

The language has over 80 monographic and digraph labialized and palatalized consonant sounds, classified into fortis and lenis modifications. The following table contains the main basic consonant sounds of Tyap:

Syntax

Tyap has the SVO constituent order type as illustrated below in the first given example:

Some words associated with the alphabet

Common phrases and sentences in Tyap

Comparison between Tyap dialects

Comparing the

cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical e ...

percentages between Kaje (Jju), Katab ("Mabatado" Tyap) and Kagoro (Gworok) on the Swadesh wordlist consisting of 118 items of ''core basic vocabulary'', Wurm (1971), in his remark stated that, the cognate percentages indicate that the three ethnic groups speak dialects of the same language. _{Percentages of cognates on the Swadesh wordlist: Wurm (1971).}
With a further comparison of their kinship terminologies, McKinney (1983:291), after comparing 174 entries between the above three found only eight to be non-cognate. _{Percentages of kingship cognate terms: McKinney (1983:291).} Below are comparisons made by Akau (2020) between the seven Tyap core dialects and Jju.

Numbers ()

* 0: // * 1: (also ) * 2: (also ) * 3: (also ) * 4: (also ) * 5: (also ) * 6: * 7: * 8: (or ) * 9:

10 to 100

The numbers 11 to 19 are created by adding 1–9 to 10 with the middle (often shortened in pronunciation to and the next a̱, e.g. in , being silent) to the adjoining number, but usually each word is written in full: e.g. (15). * 10: * 11: * 12: * 13: * 14: * 15: * 16: * 17: * 18: * 19: The numbers 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 are formed by replacing the prefix 2 to 5, affixed to the "" (ten) with ''n-'', with the itself taking the prefix ''n-'' throughout: * 20: * 30: * 40: * 50: * 60: * 70: * 80: (or ) * 90: Other numbers are formed by adding 1–9, similar to the teens: * 91: * 92: * 93: * 94: * 95: * 96: * 97: * 98: * 99:

Hundreds

Note that what could be termed as the "ancient" counting system used for 1-5 is usually used from 100 until infinity. 1 becomes ''jhyiung'', and no more ''a̱nyiung''. Same thing the 2,3,4 and 5 placed immediately after ''cyi'', the word for ''hundred''. * 100: ''Cyi jhyiung'' * 200: ''Cyi sweang'' * 300: ''Cyi tsat'' * 400: ''Cyi nyaai'' * 500: ''Cyi tswuon'' * 600: ''Cyi a̱taa'' * 700: ''Cyi a̱natat'' * 800: ''Cyi a̱ni̱nai'' (or ''a̱ri̱nai'') * 900: ''Cyi a̱kubunyiung'' * 479: ''Cyi nyaai ma̱ng nswak a̱natat ma̱ng a̱kubunyiung''

Thousands

Hayab (2016:66-67) in his research on Hyam, a related language to Tyap found out that the original word for number 10 is "kop"/''kwop'', and that the present word used for ''ten'' was the de facto word used for ''twelve'' or ''a dozen'' is "shwak" (in Hyam) or ''swak'' (in Tyap). Due to the growing Hausa/English influence, undoubtedly before 1920 (because Thomas (1920:59) cited an example with ''Kagoro'' (Gworok) which, unlike its neighbours the Nungu, Ninzam, S. Mada and Mama, was not using as at then, the duodecimal system), the counting system has taken the shape of the Hausa/English decimal style and the word "kop/kwop" became almost extinct, while the "swak" took its place and misplaced its original meaning, which is ''twelve'', to now mean ''ten''. With this in mind, when one considers the number "1,000" or ''cyi kwop jhyiung'' ("cyi kwop" is spelled one word), one can say that it literally means "hundred ten one" or "100 X 10 X 1". Below are the modern Tyap Counting style in thousands: * 1,000: ''Cyikwop jhyiung'' * 2,000: ''Cyikwop sweang'' * 3,000: ''Cyikwop tsat'' * 4,000: ''Cyikwop nyaai'' * 5,000: ''Cyikwop tswuon'' * 6,000: ''Cyikwop a̱taa'' * 7,000: ''Cyikwop a̱natat'' * 8,000: ''Cyikwop a̱ni̱nai'' * 9,000: ''Cyikwop a̱kubunyiung'' * 2,018: ''Cyikwop sweang ma̱ng nswak ma̱ng a̱ni̱nai'' * 10,000: ''Cyikwop swak'' * 100,000: ''Cyikwop cyi jhyiung''

Larger numbers

* 1,000,000: ''Milyon'' or ''cyikwop cyikwop jhyiung'' or simply ''Cyikwop a̱ka̱feang jhyiung'' * 1,000,000,000: ''Bilyon'' or ''Cyikwop cyikwop cyikwop'' or simply ''Cyikwop a̱ka̱tat jhyiung'' * 1,000,000,000,000: ''Trilyon'' or ''cyikwop cyikwop cyikwop cyikwop'' or simply ''Cyikwop a̱ka̱naai jhyiung''.

Tyap names for other languages

Some Tyap names for neighbouring and other languaɡes are as follows: .Akau, K. (2020). ntitled work ''Unpublished raw data.

Tyap and related languages

A research list called the "Swadesh 100-word List" presented by Shimizu (1975:414) shows that Tyap (''Katab'') shares the following cognate percentages with fellow

and Jukun beginning from the highest to the lowest: 72% with Izere (Izarek), 66% with Rigwe, 50% with Chara, 49% with Berom, 42% with Tarok, 41% with Pyem, 41% with Ninzam, 39% with Kuche, 39% with Eggon, 38% with Ibunu, 37% with Rindre and 34% with Jukun.

Endangered language

Research has shown that the Tyap language is classified as one of the

endangered languages An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langua ...

vulnerable towards extinction. A study by Ayuba (2014) showed that Tyap is endangered and that Hausa language and the non-transmission of Tyap by the older generation of Atyap to the younger generation largely accounted for the endangerment of Tyap. The study recommended, among other measures, that the Atyap Community Development Association (ACDA) should set up a committee to create awareness on the need for Atyap to rise up and save their language and another to work towards establishing vacation schools where older adults would provide

pre-school A preschool, also known as nursery school, pre-primary school, or play school or creche, is an educational establishment or learning space offering early childhood education to children before they begin compulsory education at primary schoo ...

child care where Tyap children could be immersed in the language.