Masaba language
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| Masaba Lumasaba |
||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Uganda | |
| Region: | Eastern, south of the Kupsabiny, Bugisu Province | |
| Total speakers: | 750,000 | |
| Language family: | Niger-Congo Atlantic-Congo Volta-Congo Benue-Congo Bantoid Southern Bantoid Narrow Bantu Central J Masaba-Luyia (J.30) Masaba |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | bnt | |
| ISO 639-3: | myx | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Masaba, (Lumasaaba) sometimes Lugisu, after one of its dialects, is a Bantu language spoken by about 750,000 people in eastern Uganda in the administrative region of Bugisu on the border to Kenya. The language is closely related to, and mutually intelligible with Bukusu, spoken in western Kenya. Its speakers, formerly known as the Bagisu, prefer to be called Bamasaba. Masaba is the local name of Mount Elgon. Like other Bantu languages, Masaba has a large set of prefixes used as noun classifiers. This is similar to how gender is used in many Germanic and Romance languages, except that instead of the usual two or three, there is around eighteen different noun classes, most of them rather only generally defined. The language is tonal and has a quite complex verb morphology.
Contents |
[edit] Sounds
[edit] Consonants
| Bilabial | Labio- dental |
Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives | p | b | t | d | k | g | ||||
| Nasals | m | n | ŋ | |||||||
| Fricatives | β | f | s | z | ||||||
| Approximant | j | |||||||||
| Lateral | l | |||||||||
[edit] Vowels
Masaba has a basic 5-vowel system consisting of /i, e, a, o, u/.
[edit] References
- Brown, Gillian (1972) Phonological Rules and Dialectal Variation: A study of the phonology of Lumasaaba ISBN 0-521-08485-7
[edit] External links
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