Daza language

The dialects spoken in Chad and Niger have some French influence whereas the dialects spoken in Libya and Sudan have more of an Arabic influence. The Dazaga language was not traditionally a written language but in recent years the SIL had developed an orthography. The majority of Dazaga speakers are bilingual or multilingual in their native tongue along with either Arabic, French, Zaghawa, Hausa, Zarma, Kanuri or Tuareg. There are thus many borrowings from other languages such as Arabic, Hausa or French. For example, the word for "thank you" is borrowed from Arabic shokran and incorporated into the language by usually being followed by the suffix -num marking the second person. The following tables contain words from the Daza dialect spoken in Omdurman, Sudan. This romanisation is not standard. Numbers Basic words and phrases The Azza are a blacksmith class who speak their own dialect of the language, referred to as Azzanga, which is considered by Dagaza speakers to be lower in status then the standard dialect. == Phonology ==

The phonology of Daza is as follows: Consonants Vowels Tone Dagaza showcases 4 distinct tones, high, low, rising, and falling, although the occurrence of rising and falling tones is limited to just a few specific contexts and no word exists which only contains low tones. For this reason, there is debate as to whether these truly represent 4 distinct tonemes or if instead Dagaza has a pitch accent system. == Grammar ==

The Daza language exhibits a subject-object-verb word order, as can be seen in the following example: There are no grammatical genders in Dagaza, and biological gender is indicated with separate lexical items for male and female. Adding the adjectivalizer suffix -ɾ́ɛ at the end of a word forms adjectives from nouns, verbs, and occasionally even other adjectives. Verbs are inflected for both subject and object arguments. This inflection is sensitive to grammatical person, but not number, gender, or other features of the subject and object. To signify presentational possession (exemplified by the have verb in English, e.g. "I have a computer"), Dazaga utilizes a transitive "have-verb" strategy where the possessor is the subject and the possessum is the object, similar to how this construction is made in English. The following example shows presentational possession in Dazaga: Dazaga uses clitic case markers for four cases: ergative, accusative, genitive, and dative. The marking of case is sensitive to an Animacy Hierarchy: the accusative enclitic /=ɡà/ encodes the object of a transitive verb when it is a high animacy referent (personal pronouns). For all other object referents, this clitic is optional. Interrogatives are indicated in two ways; yes/no questions are formed by attaching the clitic -ra to the end of the verb, information questions are indicated by the presence by equivalents to wh- question words in English at the end of the phrase. == References ==