Duala language

Spoken in

• Niger - Congo languages Benue - Congo languages Bantoide languages Bantu languages Duala

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Dua

Dua

Douala ( Duala proper name, also Diwala, Dualla, Dwala, Dwela; French Douala ) is a Bantu language in Cameroon. It is spoken by about 88,000 people.

Classification

Duala is a Northwest Bantu language and belongs to the Duala group that is classified as Guthrie Zone A20.

She has the dialects Bodiman, Mungo (also Mungu and Muungo ), Oli (also Ewodi, Ouri, Uli, Wuri, Wouri and Koli ) and Pongo.

History

About the beginning of the Duala almost nothing is known. As a relatively certain is that the people of the Duala settled at the latest around 1600 in its present location. According to its own tradition, the Duala are initially immigrated from what is now Gabon or Congo, their language is but more related to Cameroonian languages ​​like Basaa or Bakoko than with Gabonese or Congolese languages ​​- although the Basaa before the Duala in the area of Wouri estuary lived.

From the beginning of the 16th century took the Duala, which began to dominate the local trade with the Europeans, many trading trips inland and up to Calabar, which their language was the function of a lingua franca. She lost as a trade language becomes especially apparent when Cameroon was a German colony and the Kamtok got more and more influence, but has been used simultaneously in schools and churches and verschriftlicht first Cameroonian language with a translation of the Bible in the year 1862/72.

Today, the Duala is in the west of the country again a trade language, also due to the increasing population of the city of Douala. The language is also used in the districts Moungo, Nkam and Wouri in the Littoral Province and the district of Fako in the province of Sud -Ouest. Approximately 25-50% of second -language speakers can read and write Duala.

Grammar

As in Bantu languages ​​common even the Duala is an agglutinative language and has a so-called noun class system that divides the Nomen into classes, which are each marked with different Klassenpräfixen. Typical of his affiliation with the Bantu is that the Duala is a tonal language.

Phonetics

The vowel inventory of the Duala is relatively simple, but mentioned Ittmann in his grammar of the Duala in addition to / still a ' wide i' and a ' wide u' given in the table / i / and / u, which presumably corresponds to the almost closed / ɪ / and / ʊ / match. These sounds and the consonant / ɾ /, the / represents a variant pronunciation of / l / and / d, but are not listed in the Official Terms alphabet of Cameroonian languages.

The Duala therefore has seven vowels, which are usually short. It has no diphthongs.

The Duala has some of the characteristic sounds of the proto- Bantu, especially a greater number of plosives and affricates pränasalierten. Some sounds occur almost exclusively in foreign and loan words to ( / g /, / tʃ / and / f / ), others can only occur word-initially: the glottal stop before beginning with a vowel words, / h / in some interjections, / dʒ / in noun class 5

The Duala has several assimilation and vowel harmony rules, which include also the trigger for the occurrence of plosives and affricates pränasalierter beginning of a word.

Syllable structure

In Duala can form the syllable nucleus in addition to vowels and nasals. In the approach, a nasal occur if the word begins with a consonant pränasalierten. Most syllables in Duala are open ( (N ) CV or N), are rarely closed syllables ( (N) CVC).

Tones

The Duala has a whole range of sounds, including some that arise solely by the coming together of existing sounds. The following tones are in Duala:

• ◌ high
• Deep ◌
• Medium ◌ ̄
• Ascending ◌ ̌
• ◌ falling
• High - falling ◌ ᷇
• High - rising ◌ ᷄
• Deep - falling ◌ ᷆
• Deep - rising ◌ ᷅
• Rise-fall ◌ ᷉
• Falling - rising ◌ ᷈

The composite tones arise not only by the coincidence of simple tones of morpheme and word boundaries, but also by global rules, which cause a gradual decrease in the tones throughout the movement.

Spelling

For the Duala exist essentially two different ways of writing, each based on the Latin script. The older spelling goes back to a 1901 system developed by the Basel Mission with the help of Carl Meinhof alphabet, which only uses Latin letters, which are partly equipped with diacritics. The newer style has been set in 1978, in general alphabet of Cameroonian languages ​​(English GACL ). Some of the letters contained are taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet.