Sandawe language

Sandawe is a tonal language spoken by about 40,000 people in the Dodoma region of Tanzania. Language use is vigorous among both adults and children, with people in some areas monolingual. Sandawe has generally been classified as a Khoisan language since Albert Drexel in the 1920s, due at first just to the presence of clicks in the language, though later several morphological similarities with the Khoisan languages of southern Africa were proposed. A recent discussion of Sandawe's linguistic classification can be found in Sands (1998).

SIL International began work on Sandawe in 1996 and to date (2004), Daniel and Elisabeth Hunziker and Helen Eaton continue to work on the analysis of the language. They have so far produced a phonological description, a dialect survey report and several papers on aspects of grammar. Sandawe is also currently (since 2002) studied by Sander Steeman of Leiden University.

Sounds

Vowels

Sandawe has five vowel qualities:

i				u
	e		o
		a

All five vowel qualities may be found as short oral, long oral and long nasal vowels. There are therefore fifteen vowel phonemes. In word-final position, devoiced u and i vowels occur frequently.

Consonants

Non-click consonants

The glyphs in italics are the practical orthography developed by Hunziker and Hunziker, followed by approximate equivalents in the IPA.

		Labial	Alveolar	Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labialized velar	Glottal
Plosive	Aspirated	p	t			k
	Tenuis	bp	dt			gk
	Voiced	b	d			g
	Ejective					k
Nasal stop		m	n
Affricate	Aspirated			tch
	Tenuis			tc
	Voiced			dz
	Ejective		ts
	Lateral tenuis		tl
	Lateral voiced		dl
	Lateral ejective		tl
Fricative	Central	f	s			kh
Fricative	Lateral		lh
Approximant			l ; r		y		w	h

Clicks

(source: Wright et al. 1995)

	Laminal Denti-alveolar	Lateral alveolar	Apical postalveolar		Laminal Denti-alveolar
	Word-initial clicks				Word-medial clicks
Nasal	nc	nx	nq	Nasal
Voiced	gc	gx	gq	Prenasalized
Tenuis	c	x	q
Aspirated	ch	xh	qh
Glottalised	c	x	q'	Glottalized nasal

The clicks in Sandawe are not particularly loud, when compared to more famous click languages in southern Africa. The lateral click can be confused with the ejective lateral affricate . With the postalveolar clicks, the tongue often slaps the bottom of the mouth, and this slap may be louder than the actual release of the click. Wright et al. transcribe this slapped click with the ad hoc symbol , although this is not the normal Extended IPA meaning of that symbol.

Only three of the five click effluxes occur between vowels, and all are nasalized. (Nasal clicks are the easiest to pronounce; in Dahalo and Damin, for example, all clicks are nasal.) The glottalized click efflux is something like creaky voice; it is not an ejective. In initial position, the glottis is closed during the entire occlusion of the click, but not opened until after the burst of the , which is after the click release . In medial position, the glottis is closed after the velar closure and before the forward closure, but opened before the click release. Such clicks are not always nasalized all the way through; in some tokens they are simply prenasalized glottalized clicks, , bearing in mind that the superscript implies coarticulation (that is, that it is pronounced together with the [k], not after, as explained above).

The practical orthography is based on Xhosa and Zulu.

Grammar

Pronouns

	Sandawe! English
1 sg.	-és	I
2 sg.	-i	you
3 sg. male	-à	he
3 sg. female	-sà	she
1 pl	-wà	we
2 pl	-è	you
3 pl	-ʔà	they

Syllable structure

Sandawe syllables are usually of the form CV; in monosyllabic words, word-final nasals are not uncommon, CV(N). Sometimes other consonants are found in word-final position, but this is most probably the result of deletion of word-final voiceless vowels.A syllabic nasal m is found in Swahili loanwords. The most common word structure is disyllabic with or without long vowels (CV(:)CV(:)), according to De Voogt (1992).

Nouns

A noun consists generally of a stem and a suffix which indicates gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and number (singular, plural).

[suffixes to be added]

Adjectives

Adjectival concepts are mostly expressed as verbs in Sandawe according to Kagawe (1993:ix).

Syntax

Basic word order in Sandawe is SOV according to De Voogt (1992). However, word order in the Sandawe sentence is very flexible due to the presence of several 'subject identification strategies'.

Sample sentence (mid tones are not marked):

úte-s kx'aré-és hàʔ!à
yesterday-I boy-I called
Yesterday I called a boy
(source: De Voogt 1992:19 adapted from Tucker 1977)

Tone

Elderkin (1989) analyzes Sandawe as having two level tones (High, Low) and two contour tones (Falling, Rising). His thesis considers the behavior of tone at word-, sentence- and discourse-level. De Voogt (1992) and Kagaya (1993) list three level tones (High, Mid, Low) and two contour tones (Falling, Rising).

Classification

The most promising candidate as a relative of Sandawe are the Khoe languages of Botswana and Namibia.

Greenberg (1976) gives the following arguments for its classification as Khoisan, in addition to about 50 Sandawe-Khoisan vocabulary similarities. Most of these involve Sandawe and Khoe:
* Personal pronouns: tsi "I" (cf. Nama, Naro ti, Tsoa či; sa "she" (cf. Nama -s, Naro -sa); e "it" (Nama -i nominative, -e accusative), ha-we "he" (cf. Naro xa-ba); ha-su, he-su "she" (cf. Naro xa-sa)
* Demonstratives: ha "that" (cf. /Xam, ‖Xegwi ha, Naro xa, Tsoa ho); he "this" (Korana he); na "there" (common Ta'a-!Kwi, Nama //na); ne "here" (Nama ne)
* Plural suffixes: -si feminine plural (Naro -si, Nama -ti, Ju languages, !Xóõ -si common plural); -ko masculine plural (Nama -ku, /Xam -gu personal plural)
* Adjective formant -se (cf. ‡Kx'au‖'ein -si, Nama -se, Naro -sə.)
* Verbal suffixes: reciprocal -ki (cf. Naro, Nama -ku)

The evidence linking the southern Khoisan families suggests that Sandawe is no more distantly related to them than they are to each other, despite the geographic distance. Although the Khoisan hypothesis is regarded with scepticism by many linguists, Sands provides additional arguments that the inclusion of Sandawe (but not Hadza) is likely to be correct.

Sandawe language: Encyclopedia BETA

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