Gumuz language

Gumuz
Bega
Spoken in	Ethiopia, Sudan
Region	Benishangul-Gumuz Region
Ethnicity	Gumuz
Native speakers	180,000 in Ethiopia  (2007 census) 40,000 in Sudan (no date)
Language family	Nilo-Saharan? Komuz Gumuz
Dialects	Northern Southern Yaso
Writing system	Ethiopic, Latin (in Ethiopia)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	guk

Gumuz (also spelled "Gumaz") is a dialect cluster spoken along the border of Ethiopia and Sudan. Most Ethiopian speakers live in the Metekel Zone of the Benishangul-Gumuz Region, although a group of 1,000 live outside the town of Welkite. The Sudanese speakers live in the area east of Er Roseires, around Famaka and Fazoglo on the Blue Nile, extending north along the border.

An early record of this language is a wordlist from the Mount Guba area compiled in February 1883 by Juan Maria Schuver.

Varieties

Varieties are not all mutually intelligible. By that standard, there are two or three Gumuz languages. Grammatical forms are distinct between northern and southern Gumuz.

Phonology

Gumuz has both ejective consonants and implosives. The implosive quality is being lost at the velar point of articulation in some dialects (Unseth 1989). There is a series of palatal consonants, including both ejective and implosive. In some dialects, e.g. Sirba, there is a labialized palatalized bilabial stop, as in the word for 'rat' [bʲʷa] (Unseth 1989).

Tones are high and low, with downstep.

Grammar

Word order is AVO, with marked nominative case, though there is AOV in the north, probably from Amharic influence.

In intransitive clauses, SV subjects are unmarked, whereas VS order has marked nominative case.

Classification

Dimmendaal (2008) notes that mounting grammatical evidence has made the Nilo-Saharan proposal as a whole more sound since Greenberg proposed it in 1963, but that such evidence has not been forthcoming for Songhay, Koman, and Gumuz: "very few of the more widespread nominal and verbal morphological markers of Nilo-Saharan are attested in the Coman languages plus Gumuz ... Their genetic status remains debatable, mainly due to lack of more extensive data." (2008:843) And later, "In summarizing the current state of knowledge, ... the following language families or phyla can be identified — ... Mande, Songhai, Ubangian, Kadu, and the Coman languages plus Gumuz." (2008:844)

This "Coman plus Gumuz" is what Greenberg (1963) had subsumed under Koman and what Bender (1989) had called Komuz, a distant relationship of Gumuz and the Koman languages. However, Bender (2000) separated Gumuz as at least a distinct branch of Nilo-Saharan, and suggested that it might even be a language isolate. Blench, who tentatively included Koman within Nilo-Saharan, excluded Gumuz as an isolate, as it did not share the tripartite singulative–collective–plurative number system characteristic of the rest of the Nilo-Saharan language families. Ahland and Roger Blench (2010), however, report that with better attestation Gumuz does indeed appear to be Nilo-Saharan, and perhaps closest to Koman; it may even help elucidate the Nilo-Saharan family as a whole, which has been difficult to substantiate.

References

• Lionel Bender, 2000. "Nilo-Saharan". In Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse (eds.), African Languages: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.
• Gerrit Dimmendaal, 2008. "Language Ecology and Linguistic Diversity on the African Continent", Language and Linguistics Compass 2/5:842.
• Ethnologue entry for Gumuz

Further reading

• Ahland, Colleen Anne. 2004. "Linguistic variation within Gumuz: a study of the relationship between historical change and intelligibility."‭ M.A. thesis. University of Texas at Arlington.
• Colleen Ahland and Roger Blench, "The Classification of Gumuz and Koman Languages",[1] presented at the Language Isolates in Africa workshop, Lyons, December 4, 2010
• Colleen Ahland. 2011. Noun incorporation and predicate classifiers in Gumuz
• Bender, M. Lionel. 1979. Gumuz: a sketch of grammar and lexicon. Afrika und Übersee 62: 38-69.
• Unseth, Peter. 1985. "Gumuz: a dialect survey report."‭ Journal of Ethiopian Studies 18: 91-114.
• Unseth, Peter. 1989. "Selected aspects of Gumuz phonology."‭ In Taddese Beyene (ed.), Proceedings of the eighth International Conference on Ethiopian Studies, vol. 2, 617-32. Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies.
• Uzar, Henning. 1993. Studies in Gumuz: Sese phonology and TMA system. In Topics in Nilo-Saharan linguistics, edited by M.L. Bender. Hamburg: Helmut Buske: 347-383.

External links

• "Map of the Gumuz language", LL-MAP website
• World Atlas of Language Structures information on Gumuz