DAJU DAR DAJU
DAJU LANGUAGES
This section provides a brief description of some linguistic features of the Daju dar Daju language. It is not exhaustive, but gives a taste of linguistic studies on the language, as well as some new data. The only online publication on the Daju dar Daju language in English is this master's thesis by Art Aviles. Other publications include this French in-print book, Grammaire du dadjo d'Eref, by Pierre Palayer in consultation with Chaibo Yaya, and online publications about related Daju languages. Undoubtedly, resources on the language also exist in Arabic, as it is a major language of Chad and Sudan.
Presently, languages in the Daju group are spoken in Chad and Sudan, with dispersion mirroring the emigration of Daju people out of their historical settlements along the Nile and in Dar Fur. Read more about Nilo-Saharan languages here.
The Daju language group is further divided based on mutual understanding of speakers into Western Daju and Eastern Daju languages. Languages currently falling under the Eastern Daju variety are Liguri and Shatt, both spoken in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. The Western Daju group includes Daju Dar Daju, Daju Dar Sila (‘dar’ means “home of” in Arabic), Nyala, Njalgulgule, Lagowa/Lagawa. Out of all the languages in the Western Daju group, Daju dar Daju and Daju dar Sila are the only two with speech communities in Chad. While languages within the Daju language group may have many similarities, speakers of two different languages cannot understand one another’s language. This is distinct from dialects, which have a high degree of mutual understanding. Daju dar Daju has three dialects: Mongo/Gadjira, Eref, and Bardangal, all spoken in different parts of the Guéra. Daju dar Daju has over 30,000 speakers, and is not an endangered language according to Ethnologue.
INFLUENCE OF OTHER LANGUAGES
Historically, Daju languages may have had considerable contact with other Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo languages and more, as there was believed to be a Daju settlement along the Forty Days Road.
Records of old Daju have not been found, so in 1981, researchers published a reconstruction of historical Daju linguistics, or Proto Daju. It is available through an interlibrary loan program.
After the spread of Islam and the Arabization of much of Africa, the Arabic language has influenced Daju dar Daju, with borrowing evident in loanwords and sounds distinct from other sounds in the language. A large population of Daju dar Daju people practice Islam, and learn Quranic Arabic for religious purposes. Many also use Chadian Arabic for trade purposes or in school. Chad was under French colonial rule for several hundred years, so French is another language spoken in the area and taught in primary school. It is important to consider that language has social and political associations, and that some languages may have been forced onto speech communities without their consent. Many Chadian residents are multilingual.
SOUND
Consonants
As proposed by Art Aviles, Daju dar Daju has 26 consonant phonemes. A phoneme is the representation of a sound stored in a speaker’s brain, and may be different than what actually comes out of the speaker’s mouth. They often correspond to the letters in a language's alphabet, but not always, and they may come out of a speaker's mouth very differently than one might expect just looking at a written example. Aviles’s table of phonemic consonants, written in International Phonetic Alphabet, is replicated below.
The consonants (z) and (h) are borrowed from Arabic. In his book, Grammaire du dadjo d'Eref, Pierre Palayer also proposes a glottal stop as part of the phoneme inventory, though this may be a feature unique to the Eref dialect. Annie Myers found a glottal stop in her data from one Mongo speaker. The glottal stop is also found in Arabic. More research is needed on the differences between the Daju da Daju of Mongo, Eref, and Bardangal. According to Dimmendal and others, most of the differences between the three dialects are phonological and not syntactic (having to do with sound, not structure).
Vowels
Aviles also proposes 5 short vowels with long vowel counterparts, as shown below. More research is needed on vowel length in Daju dar Daju. Arabic also has long and short vowels, as shown in this video. More research is needed on vowel length in Daju dar Daju. According to Aviles, "Grammatical length distinctions are also used to indicate distance, both spatially and temporally". See some examples of vowel length (in IPA, shown with the symbol ː directly after a vowel) in the clip "Making Fish Sauce" further down on this page. Examples of lengthening to change temporal distance are also seen in the full sample of Siami Fish Story and corresponding transcription.
SOUND
Phonology
Phonology is the study of how the sounds of a language interact with other sounds in that language in a systematic way. When co-articulated, or spoken alongside, other sounds, linguistic phonemes may be changed to a different surface representation, known in linguistics as an allophone, than the representational phoneme that is stored in our brain. This happens because of phonological processes like regressive voicing assimilation, shown below in a Daju dar Daju example from Aviles. If you are an American English speaker, you may recognize this process in some of your own speech (do you say prism, or prizm?).
See if you can find where regressive voicing assimilation happens in the video of Siami's sound sample below!
A STORY IN DAJU
Story by Siami, as told to Annie Myers
Siami, a Daju dar Daju woman living in Mongo, tells a story about when she was a child. This Youtube video features a clip of the story in audio and visual representation (a spectrogram, using Praat software) with transcription in IPA as well as an English translation, both by Annie Myers, and converted to Praat by Ruth Myers. Audio, visual, and written versions of the full story and more can be found here.
MAKING FISH SAUCE
Cooking advice by Siami, as told to Annie Myers
Siami, a Daju dar Daju woman living in Mongo, shares tips on making the best fish sauce, or loga aske; a local favorite! This Youtube video shows a clip of audio and visual representation of Daju dar Daju with transcription in IPA by Annie Myers as well as a French translation by Hamid Moussa Ibedou, and an English translation by Ruth Myers. Full audio, visual, and written versions of this speech sample and more can be found here.
Notice the long vowels ɑː and ɛː in the Daju transcription, as well as the voiced alveolar implosive, ɗ.
SOUND
Tone
Linguistic tone is the interaction of sound and structure, where changes in relative pitch within a word can change the meaning of that word. It is present at varying levels in many African languages. Daju dar Daju uses tone in a few specific circumstances. This area of the language needs more research, as no minimal pairs have been found for tone.
Tonality is very common in African languages, though it is less present in discussions of tonality in linguistic literature than is tonality in other geographical locations. Below, Aviles shows the interaction of tone and vowel length, where both vowels in a long vowel segment take the same tone.
Languages around the world form syllables in different ways, through a process known as syllabification in linguistics. Each language has specific "rules" for how a syllable is formed, but these rules are something speakers acquire unconsciously. In Daju dar Daju, the syllable template proposed by Aviles is consonant+vowel+vowel+consonant, or CVVC. The double vowel denotes a long vowel, while a single vowel is a short vowel. See Table 9 below. An open syllable is one that ends in a vowel, whereas a closed syllable ends in a consonant.
DAJU SYLLABLES
STRUCTURE
Morphology
Morphology is the study of word formation and structure in a given language. Below are some examples of Daju dar Daju morphology with several verbs. These notes from Annie Myers show the way Daju verbs are structured depending on the subject (who is the action word talking about?) in consultation with Siami. In most language learning classes, this is called verb conjugation; whereas linguists call it verbal morphology. More notes on Daju dar Daju morphology can be found here.
STRUCTURE
Word Order
Daju dar Daju word order is subject-verb-object (SVO), similar to languages like English, French, and many more. The following examples are from Annie Myers's interactions with Siami. Learn about phrase structure of a related language in the Daju group, Lagowa. Do you know about more resources on Daju dar Daju phrase structure? If so, get in touch!
Syntax
Syntax is a language's grammatical structure, or how phrases are systematically formed. One example of syntax in Daju dar Daju is the Eref dialect, which uses interrogation (question) particles and negation particles at the end of a phrase to either ask a question or negate a phrase. The particle 'wa' is used in question formation, as shown in the photo to the right (Daju dar Daju in bold), and 'ro' is used in negation (shown in Palayer's book).
WRITTEN LANGUAGE
Daju dar Daju has been passed down orally, thus there is not a large body of written material, and until 2001 no writing system for the language. In recent years, Wycliffe Bible Translators, along with, SIL, NGOs, and the Chadian government funded local efforts by the Federation of Associations for the Promotion of the Guéra Languages (FAPLG) to create a Daju alphabet (based on the Roman alphabet and IPA) and language learning and teaching materials in Daju dar Daju and other languages of the Guéra. These materials are being used locally, proposed as a way toward grassroots economic growth.
FAPLG is focused on language teaching as a path to social and economic growth, stating: "...illiteracy...is closely linked to the causes of under-development, as well as promoting and making possible the continuing education of farmers, especially women, key factors in improving Chad's economic situation."
Some examples of Daju written in the Roman alphabet can be found in the Facebook group, Dadjo en ligne (mostly in French) and in these notes from a Bardangal speaker. Daju may also be written in Arabic script, as many Daju people may have learned to write Arabic before learning to write in Daju. Historically, Daju languages may have used different orthographies (writing systems) that are no longer in use, as remnants of some of the world's oldest writing systems have been discovered in Africa.
School teachers teaching Arabic to students in Mongo.
Pictured right: Sign in Mongo encouraging people to learn to read and write in Daju, or their "mother tongue". Below: A FAPLG-sponsored language class in the Guera.
CONTACT ME
Do you have a suggestion or correction for the Language Study page, or are you a Daju speaker interested in getting involved in increasing awareness of Daju language and culture?
To the right: awards ceremony at a school in Banda in the Guera.