Nizaa (, ), also known as Galim, Nyamnyam, and Suga, is an endangered Mambiloid language spoken in the Adamawa Region of northern Cameroon, by the Nizaa people. Most of the language's speakers live in and around the village of Galim in the department of Faro-et-Déo.
Nizaa has a complex sound system with 60 consonant phonemes, eleven tones, and a contrast between oral and nasal vowels. It is neither a head-initial nor head-final language (the head or main element of a clause does not prefer to come before or after its modifiers) and uses postpositions instead of prepositions (the adposition follows the noun it modifies).
Nizaa was first extensively documented in the 1980s by Norwegian linguists and Bjørghild Kjelsvik. The language is endangered, but the exact number of active speakers is unknown since the last census of speakers took place in 1985.
Name Nizaa is also referred to as Suga (also spelled Ssuga), Galim, Nyamnyam (also spelled Nyemnyem, Njemnjem, and Jemjem), "Sewe" and "Mengaka". Nizaa is the word the Nizaa call themselves, while Suga comes from Pero 'stranger' or 'not Pero'. 'Nyamnyam' is a pejorative term likely derived from the Fula word 'cannibal', which may also mean 'sorcerer', though there is no evidence the Nizaa have ever practised cannibalism or sorcery. Because another language exists in Adamawa Region also called "Nyamnyam", linguists have often confused the two languages. The name Galim comes from the main town of the Nizaa of the same name. Nizaa is referred to as "Mengaka" in the 1988 version of Ethnologue, but Endresen in 1991 did not recognise the name or know where it came from. "Sewe" may also be another alternate name for the language.
Background Demographics Nizaa is primarily spoken in and around the village of Galim, located in Faro-et-Déo, in the Adamawa Region of northern Cameroon; the village has roughly 2,000 inhabitants. The most recent census of speakers was carried out in 1985 and reported 10,000 people actively speaking the language. However, the (ALCAM) estimated only 2,000 speakers in 1983, so the actual number of speakers is unknown. The language is considered endangered.
Most Nizaa are not literate, and the few who are often only can read and write Fula in the Ajami Arabic script. The romanisation of Nizaa has not been widely adopted by the Nizaa people because of their low literacy rate. Several other languages are spoken in the region, and most Nizaa speakers are bilingual in Fula, specifically the Adamawa dialect, since it is essentially the lingua franca of northern Cameroon. Many also know Hausa, another regional language, or French, because it is one of the official languages of Cameroon.
Documentation
Initial documentation of Nizaa dates back to 1895, when linguist Carl Meinhof described the Mambiloid languages in his comparative survey of Cameroonian languages, Die Sprachverhältnisse in Kamerun. In 1910, German colonial officer and amateur ethnographer, Kurt Friedrich Strümpell, included a wordlist of the language in his work on the "pagan" languages of Adamawa, Wörterverzeichnis der Heidensprachen Adamauas. However, the language was first documented extensively by Norwegian linguist at the University of Oslo, who published his findings in 1991. Theil devised the romanisation system of Nizaa and published the first analysis of the language, and he also supervised later research on Nizaa by his student, Bjørghild Kjelsvik. Kjelsvik began her work in the Nizaa community through the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cameroon, which documented local languages in addition to engaging in evangelical conversion work.
Classification The exact classification of Nizaa is still in doubt. In 1983, ALCAM classified Nizaa and Kwanja as Mambiloid languages. Roger Blench in 1988 classified the Mambiloid languages, along with another language family in Nigeria's Adamawa State, the Dakoid languages, as members of the Northern Bantoid languages, which are a subdivision of the Bantoid language family.
However, another linguist, Bruce Connell, disagreed with this classification. In 1997, he suggested that the Mambiloid languages form a valid phylogenetic group (or the languages are each others' closest relatives), but also noted that Nizaa and Ndoro are highly divergent and can only be tenatively considered members of the Mambiloid languages. He also suggested that lexical and grammatical similarities within the Mambiloid languages are partly due to contact, not just shared ancestry, and that evidence of a phylogenetic relationship between the Mambiloid languages and the Dakoid languages is weak. Connell also suggested that the Mambiloid languages may either belong within the South Bantoid languages or may branch off independently from the Bantoid languages, separate from both the Dakoid languages and the South Bantoid languages.
Phonology and orthography Vowels The Nizaa language has a contrast between oral and nasal vowels, with five short oral vowels, ten long oral vowels, and seven long nasal vowels. In Endresen's original romanisation, nasalised vowels were indicated by adding an ogonek, but Kjelsvik's revised romanisation indicates such vowels by adding after the vowel.
Older speakers of Nizaa also distinguish an eighth nasalised vowel from , but this distinction has been lost in younger speakers.
Each of the five short oral vowels except /a/ can be pronounced in two different ways depending on the context, called allophones, that represent the same underlying vowel phoneme. Each allophone is part of one to two of three sets: the back set , used when a vowel comes before , except if the vowel follows (e.g., 'broom' is pronounced while 'poverty' is pronounced ); the front set , used when a vowel follows and is before (e.g., 'wasp nest' is pronounced ); and the "normal" set , used everywhere else (e.g., 'to fall' is pronounced ). +Nizaa vowelsShort oral vowelsLong oral vowelsLong nasal vowelsUnroundedRoundedFrontCentralBackFrontCentralBackunroundedroundedunroundedroundedClose ~ ~ Close-mid ~ ~ ( ) Open-mid Open
Consonants Nizaa has a complex consonantal inventory with 60 consonants, including five marginal phonemes, which occur infrequently in the language. In Nizaa, there are six main types of consonants: labial consonants, or consonants made with one or both lips; alveolar consonants, articulated with the tongue touching the alveolar ridge; post-alveolar consonants, articulated with the tongue behind the alveolar ridge; velar consonants, articulated with the tongue against the velum (the back part of the roof of the mouth); glottal consonants, articulated with the glottis (or the opening between the vocal folds); and labial–velar consonants, which are simultaneously articulated at the lips and velum.
Nizaa also has prenasalised consonants, which refer to sequences of nasal and non-nasal consonants that act like a single consonant, and implosive consonants, which refer to consonants articulated by both moving the glottis downward and expelling air from the lungs. Both types of consonants are common in the languages of Sub-Saharan Africa.
The consonants in parentheses are marginal: the labial flap is only found in ideophones, words that evoke a certain sound, and the voiced velar fricative is only found between vowels to distinguish compounds from disyllabic words. The two glottal stops and are also marginal and are not written in the modern orthography, although Endresen's old orthography used an apostrophe and an apostrophe followed by 'w' to represent and respectively. They are only found in interjections (e.g., 'no'), loanwords from Arabic (e.g., Nizaa 'Sunday', from , loaned via Fula ), and variants of the third-person plural pronouns (e.g., 'they', when combined with a to-be or auxiliary verb). is only distinguished from in one word root, and consequently, shares the same letter as in the orthography.
When before the rounded vowels , the consonants become labialised (e.g., 'candy', from French , is pronounced ).
The distinction between and , and between and is uncertain. Minimal pairs, pairs of words that differ by only one sound, do exist between these sounds (e.g., 'to cross' and 'to tremble'), but in many words, both and can be used interchangeably without changing meaning (e.g., and both mean 'god').
+Nizaa consonantsLabialAlveolarPost- alveolarVelarLabial– velarGlottalplainlab.plainlab.plainlab.plainlab.plainlab.Plosive/ Affricatevoiceless ()()voiced prenasalised implosive prenasalised implosive Nasal Approximantvoiced nasalised Fricativevoiceless ( ) voiced ( )prenasalised Tap/Flap( ~ )
Syllable structure Nizaa has three permissible syllable types: CV (e.g., 'to go'), CVV (e.g., 'house'), and CVC, (e.g., 'medicine') where C represents a consonant, V a short vowel, and VV a long vowel (which may be nasalised or not). The syllable structure V (a single short vowel) exists only in the particle , which has various meanings based on the tone used; these include the copula or "to-be verb" , which takes a high tone. CV and V syllables are monomoraic, while CVV and CVC syllables are bimoraic and take twice the amount of time as monomoraic syllables to fully articulate. Monosyllabic nouns can only have the syllable structures CVV and CVC, while monosyllabic verbs can have all allowed syllable structures (CV, CVV, CVC).
Nizaa only permits certain consonants to act as codas, or consonants that end a syllable; these are . The consonants /d/ and /j/ are fairly marginal as codas, with only being found in loanwords from Fula and Arabic (e.g., 'everything, all' from Fula ), and in some indigenous words (e.g., 'Rüppel's vulture'). is only found in the word , the imperative form (used for commands) of the verb 'to see or perceive', and in interjections and ideophones (e.g., 'no') in all dialects of Nizaa. However, in the Galim dialect of Nizaa, as a coda is found in more words and is not marginal (e.g., 'flour made of roasted corn and peanuts' in the Galim dialect is in other dialects, and 'a taboo or forbidden word' in the Galim dialect is in other dialects). In 1991, Endresen also listed another marginal coda , but in 2002, Kjelsvik re-analysed the only word it was known to occur in as .
Tonology Nizaa is a tonal language. Tonal languages use shifts in the pitch of syllables to differentiate words from each other, independently from pragmatic considerations. Such languages are common across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Nizaa has three phonemic tone levels: high, mid, and low, as well as a number of two- and three-tone tone contours (combinations of tones within a syllable), which are indicated in the orthography using a variety of diacritical marks. Verb roots can only use the high or mid tones, unlike nouns, which may use any of the three levels. Tones regularly participate in grammatical processes. Representation of tones in the orthographyToneChao tone letterCVCVVCVCH / H° / ꜜH˦tátáátámM / M°˧tataatamL / L°˨tàtààtàmLH˨˦tǎtàátǎmHM˦˧ta᷇táata᷇mHL˦˨tâtáàtâmMH˧˦ta᷄taáta᷄mML˧˨ta᷆taàta᷆mLHM˨˦˧tǎˉtǎatǎm̄LHL˨˦˨ta᷈tǎàtǎm̀MHL˧˦˨tata᷄àta᷄m̀
Endresen groups the tones into "primary tones" and "secondary tones". The primary tones, high (H), mid (M), low (L), and rising (LH), are found on all types of syllables (CV, CVV, and CVC). The "secondary tones", which include falling (HM, HL, and ML), rising (MH) and peaking (LHM) tones, are found on word-final syllables and can be understood as one of the primary tones plus an additional tone, though MH and ML tones can be found on non-final syllables in the augumentative and diminutive forms of words. Kjelsvik, in 2002, recognised two more peaking tones, MHL and LHL.