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Zarma is a member of the Songhay language grouping. It is the leading indigenous language of the southwestern lobe of the West African nation of Niger, where the Niger River flows and the capital city, Niamey, is located, and it is the second leading for that entire nation, after Hausa, which is spoken in south central Niger. In earlier decades, it was known as Djerma. With over 2 million speakers, Zarma is far and away the most widely spoken of the Songhay languages. The two other major Songhay dialects or languages are spoken upriver in the neighboring nation of Mali. They are Koyraboro Senni, centered on the city of Gao, with about 400,000 speakers, and yet further upriver from Zarma territory, Koyra Chiini, centered on the eminent ancient university city of Timbuktu, with about 200,000 speakers. According to some reports, speakers of Zarma do not understand Koyraboro Senni.[1]
[edit] Grammar[edit] OrthographyThe Zarma alphabet uses the following letters. a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, ɲ or ny, ŋ, o, p, r, s, t, u, w, y, z. In addition, v may be used in a few rare words of foreign origin, but many Zarma cannot pronounce it. [edit] Phonology[edit] VowelsThere are ten vowels: the five oral vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, and their nasalized counterparts. Nasalization is indicated in the spelling with a tilde or by a following n or ŋ. There is slight allophonic variation and slight dialectal variation. Vowel length is phonemically distinctive. It is sometimes reflected in the orthography by doubling the vowel, but not consistently. There are a number of combinations of vowel plus semivowel /w/ or /y/, in which the semivowel can be initial or final. [edit] ConsonantsThe consonant phonemes of Zarma are listed in the following table using Zarma orthography. Most of the letters have IPA pronunciation values, the exceptions being: /j/ = [ɟ], /y/ = [j], /r/ = [ɾ]. The labiodental nasal [ɱ] is spelled n or m, and only occurs before f. The palatal nasal ɲ is sometimes spelled ny. Short r is flapped [ɾ]; long rr is trilled [r].
The combinations /ge/, /gi/, /ke/ and /ki/ usually have some palatal quality to them and may even become interchangeable with /je/, /ji/, /ce/ and /ci/ in many people's speech. In older works, this was spelled ky or ty. Most consonants may be short or long; long consonants are written with double letters. [edit] Lexical tone and stressZarma is a tonal language with four tones: high, low, fall and rise. Tones are not written unless the word is ambiguous, in which case the standard IPA markings are used, e.g. bâ ("to want or "even"), bá ("to be a lot"), bà ("to share") and bǎ ("to be better"), though in this case the meaning is almost always unambiguous in context, so these words are usually written ba without an accent. In Dosso, some linguists have observed the fall-rise tone on certain words, e.g. ma ("the name"). Stress is generally unimportant in Zarma. According to Abdou Hamani (1980), two-syllable words are stressed on their first syllable, unless that syllable is just a short vowel: a-, i- or u-. Three-syllable words have stress on their second syllable. The first consonant of a stressed syllable is pronounced a bit more strongly and the vowel in the preceding syllable is weakened. Only emphasized words have a stressed syllable. There is no change of tone for a stressed syllable. [edit] Morphology[edit] GeneralThere are a large number of suffixes in Zarma. There are very few prefixes, of which only one (a-/i- before adjectives and numbers) is common. [edit] NounsNouns may be singular or plural. There are also three "forms" which indicate whether the noun is indefinite, definite, or demonstrative. "Form" and number are indicated conjointly by an enclitic on the noun phrase. The singular definite enclitic is -ǒ or -ǎ. Some authors always write this ending with a rising tone mark even if it is not ambiguous and even if not truly a rising tone. The other endings are in the table below. The definite and demonstrative endings replace any final vowel. See Hamani (1980) for a discussion of when to add -ǒ and when to add -ǎ, as well as other irregularities. See Tersis (1981) for a discussion of the complex changes in tone that may occur.
There is no gender or case in Zarma; thus the third person singular pronoun a can mean he, she, it, her, him, his, hers, its, one or one's, according to its position in the sentence. [edit] VerbsVerbs do not have tenses and are not conjugated. There are at least three aspects for verbs which are indicated by a modal word before the verb and any object nouns. The aspects are the completive (daahir gasu), the incompletive (daahir gasu si) and the subjunctive (afiri ŋwaaray nufa). (Beginning grammars for foreigners sometimes call the first two "past and present tenses", but this is not accurate.) There is also an imperative and a continuing or progressive construction. Lack of a modal marker indicates either the affirmative completive aspect (if there is a subject and no object) or the singular affirmative imperative (if there is no subject). There is a special modal marker, ka or ga, according to dialect, which indicates the completive aspect with emphasis on the subject. Different markers are used to indicate a negative sentence.
Linguists do not agree on the tone for ga. Some say it is high before a low tone and low before a high tone. There are several words in Zarma expressing the English idea "to be". The defective verb tí is used to equate two noun phrases and is used only with the emphasized completive ka/ga. The existential gǒ (negative sí) is not a verb (White-Kaba, 1994, calls it a "verboid") and has no aspect; it means "exist" and usually links a noun phrase to a descriptive term such as a place, price or participle. The predicative nô means "it is", "they are", etc., and is one of the most common words in the Zarma language. It has no aspect or negative form and is placed after a noun phrase, sometimes for emphasis. Other words, such as gòró, cíyà, tíyà, and bárà are much rarer and are usually used to express ideas, such as the subjunctive, which gǒ and tí cannot. Participles can be formed with the suffix -ànté, similar in meaning to the past participle in English. This suffix can also be added to quantities to form ordinal numbers and to some nouns to form adjectives. A sort of gerund can be formed by adding -yàŋ, transforming the verb into a noun. There are many other suffixes that can make nouns out of verbs, but only -yàŋ works with all verbs. Two verbs can be related with the word ká. (In many dialects it is gá, not to be confused with the incompletive aspect marker or the emphasized completive marker.) The connector ká implies that the second verb is a result of the first, or that the first is the reason or cause of the second, as in ka ga ŋwa, "come (in order to) eat." [edit] SyntaxZarma is a SOV language; that is, the normal word order is subject-object-verb. Objects are normally placed before the verb, though the object may be placed after the verb for emphasis, and a few common verbs require the object after. Zarma has postpositions (instead of prepositions as in English) which are placed after the noun. Word order in noun phrases. When a noun ("determinatum") is to be modified by another noun ("determinant"), the determinant is placed in front of the determinatum. The determinant may show possession, purpose or description. All other modifiers of a noun (adjectives, articles, numbers, demonstratives, etc.) are placed after it. Example. Here is a proverb in Zarma: Da curo fo hẽ, afo mana hẽ, i si jinde kaana bay.
i.e., 'you need to hear both sides of the story'. [edit] References
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Also[edit] External links
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