ISO 639-3 bjg | Native speakers 30,000 (2006) | |
Language family Niger–CongoAtlantic–CongoBakBijago Dialects KagbaagaKajoko (Orango)Anhaqui (Anhaki)Kamona | ||
Bijago or Bidyogo is the language of the Bissagos Archipelago of Guinea-Bissau. There are some difficulties of grammar and intelligibility between dialects, with the Kamona dialect being unintelligible to the others.
Contents
Dialects are as follows:
Characteristics
The Kajoko dialect is one of the few in the world known to use a linguolabial consonant, the voiced stop [d̼], in its basic sound system (Olson et al. 2009).
Classification
Bijago is highly divergent. Sapir (1971) classified it as an isolate within the West Atlantic family. However, Segerer showed that this is primarily due to unrecognized sound changes, and that Bijago is in fact close to the Bak languages. For example, the following cognates in Bijago and Joola Kasa (a Bak language) are completely regular, but had not previously been identified (Segerer 2010):