Writing system Arabic alphabet Glottolog chad1249 | ISO 639-3 shu | |
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Native to Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger Native speakers (1.1 million cited 1973–2006) Language family Afro-Asiatic
Semitic
Central Semitic
Arabic languages
Arabic
Chadian Arabic | ||
Chadian Arabic (also known as Shuwa/Shua/Suwa Arabic; Arabic: لهجة تشادية), Baggara Arabic, and, most recently, within a small scholarly milieu, Western Sudanic Arabic) is one of the regional colloquial varieties of Arabic. (The term "Shuwa Arabic", found in 20th-century Western linguistic scholarship, properly refers only to the Nigerian dialects of this particular language, and even then, "Shuwa" is not used by those speakers themselves.) It is the first language for over one million people, including town dwellers and nomadic cattle herders. The majority of its speakers live in southern Chad. Its range is an east-to-west oval in the Sahel, about 1400 miles long (12 to 20 degrees east longitude) by 300 miles north-to-south (between 10 and 14 degrees north latitude). Nearly all of this territory is in the two countries of Chad and Sudan. It is also spoken elsewhere in the vicinity of Lake Chad in the countries of Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger. Finally, it is spoken in slivers of the Central African Republic and South Sudan. In addition, this language serves as a lingua franca in much of the region. In most of its range, it is one of several local languages and often not among the major ones.
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Name and origin
This language does not have a native name shared by all its speakers, beyond "Arabic". It arose as the native language of nomadic cattle herders (baggāra, Standard Arabic baqqāra, means 'cattlemen', from baqar). Since the publication of a grammar of a Nigerian dialect in 1920, this language has become widely cited academically as "Shuwa Arabic"; however, the term "Shuwa" was in use only among non-Arabic speaking people in Borno State. Around 2000, the term "Western Sudanic Arabic" was proposed by a specialist in the language, Jonathan Owens. The geographical sense of "Sudanic" invoked by Owens is not the modern country of Sudan, but the Sahel in general, a region dubbed bilad al-sudan, 'the land of the blacks', by Arabs as far back as the medieval era. In the era of British colonialism in Africa, colonial administrators too used "the Sudan" to mean the entire Sahel.
How this Arabic language arose is unknown. In 1994, Braukämper proposed that it arose in Chad starting in 1635 by the fusion of a population of Arabic speakers with a population of Fulani nomads. (The Fulani are a people, or group of peoples, who originate at or near the Atlantic coast but have expanded into most of the Sahel over centuries.)
During the colonial era, a form of pidgin Arabic known as Turku was used as a lingua franca. There are still Arabic pidgins in Chad today, but since they have not been described, it is not known if they descend from Turku.
Distribution
The majority of speakers live in southern Chad between 10 and 14 degrees north latitude. In Chad, it is the local language of the national capital, N'Djamena, and its range encompasses such other major cities as Abéché, Am Timan, and Mao. It is the native language of 12% of Chadians. Chadian Arabic's associated lingua franca is widely spoken in Chad, so that Chadian Arabic and its lingua franca combined are spoken by somewhere between 40% and 60% of the Chadian population.
In Sudan, it is spoken in the southwest, in southern Kurdufan and southern Darfur, but excluding the cities of al-Ubayyid and al-Fashir. Its range in other African countries includes a sliver of the Central African Republic, the northern half of its Vakaga Prefecture, which is adjacent to Chad and Sudan; a sliver of South Sudan at its border with Sudan; and the environs of Lake Chad spanning three other countries, namely part of Nigeria's (Borno State), Cameroon's Far North Region, and in the Diffa Department of Niger's Diffa Region. The number of speakers in Niger is estimated to be 150,000 people.
In Nigeria, it spoken by 10% of the population of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno, and by at least 100,000 villagers elsewhere in Borno.
Early 20th century scholarship
In 1913, a French colonial administrator in Chad, Henri Carbou, wrote a grammar of the local dialect of the Ouaddaï highlands, a region of eastern Chad on the border with Sudan. In 1920, a British colonial administrator in Nigeria, Gordon James Lethem, wrote a grammar of the Borno dialect, in which he noted that the same language was spoken in Kanem (in western Chad) and Ouaddaï (in eastern Chad).
Grammar
It is characterized by the loss of the pharyngeals [ħ] and [ʕ], the interdental fricatives [ð], [θ] and [ðˤ], and diphthongs. But it also has /lˤ/, /rˤ/ and /mˤ/ as extra phonemic emphatics. Some examples of minimal pairs for such emphatics are /ɡallab/ "he galloped", /ɡalˤlˤab/ "he got angry"; /karra/ "he tore", /karˤrˤa/ "he dragged"; /amm/ "uncle", /amˤmˤ/ "mother". In addition, Nigerian Arabic has the feature of inserting an /a/ after gutturals (ʔ,h,x,q). Another notable feature is the change of Standard Arabic Form V from tafaʕʕal(a) to alfaʕʕal; for example, the word taʔallam(a) becomes alʔallam. The first person singular of verbs is different from its formation in other Arabic dialects in that it does not have a final t. Thus, the first person singular of the verb katab is katáb, with stress on the second syllable of the word, whereas the third-person singular is kátab, with stress on the first syllable.
The following is a sample vocabulary:
The two meanings of īd stem from formerly different words: *ʔīd "hand" < Classical yad vs. *ʕīd "festival" < Classical ʕīd.
In Classical Arabic, chicken (singular) is dajaja, and collectively dajaj.