Sandawe language

Sandawe is a tonal language spoken by about 40,000 people in the Dodoma region of Tanzania. Language use is vigorous among both adults and children, with people in some areas monolingual. Sandawe has generally been classified as a Khoisan language since Albert Drexel in the 1920's, due at first just to the presence of clicks in the language, though later several morphological similarities with the Khoisan languages of southern Africa were proposed. A recent discussion of Sandawe's linguistic classification can be found in Sands (1998).

SIL International began work on Sandawe in 1996 and to date (2004), Daniel and Elisabeth Hunziker and Helen Eaton continue to work on the analysis of the language. They have so far produced a phonological description, a dialect survey report and several papers on aspects of grammar. Sandawe is also currently (as of 2004) studied by Sander Steeman of Leiden University.

Sounds

Vowels

Sandawe has five vowel qualities:

i				u
	e		o
		a

All five vowel qualities may be found as short oral, long oral and long nasal vowels. There are therefore fifteen vowel phonemes. In word-final position, devoiced u and i vowels occur frequently.

Consonants

Non-click consonants

[not written yet]

Clicks

(source: De Voogt 1992:53,54)

	Dental	Lateral	Lamino-postalveolar
Glottalised	ʔǀ	ʔǁ	ʔǃ
Glottalised with delayed release	ǀʔ	ǁʔ	ǃʔ
Aspirated	ǀʰ	ǁʰ	ǃʰ
Nasal	ŋǀ	ŋǁ	ŋǃ

Grammar

Pronouns

	Sandawe	English
1 sg.	-és	I
2 sg.	-i	you
3 sg. male	-à	he
3 sg. female	-sà	she
1 pl	-wà	we
2 pl	-è	you
3 pl	-ʔà	they

Syllable structure

Sandawe syllables are usually of the form CV; in monosyllabic words, word-final nasals are not uncommon, CV(N). Sometimes other consonants are found in word-final position, but this is most probably the result of deletion of word-final voiceless vowels. A syllabic nasal m is found in Swahili loanwords. The most common word structure is disyllabic with or without long vowels (CV(:)CV(:)), according to De Voogt (1992).

Nouns

A noun consists generally of a stem and a suffix which indicates gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and number (singular, plural).

[suffixes to be added]

Adjectives

Adjectival concepts are mostly expressed as verbs in Sandawe according to Kagawe (1993:ix).

Syntax

Basic word order in Sandawe is SOV according to De Voogt (1992). However, word order in the Sandawe sentence is very flexible due to the presence of several 'subject identification strategies'.

Sample sentence (mid tones are not marked):

úte-s kx'aré-és hàʔ!à
yesterday-I boy-I called
Yesterday I called a boy
(source: De Voogt 1992:19 adapted from Tucker 1977)

Tone

Elderkin (1989) analyzes Sandawe as having two level tones (High, Low) and two contour tones (Falling, Rising). His thesis considers the behavior of tone at word-, sentence- and discourse-level. De Voogt (1992) and Kagaya (1993) list three level tones (High, Mid, Low) and two contour tones (Falling, Rising).

Classification

Greenberg (1976) gives the following arguments for its classification as Khoisan, as well as about 50 claimed Sandawe-Khoisan vocabulary similarities:

Personal pronouns: tsi "I" (cf. Template:Ll, Template:Ll ti, Template:Ll či; sa "she" (cf. Nama -s, Naro -sa); e "it" (Nama -i nominative, -e accusative), ha-we "he" (cf. Naro xa-ba); ha-su, he-su "she" (cf. Naro xa-sa)
Demonstratives: ha "that" (cf. Template:Ll, Template:Ll ha, Naro xa, Tsoa ho); he "this" (Template:Ll he); na "there" (common Ta’a-!Kwi, Nama //na); ne "here" (Nama ne)
Plural suffixes: -si feminine plural (Naro -si, Nama -ti, Ju languages, Template:Ll -si common plural); -ko masculine plural (Nama -ku, /Xam -gu personal plural)
Adjective formant -se (cf. Template:Ll -si, Nama -se, Naro -sə.)
Verbal suffixes: reciprocal -ki (cf. Naro, Nama -ku)

Given that the evidence linking the southern Khoisan families isn't much better, there is no reason to suppose that Sandawe is any more distantly related to them than they are to each other, despite the geographic distance. However, the Khoisan hypothesis is regarded with scepticism by many linguists, and a common ancestor of Sandawe with any other language family has yet to be established.