A quick diola grammar overview
From a personal point of view I would say that the Diola grammar is significantly different from the languages I had previously studied. Some features seemed strange at first but quickly made sense. At a basic level, the Diola grammar is rather simple and elegant, although the language, as with any other language, is rich in expressive resources and structural complexity.
This is obviously not the place for a complete grammatical description but for those who are interested, I will briefly explain some characteristics of the Diola Grammar.
This is obviously not the place for a complete grammatical description but for those who are interested, I will briefly explain some characteristics of the Diola Grammar.
sounds: vowel harmony
A remarkable feature in Diola phonology is the presence of vowel harmony. Simply speaking vowel harmony is a phenomenon in which all the vowels of are word pronounced in the same way, depending on the vowel of word's root. It is said to make the language sound more "harmonious".
In Diola, the vowels can be pronounced in two ways according to the position of the tongue: advanced or not advanced. If the vowel of the word the stem is advanced, then all of the following vowels have to be advanced.
This phenomenon has been described for other languages such as Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian and Kazakh. Click right mouse button for a quick PowerPoint explaining vowel harmony.
In Diola, the vowels can be pronounced in two ways according to the position of the tongue: advanced or not advanced. If the vowel of the word the stem is advanced, then all of the following vowels have to be advanced.
This phenomenon has been described for other languages such as Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian and Kazakh. Click right mouse button for a quick PowerPoint explaining vowel harmony.
a noun class language
As with other Niger-Congo Languages, the Diola Language has a Noun-class system, where nouns are categorized in classes such as animacy, gender and shape. Diola also uses a system of prefixes that are affixed to nouns, noun phrase constituents and verbs. All of these elements show agreement with the noun. According to Bernard Diatta, Diola Kassa has twelve noun classes. Let's see an example: "Sibeasu silako tate"
|
Si - be - asu Si - lako tate
CL8- cow - det CL8 - stay here "the cows stay here" |
CL8: class prefix number 8 (used for animals in plural), both and the subject and on the verb det: determiner |
Sibe: plural of ebe (cow)
Silako: verb lako (stay, stand) + class prefix 8, showing agreement with the noun sibe.
Silako: verb lako (stay, stand) + class prefix 8, showing agreement with the noun sibe.
svo word order
The word order in Diola is SVO, which means that the order of the syntactic constituents is subject-object-verb, exactly as in English or the Romance Languages.
want to know a little more?
Check out some of my fieldnotes about the Diola grammar (in Spanish). Click the right mouse button to open in a new tab:
| grammaire_diola.pdf |
Click here and check Olac resources for Diola Kasa language.
