Dahalo is an endangered Cushitic language spoken by around 500600 Dahalo people on the coast of Kenya, near the mouth of the Tana River. Dahalo is unusual among the world's languages in using all four airstream mechanisms found in human language: clicks, implosives, ejectives, and pulmonic consonants.

Name

While the language is known primarily as "Dahalo" to linguists, the term itself is an exonym supposedly used by Aweer speakers that itself essentially means “stupid” or “worthless.” The speakers themselves refer to the language as .

Dahalo is also called Sanye, a name shared with neighboring Waata, also spoken by former hunter-gatherers. The Waata may once have spoken a language more like Dahalo before shifting to Oromo.

History

The Dahalo, former elephant hunters, are dispersed among Swahili and other Bantu peoples, with no villages of their own, and are bilingual in those languages. Children no longer learn the language, which would make it moribund, and it may be extinct. and Kießling (2001) agrees that it has too many Eastern features to be South Cushitic.

Phonology

Consonants

Dahalo has a highly diverse sound system using all four airstream mechanisms found in human language: clicks, ejectives, and implosives, as well as the universal pulmonic sounds. Nguni languages such as Xhosa and Zulu also use all four airstream mechanisms, although the ejective consonants in these languages are weak, and vary between speakers.

In addition, Dahalo makes a number of uncommon distinctions. It contrasts laminal and apical stops, as in languages of Australia and California; epiglottal and glottal stops and fricatives, as in the Mideast, the Caucasus, and the American Pacific Northwest; and is perhaps the only language in the world to contrast alveolar lateral and palatal lateral fricatives and affricates.

Dahalo has, by all accounts, a large consonant inventory. 62 consonants are reported by Maddieson et al. (1993), whereas Tosco (1991) recognizes 50. This might explain why clicks are only present in about 40 lexical items, some of which are basic (e.g. "breast," "saliva," and "forest").

Ehret reported that different words had either dental and lateral clicks, while Elderkin reported that these were allophones. It is not clear if an old distinction has merged, or if the place of articulation is variable because there is no distinction to maintain.

References

  • Dahalo Swadesh List