Goemai language

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Goemai
Spoken in: Nigeria 
Region: Plateau State
Total speakers: 200,000
Language family: Afro-Asiatic
 Chadic
  West Chadic
   A
    Angas-Gerka (A3)
     Angas-Goemai
      Southern
       Goemai
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: afa
ISO 639-3: ank

Goemai is an Afro-Asiatic (Chadic, West Chadic A) language spoken in the Plateau state of Central Nigeria by approximately 200.000 people. Its speakers refer to themselves and their language as 'Goemai'; in older linguistic, historical and ethnographical literature the term 'Ankwe' has been used to refer to the people.

Goemai is a predominantly isolating language with the Subject Verb Object constituent order.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Hellwig, Birgit (2003) The grammatical coding of postural semantics in Goemai (a West Chadic language of Nigeria). MPI Series in Psycholinguistics [dissertation Nijmegen]. [the introduction contains info about the geography, demography, and sociolinguistics of Goemai; chapter 2 is a grammatical sketch of Goemai]
  • Hoffman, Carl (1970) 'Towards a comoparative phonology of the languages of the Angas-Goemai group.' Unpublished manuscript.
  • Kraft, Charles H. (1981) Chadic wordlists. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer (Marburger Studien zur Afrika- und Asienkunde, Serie A: Afrika, 23, 24, 25). [contains a phonological sketch of Goemai and also a Goemai word list]
  • Wolff, Hans (1959) 'Subsystem typologies and area linguistics.' Anthropological Linguistics, 1, 7, 1–88. [phonological inventory of Goemai (Duut dialect)]