Bari language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bari
Spoken in: Southern Sudan and Uganda
Total speakers: 480,000
Language family: Nilo-Saharan
 Eastern Sudanic
  Nilotic
   Eastern Nilotic
    Bari
     Bari
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2:
ISO 639-3: bfa

 

Bari is the language of the Sudan Bari and Kuku people. It is an Eastern Nilotic language, and has several dialects. According to the SIL and The Ethnologue, there were 420,000 speakers of Bari in Sudan 2000. (The Ethnologue also lists 60,000 in Uganda, although there is no census year for that datum.)

Bari is a tone language. It has vowel harmony, subject-verb-object word order, and agglutinative verbal morphology with some suppletion. A very competent dictionary and grammar were published in the 1930s, but are very difficult to find today. More recently, a dissertation has been published on Bari tonal phonology, and another dissertation on Bari syntax is available.

[edit] See also


[edit] Web sites

  1. The Ethnologue's entry for the Bari language

[edit] References

  1. Owen, R.C.R. Bari grammar and vocabulary. 1908. OCLC: 25040516
  2. Spagnolo, Lorenzo M. Bari grammar. 1933. OCLC: 34898784
  3. Yokwe, Eluzai. The tonal grammar of Bari. Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 1987.