Gusii language

For the Gusii or Kisii people, see Gusii people.

Gusii

EkeGusii

Spoken in Kenya

Region Western Kenya, Gusii district

Native speakers 1,5 million (date missing)

Language family

Niger–Congo

Atlantic–Congo
- Benue–Congo
  - Bantoid
    - Bantu
      - Northeast Bantu
        
        Great Lakes Bantu
        
        Logooli–Kuria (E.40)
        
        Gusii

Language codes

ISO 639-3 guz

This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

The Gusii language (also known as Kisii or Ekegusii) is a Bantu language spoken in the Kisii district in western Kenya,whose head-quarters is Kisii town, (between the Kavirondo Gulf of Lake Victoria and the border with Tanzania). It is spoken by the Gusii people, numbering about 1.5 million (SIL/Ethnologue 1994). A few Gusii people are bilingual in Luo.

1 Sounds
- 1.1 Vowels
- 1.2 Consonants
2 Bibliography
3 External links
- 3.1 Listening
4 See also

Sounds

Vowels

Gusii has seven vowels. Vowel length is contrastive, i.e. the words 'bór' to miss and 'bóór' to say are distinguished by vowel length only.

Phonetic inventory of vowels in Gusii
	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Near-close	ɪ		ʊ
Open-mid	ɛ		ɔ
Open		a

Consonants

In the table below, orthographic symbols are included between brackets if they differ from the IPA symbols. Note especially the use of ‘y’ for IPA /j/, common in African orthographies. When symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant.

Phonetic inventory of consonants in Gusii
	bilabial	alveo-palatal	palatal	velar
plosive	p b	t	c (c)	k ɡ
fricative		s
affricate			cç (c)
nasal	m	n	ɲ (ny)	ŋ (ng')
trill		r
approximant	w		j (y)

The following morphophonological alternations occur:

n+r = nd
n+b = mb
n+g = ŋg
n+k = ŋk
n+m = mm

Bibliography

Bickmore, Lee

1997. Problems in constraining High tone spread in Ekegusii. Lingua, vol. 102, pp. 265–290.
1998. Metathesis and Dahl’s Law in Ekegusii. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, vol. 28:2, pp. 149–168.
1999. High Tone Spreading in Ekegusii Revisited: An Optimality Theoretic Account. Lingua, vol. 109, pp. 109–153.

Cammenga, Jelle

2002 Phonology and morphology of Ekegusii: a Bantu language of Kenya. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.

Mreta, Abel Y.

2008 Kisimbiti: Msamiati wa Kisimbiti-Kiingereza-Kiswahili na Kiingereza-Kisimbiti-Kiswahili / Simbiti-English-Swahili and English-Simbiti-Swahili Lexicon. Languages of Tanzania Project, LOT Publications Lexicon Series 7, 106 pp., ISBN 9987691099.

Whiteley, Wilfred H.

1956 A practical introduction to Gusii. Dar es Salaam/Nairobi/Kampala: East African Literature Bureau.
1960 The tense system of Gusii. Kampala: East African Institute of Social Research.
1974 Language in Kenia. Nairobi: Oxford University Press.

The gusii language has the consnant ' b' not realized as the bilabial stop as in 'bat'but as as bilabial fricative as in words like baba ,baminto,abana.

External links

Listening

National Public Radio story about Kisii language (from All Things Considered program, April 29, 2006)