| Jalaa | |
|---|---|
| bàsàrə̀n dà jàlààbè̩ | |
| Spoken in | Nigeria |
| Region | Loojaa settlement in Balanga Local Government Area, Bauchi State |
| Native speakers | 200 (date missing) |
| Language family |
Unclassified (language isolate per Ethnologue 16)
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | cet |
Jalaa (autonym bàsàrə̀n dà jàlààbè̩) aka Centúúm or Cen Tuum is an endangered language of northeastern Nigeria (Loojaa settlement in Balanga Local Government Area, Bauchi State), of uncertain (possibly Niger–Congo) origins. It is nearly extinct; the ethnic group has come to use the Bwilim dialect of Cham in daily life, and the few remaining speakers of Jalaa, all elderly, are much more fluent in Cham than in Jalaa.
Traditionally, the Jalabe (as the ethnic group is called) are said to have come to Loojaa from an area a few miles south within the Muri Mountains, where they had shared a settlement with Tso and Kwa clans. (The name of this settlement, Cèntûm or Cùntûm, is used as a name for the language in some sources.) Later, during the nineteenth century, the Cham arrived in the area, fleeing attacks from the larger Waja to the north; the Cham intermarried with the Jalabe, and the Jalabe began to adopt the Cham language.
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The Jalaa lexicon is also strongly influenced by Cham (which it has in turn influenced); some similarities are also found with the nearby Tso. However, most of its vocabulary is extremely unusual. In Kleinewillinghöfer's words, "The major part of the lexicon seems to differ entirely from all the surrounding languages, which themselves represent different language families."
Both the Cham and the Tso traditionally avoided using names of the dead. When those names were also words of the language, as often happened, this forced them to change the word, sometimes by replacing it with a word from a neighboring language. Kleinewillinghöfer regards this as a motivation for certain cases of borrowing from Jalaa into Cham.
The numerals 1-6 in Jalaa are:
Above 5, the numerals are almost identical to Cham. The numerals 2 through 5 are almost identical with Tso, while "one" has no clear cognates.
Jalaa morphology (at least in its present form) is almost identical to that of Cham. The main differences in the noun class system are two of the plural suffixes: Jalaa -ta versus Cham -te̩ and (for humans) Jalaa -bo, -ba versus Cham -b(e̩).