Tangale language

Tangale
Spoken in	Nigeria
Native speakers	70,000 (1994)^[1] 130,000 (1995)^[2]
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Chadic West Chadic West Chadic A Bole–Tangale (A.2) Tangale group Tangale
Language codes
ISO 639-3	`tan`
Ethnic territories of the Tangale-speaking people in Nigeria in green

The Tangale language is a West Chadic language spoken in Nigeria.^[3]

Contents

1 Sounds
2 Notes
3 References
4 Further reading

Sounds

Tangale vowels^[4]
	Front		Central	Back
	close	open			close
Close	i	ɪ		ʊ	u
Mid	e	ɛ		ɔ	o
Open			a

A prominent feature of Tangale is vowel harmony. Suffixes control whether all the vowels in a word are open or close.^[4]

Notes

^ Frajzyngier (1994:449)
^ Ethnologue entry for Tangale
^ Raymond G. Gordon, Jr, ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 15th edition. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
^ ^a ^b van der Hulst & van de Weijer (1995:496)

References

Ethnologue entry for West Chadic A.2 languages
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt (1994), "review of A dictionary of the Tangale language", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 57 (2): 449–450
van der Hulst, Harry; van de Weijer, Jeroen (1995), "Vowel Harmony", in Goldsmith, John A., The Handbook of Phonological Theory, Blackwell, pp. 495–534

Further reading

Jungraithmayr, Herrmann (1971), "The Tangale vowel system reconsidered", Journal of African Languages 10: 28–33
Kidda, M. (1985), Tangale phonology: A discriptive analysis., University of Illinois, Champaign