Laal is an endangered language isolate spoken by 750 people () in two villages in the Moyen-Chari prefecture of Chad on opposite banks of the Chari River, called Gori (), and Damtar (). It represents an isolated survival of an earlier language group of Central Africa. It is unwritten except in transcription by linguists. According to former Summer Institute of Linguistics-Chad member David Faris, it is in danger of extinction, with most people under 25 shifting to the locally more widespread Bagirmi.
This language first came to the attention of academic linguists in 1977 through Pascal Boyeldieu's fieldwork in 1975 and 1978. His fieldwork was based, for the most part, on a single speaker, Djouam Kadi of Damtar.
Speakers and status The language's speakers are mainly river fishermen and farmers, who also sell salt extracted from the ashes of doum palms and Vossia cuspidata. Like their neighbours, the Niellim, they were formerly cattle herders but lost their herds around the turn of the 19th century. They are mainly Muslims, but until the latter half of the 20th century, they followed the traditional religion of the Niellim. The area is fairly undeveloped; while there are Qur'anic schools in Gori and Damtar, the nearest government school is 7 km away, and there is no medical dispensary in the region ().
The village of Damtar formerly had a distinct dialect, called Laabe (), with two or three speakers remaining in 1977; it was replaced by the dialect of Gori after two Gori families fled there at the end of the 19th century to escape a war. No other dialects of Laal are known.
Under Chadian law, Laal, like all languages of Chad other than French and Arabic, is regarded as a national language. Although the 1996 Constitution stipulates that "the law shall fix the conditions of promotion and development of national languages", national languages are not used for education, for official purposes, or usually for written media, but some of the larger ones (but not Laal) are used on the radio.
Classification Laal remains unclassified, although extensive Adamawa (specifically Bua) and to a lesser extent Chadic influence is found. It is sometimes grouped with one of those two language families, and sometimes seen as a language isolate. Boyeldieu (1982) summarizes his view as "its classification remains problematic; while it shows certain lexical, and no doubt morphological, traits with the Bua languages (Adamawa-13, Niger–Congo family of Joseph H. Greenberg), it differs from them radically in many ways of which some, a priori, make one think of geographically nearby Chadic languages." Roger Blench (2003), similarly, considers that "its vocabulary and morphology seem to be partly drawn from Chadic (i.e. Afro-Asiatic), partly from Adamawa (i.e. Niger–Congo) and partly from an unknown source, perhaps its original phylum, a now-vanished grouping from Central Africa." It is the last possibility which attracts particular interest; if this proves true, Laal may be the only remaining window on the linguistic state of Central Africa before the expansion of the main African language families - Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo - into it.
Their immediate neighbors speak Bua, Niellim, and Ndam. Laal contains a number of loanwords from Baguirmi, which for several centuries was the lingua franca of the region under the Baguirmi Empire, and perhaps a dozen Chadic roots, which are not similar to the Chadic languages that currently neighbor Laal. In addition, almost all Laal speak Niellim as a second language, and 20%–30% of their vocabulary is cognate with Niellim, especially agricultural vocabulary (Boyeldieu 1977, Lionnet 2010). Like the Baguirmi, the Laal are Muslims; partly because of this, some Arabic loanwords are also found. However some 60% of the vocabulary, including most core vocabulary, cannot be identified with any known language family (Lionnet 2010). Indeed, some of the words cognate with Niellim, including some basic vocabulary, is not cognate with closely related Bua, suggesting that these are not Adamawa roots but loans in Niellim from the Laal substrate (Lionnet 2010). Pozdniakov (2010) believes Laal is a distinct branch of Niger–Congo with part of its pronominal system borrowed from a Chadic language like Kera.
Laal is grouped with the Chadic languages in an automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013), suggesting early contact with Chadic.Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013).
Phonology The sounds of Laal are transcribed here using International Phonetic Alphabet symbols.
Consonants Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar GlottalStopvoiceless plain voiced prenasalized implosive Fricative Nasal Approximant Flap
Implosives and prenasalised stops as well as /h/ are found only word-initially. Voiceless stops as well as /s/ cannot occur at the end of a syllable. occurs only intervocalically and word-finally. appears exclusively in loanwords and certain numbers. Prenasalized stops as well as the implosive are extremely rare.
Vowels The vowel system for non-initial syllables is and the diphthong , with no length distinction. is heard as a glide in the vowel sequences as . For initial syllables, however, it is much more complicated, allowing length distinctions and distinguishing the following additional diphthongs: (but the latter two appear only as morphologically conditioned forms of and and so are perhaps better seen as allophonic).
In addition, may occur very occasionally; Boyeldieu quotes the example of (plural form of 'red').
There are three level tones: high (), mid (), low (). Combinations may occur on a single vowel, resulting in phonetic rising and falling tone, and which are phonemically sequences of level tones. Such cases are transcribed here by repeating the vowel (e.g. ); long vowels are indicated only by a colon (e.g., ).
Suffixes may force any of four kinds of ablaut on the vowels of preceding words: raising (takes to ), lowering (takes to ), low rounding (takes and to ; and to ; , and to ), and high rounding (takes and to ; and to ; , and to ). They are transcribed in the suffix section as ↑, ↓, ↗, ↘ respectively. In some verbs, / is "raised" to rather than, as expected, to .
In suffixes, ə and o undergo vowel harmony: they become and u respectively if the preceding vowel is one of {, , }. Likewise, r undergoes consonant harmony, becoming l after words containing l. Suffixes with a neutral tone copy the final tone of the word to which they are suffixed.
+VowelsFrontCentralBackClose Mid Open
Morphology Syntax The typical word order can be summarised as subject–(verbal particle)–verb–object–adverb; preposition–noun; possessed–possessor; noun–adjective. Nouns can be fronted when topicalized. See the sample sentences below for examples and the conjunctions for clause syntax.
Nouns Nouns have plural and singular forms (the latter are perhaps better viewed as singulative in some cases), with plural formation hard to predict: ('bone') → ('bones'), ('chicken') → ('chickens'), ('hunger') → ('hungers'). Nouns do not have arbitrary gender, but three natural genders (male, female, non-human) are distinguished by pronouns.
The possessive is expressed in two ways: Inalienable, or direct, possession: by following the possessed with the possessor (and modifying the tone or ending of the possessed in some cases): ('person's leg', ); Alienable possession: by putting a connecting word, conjugated according to number and gender, between the possessed and the possessor:
The connecting word is sometimes abbreviated to a simple high tone.
However, if the possessor is a pronoun, it is suffixed with extensive vowel ablaut (in the first case) or prepositional forms with "at" and optionally the connector as well, are used (in the second case): ('my man', ), ('her eye', ; from , 'eye'). Some nouns, such as ('friend') occur only with bound pronouns and have no independent form. That is called obligatory possession and is found in many other language, usually for words referring to personal relationships. See pronouns for the relevant suffixes.
A noun indicating someone who does, is, or has something can be formed with the prefix , meaning roughly 'he/she/it who/of': ('landowner'), ('farmer'; from meaning 'cultivate'), ('fisherman'; from meaning 'to fish'), ('a fisher of fish').
Laal does show traces of an old Adamawa-type noun-class system, but apart from loans, the forms do not appear to be cognate with the Adamawa system (Lionnet 2010).
Some singular and plural nouns in Laal (Blench (2017):
Gloss Laal singular plural mahogany bag mat cock hyena ear elephant dog bird pigeon water sheep
Pronouns Personal In the following tables, note the distinction between inclusive and exclusive we, found in many other languages but not English, and the gender differentiation of "I" in certain forms. The inanimate plural has been dropped by most popular younger speakers in favour of the animate plural, but both are given below. The object paradigm for verbs is quite complex; only two of its several sets of allomorphs are given in the table below. "He" and "she" are used only for human referents; other nouns take the neuter pronoun. That is quite distinct from the languages with which Laal shares vocabulary, but Laal has traces of an old Adamawa-type noun-class system (Lionnet 2010). The first- and second-person plural forms are quite similar to Chadic languages (specifically, Kera) which are currently quite distant from the Laal-speaking region, but they have no similarities to Adamawa.
Simple Emphatic Benefactive At Possessive Object n-type r-type I (masc.) I (fem.) you he she , it , we (excl.) , , we (incl.) you (pl.) , , they (anim.) they (inan.) , ,
(The arrows indicate vowel harmony triggered in by the suffix by the root.)
Relative and indefinite pronouns Singular Plural Male Female Inanimate Animate Inanimate who/of some ... such a ...
Interrogative ('what'), ('who'), ('where'), ('how much')
Prepositions Prepositions precede their objects: ('in[to] the village'), ('to his body'; ).
Verbs The verb does not vary according to the person or gender of the subject, but some verbs (about a quarter of the verbs attested) vary according to its number: ('the person eats'), ('the people eat'). The plural form of the verb is hard to predict, but is often formed by ablaut (typically raising the vowel height) with or without a suffix or and tonal change. The verb, however, changes according to the direct object. It takes personal suffixes to indicate a pronominal direct object, and it commonly changes when a non-pronominal direct object is added to a transitive form with final low tone (formed similarly to the "centripetal", for which see below): ('he will do'); ('he will do something'); ('he sees the man'); ('he sees you [pl.]').
The verb has three basic forms: simple, "centripetal", and "participative" to calque Boyeldieu's terminology. The simple form is used in the simple present tense or the imperative: ('he goes down the riverbank'; ). The "centripetal" indicates action "hither", either spatially, motion towards the speaker, or temporally, action up to the present moment; it is formed mainly by suffixing a vowel (often, but not always, identical to the last vowel in the word): ('he comes down the riverbank [towards me]'). The "participative", generally formed like the centripetal but with final high tone, generally indicates an omitted object or instrument: