Samwé (samoe), also known as Wara (ouara, ouala), is a Gur language of Burkina Faso. Dialects are Negueni-Klani, Ouatourou-Niasogoni, and Soulani. Niasogoni speakers have difficulty with Negueni, but not vice versa.
Phonology Consonants +Consonants Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Labial-velarPlosive voiceless voiced Nasal Fricative Flap Approximant
can be lenited to between vowels. has a free variant after nasals, vowels, and other consonants. is voiced after nasals and between vowels. is often or between vowels. It tends to stay voiceless at morpheme boundaries. becomes voiced between vowels or after nasals. is not allowed before . , which is not phonemic, occurs intervocalically between the same vowel. is always voiceless. is voiced intervocalically and after nasals, before and , and elsewhere. can be lenited to , which Ouattara represents as . As with stops, voicing and lenition are in free variation. can also be realized as or . is also in free variation with in some words. Sometimes, becomes or . and are contrastive, but roughly 20 words have in free variation.
Vowels Samwe has 20 vowels: 7 short oral vowels, 7 long oral vowels, 3 short nasal vowels, and 3 long nasal vowels.
+Oral vowels Front Central Back short long short long short long Close Close-mid Open-mid Open
+Nasal vowels Front Central Back short long short long short long Close Open
Samwe has two types of vowel harmony: ATR harmony and front-back harmony. do not occur in stems with . Front and back vowels ( and ) do not co-occur in disyllabic imperative verb stems, but this rule is not followed in other verb forms. is neutral in both types.
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