Bijago language

Bijago
Native to Guinea-Bissau
Region Offshore Bissagos Islands
Native speakers
30,000 (2006)[1]
Dialects
Kagbaaga
Kajoko (Orango)
Anhaqui (Anhaki)
Kamona
Language codes
ISO 639-3 bjg
Glottolog bidy1244[2]

Bijago or Bidyogo is the language of the Bissagos Archipelago of Guinea-Bissau. There are some difficulties of grammar and intelligibility between dialects, with the Kamona dialect being unintelligible to the others.

Dialects are as follows:

Characteristics

The Kajoko dialect is one of the few in the world known to use a linguolabial consonant, the voiced stop [d̼], in its basic sound system (Olson et al. 2009).

Classification

Bijago is highly divergent. Sapir (1971) classified it as an isolate within the West Atlantic family. However, Segerer showed that this is primarily due to unrecognized sound changes, and that Bijago is in fact close to the Bak languages. For example, the following cognates in Bijago and Joola Kasa (a Bak language) are completely regular, but had not previously been identified (Segerer 2010):

GlossBijagoJoola Kasa
head bu fu-kow
eye ji-cil

References

  1. Bijago at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Bidyogo". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.


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