Wapan language
| Wapan | |
|---|---|
| Jukun | |
| Native to | Nigeria |
| Region | Taraba State, Plateau State, Nassarawa State |
Native speakers | 100,000 (1994)[1] |
|
Niger–Congo
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
juk |
| Glottolog |
wapa1235[2] |
Wapan or Jukun Wapan, also known as Wukari after the local town, is a major Jukunoid language of Nigeria.
Wapan and other Jukunoid languages are interesting in the development of asymmetrical patterns of nasal and oral consonants in West Africa, where one could posit that voiced oral stops become nasal before nasal vowels, sometimes at the expense of having more nasal than oral vowels (which is typologically odd), or that nasal stops denasalize before oral vowels, which is also typologically odd. In Wapan, the asymmetry is as follows: Oral vowels are only allowed in syllables like ba, mba and nasal vowels in bã, mã. Historically, however, the consonants nasalized: *mb became **mm before nasal vowels, and then reduced to *m, leaving the current asymmetric distribution.[3]
| allophonic Ṽ next to N | *mã | *mãm | *mba | *mbãm | *ba | *bãm |
| *mb → *mm/_Ṽ | *mã | *mãm | *mba | *mmãm | *ba | *bãm |
| *mm → *m | *mã | *mãm | *mba | *mãm | *ba | *bãm |
| loss of final C | mã | mã | mba | mã | ba | bã |
References
- ↑ Wapan at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Wapan". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- ↑ Larry Hyman, 1975. "Nasal states and nasal processes." In Nasalfest: Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization, pp. 249–264
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