Shubi language

Shubi
Region Kagera Region in Tanzania
Ethnicity Shubi people
Native speakers
(153,000 cited 1987)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 suj
Glottolog shub1238[2]
JD.64[3]

Shubi (Subi) is a Bantu language spoken in by the Shubi people in north-western Tanzania. It may use labiodental plosives //, // (sometimes written ȹ, ȸ) as phonemes, rather than as allophones of /p, b/. Peter Ladefoged wrote:

We have heard labiodental stops made by a Shubi speaker whose teeth were sufficiently close together to allow him to make an airtight labiodental closure. For this speaker this sound was clearly in contrast with a bilabial stop; but we suspect that the majority of Shubi speakers make the contrast one of bilabial stop versus labial-labiodental affricate (i.e. bilabial stop closure followed by a labiodental fricative), rather than bilabial versus labiodental stop.[4]

References

  1. Shubi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Shubi". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online
  4. LINGUIST List 5.219: Labiodental nasals

External links


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