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Dahalo
Spoken in:	Kenya
Region:	Coast Province
Total speakers:	400
Language family:	Afro-Asiatic  Cushitic   South Cushitic    Dahalo
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	cus
ISO 639-3:	dal
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Dahalo is an endangered South Cushitic language spoken by at most 400 people on the Kenyan coast near the mouth of the Tana River. The Dahalo are dispersed among Swahili and other Bantu peoples, with no villages of their own, and are bilingual in those languages. It may be that children are no longer learning the language.

Dahalo has one of the most diverse sound systems of the world's languages. It is perhaps the only language to employ all four airstream mechanisms used in human language: clicks, ejectives, and implosives, as well as the universal pulmonic sounds.

In addition, Dahalo makes a number of rare distinctions. It contrasts laminal and apical stops, as in Basque and languages of Australia and California; epiglottal and glottal stops and fricatives, as in the Mideast, the Caucasus, and the American Pacific Northwest; and is perhaps the only language in the world to contrast alveolar and palatal lateral fricatives and affricates.

It is suspected that the Dahalo may have once spoken a Sandawe- or Hadza-like language, and that they retained clicks in some words when they shifted to Cushitic, because many of the words with clicks are basic vocabulary. If so, the clicks represent a substratum.

Contents 1 Sounds 1.1 Consonants 1.2 Vowels 1.3 Phonotactics 2 Grammar 3 External links 4 Bibliography

Dahalo has 62 consonants:

			Labial	Alveolar			Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar		Epiglottal	Glottal
				laminal	apical	labial			plain	labial
Stop	plain	voiceless	p	t̪	t̠				k	kʷ	ʡ	ʔ
		voiced	b	d̪	d̠				ɡ	ɡʷ
	pre- nasalized	voiceless	mp	ⁿt̪	ⁿt̠				ŋk	ŋkʷ
		voiced	mb	ⁿd̪	ⁿd̠	ⁿd̠ʷ			ŋg	ŋgʷ
	nasal		m	n				ɲ
	ejective		p’	t̪’	t̠’				k’	k’ʷ
	implosive		ɓ	ɗ
Affricate	plain	voiceless		ʦ			ʧ
		voiced			ʣ	ʣʷ	ʤ
	pre- nasalized	voiceless		ⁿʦ			ⁿʧ
		voiced		ⁿʣ			ⁿʤ
	nasalized click	voiceless		ŋ̊|		ŋ̊|ʷ
		voiced		ŋ|		ŋ|ʷ
	ejective	central					ʧ’
		lateral		tɬ’				cʎ̥’
Fricative		central	f	s   (z)			ʃ				ʜ	h
		lateral			ɬ	ɬʷ		ʎ̥
Approximant		central						(j)		w̜
		lateral		l
Trill				r

The prenasalized voiceless stops have been analysed as syllabic nasals plus stops by some researchers. However, one would expect this additional syllable to give Dahalo words additional tonic possibilities, as Dahalo pitch accent is syllable-dependent (see below), and Ladefoged reports that this does not seem to be the case.

When geminate, the epiglottals are a voiceless stop and fricative. (Thus /ʡ/ is not pharyngeal as sometimes reported, since pharyngeal stops are not believed to be possible.) In utterance-initial position they may be a partially voiced (negative voice onset time) stop and fricative. However, as singletons between vowels, /ʡ/ is a flap or even an approximant with weak voicing, while /ʜ/ is a fully voiced approximant. Other obstruents are similarly affected intervocalically, though not to the same degree.

/b d̪ d̠/ are often fricative [β ð̪ ð̠] between vowels. Initially, they and /g/ are often voiceless, whereas /p t̪ t̠ k/ are fortis (perhaps aspirated). Tosco reports a voiced lateral /dɮ/. /w̜/ has little rounding. /j/ is only attested in a single root, jáːjo/ 'mother'.

Dahalo has 10 vowels:

	Front		Back
High	i / iː		u / uː
Mid	e / eː		o / oː
Low	a / aː

Dahalo has both long and short vowels.

Dahalo words are commonly 2-4 syllables long. Syllables are exclusively of the CV pattern, except that consonants may be geminate between vowels. As with many other Afro-Asiatic languages, gemination is grammatically productive. Voiced consonants partially devoice, and prenasalized stops denasalize when geminated as part of a grammitical function. However, lexical prenasalised geminate stops also occur.

(It is likely that the glottals and clicks do not occur as geminates, although only a few words with intervocalic clicks are known, such as /ʜáŋ̊|ana/.)

Dahalo has pitch accent, normally with zero to one high-pitched syllables (rarely more) per root word. If there is a high pitch, it is most frequently on the first syllable; in the case of disyllabic words, this is the only possibility: e.g. /ʡani/ head, /p’úʡʡu/ pierce.

• Ethnologue entry for Dahalo

• Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (15th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. ISBN 1-55671-159-X. (Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com).
• Maddieson, Ian; Spajić, Siniša; Sands, Bonny; & Ladefoged, Peter. (1993). Phonetic structures of Dahalo. In I. Maddieson (Ed.), UCLA working papers in phonetics: Fieldwork studies of targeted languages (No. 84, pp. 25-65). Los Angeles: The UCLA Phonetics Laboratory Group.