Goemai language

language
name=Goemai
states=Nigeria
region=Plateau State
speakers=200,000
familycolor=Afro-Asiatic
fam1=Afro-Asiatic
fam2=Chadic
fam3=West Chadic
fam4=West Chadic A
fam5=Angas-Gerka (A3)
fam6=Angas-Goemai
fam7=Southern
iso2=afa|iso3=ank

Goemai is an Afro-Asiatic (Chadic, West Chadic A) language spoken in the Plateau state of Central Nigeria by approximately 200.000 people. [Raymond G. Gordon, Jr, ed. 2005. "Ethnologue: Languages of the World". 15th edition. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.] Its speakers refer to themselves and their language as 'Goemai'; in older linguistic, historical and ethnographical literature the term 'Ankwe' has been used to refer to the people.

Goemai is a predominantly isolating language with the Subject Verb Object constituent order.

Bibliography

* [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ank Ethnologue entry for Goemai]
* Hellwig, Birgit (2003) "Fieldwork among the Goemai in Nigeria: discovering the grammar of property expressions". [http://www.atypon-link.com/OLD/doi/abs/10.1524/stuf.2007.60.1.67 STUF]
* Hellwig, Birgit (2003) "The grammatical coding of postural semantics in Goemai (a West Chadic language of Nigeria)". MPI Series in Psycholinguistics [dissertation Nijmegen] . " [the introduction contains info about the geography, demography, and sociolinguistics of Goemai; chapter 2 is a grammatical sketch of Goemai] "
* Hoffman, Carl (1970) 'Towards a comoparative phonology of the languages of the Angas-Goemai group.' Unpublished manuscript. "
* Kraft, Charles H. (1981) "Chadic wordlists". Berlin: Dietrich Reimer (Marburger Studien zur Afrika- und Asienkunde, Serie A: Afrika, 23, 24, 25). " [contains a phonological sketch of Goemai and also a Goemai word list] "
* Wolff, Hans (1959) 'Subsystem typologies and area linguistics.' "Anthropological Linguistics", 1, 7, 1–88. " [phonological inventory of Goemai (Duut dialect)] "

References