Ekoti (pronounced [ekot̪i]) is a Bantu language spoken in Mozambique by about 64,200 people^[1], the Akoti. Ekoti is spoken on Koti Island and is also the major language of Angoche, the capital of the district with the same name in the province of Nampula. Categories: Stub | Provinces of Mozambique ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... Map showing the distribution of Niger-Congo languages The Niger-Congo languages constitute one of the worlds major language families, and Africas largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... In the classification of African languages, Volta-Congo is the major branch (in terms of number of languages) of the Niger-Congo phylum. ... The Benue-Congo group of languages constitutes the largest branch of the Niger-Congo language family, both in terms of sheer number of languages, of which 938 are known (not counting mere dialects), and in terms of speakers, numbering perhaps 550 million. ... In the classification of African languages, Bantoid is a branch of the Benue-Congo subfamily of the Niger-Congo phylum. ... In the classification of African languages, Southern Bantoid (or South Bantoid) is one of the two branches of the Bantoid subfamily of the Niger-Congo phylum. ... In the classification of African languages, Narrow Bantu is a term commonly used to designate the branch of Niger-Congo containing the numerous Bantu languages as recognized by Guthrie (1948) in his seminal classification of the Bantu languages. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2:1998 Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code Twenty-two of the languages have two three-letter codes: a code for bibliographic use (ISO 639-2/B) a code for terminological use (ISO 639-2/T). ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... Map showing the approximate distribution of Bantu (dull yellow) vs. ... Angoche is a district and village of the province of Nampula, in Mozambique. ... Categories: Stub | Provinces of Mozambique ...

In terms of genetic classification, Ekoti is generally considered to belong to the Makhuwa group (P.30 in Guthrie's classification). A large portion of its vocabulary however derives from a past variety of Swahili, today the lingua franca of much of East Africa's coast. This Swahili influence is usually attributed to traders from Kilwa or somewhere else on the Zanzibar Coast, who in the fifteenth century settled at Angoche.^[2] Malcolm Guthrie (1903-1972), professor of Bantu languages, is known primarily for his classification of Bantu languages (Guthrie 1971). ... This article is about the language. ... Kilwa Kisiwani is an Islamic community on an island off the coast of East Africa, in present day Tanzania. ... Map of Zanzibars main island Zanzibar, Tanzania, comprises a pair of islands off the east coast of Africa called Zanzibar (Unguja) (1994 est. ...

Geography and demography

The place name Koti refers primarily to the island. An older form is [ŋgoji]; this form with the class 2 nominal prefix a for 'people' gave rise to the Portuguese name Angoche. The much older local African name of Angoche, still in use, is Parápaátho. Angoche was probably established in the fifteenth century by dissidents from Kilwa.^[3] In the centuries that followed, it flourished as a part of the Indian Ocean trading network. Kilwa Kisiwani is an Islamic community on an island off the coast of East Africa, in present day Tanzania. ...

About nine Akoti villages are found in the coastal areas of Koti island; these are usually accessed by boat. Much of the coastline is covered by mangrove woods (khava). On the mainland, there are about five other Akoti villages, all in the vicinity of Angoche. The main economic activity of men in the villages is fishing; the catch is sold on the markets of Angoche. People keep chickens and some goats.

In Makhuwa, the dominant regional language of much of northern Mozambique, the Akoti are called Maka, just like other coastal Muslim communities that were part of the Indian Ocean trading network. Most Akoti have at least some knowledge of Makhuwa or one of its neighbouring dialects; this extensive bilinguality has had considerable influence on the Ekoti language in recent years.

Sounds

Vowels

Ekoti has five vowels. The open vowels ɛ and ɔ are normally written e and o. The high vowels i and u do not occur word-initially. There is a restricted form of vowel harmony in verbal bases which causes /u/ in verbal extensions to be rendered as [o] after another /o/; thus, the separative extensions -ul- and -uw- appear as -ol- and -ow- after the vowel o. Furthermore, a distributional analysis shows that /o/ tends to occur mainly after another /o/, and only rarely after the other vowels.^[4] Vowel harmony (also metaphony) is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels. ...

Vowel length is contrastive in Ekoti, except in word-final position. Long vowels are best treated as two tone-bearing units. Several vowel coalescense processes do take place, within words as well as across morpheme boundaries: mathápá mawíxí apa → mathápá mawíx'áapa 'these green leaves' (the apostroph shows the location of coalescence). In case of word-final 'i' it is sometimes accompanied with glide formation: olíli áka → olíly'aáka 'my bed'.^[5] Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ... A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ... A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. ... The open-mid vowels make a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages. ... An open vowel is a vowel sound of a type used in most spoken languages. ...

Consonants

The table below shows the consonant inventory of Ekoti.^[6] The two glides w and y are only phonemically contrastive in certain contexts; in some other contexts, they can be derived from vowels. Consonants in parentheses are extremely rare, with the only example of dh in S&M's corpus, adhuhuri 'second prayer in the morning', being in variation with aduhuri; the fricative zh occurs only in some recent loans from Portuguese. Voiced stops are rather infrequent overall, and they tend to occur after a homorganic, tone-bearing nasal. Additionally, voiced stops often vary with their voiceless unaspirated counterparts.

Words in Ekoti show incompatibility of aspirated consonants; this phenomenon is dubbed Katupha's Law in Schadeberg (1999), and is found in related Makhuwa languages as well. If two aspirated consonants are brought together in one stem, the first such consonant loses its aspiration. The effect is particularly clear in reduplicated words: kopikophi 'eyelash'; piriphiri 'pepper' (cf. Swahili 'piripiri'); okukuttha 'to wipe'. Another incompatibility concerns dental and retroflex consonants, which never occur together within a stem, and usually dissimilate when brought together. Consider the class 1 demonstrative for example: o-tthu-o-tu becomes othuutu under influence of the dentral-retroflex incompatibility.

Tone

Ekoti, like most Bantu languages, is a register tone language with two tones: High and Low. Tone is not lexically distinctive for verbs, but it is very important in verbal inflection and in some other parts of grammar. Contour tones (falling and rising tones) do occur, but only on long vowels, therefore they are analysed as sequences of the H and L level tones. There is a process of High Doubling which spreads any H tone to the following tone bearing unit, and a process of Final Lowering which deletes any utterance-final High tone. Both can be seen in effect in the following example (Low tone is unmarked): kaláwa 'boat', kaláwá khuúlu 'the biggest boat'. In kaláwa, High doubling is canceled because Final Lowering applies, so the last syllable has a Low tone. In the second example, the first H tone in kaláwá has spread to the next syllable (High Doubling) and Final Lowering again causes the very last syllable of the utterance to be Low in tone.

Morphosyntax

Ekoti has a typical Bantu noun class system, in which every noun belongs to a nominal class which class markers throughout the sentence are in agreement with. Classes pair up in 'genders' for the derivation of plurals. Verbal words consist of a stem to which various morphemes and clitics can be affixed. In linguistics, grammatical genders, also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once. ...

Notes and references

Notes

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. ...

References

• Schadeberg, Thilo C. (1999) 'Katupha's Law in Makhuwa', in Bantu historical linguistics: Theoretical and empirical perspectives, ed. by J.-M. Hombert and L.M. Hyman. Stanford: CSLI, pp. 379-394.
• Schadeberg, Thilo C. & Mucanhei, Francisco Ussene (2000) Ekoti: The Maka or Swahili language of Angoche. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.