Goemai is an Afro-Asiatic (Chadic, West Chadic A) language spoken in the Plateau state of Central Nigeria by approximately 200.000 people. Map showing the distribution of Afro-Asiatic languages The Afro-Asiatic languages are a language family of about 240 languages and 285 million people widespread throughout North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia. ... The Chadic languages are a language family spoken across Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, belonging to the Afro-Asiatic languages phylum; their best-known member is Hausa, the lingua franca of much of West Africa. ...

It is a predominantly isolating language with the Subject Verb Object constituent order. An analytic language (or isolating language) is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and considered to be full-fledged words. By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote its syntactic meanings. ... In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO) is the sequence subject verb object in neutral expressions: Sam ate oranges. ...

Bibliography

• Hellwig, Birgit (2003) The grammatical coding of postural semantics in Goemai (a West Chadic language of Nigeria). MPI Series in Phycholinguistics [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 Unpublished manuscript.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)]