Maasai is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania by the Maasai people, numbering about 900,000. It is closely related to the other Maa languages (or better, dialects) Samburu (or Sampur), the language of the Samburu people of central Kenya, and to Chamus, spoken south and southeast of Lake Baringo (sometimes regarded a dialect of Samburu). The Maasai, Samburu and il-Chamus people are historically related and all refer to their language as ɔl Maa. Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... Map showing the distribution of the Nilo-Saharan languages. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... The Eastern Nilotic languages are one of the three primary branches of the Nilotic languages, themselves belonging to the Eastern Sudanic subfamily of Nilo-Saharan; they are believed to have begun to diverge about 3,000 years ago, and have spread southwards from an original home in Equatoria in the... The Maa languages, are a group of closely related Eastern Nilotic languages (or from a linguistic perspective, dialects, as they appear to be mutually-intelligible) spoken in parts of Kenya and Tanzania by more than a million speakers altogether. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639 is one of several international standards that lists short codes for language names. ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Unicode is an industry standard whose goal is to provide the means by which text of all forms and languages can be encoded for use by computers. ... The Eastern Nilotic languages are one of the three primary branches of the Nilotic languages, themselves belonging to the Eastern Sudanic subfamily of Nilo-Saharan; they are believed to have begun to diverge about 3,000 years ago, and have spread southwards from an original home in Equatoria in the... A Maasai tribesman The Maasai or Masai, an indigenous African tribe of semi-nomadic people located primarily in Kenya and northern Tanzania, are probably one of the most familiar tribes of East Africa. ... The Maa languages, are a group of closely related Eastern Nilotic languages (or from a linguistic perspective, dialects, as they appear to be mutually-intelligible) spoken in parts of Kenya and Tanzania by more than a million speakers altogether. ... Samburu is the Eastern Nilotic, North Maa language spoken by the Samburu in the highlands of northern Kenya. ... The Samburu are an ethnic tribe in north central Kenya related to the Maasai. ...

Phonology

Like the other Maa languages, Maasai has ATR vowel harmony. There are nine contrastive vowels, with the vowel /a/ being "neutral" for harmony. For some speakers the voiced stops may be realized as implosive consonants, but often the implosion is very light to non-existent. Tone is extremely important for conveying correct meaning. In linguistics, a language is said to possess vowel harmony (also metaphony) when it has a phonological rule that requires all vowels in a word to belong to a single class. ... Implosive consonants are plosives (rarely affricates) with a glottalic ingressive airstream mechanism. ... This article or section uses Ruby annotation. ...

Syntax

Word order is usually Verb Subject Object, though order can vary because tone is the most important indicator of Subject versus Object. What really determines order in a clause is topicality; thus order in most simple clauses can be predicated according to the information structure pattern: [Verb - Most.Topical - Less.Topical]. Thus, if the Object is highly topical in the discourse (e.g. a first person pronoun), and the Subject is less topical, the Object will occur right after the verb and before the subject. Verb Subject Object—commonly used in its abbreviated form VSO—is a term in linguistic typology. ...

The Maasai language has only two fully grammaticalized prepositions, but can use "relational nouns" along with the most general preposition to designate specific locative ideas. Noun Phrases begin with a Demonstrative or Gender-Number Prefix, followed by a quantifying noun or other head noun. Other modifiers follow the head noun, including Possessive phrases. In grammar, a preposition is a word that establishes a relationship between an object (usually a noun phrase) and some other part of the sentence, often expressing a location in place or time. ... Demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to, and distinguishes those entities from others. ... Possessive can refer to: Possessive case Possessive pronoun This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

See also

• Kwavi language

The Kwavi language is the language or dialect of Maasai spoken by the Kwavi or Parakuyo (aka Baraguyu) sub-tribe of the Maasai in Tanzania. ...

Bibliography

• Mol, Frans (1995) Lessons in Maa: a grammar of Maasai language. Lemek: Maasai Centre.
• Mol, Frans (1996) Maasai dictionary: language & culture (Maasai Centre Lemek). Narok: Mill Hill Missionary.
• Tucker, Archibald N. & Mpaayei, J. Tompo Ole (1955) A Maasai grammar with vocabulary. London/New York/Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co.
• Vossen, Rainer (1982) The Eastern Nilotes. Linguistic and historical reconstructions (Kölner Beiträge zur Afrikanistik 9). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.

External links

• Ethnologue report on Maasai
• On-line Maa dictionary
• Maasai Language Project