Day language

Day
Native tosouthern Chad
Native speakers
(50,000 cited 1993 census)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3dai
Glottologdayy1236

Day (also spelled Daye) is an Adamawa language of southern Chad, spoken by 50,000 or so people southeast of Sarh. Ethnologue reports that its dialects are mutually intelligible, but Blench (2004) lists Ndanga, Njira, Yani, Takawa as apparently separate languages.

Pierre Nougayrol's publications and field notes of Day from the 1970s constitute almost all of the available materials on the Day language.[2][3][4]

Güldemann (2018) notes that Day has few morphological and lexical features that are typical of Niger-Congo, and hence cannot be classified with certainty.[5]

  1. ^ Day at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ Nougayrol, Pierre. 1979. Le day de Bouna (Tchad), I: phonologie, syntagmatique nominale, synthématique. (Bibl. de la SELAF (Société des Etudes Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France), 71-72.) Paris: Paris. 174pp.
  3. ^ Nougayrol, Pierre. 1980. Le Day de Bouna (Tchad), II: Lexique Day-Français, Index Français-Day. (Société d'Études Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France, 77-78.) Paris: Centre National de la Récherche Sciéntifique. 176pp.
  4. ^ Nougayrol, P. 1977. Éléments de phonologie du day de Bouna. In Caprile, J.-P. (ed.), Études phonologiques tchadiennes, 213-231. Paris: SELAF.
  5. ^ Güldemann, Tom (2018). "Historical linguistics and genealogical language classification in Africa". In Güldemann, Tom (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of Africa. The World of Linguistics series. Vol. 11. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 58–444. doi:10.1515/9783110421668-002. ISBN 978-3-11-042606-9.