Ekoti language
Encyclopedia
The Koti language, or Ekoti , is a Bantu
language spoken in Mozambique
by about 64,200 people, the Koti people (Akoti). Koti 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
.
In terms of genetic classification, Koti 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.
About nine Koti 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 Koti 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 Koti are called Maka, just like other coastal Muslim communities that were part of the Indian Ocean trading network. Most Koti have at least some knowledge of Makhuwa or one of its neighbouring dialects; this extensive bilinguality has had considerable influence on the Koti language in recent years.
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.
Vowel length is contrastive in Koti, 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'.
. 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 Koti 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.
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.
Bantu languages
The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
language spoken in Mozambique
Mozambique
Mozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique , is a country in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west and Swaziland and South Africa to the southwest...
by about 64,200 people, the Koti people (Akoti). Koti is spoken on Koti Island and is also the major language of Angoche
Angoche
Angoche is a city of Nampula Province in Mozambique. The city was named António Enes until 1976, after the 19th century Portuguese journalist and colonial administrator, António José Enes...
, the capital of the district with the same name in the province of Nampula
Nampula Province
Nampula is a province of Mozambique. It has an area of 81,606 km² and a population of 3.985.285 . Nampula is the capital of the province...
.
In terms of genetic classification, Koti is generally considered to belong to the Makhuwa group (P.30 in Guthrie's
Malcolm Guthrie
Malcolm Guthrie , professor of Bantu languages, is known primarily for his classification of Bantu languages...
classification). A large portion of its vocabulary however derives from a past variety of Swahili
Swahili language
Swahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...
, today the lingua franca of much of East Africa's coast. This Swahili influence is usually attributed to traders from Kilwa
Kilwa Kisiwani
Kilwa Kisiwani is a community on an island off the coast of East Africa, in present day Tanzania.- History :A document written around AD 1200 called al-Maqama al Kilwiyya discovered in Oman, gives details of a mission to reconvert Kilwa to Ibadism, as it had recently been effected by the Ghurabiyya...
or somewhere else on the Zanzibar
Zanzibar
Zanzibar ,Persian: زنگبار, from suffix bār: "coast" and Zangi: "bruin" ; is a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, in East Africa. It comprises the Zanzibar Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the mainland, and consists of numerous small islands and two large ones: Unguja , and Pemba...
Coast, who in the fifteenth century settled at Angoche.
Geography and demography
The place name Koti refers primarily to the island. An older form is [ŋɡoji]; 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. In the centuries that followed, it flourished as a part of the Indian Ocean trading network.About nine Koti 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 Koti 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 Koti are called Maka, just like other coastal Muslim communities that were part of the Indian Ocean trading network. Most Koti have at least some knowledge of Makhuwa or one of its neighbouring dialects; this extensive bilinguality has had considerable influence on the Koti language in recent years.
Vowels
Koti 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 harmonyVowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
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.
Vowel length is contrastive in Koti, 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'.
Consonants
The table below shows the consonant inventory of Koti. 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 PortuguesePortuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
. 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.
| | labial | | dental | | alveolar | | retroflex | | palatal | | velar | | glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | p b | t d | tt [ʈ] dd [ɖ] | c j [ɟ] | k g | ||
| Aspirated stop | ph [pʰ] | th [t̪ʰ] | tth [ʈʰ] | ch [cʰ] | kh [kʰ] | ||
| fricative | f v | (dh [ð] | s z | x [ʃ] (zh [ʒ]) | h | ||
| Nasal | m | n | ny [ɲ] | ||||
| trill | r | ||||||
| Approximant | l | y [j] | w |
Words in Koti 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
Koti, 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
Koti has a typical Bantu noun classNoun class
In linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional...
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.