Dahalo is an endangered Cushitic language spoken by around 500600 Dahalo people on the coast of Kenya, near the mouth of the Tana River. Dahalo is unusual among the world's languages in using all four airstream mechanisms found in human language: clicks, implosives, ejectives, and pulmonic consonants.
While the language is known primarily as “Dahalo” to linguists, the term itself is an exonym supposedly used by Aweer speakers that itself essentially means “stupid” or “worthless.” The speakers themselves refer to the language as numma guhooni.
Overview
The Dahalo, former elephant hunters, are dispersed among Swahili and other Bantu peoples, with no villages of their own, and are bilingual in those languages. Children no longer learn the language, which would make it moribund, and it may be extinct.
Dahalo has a highly diverse sound system using all four airstream mechanisms found in human language: clicks, ejectives, and implosives, as well as the universal pulmonic sounds.
In addition, Dahalo makes a number of uncommon distinctions. It contrasts laminal and apical stops, as in languages of Australia and California; epiglottal and glottal stops and fricatives, as in the Mideast, the Caucasus, and the American Pacific Northwest; and is perhaps the only language in the world to contrast alveolar lateral and palatal lateral fricatives and affricates.
It is suspected that the Dahalo may have once spoken a Sandawe- or Hadza-like language, and that they retained clicks in some words when they shifted to Cushitic, because many of the words with clicks are basic vocabulary. If so, the clicks represent a substratum.
Dahalo is also called Sanye, a name shared with neighboring Waata, also spoken by former hunter-gatherers. The Waata may once have spoken a language more like Dahalo before shifting to Oromo.
The classification of Dahalo is obscure. Traditionally included in South Cushitic, Tosco (1991) argues instead that it is East Cushitic, and Kießling (2001) agrees that it has too many Eastern features to be South Cushitic.
Phonology
Consonants
Dahalo has, by all accounts, a large consonant inventory. 62 consonants are reported by Maddieson et al. (1993), whereas Tosco (1991) recognizes 50. The inventory according to the former is presented below:
1 The dental clicks are most commonly written , but that can be misread as . Thus, for legibility, the alternative letter is used here; this is found in a few sources such as Elderkin. They may freely vary as lateral clicks.
Tosco's account differs in not including the labialized clicks, the palatal laterals, and the voiceless prenasalized consonants (on which see below), analyzing as , and adding , and (which Maddieson et al. believe to be an allophone of ).
This typologically extraordinary inventory appears to result from extended contact influence from substratal and superstratal languages, due to long-running bilinguality. Only 27 consonants (shown in bold) are found in the final position of verbal stems, which Tosco suggests represents the inherited Cushitic component of the consonant inventory.
Several phonemes can be shown to be recent intrusions into the language through loanwords: is only found in recent loans from Bantu and can be nativized as . is only found in loanwords from Swahili. is only found in loanwords from Swahili and Somali. Additionally, several consonants are marginal in their occurrence. Five are only attested in a single root:
, in 'place where maize is seasoned'
, in 'centipede'
, in 'to pinch'. , in 'mother'. Less than five examples each are known of .
The prenasalized voiceless stops have been analyzed as syllabic nasals plus stops by some researchers. However, one would expect this additional syllable to give Dahalo words additional tonic possibilities, as Dahalo pitch accent is syllable-dependent (see below), and Maddieson et al. report that this does not seem to be the case. Tosco (1991) analyzes these as consonant clusters, on the grounds that Dahalo allows long vowels in open syllables only, and that while words such as /tʃaːⁿda/ 'finger' can be found, only short vowels occur preceding the alleged voiceless prenasalized consonants. He additionally reports fricative and glottalized clusters: , , and .
Allophony
The laminal coronals are denti-alveolar, whereas the apicals are alveolar tending toward post-alveolar.