Tangale language

Tangale
Native to	Nigeria
Native speakers	200,000 (2006 census)
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Chadic West Chadic Bole–Angas Bole–Tangale (A.2) Tangale (South) Tangale
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tan
Glottolog	nucl1696
Ethnic territories of the Tangale-speaking people in Nigeria in green

Tangale (Tangle) is a West Chadic language spoken in Nigeria.

Phonology

There are nine Tangale vowels. Each occurs in a contrastive long and short form.

Tangale vowels

	Front		Back
	close	open		close
High	i	ɪ	ʊ	u
Mid	e	ɛ	ɔ	o
Low		a

There are up to 34 consonant phonemes in the language, including implosive stops, prenasalized stops, and labialized consonants. The language uses two levels of contrastive tone.

A prominent feature of Tangale is vowel harmony. Suffixes control whether all the vowels in a word are open or close.

Nouns

Nouns have a masculine or feminine gender, but this is not marked on the noun. The different in gender is only seen in the agreement system (covert gender). Nouns are not marked for plural, except for the word "child" which has an irregular plural form. A suffix -i marks definite nouns. Nouns can also take a possessive suffix, which indexes the possessor of the noun (possessor agreement).

Verbs

Verbs are bound roots of the following segmental shapes: CVC-, CVːC-, CV(m)CC-, and CVCː-. Verbs root can be marked for verbal plurality in nine different ways including reduplication, suffixation, infixation and devoicing. A subclass of about 30 verbs have shorter roots with only one consonant.

Verbs stems are marked with one of nine tense-aspect-mood (TAM) suffixes: Imperative-Subjunctive, Aorist-Intentional, Aorist-Subjunctive, Progressive I, Future, Perfect I, Perfect II (Dependent or Repetitive Perfect), Progressive II, or Habitual.

In addition, verbs in some TAM can take a Altrilocal-Ventive or Distance suffix.

Ideophones

Ideophones are a "emotional-expressive" word class. Morphologically, ideophones are typically disyllabic and have a word-final coda. They also have an alternate form derived by total reduplication. Ideophones only carry low tone.

Pronouns

The pronominal systems distinguishes 8 categories: three persons, singular & plural, and a gender distinction in second and third person singular forms. There are three types of independent (or absolute) pronouns. Subject pronouns also have three forms which are distinguished by their use in different TAMs. Object and indirect object pronominals are suffixed to the verb. The possessive suffix (or possessor agreement suffix) attaches to nouns and indexes the possessor following the same categories as other pronominals. A reflexive pronoun is formed by the word kɪɪ with a possessive suffix.

Negation

Nominal and verbal predicates are negated by what is described as a suffix -m.