Samwe language


Samwé, also known as Wara, is a Gur language of Burkina Faso. Dialects are Negueni-Klani, Ouatourou-Niasogoni, and Soulani. Niasogoni speakers have difficulty with Negueni, but not vice versa.

Phonology

Consonants

  • can be lenited to between vowels.
  • has a free variant after nasals, vowels, and other consonants.
  • is voiced after nasals and between vowels.
  • is often or between vowels. It tends to stay voiceless at morpheme boundaries.
  • becomes voiced between vowels or after nasals. is not allowed before.
  • , which is not phonemic, occurs intervocalically between the same vowel.
  • is always voiceless.
  • is voiced intervocalically and after nasals, before and, and elsewhere. can be lenited to, which Ouattara represents as. As with stops, voicing and lenition are in free variation.
  • can also be realized as or. is also in free variation with in some words. Sometimes, becomes or.
  • and are contrastive, but roughly 20 words have in free variation.

    Vowels

Samwe has 20 vowels: 7 short oral vowels, 7 long oral vowels, 3 short nasal vowels, and 3 long nasal vowels.
Samwe has two types of vowel harmony: ATR harmony and front-back harmony. do not occur in stems with. Front and back vowels do not co-occur in disyllabic imperative verb stems, but this rule is not followed in other verb forms. is neutral in both types.