Western Plains Dogon


The Dogon dialects of the western plains below the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali are mutually intelligible. They are sometimes called the Kan Dogon because they use the word kan for varieties of speech. The dialects are:
  • Tomo kã
  • Teŋu kã
  • Togo kã
The latter two are traditionally subsumed under the name Tene kã, but Hochstetler separates them because the three varieties are about equidistant.
There are a quarter million speakers of these dialects, about evenly split between Tomo Kan and Tene Kan, making this the most populous of the Dogon languages. There are a few Tomo-speaking villages just across the border in Burkina Faso.

Phonology

Consonants

  • Consonant germination also occurs frequently among sounds.
  • can only occur among loanwords.
  • is interchangeable with.
  • Consonant sound only rarely occurs and in almost absent.
  • Consonant sounds are absent, except in loanwords.
  • can be realized as a fricative between vowel sounds.
  • Sounds only occur from loanwords, and are interchangeable.
  • Glottal sound can only occur as an element in some reduplicated forms of vowel-initial words, or between vowels within a word.

    Vowels

  • In Tomo Kan, an extra central vowel sound is also attested possibly as a result of preceding a nasalised segment or a. It may also regularly be pronounced as as well.