Samwé (samoe), also known as Wara (ouara, ouala), 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 ( and ) do not co-occur in disyllabic imperative verb stems, but this rule is not followed in other verb forms. is neutral in both types.
Notes
References