Chakali is a Gur language spoken by approximately 3,500 people in seven communities in the Wa East District, Upper West Region of Ghana. The term Chakali itself can be used to describe either a land, an ethnic group or a language. The language is used in just seven villages: Tiisa, Sogla, Tuosa, Motigu, Ducie, Katua and Gurumbele, who all use the collective demonym which translates to " m̀ ̩ ŋmá kàà (lit.) ‘I say that’". The land Chakali is used to refer to the previous seven villages, as well as six more: Bulenga, Chagu, Bisikan, Kandia, Dupari and Gilan. The demonym for these people is 'ŋmɪńɪŋ́ dʒɔ̀ŋ' lit. "What is it?"‘

Another popular categorization is that of 'black' and 'white' Chakali. Black Chakali is a notion which connotes with secretive individuals and possessors of powerful medicine; it is roughly equivalent to what 'm̀ ̩ ŋmá kàà' represents. 'White Chakali' refers to talkative people who cannot hold back, and, again comprises the people living in the six villages mentioned earlier of being Chakali but not speaking the language.

While all the dialectal variants of the language are mutually intelligible, a speaker can be identified based on the features that are used.

Despite having 3,500 hundred speakers, and being spoken by all community members in Gurumbele and Ducie, as well as by the majority of the community in Motigu and Katua, the language is slowly on its way to extinction, due to the Islamization of youth and to encroachment by other languages of the area, specifically "Waali". However, while it is clear this is happening, the language is, in most places, not yet in serious risk of dying out.

The language has a system of linguistic taboos, in which certain words are avoided on certain occasions due to misfortune associated with those words. The beliefs, and thus the circumstances, can be widespread or marginal, and, in some cases, the word may only be tabooed at certain times of the day. An example of this is teh fact that no sweeping is allowed when someone eats, and uttering the word 'tʃãã', lit. "broom", is also forbidden. Certain animal names are excluded as they may either be tabooed by someone present, due to their animal totem and/or their meet is forbidden. Furthermore, they may be tabooed to avoid attracting the animal's attention, with the belief that saying its name will draw attention. Some examples of tabooed words are below:

Avoided Word	Substitute Word	Literal Meaning	Gloss
bɔ̀là	sé-zèŋ́	animal-big	elephant
bɔ̀là	néŋ-tɪɪ̄n̄ā	arm	hand-owner
dʒɛ̀tɪ̀	ɲú-zéŋ-tɪɪ̄n̄ā	head-big-owner	lion
bʊ́ɔ̀mánɪɪ́́	ɲú-wíé-tɪɪ̄n̄ā	head-small-owner	leopard
tébíŋ̀	bárà-tʃɔ́gɔ́ʊ́	place-spoil.pfv.foc	night
búmmò	dóŋ	dirt	black

Linguistics

As a Gursi language, Chakali is closely related to languages such as Deg, Vagla, Tampulma, Kyitu/Siti, Phuie, Winyé and the various varities of Sisaala, including Pasaale. All of these are minority languages spoken in northwest Ghana, southwest Burkina Faso and northeast Ivory Coast. Tampulma, Vagla, Deg and Pasaale are the closest to Chakali in terms of mutual intelligibility.

All of these languages are also part of the much bigger Niger-Congo family, which includes languages such as Yoruba, Igbo, Fula and Shona. Perhaps the most well-known Niger-Congo language is all from the Bantu subgrouping (which Shona also belongs to): Swahili, Xhosa and Zulu.

Please bear in mind that, while the languages themselves are considered related, the internal structure of the Niger-Congo languages is not well defined, and more research needs to be done.

Classification

Chakali's full classification is as follows:

Niger-Congo > Atlantic-Congo > Savannas > Gur > Southern Gur > Grũsi > Western > Chakali

Phonology and Phonotactics

Chakali has nine phonemic oral vowels, which can be realized as 11 different surface vowels. The vowel phonemes are /i u ɪ ʊ e o ɛ ɔ a/ with [ə] and [ɑ] being the surface forms that aren't phonemic. [ɑ] occurs is often found following the –ATR vowels (i.e. ɪ, ɛ, ɔ, ʊ). [ə] occurs as an epenthetic vowel or as a reduction of a full vowel.

All vowels, except for [ə], do have a nasalized counterpart. While most of these are found near nasal features, and often occur under their influence, there are attested nasal vowels where adjacent nasal features are absent, giving rise to three (near-)minimal pairs that show oral and nasal vowels do contrast. Likewise, vowel length can be contrastive, thus giving over around 27 phonemic vowel realizations in the language.

There are a total of 25 phonemic consonants in Chakali. These are spread across eight places of articulation -- bilabial, labial-dental, alveolar, postalveolar, palatal, velar, glottal and labial-velar -- and often contrast for voicing. Likewise, two further consonants can be realized on different underlying phonemes.

There are 10 attested syllable types in the language: CV, CVV, CVC, CVVC, V, N, CVVV, CCVC, CCVV, CCV; C represents a consonant, V is a vowel and N is a syllabic nasal. Of these ten attested syllable types, only four -- the first four -- appear word medially; these four are by far the most attested as well.

All velars, as well as the alveolar nasal, lateral and trill, plus rare instances of [m] are permitted in the coda of a syllable. Syllables can either be light, containing one mora; heavy, with two moras; or superheavy, with three moras. Furthermore, there is also a weak syllable, which has resulted from reduction or augmentation of a syllable through the process of (a) vowel epenthesis, (b) vowel weakening or (c) intervocalic lenition.

A sequence of consonants is not phonologically distinctive and many tokens are the results of place assimilation. It is treated as a repetition of adjacent and identical segments within a word, closing one and opening the next syllable. Only the set of consonants {n, l, m, ŋ} is attested.

There are a number of sandhi affects working on the language, both word-internally and across word boundaries. Some of the internal processes include: nasal place assimilation, nasalization of verbal suffixes, vowel epenthesis and vowel reduction. External sandhi include nasal place assimilation, focus particle's place assimilation and vowel harmony.

Chakali is also a tonal language, using both lexical and grammatical tone. This means that tone works both on the lexical level, and distinguishes words pronounced exactly the same except for the tone, as well as on the phrasal level, where tone is used to distinguish grammatical sentences, such as "I am eating" from "I ate". There are two tones, High and Low, which are assigned to the mora. This means that light syllables get one tone, while heavy syllables can either have a falling or rising tone.

Falling intonation is a phrasal property by which a sequence of tones is cu- mulatively lowered; underlyingly though, the tones are either high or low. This gradual pitch fall may result in a low tone at the beginning of a phrase being as high as a high tone at the end of the phrase.

Lastly, Chakali has a process of vowel harmony. This harmony is expressed on suffixes based on the stem root, and works based on advanced tongue root (ATR) and roundess of the vowel.

Morphology and Syntax

Definiteness is encoded on Chakali nouns via the use of articles. There are two articles in Chakali à (ART1) and tɪ̀ŋ (ART2). Both of the articles are translated roughly as English 'the'. ART1 is treated as a functional word which makes the noun phrase specific, but not necessarily definite; the speaker should have a particular referent in mind whereas the addressee may or may not share this knowledge. ART2 is better phrased as 'as referred previously' or 'this (one)', and thus it appears when the speaker knows that the addressee will be able to identify the referent of the noun phrase; in essence, the referent is familiar.

Depending on how noun classes are defined, there are nine in Chakali. However, out of these nine, only five are common. The table below shows how the singular and plural of all nine noun classes are formed, as well as what percentage of nouns are in each class.

Feature	Class 1	Class 2	Class 3	Class 4	Class 5	Class 6	Class 7	Class 8	Class 9
Singular	-V	Ø	Ø	V	Ø	Ø	Ø	Ø	-N
Plural	-sV	-sV	-V	-V	-nV	Ø	-tV	-mV	-sV
Percentage	8%	32%	23%	17%	8%	7%	1.8%	0.9%	0.8%

While the classes may have originally had semantic criteria used when assigning nouns to them, those criteria are no longer productive. Instead, it seems that new nouns are assigned to a noun class based on the phonological stem of the root.

There are several ways to derive a nominal stem. Verbal processes, which denote non-stative events, are made with either reduplication or adding a suffix -/r/. This is used to add either an 'agent of X' or 'action of X', so you can take gʊ̀ɔ̀, 'dance', add /-r/ to get gʊ̀ɔ̀r, 'dancer'. Likewise, búól, 'sing' can be reduplicated to give bùòlbúóló, 'singer'.

The specification of the maturity and sex of an animate entity is accomplished in the following way: male, female, young, and adult are organized in morphemes encoding one or two distinctions. These morphemes are suffixed to the rightmost stem. To distinguish between male and female, the morphemes (sg/pl) wal/wala ‘male’ and nɪɪ/nɪɪta ‘female’. The language employs two strategies to express the distinction between the adult animal and its young, which is called here ‘maturity’. The first is to simply add the morpheme -bi ‘child’ to the head, e.g. bɔla-bie/bɔla-bise ‘young elephant(s)’. In the second strategy both the sex and maturity distinctions are con-veyed by the morpheme, seen in the table below:

Age	Male	Female
Young	-w(a/e)lee	-lor
Adult	-wal	-nɪɪ

Chakali has seven personal pronouns, corresponding to a singular and plural person split between three persons. In the third person plural, there is a split based on animacy between humans and non-humans. All seven of these pronouns have three forms: a weak, strong and emphatic form. Strong forms cannot occur with a focus particle, while weak forms cannot be fronted and don't appear at the beginning of a sentence. An emphatic pronoun can be correferential with a weak pronoun, but a strong and weak one cannot. The proper use of strong and weak pronouns is conditioned by the emphasis placed on the participant(s) of the event or the event itself, and by the polarity of the clause in which they appear. In this way, strong pronouns cannot co-occur in a sentence that another constituent is in focus in. All the personal pronomial forms, as well as the possessive forms, can be seen in the table below:

Person	Weak	Strong	Emphatic	Possessive
First Singular	ṇ	mɪ́ŋ	ńwà	ṇ(ː)
Second Singular	ɪ	hɪ́ŋ	ɪ́ɪ́ẃà	ɪ(ː)
Third Singular	ʊ	wáá	ʊ́ʊ́wà	ʊ(ː)
First Plural	ja	jáwáá	jáwà	ja
Second Plural	ma	máwáá	máwà	ma
Third Plural Non-human	a	áwáá	áwà	a(ː)
Third Plural Human	ba	báwáá	báwà	ba

Chakali has only a few verb forms, and is in fact limited to two inflectional suffixes and one assertive suffix: (i) signals negation int he negative imperative clause (ii) another attaches to some verb stems int he perfective intransitive only and (iii) the other signals assertion and puts the verbal constituent in focus.

As its name suggests, a perfective intransitive construction lacks a grammatical object and implies an event’s completion or its reaching point. In the case of verbal state, the perfective implies that the given state has been reached, or that the entity in subject position satsfies the property encoded in the verbal state lexeme. The imperfective conveys the unfolding of an event, and it is often used to describe an event taking place at the moment of speech. In addition, the behavior of the egressive marker ka suggest that the imperfective may be interpreted as a progressive event.

To contrast the difference between a transitive perfective and a transitive imperfective, a combination of tone and pronoun length is used. Furthermore, tone is also used to signify polar questions.

In Chakali, preverb particles encode various event-related meanings. These preverbs are used to encode tense, aspect and mood in the verb, and often have several meanings based upon tone; for instance, ka(a) can be used as a present progressive or as a future marker, depending on if it has a high or rising tone, respectfully.

Chakali encodes in preverbs a type of time categorization known as three-interval tense. It is possible to express that an event occurred specifically yesterday, as opposed to earlier today and the day before yesterday, i.e. hesternal tense, or specifically tomorrow, as opposed to later today and the day after tomorrow, i.e. crastinal tense (glossed cras). The hesternal tense particle dɪ/de (glossed hest) refers to the day preceding the speech time. Lengthening the hesternal past particle allows one to express the tense associated with the particle, in addition to indicating progressive.

Preverbs can also be used to express concepts such as 'early'/'quickly' on a verb (te), to express order of events (zɪ́), modal meanings or an abrupt/swift manner (baaŋ), interative iteration and the single repetition of an event (bɪ), change in direct (bra), habitual aspect, with a possible (im)perfective aspect distinguished by length and tone (ja(a)), used to express 'yet' or 'still' (ha/haalɪ), and to make reference to two opposite paths (tu and zɪn).

A pronomial object can be incorporated and expressed on the verb as a clitic, followed by the focus particle. Some examples of this can be seen on the table below:

tɪɛ	‘give’
wʊ̀ sá tɪɛ́ ́-ń̩ nā	'Wusa gave me'
wʊ̀ sá tɪɛ́ ́-ɪ́ rā	Wusa gave you
wʊ̀ sá tɪɛ́ ́-ʊ́ rā	Wusa gave her
wʊ̀ sá tɪɛ́ ́-já rā	Wusa gave us
wʊ̀ sá tɪɛ́ ́-má rā	Wusa gave you
wʊ̀ sá tɪɛ́ ́-á rā	Wusa gave them
wʊ̀ sá tɪɛ́ ́-bá rā	Wusa gave them

Miscellany

Chakali uses a vigesimal (Base 20) number system. Therefore, 82 is expressed (much like in French) as 4 x 20 + 2
Chakali speakers use the word for 'bag' to refer to 200 Ghanian cedis when refering to currency, and often still refer to the old Ghanaian cedis, redenominated in 2007, when discussing currency.
Greetings are compulsory to any communicative exchange. When meeting elders, one should squat or bend forward hands-on-knees while greeting. Praise names can be used in greetings, and often vary based on time of day. The more extensive the greeting, the more respect one shows to the addressee. Some of these, with their responses, are seen in the table below.

Time	Speaker A	Followed by either Speaker A or B
Morning	ánsùmōō	ɪ̀ sìwȍȍ ‘You stood?’; ɪ̄ dɪ̀ tʃʊ́àwʊ̏ʊ̏ ‘And your lying?’; ɪ̀ bàtʃʊ̀ àlɪɪ́ ̀ wīrȍȍ ‘You sleeping place was good?’
Afternoon	átnèrēē	ɪ́ wɪśɪ́ tèlȅȅ‘ Has the sun reached you?; ɪ́ dɪá́ ‘And your house?’; ɪ̄ bìsé mūŋ ‘And all your children?’
Evening	ɪ́ dʊ̀ ànāā	ɪ́ dʊ̄ɔ̄n tèlȅȅ ‘Your evening has reached’; ɪ́ kúó ‘And your farm?’

A single palatal click, produced with the mouth closed, is often used to mean 'yes', 'I understand' or 'I agree'. Two clicks are used to denote the opposite.

Samples

Spoken sample:

Various recordings from Christian missionaries

Written sample:

N/A

Sources

A dictionary and grammatical outline of Chakali, Brindle 2017. Found online here

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ansa - This week's language of the week: Chakali!

Linguistics

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