Divergence across Bade Varieties ‒ A Case of Naboopposition?

Abstract

In a dialect survey of Bade (Chadic), Schuh (1981) lists several morphosyntactic, phonological, and lexical innovations differentiating Bade varieties. While certain innovations may be attributed to the influence of Kanuri, e.g., a sound change r > r̃ in Western Bade, other features are difficult to accommodate in terms of convergence with neighboring languages. Probably the most striking innovation concerns so called nunation in Western Bade, i.e., common nouns in their indefinite citation form take a suffix -n, a feature which is not only absent in all other varieties of the Bade-Ngizim group, but also in other non-related languages of the region. Divergence across varieties of the Bade language cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of language-internal processes (e.g., analogy), or contact, or extra-linguistic factors like prestige and attitudes. This paper explores the significance of Larsen’s (1917) hardly noticed concept of naboopposition (neighbor-opposition) in filling this gap.

Keywords

• bade
• kanuri
• wider lake chad region hyperdialectalism
• neighbor-opposition