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Laal
yəw láàl
Native to	Chad
Region	Gori, Damtar, Mailao villages inMoyen-Chari prefecture
Native speakers	(750 cited 2000)[1]
Language family	Language isolate
Dialects	Gori Laabe
Language codes
ISO 639-3	gdm
Glottolog	laal1242
ELP	Laal
Location withinChad where the Laal language is spoken
This article containsIPA phonetic symbols. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofUnicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA.

Laal is an endangeredlanguage isolate spoken by 750 people (as of 2025^[update]) in two villages in theMoyen-Chari prefecture ofChad on opposite banks of theChari River, calledGori (lá), and Damtar (ɓual). It represents an isolated survival of an earlier language group ofCentral Africa. It is unwritten except intranscription by linguists. According to formerSummer Institute of Linguistics-Chad member David Faris, it is in danger of extinction, with most people under 25 shifting to the locally more widespreadBagirmi.

This language first came to the attention of academic linguists in 1977 throughPascal Boyeldieu's fieldwork^[2][3] in 1975 and 1978. His fieldwork was based, for the most part, on a single speaker, Djouam Kadi of Damtar.

The language's speakers are mainlyriverfishermen andfarmers, who also sellsalt extracted from the ashes ofdoum palms andVossia cuspidata. Like their neighbours, theNiellim, they were formerly cattle herders but lost their herds around the turn of the 19th century. They are mainlyMuslims, but until the latter half of the 20th century, they followed the traditionalYondo religion of theNiellim. The area is fairly undeveloped; while there areQur'anic schools inGori and Damtar, the nearest government school is 7 km away, and there is no medical dispensary in the region (as of 1995^[update]).

The village of Damtar formerly had a distinct dialect, called Laabe (la:bé), with two or three speakers remaining in 1977; it was replaced by the dialect of Gori after two Gori families fled there at the end of the 19th century to escape awar. No other dialects of Laal are known.

Under Chadian law, Laal, like all languages of Chad other thanFrench andArabic, is regarded as anational language. Although the 1996 Constitution stipulates that "the law shall fix the conditions of promotion and development of national languages", national languages are not used for education, for official purposes, or usually for written media, but some of the larger ones (but not Laal) are used on the radio.

Laal remainsunclassified, although extensiveAdamawa (specificallyBua) and to a lesser extentChadic influence is found. It is sometimes grouped with one of those twolanguage families, and sometimes seen as alanguage isolate. Boyeldieu (1982) summarizes his view as "Its classification remains problematic; while it shows certain lexical, and no doubt morphological, traits with the Bua languages (Adamawa-13,Niger–Congo family ofJoseph H. Greenberg), it differs from them radically in many ways of which some,a priori, make one think of geographically nearby Chadic languages."Roger Blench (2003), similarly, considers that "its vocabulary and morphology seem to be partly drawn from Chadic (i.e.Afro-Asiatic), partly fromAdamawa (i.e. Niger–Congo) and partly from an unknown source, perhaps its original phylum, a now-vanished grouping fromCentral Africa." It is the last possibility which attracts particular interest; if this proves true, Laal may be the only remaining window on the linguistic state of Central Africa before the expansion of the mainAfrican language families—Afro-Asiatic,Nilo-Saharan, and Niger–Congo—into it.

Their immediate neighbors speakBua,Niellim, andNdam. Laal contains a number ofloanwords from Baguirmi, which for several centuries was the lingua franca of the region under theBaguirmi Empire, and perhaps a dozen Chadic roots, which are not similar to the Chadic languages that currently neighbor Laal. In addition, almost all Laal speak Niellim as a second language, and 20%–30% of their vocabulary is cognate with Niellim, especially agricultural vocabulary (Boyeldieu 1977, Lionnet 2010). Like theBaguirmi, the Laal areMuslims; partly because of this, someArabic loanwords are also found. However some 60% of the vocabulary, including most core vocabulary, cannot be identified with any known language family (Lionnet 2010). Indeed, some of the words cognate with Niellim, including some basic vocabulary, is not cognate with closely related Bua, suggesting that these are not Adamawa roots but loans in Niellim from the Laal substrate (Lionnet 2010). Pozdniakov (2010) believes Laal is a distinct branch of Niger–Congo with part of its pronominal system borrowed from a Chadic language like Kera.

Laal is grouped with theChadic languages in an automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013), suggesting early contact with Chadic.^[4]

The sounds of Laal are transcribed here usingInternational Phonetic Alphabet symbols.

Implosives and prenasalised stops as well as /h/ are found only word-initially. Voiceless stops as well as /s/ cannot occur at the end of a syllable./ŋ/ occurs only intervocalically and word-finally./s/ appears exclusively inloanwords and certain numbers. Prenasalized stops as well as the implosive/ʄ/ are extremely rare.

The vowel system for non-initial syllables is/i/,/y/,/ɨ/,/u/,/e/,/ə/,/o/,/a/ and thediphthong/ua/, with no length distinction./y/ is heard as a glide[ɥ] in the vowel sequences/yo,ya/ as[ɥo,ɥa]. For initial syllables, however, it is much more complicated, allowing length distinctions and distinguishing the following additional diphthongs:/ia/,/yo/,/ya/ (but the latter two appear only as morphologically conditioned forms of/e/ and/ia/ and so are perhaps better seen as allophonic).

In addition,/y/ may occur very occasionally; Boyeldieu quotes the example ofmỳlùg "red (pl.)".

There are three level tones: high (á), middle (a), low (à). Combinations may occur on a single vowel, resulting in phonetic rising and falling tone, and which are phonemically sequences of level tones. Such cases are transcribed here by repeating the vowel (e.g. àá); long vowels are indicated only by a colon (e.g. a:).

Suffixes may force any of four kinds ofablaut on the vowels of preceding words: raising (takes/ia/,/a/,/ua/ to[ɛ],[ə],[ɔ]), lowering (takes/e/,/ə/,/o/ to[ia],[a],[ua]), low rounding (takes/i/ and/ɨ/ to[u];/e/ and/ia/ to[ɥo];/ə/,/a/, and/ua/ to[o]), and high rounding (takes/i/ and/ɨ/ to[u];/e/ and/ia/ to[ɥa];/ə/,/a/, and/o/ to[ua]). They are transcribed in the suffix section as ↑, ↓, ↗, ↘ respectively. In some verbs, a/ə is "raised" to[e] rather than, as expected, to[ə].

In suffixes, ə and o undergovowel harmony: they becomeɨ and u respectively if the preceding vowel is one of {i,ɨ, u}. Likewise, r undergoes consonant harmony, becoming l after words containing l. Suffixes with a neutral tone copy the final tone of the word to which they are suffixed.[1]^{[dead link]}

The typicalword order can be summarised assubject–(verbalparticle)–verb–object–adverb;preposition–noun;possessed–possessor;noun–adjective. Nouns can be fronted whentopicalized. See thesample sentences below for examples and theconjunctions for clause syntax.

Nouns have plural and singular forms (the latter are perhaps better viewed assingulative in some cases), with plural formation hard to predict:kò:g "bone" >kuagmi "bones",tuà:r "chicken" >tò:rò "chickens",ɲaw "hunger" >ɲə̀wə́r "hungers". Nouns do not have arbitrary gender, but three natural genders (male, female, non-human) are distinguished by pronouns.

The possessive is expressed in two ways:

• "inalienable", or direct, possession: by following the possessed with the possessor (and modifying the tone or ending of the possessed in some cases):piá:r no "person's leg" ("leg person");
• alienable possession: by putting a connecting word, conjugated according to number and gender, between the possessed and the possessor:

The connecting word is sometimes abbreviated to a simple high tone.

However, if the possessor is a pronoun, it is suffixed with extensive vowelablaut (in the first case) or prepositional forms with "at" and optionally the connector as well, are used (in the second case):na:ra ɟá ɗe: "my man" ("man CONN. at-me"),mùlù "her eye" ("eye-her", frommɨla "eye"). Some nouns (páw- "friend") occur only with bound pronouns and have no independent form. That is calledobligatory possession and is found in many other language, usually for words referring to personal relationships. Seepronouns for the relevant suffixes.

A noun indicating someone who does, is, or has something can be formed with the prefixmàr, meaning roughly "he/she/it who/of":màr jùgòr "landowner",màr ce "farmer" (ce = cultivate),màr pál "fisherman" (pál = to fish),màr pàlà ta: "a fisher of fish".

Laal does show traces of an old Adamawa-type noun-class system, but apart from loans, the forms do not appear to be cognate with the Adamawa system (Lionnet 2010).

Some singular and plural nouns in Laal (Blench (2017):^[5]

In the following tables, note the distinction betweeninclusive and exclusive we, found in many other languages but notEnglish, and the gender differentiation of "I" in certain forms. The inanimate plural has been dropped by most popular younger speakers in favour of the animate plural, but both are given below. The object paradigm for verbs is quite complex; only two of its several sets ofallomorphs are given in the table below. "He" and "she" are used only for human referents; other nouns take the neuter pronoun. That is quite distinct from the languages with which Laal shares vocabulary, but Laal has traces of an old Adamawa-type noun-class system (Lionnet 2010). The first- and second-person plural forms are quite similar to Chadic languages (specifically,Kera) which are currently quite distant from the Laal-speaking region, but they have no similarities to Adamawa.

(The arrows indicatevowel harmony triggered in by the suffix by the root.)

jé "what?",ɟè "who?",ɗé "where?",sɨ̀g "how much?".

Prepositions precede their objects:gɨ̀ pə:l "in(to) the village",kɨ́ jà:ná "to his body" (="to near him").

The verb does not vary according to the person or gender of the subject, but some verbs (about a quarter of the verbs attested) vary according to its number:no kaw "the person eats",mùáŋ kɨw "the people eat". The plural form of the verb is hard to predict, but is often formed by ablaut (typically raising the vowel height) with or without a suffix-i(ɲ) or-ɨɲ and tonal change. The verb, however, changes according to thedirect object. It takes personal suffixes to indicate a pronominaldirect object, and it commonly changes when a non-pronominal direct object is added to atransitive form with final low tone (formed similarly to the "centripetal", for which see below):ʔà ná ká "he will do";ʔà ná kàrà mɨ́ná "he will do something";ʔà kú na:ra "he sees the man";ʔà kúù:rùúŋ "he sees you (pl.)".

The verb has three basic forms: simple, "centripetal", and "participative" tocalque Boyeldieu's terminology. The simple form is used in the simplepresent tense or theimperative:ʔà duàg jə́w gə̀m "he goes down the riverbank" (lit. "he descend mouth riverbank"). The "centripetal" indicates action "hither", either spatially, motion towards the speaker, or temporally, action up to the present moment; it is formed mainly by suffixing a vowel (often, but not always, identical to the last vowel in the word):ʔà duàgà jə́w gə̀m "he comes down the riverbank (towards me)". The "participative", generally formed like the centripetal but with final high tone, generally indicates an omitted object or instrument:

Immediately before the verb, a particle may be placed to indicate forms other than a simple present tense; such particles includená (pl.ní) marking future tense,taá:/teé: (pl.tií:) marking continuous action,wáa: (pl.wíi:) marking motion,náa: (pl.níi:) being apparently a combination ofná andwáa:,mà (pl.mì) meaning "must",mɨ́ marking reported speech (apparently anevidential),mɨ́nà (pl.mínì) expressing intention,kò marking habitual action,ɓə́l orga (pl.gi) marking incomplete action, andwó (always accompanied byʔàle after the verb) meaning "maybe".

Mediopassives (seepassive voice,middle voice) can be formed fromtransitive verbs by adding a suffix-↑ɨ́ɲ:no siár sà:b "someone ripped the cloth" >sà:b sérɨ́ɲ "the cloth ripped". For the inverse, forming transitive verbs fromintransitives, changes in tone or to the plural sometimes occur.

Verbal nouns can sometimes be formed, mainly from intransitives, by the addition of a suffix -(vowel)l, sometimes withablaut and tone change:wal "fall" >wàlál "a fall",sùbá "lie" >sɨ́blál (pl.súbɨ̀r) "a lie". Thel becomesn near a nasal andr nearr:man "taste good",manan "a good taste".

Adjectives do not seem to constitute an independent category in Laal; to all intents and purposes, they behave just like verbs:gò: ʔì:r "the goat is black". Attributively, they are typically linked as arelative clause:

^[2]

Adverbs generally come at the end of the clause. Here are some important adverbs:

Adverbs of location:

• "here":ɗágàl, núŋú
• "there":ɗaŋ
• "over there, yonder":ɗàŋá

Temporal adverbs:

• "day before yesterday":tá:r
• "yesterday":ʔiè:n
• "today":cicam,tari-màá
• "recently":bèrè
• "soon":sugo
• "tomorrow":jìlí-kà:rì
• "day after tomorrow":miàlgà

Here are the most important modals:

• Before the verb:mɨ́ "(say) that",gàná "then"
• After the verb:wó "not",(ʔà)le "maybe",ɓə́l "again",ʔá orgà "already",àinterrogative,wáexclamatory,ta "now",cám "again, anew".

Conjunctions can be divided into five types:

• only (main clause -conjunction -subordinate clause}:mɨ́ "(say) that",ɓə "because"
• either {main clause - conjunction - subordinate clause} or {conjunction - subordinate clause - main clause}:ɟò "if",dànngà (possibly from Baguirmian) "when"
• circumposed: either {conjunction - main clause - conjunction - subordinate clause} or {conjunction - subordinate clause - conjunction - main clause}:ɟò... gàná "if"
• coordinate clause - conjunction - coordinate clause:ní "then afterwards",ku "then",kó "nonetheless",á orná "and",ɓe: "or",ʔàmá (from Arabic or Baguirmian) "but".
• circumposed: conjunction - coordinate clause - conjunction - coordinate clause:ku... ku "then",jàn... jàn "both... and".

• Laal Swadesh list (Wiktionary)

• Roger Blench.Archaeology, Language, and the African Past. Altamira Press forthcoming.
• Pascal Boyeldieu. 1977. "Eléments pour une phonologie du laal de Gori (Moyen-Chari),Etudes phonologiques tchadiennes, Paris, SELAF (Bibliothèque, 63–64), p. 186–198.
• Pascal Boyeldieu. 1982.Deux études laal (Moyen-Chari, Tchad), inVerbindung mit SELAF, Paris. Berlin: Reimer. Marburger Studien zur Afrika- und Asienkunde: Ser. A, Afrika; Bd. 29.ISBN 3-496-00557-2.
• Pascal Boyeldieu. 1982. "Quelques questions portant sur la classification du laal (Tchad)". in JUNGRAITHMAYR, H.,The Chad languages in the Hamitosemitic-Nigritic Border Area (Papers of the Marburg Symposium, 1979). Berlin : Reimer, p. 80–93. Coll. Marburger Studien zur Afrika- und Asienkunde, Serie A : Afrika.
• Pascal Boyeldieu. 1987. "Détermination directe/indirecte en laal". in BOYELDIEU, P.,La maison du chef et la tête du cabri : des degrés de la détermination nominale dans les langues d'Afrique centrale. Paris : Geuthner, p. 77–87.ISBN 2-7053-0339-1
• David Faris, 19 September 1994. "In-House Summary: Laal/Gori language".SIL/Chad Survey Team. (Unpublished.)
• Florian Lionnet & Konstantin Pozdniakov, "Laal: an isolate language?",[2] inLanguage Isolates in Africa workshop, Lyons, December 4, 2010

• Laal at LLACAN
• The Genographic Project: Zalloua's notes including two recordings of the Laal recordings online
• Laal Swadesh listArchived 2021-01-05 at theWayback Machine (from Florian Lionnet)

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