Кот-д’Ивуардың Дида тілдері тобы

Kru dialect cluster of Ivory Coast

Dida is a dialect cluster of the Kru family spoken in Ivory Coast. ISO divides Dida into three groups, Yocoboué (Yokubwe) Dida (101,600 speakers in 1993), Lakota Dida (93,800 speakers in 1993), and Gaɓogbo (Guébié/Gebye) which are only marginally mutually intelligible and best considered separate languages. Yocoboué consists of the Lozoua (Lozwa) and Divo dialects (7,100 and 94,500 speakers), and Lakota the Lakota (Lákota), Abou (Abu), and Vata dialects. The prestige dialect is the Lozoua speech of the town of Guitry.

The Dida lects have consonant and vowel inventories typical of the Eastern Kru languages. However, tone varies significantly between dialects, or at least between their descriptions. The following phonology is that of Abu Dida, from Miller (2005), and of Yocoboué Dida, from Masson (1992).

Abu Dida has a ten vowel system: nine vowels distinguished by "tenseness", likely either pharyngealization or supra glottal phonation (contraction of the larynx) of the type described as retracted tongue root, plus an uncommon mid central vowel
The non contracted vowels are , and the contracted vowels (These could be analyzed as , but here are transcribed with lower vowels to reflect their phonetic realization. There is no tense contrast with the low vowel.) The formants of the tense vowels show them to be lower than their non tense counterparts: the formants of the highest tense vowels overlap the formants of the non tense mid vowels, but there is visible tension in the lips and throat when these are enunciated carefully. Abu Dida has a number of diphthongs, which have the same number of tonal distinctions as simple vowels. All start with the higher vowels, , and except for , both elements are either contracted or non contracted, so the pharyngealization is here transcribed after the second element of the vowel. Examples are "bottle" (from English), "get stuck", and "little bone". Dida also has nasal vowels, but they are not common and it is not clear how many. Examples are "nothing", "chin", "25 cents" (from English "pound"). In diphthongs, nasalization shows up primarily on the second element of the vowel. Vowel length is not distinctive, apart from phonesthesia (as in "nothing"), morphemic contractions, and shortened grammatical words, such as the modal "will" (compare its likely lexical source "get").

Yocoboué Dida has a nine vowel system: four vowels being standard, and five vowels being a retracted series, plus a realization. The four regular vowels are /i e o u/, and the retracted vowels are /ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ/. /a/ may also be realized as [ʌ]. All vowels do have nasal realizations, but the nasalization of vowels is not phonemic.

Dida uses tone as a grammatical device. Morpho tonology plays a greater role in verb and pronominal paradigms than it does in nouns, and perhaps because of this, Dida verbs utilize a simpler tone system than nouns do: Noun roots have four lexically contrastive tones, subject pronouns have three, and verb roots have just two word tones. There are three level tones in Abou Dida: high , mid , and low , with mid about twice as common as the other two. Speaker intuition hears six contour tones: rising and falling (The falling tones only reach bottom register at the end of a prosodic unit; otherwise the low falling tone is realized as a simple low tone.) However, some of these only occur in morphologically complex words, such as perfective verbs. Monosyllabic nouns contrast four tones: high, mid, low, and mid falling: "egg", "leopard", "buffalo", "arrow", with high and mid being the most frequent.