Sucite language - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Sucite is a Senufo

Senufo languages

The Senufo or Senufic languages comprise ca. 15 languages spoken by the Senufo in the north of Côte d'Ivoire, the south of Mali and the southwest of Burkina Faso. An isolated language, Nafaanra, is also spoken in the west of Ghana. The Senufo languages are generally considered a branch of the Gur...

language spoken in southwestern Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso – also known by its short-form name Burkina – is a landlocked country in west Africa. It is surrounded by six countries: Mali to the north, Niger to the east, Benin to the southeast, Togo and Ghana to the south, and Côte d'Ivoire to the southwest.Its size is with an estimated...

by approximately 35 000 people. Sucite is a close neighbour of Supyire

Supyire language

Supyire, or Suppire, is the name of a language centralized in the Sikasso Region region of southeastern Mali, in western Africa. Supyire is spoken by an estimated 364,000 Supyire people, according to Ethnologue. The language belongs to the larger language group of Senufo, a member of the Gur...

, spoken in southeastern Mali

Mali

Mali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...

. Sucite is sometimes regarded as the northern extension of Supyire. The two dialects are, according to Garber (1987), ‘quite mutually intelligible’. Sometimes speakers of Sucite will even refer to themselves as speaking Supyire. Another closely related lect is Mamara (also known as Minyanka).

Some other Senufo groups refers to the Sùcìté people as Tagba, because they live on the Tagouara plateau. There are various ways to spell the dialect names. Variants of Sùcìté include Sìcìté, Sìpììté, and Sicire. The SIL

SIL International

SIL International is a U.S.-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into local languages,...

language code is SEP.

Vowels

All vowels can be lengthened and nasalized

Nasalization

In phonetics, nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth...

. The schwa /ə/ is included in brackets because it is found only in two specific environments, where it appears to be in complementary distribution

Allophone

In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...

with some other vowel.

Phonetic inventory of vowels in Sucite
Garber 1987	Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...	Central Central vowel A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel...	Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...
Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...	i • ĩ		u • ũ
Close-mid Close-mid vowel A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel...	e • ẽ	(ə)	o • õ
Open-mid Open-mid vowel An open-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel...	ɛ • ɛ̃		ɔ • ɔ̃
Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue...		a • ã

Consonants

		Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...	Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...	(Alveolo- Alveolo-palatal consonant In phonetics, alveolo-palatal consonants are palatalized postalveolar sounds, usually fricatives and affricates, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate... )Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....	Labio-velar	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Plosive / Affricate	voiceless	p	t	t͡ɕ	k		ʔ
	voiced	b	d	d͡ʑ		ɡ͡b
	geminate	bː	dː	d͡ʑː	ɡː
	prenasalized	ⁿb	ⁿd	ⁿd͡ʑ	ⁿɡ	ⁿɡ͡b
Nasal		m	n	nʲ	ŋ	ŋ͡m
Fricative		f fʲ	s		x
Glide		w wʲ		j

Geminate voiced stops/affricates are cognate to prenasalized voiceless stops in Supyire

Supyire language

, and are indicated orthographically as in Garber (1987).

Tone

Sucite is a tonal language with three surface tone levels: High, Mid, and Low. Garber (1987) and Carlson (1994) analyse the Northern Senufo system as having two different Mid tones, a strong mid (Ms) and a weak mid (Mw). The Ms tone undergoes substantially less tonal alternations than the Mw tone. Garber (1988) suggests that this peculiarity may have its origin in a tonal split.

Glides formed by combining pairs of tones exist, the most common being HL and ML.

Nouns

Like the other Senufo languages, Sucite employs a noun class

Noun class

In linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional...

system of five genders: three pairings of singular/plural classes and two mass/collective classes.

Nouns take class-specific suffixes for definiteness. For example:

Gloss	Indef.	Def.	Gender	Class
'river'	gba	gba-ŋé	wi	1
'rivers'	gba-ála	gba-á-bí	wi	2
'house'	gba-xa	gba-ké	ki	3
'houses'	gba-ya	gba-nyɛ́	ki	4
'forehead'	gba-là	gba-à-ne	li	5
'foreheads'	gbà-ʔala	gbà-ʔà-ki	li	6

Pronouns

Each noun class has its own set of pronouns. These may be general (clitic), emphatic, partitive

Partitive

In linguistics, the partitive is a word, phrase, or case that divides something into parts. For example, in the English sentence I'll have some coffee, some is a partitive determiner because it makes the noun phrase some coffee refer to a subset of all coffee...

, interrogative, demonstrative, or relative.

Pronouns
Class	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Clitic	wu	bi	kə	yi	lə	ki	tə	bə
Emphatic	wurə̀	perə̀	kərə̀	yirə̀	lərə̀	kerə̀	tərə̀	pərə̀
Partitive	wà	pì	kà	yà	là	kì	tà	pà
Demonstrative	ngə́	mpí	nkə́	njí	ndə́	nkí	ntə́	mpə́
Interrogative	ngə	mpi	nkə	nji	ndə	nki	ntə	mpə

Sources