Abstract
The Baggara Belt constitutes the southernmost periphery of the Arabic-speaking world. It stretches over 2500 km from Nigeria to Sudan and it is largely inhabited by Arab semi-nomadic cattle herders. Despite its common sociohistorical background, the ethnography of Baggara nomads is complex, being the result of a long series of longitudinal migrations and contacts with different ethnolinguistic groups. Thanks to a number of comparative works, there is broad agreement on the inclusion of Baggara dialects within West Sudanic Arabic. However, little or nothing is known of the internal classification of Baggara Arabic. This paper seeks to provide a comparative overview of Baggara Arabic and to explain dialect convergences and divergences within the Baggara Belt in light of both internally and externally motivated changes. By providing a qualitative analysis of selected phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features, this study demonstrates that there is no overlapping between the ethnic and dialect borders of the Baggara Belt. Furthermore, it is argued that contact phenomena affecting Baggara Arabic cannot be reduced to a single substrate language, as these are rather induced by areal diffusion and language attrition. These elements support the hypothesis of a gradual process of Baggarization rather than a sudden ethnolinguistic hybridization between Arab and Fulani agropastoralist groups. Over and above, the paper aims at contributing to the debate on the internal classification of Sudanic Arabic by refining the isoglosses commonly adopted for the identification of a West Sudanic dialect subtype.
Highlights
In his early account of the Shuwa Dialect of Bornu, Nigeria and of the Region ofLake Chad, the British colonial governor G
We provide a comparative overview of five different Baggara dialects in order to assess their degree of structural proximity and to explore the sociohistorical factors underlying the diffusion of linguistic innovations across the Baggara Belt
Chari-Baguirmi region provides str we look at the geographic distribution oft plosive q, which is still attested at the fringes the Baggara continuum (i.e., Nigeria in the west,ofKordofan in the east)
Summary
In his early account of the Shuwa Dialect of Bornu, Nigeria and of the Region of. Lake Chad, the British colonial governor G. Several studies (Blanc 1971; Kaye 1976; Owens 1985, 1993b; Roth-Laly 1994a; Manfredi 2012) have identified a number of isoglosses for pinpointing the Sudanic area within the wider Arabicspeaking world ESA covers the remaining parts of the Sudanic dialect area (i.e., the central and eastern part of Sudan) and it includes the koine of the capital Khartoum (i.e., Khartoum or Sudanese Arabic, Bergman 2002; Dickins 2011) and the rural dialects spoken in the Gezira and Butana regions (Reichmuth 1983). Languages 2021, 6, 146 constructing the dialect history of the Baggara Belt and provides some new hints on the internal classification of West Sudanic Arabic
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