Abstract
Temne belongs to the South Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo (formerly the Southern Branch of the Atlantic Group of Niger-Congo; Blench 2006, Childs 2010) spoken in the northern part of Sierra Leone. According to Ethnologue (ISO 639-3: tem, Lewis 2009), Temne has a population of about 1.2 million native speakers. Like other South Atlantic languages, Temne is a tonal language with a noun class system, prefixed noun class markers and agreeing prefixes on dependent elements. Features determining class membership include number and animacy. Temne also features extension suffixes which alter the valency or the semantic structure of simple verb stems. The basic word order is Subject-Verb-Object.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 247-253 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | Journal of the International Phonetic Association |
Volume | 40 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 2010 |
Externally published | Yes |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Anthropology
- Linguistics and Language
- Speech and Hearing