Temne

Sullay M. Kanu, Benjamin V. Tucker

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

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 languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)247-253
Number of pages7
JournalJournal of the International Phonetic Association
Volume40
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2010
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Anthropology
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Speech and Hearing

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Temne'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this