Azania xu 2006 A click in Digo and its historical interpretation Martin T. Walsh Introduction This note provides a preliminary description and interpretation of the occurrence of a nasalised dental click! in different varieties of Digo, a Mijikenda (Northeast Coast Bantu) language spoken on both sides of the Tanzania/Kenya border. This complex click has only been recorded in ideophones, and might be explained as a local innovation that reflects the widespread use of unaccompanied click sounds-in_paralinguistic communication. Relatively few languages in the world make regular use of click phonemes, most notably the Khoesan languages of southern Africa and neighbouring Bantu languages that have borrowed from them. The only East African languages that use clicks in this way are Hadza, Sandawe and Dahalo, though itis generally presumed that ‘click languages were more widely spoken in the hunting and foraging past. This suggests the hypothesis that the Digo click isa borrowed and/or relic phoneme, a possibility which has implications for our understanding of history on the East African coast. Digo and its local varieties The Digo (adigo) are a group of more than 360,000 farmers, fishers, traders and town- dwellers whose traditional territory lies along the East African coast between Mombasa in the north and Tanga in the south (Mwalonya ef al. 2004: 203). The Digo language (chidigo) is often considered to be a dialect of Mijikenda, which Nurse and Hinnebusch (1993) classify as one of the constituent languages of the Sabaki group of Northeast Coast Bantu. The Mijikenda dialects fall into two groups: Northern Mijikenda includes Giryama and a number of lesser-known idioms (Ribe, Kambe, Jibana, Chonyi, and Kauma); Southern Mijikenda comprises Rabai, Duruma, and Digo. Digo speakers recognise a number of local speech varieties, including (1) Chinondo (Northern Digo), spoken along the south Kenya coast becween Likoni and Msambweni "According to Ladefoged and Maddieson’s formal definition, ‘Clicks are stops in which the essential component isthe rarefaction of air enclosed between two articulatory closures formed in the oral cav that a loud transient is produced when the more forward closure is released’ (1996: 246). Clicks in Khoesan and other African languages are generally classified into one of five major types (bilabial, dental, alveolar, palatal, ot lateral) as determined by the nature of the click influx (location and release of front, closure). ‘These are produced together with articulations in che back of the mouth and other features (e.g. nasalisation) that are collectively referred to as the click accompaniment or efflux. Linguists do not agree on the best way ro symbolise lick accompaniments, nor on the best way to analyse complex click phonemes (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996, Traill 1997, Giildemann and Vossen 2000, Clements 2000).Martin T. Walsh 159 (Hinnebusch 1973, Walsh 1986, de Groot 1988); (2) Ungu (Lungu, Southern Digo), spoken on the coastal strip south of Msambweni and across the border into northern ‘Tanzania (Dammann 1938/39, 1944, Hinnebusch 1973); (3) Tsimba, spoken in the Shimba Hills betwen Vuga in the east and Ng'onzini in the west (not described in the literature); and (4) Tsw'aka (Chw'aka), spoken in and around the village of the same name on the Shimoni Peninsula (Lambert 1957, Méhlig 1992, Nurse and Walsh 1992). ‘Tow'aka was once thought to have been a local variety of the Vumba dialect of Swahili, but is now considered to be a variety of Digo in the process of shifting to Vumba, The precise status of Ts'imba is unknown: Mchama Harri (sce below) described it as similar to Chinondo but with Duruma-like pronunciation. Assimilated Segeju and Degere are also said to speak their own varieties of Digo, presumably as a consequence of language cju are former speakers of a Central Kenya Bantu (Thagicu) language, some of whom now speak Digo as their first language, especially on the north Tanzanian coast (Nurse and Walsh 1992, Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993, 17, fn.28). The Degere are former hunter-gatherers, settled on both sides of the Kenya/ Tanzania border, who appear to have once spoken Waata, a dialect of the Eastern Cushitic language Oromo (Walsh 1990, 1992/93). The nasalised dental click of Digo Clicks do not form part of the regular phonological inventory of Digo (Hinnebusch 1973, Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993, Mwalonya et a/. 2004); nor, as far as is known, of any other East African Bantu language. None of the Digo ideophones listed in the literature feature clicks or other unusual sounds (de Groot 1988, Mwalonya et al. 2004). The same applies to neighbouring Duruma (Newman and Newman 1988). Although simple unelaborated clicks do occur in Digo interjections, these have never been systematically studied or recorded.? The use of a complex click in Digo was first brought to my attention in 1992 by Ramadhani M, D. Rumba, a scholar and poet living in Tanga (Mulokozi and Sengo 1995, 128).? I later elicited additional information on its use from a speaker of the Tsimba variety ofbigs in Kenya, Mchama Harri.’ More recently, in 2003, I interviewed Compare Eastman's work (e.g. 1983, 1992) on Swahili interjections, For interjections in general see Ameka (1992) and Kockelman (2003). Fora worldwide survey of the use of licks in interjections and other forms of paralinguistic communication see Gil (2005). ‘We metin Tanga town on 8 January 1992. In addition to work in Swahili, Rumba was a speaker of Ungu or Southern Digo (he told me that his father was a Digo from Msambweni on che Kenya coast) and had written a manuscript in Digo which he was hoping to get published in Dar es Salaam. Achat time there was no standardised or widely- known orthography of Digo, though some conventions were in general use (e.g. the use of the digraph ‘ph’ to represent the bilabial fricative of Digo, /8/).. We discussed his attempts to devise an orthography for various Digo sounds which do not occur in Standard Swahili, and the click described here was one of these. Credit for its formal recognition as.a distinctive sound in Digo speech must therefore go to Rumba, and I have added this anecdotal account of the ‘context of discovery’ in order to emphasise this, Harri was born in the village of Lukore atthe southern end of the Shimba Hills Settlement Scheme, and, like the rest of his family, spoke the Ts’imba variety of Digo (his father was from Vuga and his mother Ngombeni). We met on the Mombasa-Nairobi train on 12 January 1992. Harri was then a 26 year-old graduate of the University of Nairobi, working asa trainee electrical engineer in Nairobi.160 Notes a Digo speaker in Dar es Salaam, Mohammed Njama Sarai, and tape-recorded examples of his own use of the click, together with a sample of simple Digo interjections.’ ‘The click consonant used by these speakers of two varieties of Digo - Ungu (Southern Digo) and ‘Ts'imba — can be characterised as a dental click (| in the orthography of the International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA) with a voiced velar nasal accompaniment (q),° Rumba wrote it as ‘ntsy’ in his own Digo transcription.” Here | will follow Ladeloged and Maddieson’s (1996) IPA-based orthography by representing the nasalised dental click: as]. The following examples of its use were elicited: 1. "Ja ‘go away, get lost, buzz off!” {all three informants] la. ® | a! ukaiBa [contracted from BaBa] ‘go away! leave here” [Rumba] 1b. "a! niukira ipa ‘go away! leave me alone here’ [Njama*] The Digo term can be described as an interjection or ideophone which is employed with the intention of (perhaps rudely) driving someone away. Like many ideophones, 1 a scoms to be used to give intensive force to a small number of stock expressions, in this case dismissive commands using the Digo verb —uka, ‘to leave, go away’. Itis perhaps best translated by the idiomatic English expression ‘get lost!’ and its equivalents (e.g. ‘clear off?, ‘buzz off’, ‘get gone!’).’ When asked, Njama emphasised that it could be used by men and women, young and old alike, and did not have any vulgar or tabooed connotations. [first interviewed Njama at Msasani on 24 July, and tape-recorded him on 4 August 2003. He was born in 1954 in Bamba-Mwarongo in Mkinga District, Tanga Region, and educated to Standard 7. He moved 10 Dar in 1970 and when we met was living in Kigogo and working as a taxi driver in the city Tam grateful to lan Maddieson for listening to the tape-recording and confirming its identification asa nasalised dental click. Referring to two examples he writes: “in the first example the click has a two-part release (the second itera has a single release) and nasalization spreads further into the following vowel. Like dental clicks in other languages these releases are quite strongly affricated” (personal communication, 7 January 2004). The quality of the nasal remains to be confirmed. Cf. Elderkin (1992). Rumba’ notation clearly shows the nasal‘. Tt is also interesting in view of the fact that /ts/is known asa regular replacement for the dental click in Khoesan sound correspondences (Traill and Vossen 1997, Gilldemann and Vossen 2000). In the taped record Njama pronounced ® | a with a rising tone. Harri translated the ideophone idiomatically into Swahili as ‘potelea mbalf, ‘get lost”, and ‘kiwenda buco’, “go away (be away with you)!"