CHADIC LANGUAGES

group of languages spoken in northern Nigeria, northern Ghana, Niger, and Cameroon and in parts of Togo, Benin, Chad, and the Central African Republic and generally classified as a branch of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) language family. The group includes many languages that are spoken by small numbers of people and that have no written form; among these are Angas, Kotoko, Sokoro, and Mubi. Additional reading On the general problems of the Chadic branch see Paul Newman and Roxana Ma, Comparative Chadic: Phonology and Lexicon, Journal of African Languages, vol. 5 (1966); D. Westermann and M. Bryan, Languages of West Africa, Handbook of African Languages, vol. 2 (1952); Joseph H. Greenberg, Studies in African Linguistic Classfication, IV, Hamito-Semitic, SWest. J. Anthrop., vol. 6 (1950). Among the studies of individual Chadic languages those devoted to Hausa are the most numerous of all; the following may be especially useful: C.T. Hodge and Ibrahim Umaru, Hausa: Basic Course (1963); Charles H. Kraft, A Study of Hausa Syntax, 3 vol. (1963); and R.C. Abraham, The Language of the Hausa People (1959). Among the grammatical studies of the other Chadic languages are Herrmann Jungraithmayr, Die Ron-Sprachen (1970); Carl Hoffman, A Grammar of the Margi Language (1963); and H.D. Foulkes, Angass Manual (1915). Of the many vocabularies of Hausa the most important is G.P.A. Bargery (comp.), A Hausa-English Dictionary and English-Hausa Vocabulary (1934). Igor Mikhailovich Diakonoff