| Bijago | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | Guinea-Bissau | |
| Region | Offshore Bissagos Islands | |
| Total speakers | 30,000 | |
| Language family | Niger-Congo
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | – | |
| ISO 639-3 | bjg | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Bijago, or Bidyogo, is the language of the Bissagos Archipelago of Guinea-Bissau. There are some difficulties of grammar and intelligibility between dialects, with the Kamona dialect of Caravela and Carache Islands being unintelligible to the others.
Sapir (1971) classified Bijago as an isolate within the West Atlantic family. Linguists such as Blench who reject the validity of West Atlantic keep Bijago as a separate branch of the Atlantic-Congo core of the Niger-Congo family.
Characteristics
The Kajoko dialect of Bijago is one of the few speech varieties of the world, and the only one outside of Vanuatu, known to use a linguolabial consonant in its basic sound system (Olson et al. in press).
References
- Olson, Kenneth S., D. William Reiman, Fernando Sabio & Filipe Alberto da Silva. In press. The voiced linguolabial plosive in Kajoko. Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) 45(1).
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