Chimwiini: Endangered Status and Syntactic Distinctiveness Brent Henderson University of Florida
[email protected] Chimwiini is a highly endangered Bantu language, once spoken in the small town of Brava in Southern Somalia, but now spoken chiefly in refugee communities around the globe. Though often referred to as a dialect of Swahili, Chimwiini distinguishes itself strongly from standard Swahili at all levels of linguistics description. This paper presents the major factors that have led to Chimwiini’s endangered status and examines some of the syntactic structures that distinguish Chimwiini from Swahili. Le chimwiini est une langue sur le point de disparaître. Cette langue se parlait dans la ville de Brava au Sud de la Somalie, mais aujourd¹hui elle ne se parle dans le monde que dans les communautés de réfugiés. Bien que le chimwiini soit reconnu comme un dialecte du swahili, cette langue se distingue fortement du swahili standard sur tous les plans linguistiques. Cet article a pour but de présenter les facteurs principaux qui ont mené à la disparition progressive du Chimwiini, et examine en second lieu certaines structures syntaxiques qui distinguent le chimwiini du swahili. 0. INTRODUCTION This paper has two goals. The first is to report on the endangered status of Chimwiini, a Bantu language of southern Somalia often considered a dialect of Swahili. As I describe in section 2, Chimwiini has been transformed from the language of a small but stable group of speakers to a scattered and highly endangered language in only a few decades as a result of government policy and political turmoil. My second goal is to offer a preliminary report on some of the distinctive syntactic features of Chimwiini, when compared with the so-called Standard Swahili spoken in most of Kenya and Tanzania.