Lake Chad Arabic

Map 1 LCA dialects
LCA dialects
- Arabs in the Lake Chad areaHide
- Arabs in the Lake Chad area are first reported in a 1391 letter of the Kanem Mai (king) Uthman Biri to the Mameluke Sultan Barquq. Based on travelers’ writings (e.g. Denham and Clapperton, Barth, Nachtigal), their presence along the Chari River, which in its northern extremity separates Chad from Cameroon, can be inferred by 1540. Today they constitute a large minority group stretching between Gubio in western Borno into Cameroon, Chad, and ultimately the Sudan in the east. Today in Nigeria there are probably between 200,000-400,000 Arabs. Ethnic demographic figures can only be estimated. Increasingly the largest concentration of Arabs – as indeed concentrations of any ethnic group in NE Nigeria – has been gravitating towards cities. This movement has been sharply expedited in the last 15 years by the Boko Haram insurgency which has virtually denuded rural Borno of its sedentary populations (of any ethnic group).
- DesignationHide
- Like all ethnic groups in the region, Arabs have an exonym and a self-designation. Their self designation is simply “ʔArab” (= nafar or nafara). Their exonym, by which they are popularly known in the region, is “Shuwa”.
- Arabic languageHide
- Native Arabic belongs to a larger dialect area encompassing all of the western Sudan (Kordofan, Darfur), Chad, northern Cameroon and the northern part of Borno in NE Nigeria. Within this large geo-dialectal expanse the westerly region beginning about at Abbeché (see Map 1) forms a sub-area marked inter alia by the sound shift *pharyngeal → laryngeal; *ʕ ~ ħ → ʔ ~ h (e.g hilim ‘dream’ instead of ħilim). Speaking very generally and non-technically, Western Sudanic Arabic aligns linguistically with the Arabic of the Nile Valley in the Sudan and Egypt, its ancestral speakers having migrated down the Nile Valley before bending to the west, beginning in about 1200.
- SubsistenceHide
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Map 2 Inset
- The sampleHide
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