Language

Lagwan language

Provisional — awaiting verification

From Wikipedia

Lagwan (Logone) is a Chadic language spoken in northern Cameroon and southwestern Chad. Dialects include Logone-Birni and Logone-Gana.

Lagwan is spoken in the northern part of Logone-Birni, from the banks of the Logone River to the Nigerian border (Logone-et-Chari Department, Far North Region). It is also spoken in Chad and Nigeria. It has 38,500 speakers in Cameroon.

Phonology

As is common in Chadic languages, the principal vowel is the low central vowel /a/; where there is no underlying V-slot, an epenthetic ‘zero vowel’ is inserted. Despite the limited distribution of the other vowels, /i, u, e, o/ have emerging phonological status. However, as has been observed in other Chadic languages, certain contrasts are productive only word-finally, excluding the sub-lexicon of loan words.

Lagwan has two contrastive tones, low and high. Mid tone is also found on a few nouns loaned from Classical Arabic. On intensifiers the phonological high tone has an extra-high realisation.

Text from the Wikipedia article “Lagwan language”, revision of 25 June 2024, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Wikipedia is written by volunteers; check important facts against the sources it cites.

This record is provisional: it was compiled from the cited sources but has not yet been checked by an InsideKamer editor.

Sources

  1. 1.
    Lagwan
    WikidataLast verified: 21 October 2026
  2. 2.
    Lagwan language
    Wikipedia (English)Published 25 June 2024Last verified: 21 October 2026
  3. 3.
    Lagwan
    Wikipédia (français)Published 15 March 2021Last verified: 21 October 2026

Suggest an editCorrections