Bijago language

Bijago
Native to	Guinea-Bissau
Region	Offshore Bissagos Islands
Native speakers	30,000 (2006)
Language family	Niger–Congo Atlantic–Congo Bak Bijago
Dialects	Kagbaaga Kajoko (Orango) Anhaqui (Anhaki) Kamona
Language codes
ISO 639-3	bjg
Glottolog	bidy1244

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 being unintelligible to the others.

Dialects are as follows:

• Anhaki on Canhabaque (Roxa) Island
• Kagbaaga on Bubaque Island
• Kajoko on Orango and Uno Islands.
• Kamona on the northern Caravela and Carache Islands

Characteristics

The Kajoko dialect is one of the few in the world known to use a linguolabial consonant, the voiced stop [d̼], in its basic sound system (Olson et al. 2009).

Classification

Bijago is highly divergent. Sapir (1971) classified it as an isolate within the West Atlantic family. However, Segerer showed that this is primarily due to unrecognized sound changes, and that Bijago is in fact close to the Bak languages. For example, the following cognates in Bijago and Joola Kasa (a Bak language) are completely regular, but had not previously been identified (Segerer 2010):

Gloss	Bijago	Joola Kasa
head	bu	fu-kow
eye	nɛ	ji-cil

References

• Olson, Kenneth S., D. William Reiman, Fernando Sabio & Filipe Alberto da Silva. 2009. The voiced linguolabial plosive in Kajoko. Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) 45(1), 519-530.
• Segerer, Guillaume. La langue bijogo. Oxford : Pergamon Press, 1997.
• Segerer, Guillaume. Lʼorigine des Bijogo : hypothèses de linguiste. In Gaillard, Gérald (Ed), Migrations anciennes et peuplement actuel des Côtes guinéennes, Paris : LʼHarmattan, 2000, pp. 183–191
• Segerer, Guillaume. La langue bijogo de Bubaque (Guinée Bissau). Louvain, Paris : Editions Peeters, 2002. 310 pp.
• Guillaume Segerer & Florian Lionnet 2010. "'Isolates' in 'Atlantic'". Language Isolates in Africa workshop, Lyon, Dec. 4