Ngambay language


Ngambay is one of the major languages spoken by Sara people in southwestern Chad, northeastern Cameroon and eastern Nigeria, with about a million native speakers. Ngambay is the most widely spoken of the Sara languages, and is used as a trade language between speakers of other dialects.
Ngambay has SVO word order. Suffixes indicate case. There is no tense; aspect is indicated by a perfective–imperfective distinction. Modifiers follow nouns. The numeral system is decimal, but eight and nine are expressed as 10-minus-two and 10-minus-one. It is a tone language with three tones, high, mid and low. There are loan words from both Arabic and French.

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels/Nasals

Vowels can be accented or nasalised. Diacritics and accents include high /á/, mid /ā/, low /à/, and nasalised /ã/.