Sucite is a Senufo language spoken in southwesternBurkina Faso by approximately 35,000 people. Sucite is a close neighbour of Supyire, spoken in southeastern Mali. Sucite is sometimes regarded as the northern extension of Supyire. The two dialects are, according to Garber, ‘quite mutually intelligible’. Sometimes speakers of Sucite will even refer to themselves as speaking Supyire. Another closely related lect is Mamara. Some other Senufo groups refers to the Sùcìté people as Tagba, because they live on the Tagouara plateau. There are various ways to spell the dialect names. Variants of Sùcìté include Sìcìté, Sìpììté, and Sicire. The SILlanguage code is SEP.
Sounds
Vowels
All vowels can be lengthened and nasalized. The schwa /ə/ is included in brackets because it is found only in two specific environments, where it appears to be in complementary distribution with some other vowel.
Garber 1987
Front
Central
Back
Close
i • ĩ
u • ũ
Close-mid
e • ẽ
o • õ
Open-mid
ɛ • ɛ̃
ɔ • ɔ̃
Open
a • ã
Consonants
Geminate voiced stops/affricates are cognate to prenasalized voiceless stops in Supyire, and are indicated orthographically as in Garber.
Tone
Sucite is a tonal language with three surface tone levels: High, Mid, and Low. Garber and Carlson analyse the Northern Senufo system as having two different Mid tones, a strong mid and a weak mid. The Ms tone undergoes substantially less tonal alternations than the Mw tone. Garber suggests that this peculiarity may have its origin in a tonal split. Glides formed by combining pairs of tones exist, the most common being HL and ML.
Like the other Senufo languages, Sucite employs a noun class system of five genders: three pairings of singular/plural classes and two mass/collective classes. Nouns take class-specific suffixes for definiteness. For example:
Gloss
Indef.
Def.
Gender
Class
'river'
gba
gba-ŋé
wi
1
'rivers'
gba-ála
gba-á-bí
wi
2
'house'
gba-xa
gba-ké
ki
3
'houses'
gba-ya
gba-nyɛ́
ki
4
'forehead'
gba-là
gba-à-ne
li
5
'foreheads'
gbà-ʔala
gbà-ʔà-ki
li
6
Pronouns
Each noun class has its own set of pronouns. These may be general, emphatic, partitive, interrogative, demonstrative, or relative.
