Zarma language
Zarma is one of the Songhay languages. It is the leading indigenous language of the southwestern lobe of the West African nation of Niger, where the Niger River flows and the capital city, Niamey, is located. Zarma is the second-most common language in the country, after Hausa, which is spoken in south-central Niger. With over 2 million speakers, Zarma is easily the most widely spoken Songhay language.
In earlier decades, Zarma was known as Djerma, and it is still sometimes called Zerma, especially among French-speakers, but it is usually now called Zarma, the name that its speakers use in their own language.
Orthography
The Zarma alphabet uses the following letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, ɲ, ŋ, o, p, r, s, t, u, w, y, z. Nasal vowels are written with a tilde or a following or. Officially, the tilde should go under the vowel, but many current works write the tilde over the vowel. Also, v may be used in a few words of foreign origin, but many Zarma cannot pronounce it.Most of the letters are pronounced with the same values as the International Phonetic Alphabet, the exceptions being , , . The letter is approximately like English ch but more palatalized. The palatal nasal is spelled in older works.
Long consonants are written with double letters; is a trilled. Long vowels are sometimes but inconsistently written with double letter. In older works, was spelled or. Both and are pronounced as a labiodental nasal before.
Tone is not written unless the word is ambiguous. Then, the standard IPA diacritics are used: bá, bà, bâ and bǎ. However, the meaning is almost always unambiguous in the context so the words are usually all written ba.
Phonology
Vowels
There are ten vowels: the five oral vowels and their nasalized counterparts. There is slight variation, both allophonic and dialectal. Vowel length is phonemically distinctive. There are a number of combinations of a vowel with a semivowel or, the semivowel being initial or final.Consonants
The combinations and usually have some palatal quality to them and may even be interchangeable with and in the speech of many people.All consonants may be short, and all consonants except /c/, /h/, /f/ and /z/ may be long.
Lexical tone and stress
Zarma is a tonal language with four tones: high, low, fall and rise. In Dosso, some linguists have observed a dipping tone for certain words: ma.Stress is generally unimportant in Zarma. According to Abdou Hamani, two-syllable words are stressed on their first syllable unless that syllable is just a short vowel: a-, i- or u-. Three-syllable words have stress on their second syllable. The first consonant of a stressed syllable is pronounced a bit more strongly, and the vowel in the preceding syllable is weakened. Only emphasized words have a stressed syllable. There is no change of tone for a stressed syllable.
Morphology
General
There are many suffixes in Zarma. There are very few prefixes, and only one is common.Nouns
Nouns may be singular or plural. There are also three "forms" that indicate whether the noun is indefinite, definite or demonstrative. "Form" and number are indicated conjointly by an enclitic on the noun phrase. The singular definite enclitic is -ǒ or -ǎ. Some authors always write the ending with a rising tone mark even if it is not ambiguous and even if it is not truly a rising tone. The other endings are in the table below. The definite and the demonstrative endings replace any final vowel. See Hamani for a discussion on when to add -ǒ or -ǎ as well as other irregularities. See Tersis for a discussion of the complex changes in tone that may occur.| Indefinite | Definite | Demonstrative | |
| Singular | -∅ | -ǒ or -ǎ | -ô |
| Plural | -yáŋ | -ěy | -êy |
For example, súsúbày means "morning" ; súsúbǎ means "the morning" ; and súsúbô means "this morning".
The indefinite plural -yáŋ ending is often used like English "some". Ay no leemuyaŋ means "Give me some oranges." Usually, the singular forms are used if the plurality is indicated by a number or other contextual clue, especially for the indefinite form: Soboro ga ba ; ay zanka hinkǎ ; hasaraw hinko kulu ra.
There is no gender or case in Zarma so the third-person singular pronoun a can mean "he", "she", "it", "her", "him", "his", "hers", "its", "one" or "one's", according to the context and its position in the sentence.
Verbs
Verbs do not have tenses and are not conjugated. There are at least three aspects for verbs that are indicated by a modal word before the verb and any object nouns. The aspects are the completive, the incompletive and the subjunctive. There is also an imperative and a continuing or progressive construction. Lack of a modal marker indicates either the affirmative completive aspect or the singular affirmative imperative. There is a special modal marker, ka or ga, according to the dialect, to indicate the completive aspect with emphasis on the subject. Different markers are used to indicate a negative sentence.| Affirmative | Negative | |
| Completive | ∅ or nà | mǎn or màná |
| Emphasized completive | ka or ga | mǎn or màná |
| Incompletive | ga | sí |
| Subjunctive | mà | mà sí |
| Progressive | go ga | si ga |
| Singular Imperative | ∅ | sí |
| Plural Imperative | wà | wà sí |
Linguists do not agree on the tone for ga. Some say that it is high before a low tone and low before a high tone.
There are several words in Zarma to translate the English "to be". The defective verb tí is used to equate two noun phrases, with the emphasized completive ka/ga, as in Ay ma ka ti Yakuba. The existential gǒ is not a verb and has no aspect; it means "exist" and usually links a noun phrase to a descriptive term, such as a place, a price or a participle: A go fuwo ra. The predicative nô means "it is", "they are", etc. and is one of the most common words in Zarma. It has no aspect or negative form and is placed after a noun phrase, sometimes for emphasis: Ni do no ay ga koy. Other words, such as gòró, cíyà, tíyà and bárà are much rarer and usually express ideas, such as the subjunctive, which gǒ and tí cannot handle.
Participles can be formed with the suffix -ànté, which is similar in meaning to the past participle in English. It can also be added to quantities to form ordinal numbers and to some nouns to form adjectives. A sort of gerund can be formed by adding -yàŋ, which transforms the verb into a noun. There are many other suffixes that can make nouns out of verbs, but only -yàŋ works with all verbs.
Two verbs can be related with the word ká. The connector ká implies that the second verb is a result of the first or that the first is the reason or cause of the second: ka ga ŋwa, "come eat." A large number of idiomatic expressions are expressed with it: sintin ga... or sintin ka means "to begin to...", ban ga... means "to have already...", ba ga... means "to be about to..., gay ga... means "it's been awhile since...", haw ga... means "to purposely..." and so on.
Syntax
Zarma's normal word order is subject–object–verb. The object is normally placed before the verb but may be placed after the verb for emphasis, and a few common verbs require the object after them. Unlike English, which places prepositions before a noun, Zarma has postpositions, which are placed after the noun: fuwo ra, fuwo jine.When two nouns are placed together, the first noun modifies the second, showing possession, purpose or description: Fati tirǎ, haŋyaŋ hari, fu meeyo. The same construction occurs with a pronoun before a noun: ni baaba. All other modifiers of a noun are placed after the noun: Ay baaba wura muusu boŋey.
Here is a proverb in Zarma:
Da curo fo hẽ, afo mana hẽ, i si jinde kaana bay.
That means that "you need to hear both sides of the story".