Bole's Linguistic Relatives

BOLE is a member of the Chadic language family. The Chadic family, in turn, is a member of the Afroasiatic phylum, i.e. at a very deep historical level, probably dating back 8-10,000 years, Bole shares a common ancestry with Arabic, Ancient Egyptian, Somali, and other languages of north Africa and the Middle East. Within the Chadic family, Bole is a member of the West Chadic subfamily, "A" branch, the same branch to which Hausa belongs.

• Place the cursor over the Afroasiatic tree to see the Chadic tree.
• Click to see the place of Bole within the West Chadic "A" branch.

Evidence for the family grouping of Bole

The most obvious evidence for asserting that languages are related to each other (i.e. that they descend from what was once a single language) is resemblances in everyday words. Every language has words for things common in daily life, such as terms for body parts, universal environmental features (e.g. sun, moon, water, fire), small numbers, universal actions and events (e.g. eat, drink, die, know, go), and so on. Depending on where languages are spoken, there will also be words that all languages of that area would need. In the West African savannah, some universally known objects would be dog, goat, sheep, fish, crocodile, python, guinea fowl, elephant, buffalo, baobab, various acacia trees, and other plants and animals typical of the area.

If we find that languages share a substantial number of similar words for such concepts, the only reasonable conclusion is that those languages must have inherited the words from a single ancestral language from which they all descend. Shifts in pronunciation and meaning have taken place in different ways in different communities after they dispersed from the home of their original community.

The table below presents the type of evidence we can use to demonstrate language relatedness.

• BOLE and HAUSA show many resemblances: we group them both in the "A" branch of West Chadic under the assumption of a relatively recent common ancestor
• BOLE and NGIZIM (and HAUSA and NGIZIM) show resemblances, but fewer and less similar than Bole and Hausa: we place Ngizim in the "B" group of West Chadic under the assumption that we have to go back in time to the original West Chadic language to find the ancestor that was common to Ngizim and the West Chadic "A" languages Bole and Hausa
• BOLE and KANURI show few, if any resemblances: Kanuri is not a Chadic language--it does not have a common ancestor with the Chadic languages

Words considered to "resemble" each other within a line are in red.

@ = a "barred i" (written as a "shwa" in the standard orthography; a letter with an apostrophe after it = a "glottalized" sound

Notes on Kanuri: The Kanuri citations are from Norbert Cyffer, English-Kanuri Dictionary, Köln:Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 1994. The words for crocodile and baobab resemble the Chadic words because they ARE originally Chadic words borrowed into Kanuri. We know this because many Chadic languages that have had no contact with Kanuri also have similar words for these concepts. The ancestors of the people in today's Kanuri-speaking area of Nigeria originally spoke Chadic languages. As the Kanuri took dominion over this area, people began speaking Kanuri at the expense of their original languages, but they apparently retained their old names for many species of flora and fauna, and those words came into the mainstream of Kanuri. Note that Ngizim has reborrowed the original Chadic root back from Kanuri! There are no waterways in Ngizim country that would support crocodiles, so this was probably an "exotic" creature to the Ngizims, who had no native name for it.