Wapan language

Not to be confused with Jukun language.

Wapan
Jukun
Native to	Nigeria
Region	Taraba State, Plateau State, Nasarawa State
Native speakers	(100,000 cited 1994) [1]
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo languages Benue–Congo Jukunoid Central Kororofa Wapan
Dialects	Wukan
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	juk
Glottolog	wapa1235
ELP	Wapan

Wapan (Jukun Wapan) or Kororofa, ^[2] also known as Wukari after the local town of Wukari, is a major Jukunoid language ^[3] of Nigeria.

Varieties

Blench (2019) lists the following varieties as part of the Kororofa (Jukun Wapan) cluster: ^[2]

• Abinsi
• Wapan proper
• Hõne
• Dampar (spoken at Dampar, Wukari LGA)

Phonology

Consonants

		Labial			Alveolar			Palatal	Velar			Labio- velar	Glottal
		plain	pal.	lab.	plain	pal.	lab.		plain	pal.	lab.		plain	pal.	lab.
Nasal		m	mʲ		n				ŋ
Plosive	voiceless	p	pʲ	pʷ	t	tʲ			k	kʲ	kʷ	k͡p
	voiced	b	bʲ	bʷ	d	dʲ			ɡ	ɡʲ		ɡ͡b
	prenasal	ᵐb	ᵐbʲ		ⁿd	ⁿdʲ			ᵑɡ	ᵑɡʲ
Affricate	voiceless				t͡s		t͡sʷ
	voiced				d͡z		d͡zʷ
Fricative	voiceless	f	fʲ		s	sʲ	sʷ						h	hʲ	hʷ
	voiced	v	vʲ		z	zʲ
Trill					r
Approximant								j				w

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i ĩ		u ũ
Mid	e ẽ		o õ
Low		a ã

• Vowels are also typically always pronounced as nasalized when after nasal consonants. ^[4]

Nasal consonants

Wapan and other Jukunoid languages are interesting in the development of asymmetrical patterns of nasal and oral consonants in West Africa.

One could posit that voiced oral stops become nasal before nasal vowels, sometimes at the expense of having more nasal than oral vowels, which is typologically odd, or that nasal stops denasalise before oral vowels, which is typologically odd as well.

Oral vowels are allowed only in syllables like ba, mba, nasal vowels in bã, mã.

Historically, however, the consonants nasalized: *mb became **mm before nasal vowels and then reduced to *m, leaving the current asymmetric distribution. ^[5]

allophonic Ṽ next to N	*mã	*mãm	*mba	*mbãm	*ba	*bãm
*mb → *mm/_Ṽ	*mã	*mãm	*mba	*mmãm	*ba	*bãm
*mm → *m	*mã	*mãm	*mba	*mãm	*ba	*bãm
loss of final C	mã	mã	mba	mã	ba	bã

References

1. Wapan at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
2. Blench, Roger (2019). An Atlas of Nigerian Languages (4th ed.). Cambridge: Kay Williamson Educational Foundation.
3. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Wapan". Glottolog 3.0 . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
4. Welmers, William Everrett (1968). Jukun of Wukari and Jukun of Takum. Ibadan, Nigeria: University of Ibadan.
5. Larry Hyman, 1975. "Nasal states and nasal processes." In Nasalfest: Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization, pp. 249–264