Maasai language

Maasai (previously spelled Masai) or Maa (English: /ˈmɑːsaɪ/ MAH-sye; autonym: ɔl Maa) is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania by the Maasai people, numbering about 1.5 million. It is closely related to the other Maa varieties: Samburu (or Sampur), the language of the Samburu people of central Kenya, Chamus, spoken south and southeast of Lake Baringo (sometimes regarded as a dialect of Samburu); and Parakuyu of Tanzania. The Maasai, Samburu, il-Chamus and Parakuyu peoples are historically related and all refer to their language as ɔl Maa. Properly speaking, "Maa" refers to the language and the culture and "Maasai" refers to the people "who speak Maa".

The Maasai variety of ɔl Maa as spoken in southern Kenya and Tanzania has 30 contrasting phonemes, including a series of implosive consonants. In Maasai, tone has a very productive role, conveying a wide range of grammatical and semantic functions.

In the table of consonant phonemes below, phonemes are represented with IPA symbols. When IPA conventions differ from symbols normally used in practical writing, the latter are given in angle brackets.

For some speakers, implosive consonants are not ingressive (e.g. IlKeekonyokie Maa), but for others, they are lightly implosive or have a glottalic feature (e.g. Parakuyo Maa). ^{[citation needed]} In Arusha Maa, /p/ is typically realized as a voiceless fricative [ɸ], but in some words, it can be a voiced trill [ʙ].^{[citation needed]} The sounds [tʃ] and [ʃ] occur in complementary distribution, with [tʃ] occurring following a consonant, and [ʃ] elsewhere.^{[citation needed]}

There are nine vowel phoneme qualities in Maasai

A feature that Maasai shares with the other Maa languages is advanced tongue root vowel harmony. In Maasai words, only certain combinations of vowels co-occur in the same word (i.e. vowel harmony), with the vowel /a/ being "neutral" in this system. In Maasai, advanced tongue vowels only co-occur with other advanced tongue vowels (i.e. /i e o u/) and /a/, whereas non-advanced tongue vowels (i.e. /ɪ ɛ ʊ ɔ/) only co-occur with each other and with /a/. Note that tones play no role in the harmony system.

Maasai is written using the Latin script with additional letters taken from the IPA, namely ⟨ɛ ɨ ŋ ɔ ʉ⟩, where the barred letters represent the near-close vowels. The orthography uses a few digraphs (e.g. ⟨rr⟩ for /r/, ⟨sh⟩ for /ʃ), and diacritics on vowels to represent tones. In this system, level tones are not represented, so that /ā ē ū/ etc. are represented as ⟨a e u⟩ and so forth.

Word order is usually verb–subject–object but can vary because tone is the most salient indicator of the distinction between subject and object roles. What determines the order in a clause is topicality since the order, in the simplest clauses, can be predicted according to the information structure pattern: [Verb – Most.Topical – Less.Topical]. Thus, if the object is highly topical in the discourse (e.g. a first-person pronoun), and the subject is less topical, the object occurs right after the verb and before the subject.