Lau Laka language

Central Sudanic language spoken in Nigeria

Lau Laka
Laka
Native to	Nigeria
Region	Lau LGA, Taraba State
Language family	Nilo-Saharan? Central Sudanic Bongo–Bagirmi Sara–Bagirmi Sara languages West Lau Laka
Language codes
ISO 639-3	`lak` (deprecated)^[1]
Glottolog	`laka1252`
IETF	`ksp-NG`

Laka or Lau is a Central Sudanic language spoken in Nigeria. It is most closely related to Kabba Laka of Chad. The Hausa refer to the Laka people of Lau as Lakawa. The language was only recently documented in the mid-2010s, and had been previously misclassified as a Mbum language along with Lau.^[2]^[3]

Distribution

Laka speakers live in Laka ward of Lau LGA (Hausa: Angawan Lakawa; formerly Garin Lakawa ‘Laka town’), Taraba State, eastern Nigeria.^[2] They live alongside the Win Lau (or Lau proper; formerly Lau Habe), who are Jukunoid speakers.^[4]

Lexical comparison

The following table compares Laka (Lau) and Laka (Chad), both of which are Central Sudanic languages, with Lau proper, a Jukunoid language.^[2]

English	Laka (Lau)	Laka (Chad)	Lau proper
animal	dā	/dā/	nɛ̃́wkũ̂
cow	mã̀ŋgɨ̄	/màngɨ̄/	nâw
chicken	kũ̄nʤá	/kūnʤá/	zǟw
man	ʤĩ̀ŋgàw	/ʤìngàw/	jĩ̂nə̀nwò
medicine	kũ̀mā	/kùmā/	gâj

References

^ Still misclassified in Ethnologue (22nd ed.) and Glottolog 4.1.
^ ^a ^b ^c Idiatov, Dmitry, Mark Van de Velde, Tope Olagunju and Bitrus Andrew. 2017. Results of the first AdaGram survey in Adamawa and Taraba States, Nigeria. 47th Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (CALL) (Leiden, Netherlands).
^ Blench, Roger (2019). An Atlas of Nigerian Languages (4th ed.). Cambridge: Kay Williamson Educational Foundation.
^ Blench, Roger. "The Central Sudanic languages in the context of Nilo-Saharan: a new overview". Academia.edu. Retrieved 25 August 2018.