Western Plains Dogon

The Dogon dialects of the western plains below the Bandiagara Escarpment is Mali are mutually intelligible. They are sometimes called the Kan Dogon because they use the word kan (also spelled kã) for varieties of speech. The dialects are:

  • Tomo kã
  • Teŋu kã
  • Togo kã
Western Plains Dogon
Kan Dogon
RegionMali, Burkina Faso
Native speakers
(260,000 cited 1998)[1]
Niger–Congo?
  • Dogon
    • Plains
      • Western Plains Dogon
Dialects
  • Tomo Kan
  • Tengu Kan
  • Togo Kan
Language codes
ISO 639-3Either:
dtm – Tomo Kan
dtk – Tene Kan
Glottologwest2508

The latter two are traditionally subsumed under the name Tene kã (Tene Kan, Tene Tingi), but Hochstetler separates them because the three varieties are about equidistant.

There are a quarter million speakers of these dialects, about evenly split between Tomo Kan and Tene Kan, making this the most populous of the Dogon languages. There are a few Tomo-speaking villages just across the border in Burkina Faso.

Phonology

Consonants
Tomo-Kan consonants[2]
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Stop/
Affricate		 voiceless p t t͡ʃ k ʔ
voiced/nasal b d d͡ʒ g ʔ̃
Fricative voiceless (ɸ) s h
voiced (z)
Nasal m n ɲ ŋ
Tap ɾ
Approximant central w l j
nasal w̃ (j̃)
  • Consonant germination also occurs frequently among sounds [kː lː nː tː].
  • /z/ can only occur among loanwords.
  • /ɸ/ is interchangeable with /h/.
Togo-Kan consonants[3]
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Stop/
Affricate		 voiceless p t (t͡ʃ) k (ʔ)
voiced b d d͡ʒ g
Fricative (f) s (ɣ) (h)
Nasal m n ɲ ŋ
Tap central ɾ
nasal ɾ̃
Approximant central w l j
nasal w̃ j̃
  • Consonant sound /t͡ʃ/ only rarely occurs and in almost absent.
  • Consonant sounds [z ʃ ʒ] are absent, except in loanwords.
  • /ɡ/ can be realized as a fricative [ɣ] between vowel sounds /a ɔ/.
  • Sounds [f h] only occur from loanwords, and are interchangeable.
  • Glottal sound [ʔ] can only occur as an element in some reduplicated forms of vowel-initial words, or between vowels within a word.

Vowels
Oral Nasal
Front Back Front Back
Close i iː u uː ĩ ĩː ũ ũː
Close-mid e eː o oː ẽ ẽː õ õː
Open-mid ɛ ɛː ɔ ɔː ɛ̃ ɛ̃ː ɔ̃ ɔ̃ː
Open a aː ã ãː
  • In Tomo Kan, an extra central vowel sound [ʉ] is also attested possibly as a result of /i/ preceding a nasalised segment or a /u/. It may also regularly be pronounced as [u] as well.[2]

References
  1. Tomo Kan at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Tene Kan at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. Dyachkov, Vadim (2019). A Grammar of Tomo Kan Dogon.
  3. Heath, Jeffrey (2015). A Grammar of Togo Kan. University of Michigan.
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