Wandala

Abstract Wandala (Central Chadic) is spoken by about 45,000 people in Cameroon and northern Nigeria. The language has grammaticalized phonological means marking types of connections between the elements of the utterance, indicating an expected follow-up, a less expected follow-up, and the absence of a follow-up. The coding of some grammatical relations, such as subject and object, is distributed over a wide range of morphemes. Wandala has two tones. While in nouns both tones can be part of the underlying structure, the tones are not part of the underlying structure of verbs and carry only grammatical function. The language has a rich verbal morphology coding syntactic and semantic relations within the clause. Subject suffixes to the verb mark aspectual and modal functions different from those marked by subject pronouns preceding the verb. Inflectional markers on the verb indicate the grammatical relation of the noun phrase following the verb.