Introduction to the dictionary

This trilingual dictionary is the first of any kind for the Cicipu language. It is intended for people who want to learn to read, write, or speak the Cicipu language and who already read English or Hausa. These might be native speakers of Cicipu, or others who are learning it as a second language. A second reason for producing the dictionary is to ensure that future generations of Acipu have a written record of their language. Finally, we hope the dictionary will also be of some interest to linguists, and so a fuller introduction is available in PDF format, providing basic sociolinguistic, phonological and grammatical information. For further information see McGill (2009).

Cicipu is spoken in northwest Nigeria, with the main language area straddling the boundary between Kebbi and Niger States (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Cicipu language area within Nigeria (taken from d-maps.com)

The language is a member of the Kainji subgroup of Benue-Congo. Native speakers identify seven dialects (Table 1), the approximate locations of which can be seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Cicipu dialects

Unless otherwise stated the words and examples in this dictionary are from Tirisino, the most prestigious and probably most robust dialect of Cicipu. The Orisino have maintained their language, and children in every village I visited spoke Cicipu as their mother tongue. Nevertheless younger speakers are heavily influenced by Hausa, which has spread into sociolinguistic domains such as casual conversation which were previously the preserve of the vernacular. The speech of young men and children (particularly boys) is markedly different to that of old men, with a higher incidence of Hausa loanwords and calqued constructions. The number system is a linguistic subdomain which, although very simple, is falling out of use: some young Orisino struggle to count past 5. Similarly many of the words in this dictionary will be unknown to the younger generation.

In contrast, Tikula is possibly the most endangered of the dialects, with only a small number of children learning Cicipu. The Tikumbasi dialect may be similarly endangered, and others likely fall between these two extremes. A few words from other dialects (especially Tikula) are included in the dictionary and clearly marked as such, but no systematic research has been attempted on any dialect other than Tirisino.

This dictionary is part of a broader effort to document the Cicipu language which began in 2006, funded mainly by the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Project. The focus was on spoken language, resulting in a substantial corpus of texts from various genres (available from the Endangered Languages Archive) but little in the way of lexical documentation. This dictionary serves to improve the balance.

The lexical database on which the dictionary is based has been built up gradually since Stuart McGill’s initial linguistic fieldwork in 2006. From 2010-2012 native speaker Markus Yabani was responsible for writing and recording the example sentences together with their Hausa translations. It is his voice that can be heard in the recordings. In 2015 a LexiquePro version of this dictionary was put online, and then in 2017 this was replaced by a mobile-friendly version. The photographs included in this dictionary were taken variously by Markus Yabani, Stuart McGill, and Roger Blench.

An attempt has been made to translate every word and every example sentence into Hausa as well as English. This is problematic due to the lack of a written standard for the particular dialect of Hausa spoken by the Acipu. This variety is a form of the 'Western Hausa' dialect centred on Sokoto (Newman 2000:1). It is also my impression – based on comparing Yabani's Hausa translations with the dialectal forms given in Bargery (1934) – that in terms of vocabulary there is (or at least has been) strong influence from Katsina too.

But the Hausa spoken by the Cicipu diverges in other ways too, and no-one who has spent all their life in Cicipuland would be able to pass themselves off as a native Hausa speaker – an obvious example is that almost all nouns are assigned to the masculine gender, the exceptions being when the referent is actually female. There are also phonologial differences such as the use of epenthetic vowels (e.g. fuska 'face' is pronounced [húsᵊkà ]) and the simplification of phonemes: the Hausa ejectives ts [sʼ] and ƙ are pronounced [s] or [tʃ] and [k] respectively. Hausa sh [tʃ] is also often pronounced [s]. Cicipu vowel harmony also has a significant effect on the way native speakers pronounce Hausa (e.g. [ɡúːnáː] for gona 'farm').

When revising Yabani's initial Hausa transcriptions we have tended to retain grammatical differences, but abstract away from phonological differences in an effort to make the identification of the Hausa words easier. Bargery (1934) has been followed for Sokoto Hausa spelling. Yabani's original unedited transcriptions are available from the ELAR Cicipu deposit.

Although officially part of the Hausa orthography, in practice the hooked letters ɓ, ɗ, and ƙ are often written as b, d, and k respectively. In this dictionary we follow the standard Hausa orthography.

The audio recordings in this dictionary were recorded by Markus Yabani. Some of these sound files cover two examples, in which case you may have to wait a few seconds to get to the start of the example you want to hear. It should be possible even for beginners to identify the relevant portion.

The sound quality of the audio recordings varies. Our original intention was to use them purely as an aid to transcription but we decided that they were too valuable a resource not to publish along with the dictionary. In particular native speakers may find them useful for checking their understanding of the accompanying written Cicipu.

Acknowledgments

Many people have helped make this dictionary possible, especially the Wømø of Karishen, the Sarkinƙasa in Sakaba, the Mai Unguwa of Inguwar Rogo, and Mohammed Mallam. Other important contributors have been Mohammed Musa, Musa Mai Unguwa, Ibrahim Mai Unguwa, Ayuba Sani, Ishiaku Ibrahim, Amos Bako, Israel and Omonor Wade, David Heath, and David Crozier. Tugweede ggẽi!

I am especially grateful to the Kay Williamson Educational Foundation for a grant towards the production of this dictionary, and especially to Roger Blench for his encouragement throughout the project.

References

Bargery, George P. 1934. A Hausa-English dictionary and English-Hausa vocabulary. London: Oxford University Press.

McGill, Stuart. 2009. Gender and person agreement in Cicipu discourse. PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies.

Newman, Paul. 2000. The Hausa language: an encyclopedic reference grammar. New Haven: Yale University Press.