Supyire language

Supyire is a Senufo language spoken in southeastern Mali in the Sikasso Region. Its speakers, the Supyire people, number 364 000 according to SIL/Ethnologue. Supyire belongs to the Northern Senufo group and is classified under the Suppire-Mamara languages along with Sucite and Mamara (Minyanka).

Quite a few different terms have been used to refer to Supyire. Supyire people are often called Bamana by outsiders. Spelling variants of Supyire include Sup’ide, Supide, and Suppire; the SIL language code is SPP.

Sounds

Tone

Tone plays a very important role in marking both lexical and grammatical contrasts in Supyire. On the surface, there are three levels of tone in Supyire: High (marked by [ ́ ]), Mid (no marking), and Low (marked by [ ` ]), as exemplified below:

High — círíŋɛ́ orphan
Mid — baga house
Low — nà man

Supyire has four phonemic tones. High and Low tone are fairly ordinary. The two middle surface tones are differentiated in behaviour rather than pitch. Carlson (1994) analyses the Northern Senufo system as having two different Mid tones, a strong mid (Ms) and a weak mid (Mw). The Ms tone undergoes substantially less tonal alternations than the Mw tone. The difference between the two Mid tones is exemplified below. The weak mid noun cigé is placed in a possessor construction and undergoes tonal change, whereas the strong mid noun bagé keeps its mid tone.

Weak Mid tone
* cigé tree
* mìì cíge my tree
Strong Mid tone
* bagé house
* mìì bagé my house
Grammar

The noun

Supyire employs a noun class system of five genders: three pairings of singular/plural classes and two mass/collective classes. Noun gender is marked on nouns by means of suffixes. These suffixes in turn can can be analysed as consisting of a consonant marking the gender membership and a vowel marking some other categories, such as definiteness. Morphophonological processes sometimes obscure the gender suffix, e.g. a root-final nasal may absorb the suffix consonant as can be seen in the gender 2 example ŋkéŋɛ̀ ‘branch’ below. The gender suffix is not added to every noun in a gender; this is sometimes determined by the position of stress. To complicate matters further, loan words generally do not take the gender suffix.
Gender 1: -wV (singular) -(bi)li (plural)
* pòòwò catfish — pòòli catfish (pl)
Gender 2: -gV (singular) -yV (plural)
*cige tree ciye trees
Gender 3: -lV (singular) -gi(l)i (plural)
*tahala layer tahagii layers
Gender 4: -rV
*lara intestines
Gender 5: -mV/-bV
*sìnmɛ̀ oil, fat

References

Carlson, Robert (1994) A Grammar of Suppyire. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Garber, Anne (1987) A Tonal Analysis of Senufo: Sucite dialect (Gur; Burkina Faso). PhD dissertation, Urbana: University of Illinois / Ann Arbor: UMI.