The Majang language is spoken by the Majangirpeople of Ethiopia. Although it is a member of the Surmic language cluster, it is the most isolated one in the group. A language survey has shown that dialect variation from north to south is minor and does not seriously impede communication. The 2007 Ethiopian Census lists 6,433 speakers for Majang, but also reports that the ethnic group consists of 32,822 individuals. According to the census, almost no speakers can be found in Mezhenger Zone of Gambela Region; a total of eleven speakers are listed for the zone, but almost 10,000 ethnic Mejenger or Messengo people.
Phonology
Front
Central
Back
Close
i
u
Close-mid
e
o
Open-mid
ɛ
ɔ
Open
a
Vowel length is distinctive in Majang, so all vowels come in pairs of long and short, such as goopan 'punishment' and gopan 'road'. The vowel inventory is taken out of Joswig and Getachew. Unseth posed a 9-vowel system with a row of -ATR closed vowels ɪ and ʊ. Moges claims a tenth vowel ɐ, whereas Bender was only ready to confirm six vowels. All authors agree that there is no ATR vowel harmony in the language. Bender also claims that the glottal stop needs to be treated as a phoneme of Majang though Unseth refutes this. Majang has two implosives, bilabial and coronal, which Moges Yigezu has studied acoustically and distributionally.
Prosodic Features
Tones distinguish meaning in Majang, on both the word level and the grammatical level: táŋ 'cow', tàŋ 'abscess'. The tonal inventory consists of two tone levels, with falling and rising contour tones possible at the end of phonological words, plus automatic and non-automatic downstep.
Morphology
The language has markers to indicate three different past tenses and two future tenses. The language has a wide variety of suffixes, but almost no prefixes. Though its use is limited to a handful of roots, there are a few words that preserve vestiges of the archaic causative prefix i-, a prefix found in other Surmic languages and also Nilotic. The counting system is a modified vigesimal system, based on 5, 10, and 20. "Twenty" is 'one complete person', so 40 is 'two complete people', 100 is 'five complete people'. However, today, under the influence of schools and increased bilingualism, people generally use the Amharic or Oromo words for 100. The person and number marking system does not mark the inclusive and exclusive we distinction, a morphological category that is found in nearby and related languages.
Syntax
Majang has a basic VSO word order, though allowing some flexibility for focus, etc. The language makes extensive use of relative clauses, including for circumstances where English would use adjectives. A recent study states that Majang is characterized by a strong morphological ergative-absolutive system, and a conjoint-disjoint distinction which is based on the presence or absence of an absolutivenoun phrase directly following the verb. Many of these distinctions are coded by tonal differences. Majang, and some related Surmic languages, has been shown to be exceptional to some syntactic typological predictions for languages with Subject–verb–objectword order. Majang has postpositions and question words sentence-finally, two properties that had been predicted to not occur in languages with VSO word order.
