A Grammatical Outline of Gùrdùŋ / Gùrùntùm (review)

Andrew Haruna’s description of the Nigerian West Chadic language Gùrùntùm is organized into the following chapters: Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–16); Ch. 2, ‘Phonology’ (17–32); Ch. 3, ‘The noun’ (33–67); Ch. 4, ‘The verb’ (68–98); Ch. 5, ‘Adverbs’ (99–103); Ch. 6, ‘Prepositions’ (104–9); Ch. 7, ‘Conjunctions’ (110–20); and Ch. 8, ‘The sentence’ (121–39). Subsections vary in degree of organization up to a rare depth of five, for example, 8.1.3.1.2, ‘Equational constructions without subjects’ (126). Most commonly, organization of subtopics does not exceed a depth of three, for example, 7.7.5, ‘Sai as an introducer of a nominal phrase’. As the title word ‘outline’ suggests, there is a limit to the detail with which any particular feature of Gùrùntùm is treated, but the organizational outline indicates that a great many topics are at least touched upon. Phrase and sentence length examples are included in all sections dealing with parts of speech, as well as in the syntactic chapter (Ch. 8). Paradigms are also common in the parts-of-speech chapters, which constitute the largest portion of the book (33–120).

H includes sections on the social context of Gùrùntùm in both the preface and the introduction. The introduction provides a description of some salient dialect distinctions. The preface is of special interest for how it illustrates the sociolinguistic position of Gùrùntùm at present. Here H describes himself as a ‘semi-speaker’ of the language (vi), probably meaning that he has a fluent understanding but less than ideal productive control of the language. Elsewhere he notes that all Gùrùntùm speakers are bilingual with Hausa, the lingua franca of Northern Nigeria, and that the ethnic language is receding. He makes clear that his description is based on the assistance of a great many fluent speakers, mainly of an older generation, including his late father. Given Gùrùntùm’s precarious sociolinguistic situation, it is fortunate that a linguist as intimately connected to the language as H is has recognized the need for a general description and was energized to do the research to bring it about. The work is well organized, contains a great deal of information on general grammatical aspects of Gùrùntùm, and establishes a useful point of departure for further studies, most of which, it can be anticipated, will be elaborations on issues already identified in the present work.