Laal

Project Statistics

  • Sessions: 142
  • Audio recordings: 427
  • Video recordings: 67
  • Annotations: 48
  • Images: 66

Last update: 2017-6-18

Laal is a poorly described language, traditionally spoken by an estimated 750 people in two (monoethnic) villages on the Chari river banks, at the border between the Chari-Baguirmi and Moyen-Chari prefectures of Southern Chad. Gori (lá in Laal) sits on the right bank of the Chari river and numbers about 390 inhabitants; it is the original Laal village, and all the Laal speakers are commonly called “Gori” by all other ethnolinguistic groups. Damtar (ɓuāl in Laal), located on the left bank of the river a few kilometers down the river, was settled about a century ago by one family from Gori, and numbers about 150 inhabitants. Many speakers can also be found in town (mainly Bousso, Sarh, and N’Djaména).