Northern Mao is an endangered Afroasiatic-Omotic language of western Ethiopia with fewer than 5,000 speakers. This study is a comprehensive grammar of the language, written from a functional/typological perspective which embraces historical change as an explanation for synchronic structure. The grammar introduces the Northern Mao people, aspects of their culture and history, and the major aspects of the language: contrastive phonology, tone phenomena, nouns, pronouns, demonstratives, numerals, noun phrases, verbs and verbal morphology, single verb constructions, non-final/medial clauses, subordinate clauses and alignment. The tone system has three contrastive levels, where the Mid tones subdivide into two classes which historically derive from two different sources. Nouns each exhibit two tonal melodies: one melody in citation form or other unmodified environments and another melody when syntactically modified. Extensive coverage is given to developments in the pronominal and subject-marking systems as well as the verbal system. In the pronominal and subject marking systems, innovations include the development of a dual opposition, the fusion of an affirmative verbal prefix to subject prefixes, and the development of these subject prefixes into new pronouns. In the verbal system, innovations include the development of new verbal wordforms from subordinate + final verb periphrastic constructions and a set of new subject markers from an old subordinator morpheme. The verbal system is oriented around two oppositional relations: realis vs. irrealis and finite vs. infinitive verb forms. Realis and irrealis verbs have distinct item-arrangement patterns: realis verbs take subject prefixes while irrealis verbs take subject suffixes. Realis is associated with affirmative polarity and non-future tense and may be used with many aspectual distinctions. Irrealis is associated with negative polarity, future tense, and counterfactual constructions; irrealis verbs do not express many aspectual distinctions. Finite versus infinitive verb stems are differentiated by tone. Finite verb stems are used in affirmative declarative and interrogative utterances, non-final/medial constructions and the more finite subordinate clause structures. Infinitive verb stems are used in negative declarative and interrogative utterances, non-final/medial constructions and the less finite subordinate clause structures. The work concludes with a summary of cross-constructional alignment patterns and evaluates the efficacy of a marked-nominative analysis.

This thesis describes basic grammatical features and lexicon of Matal, a Chadic language spoken by around 18 000 people in northern Cameroon. A translation of the New Testament is used as a parallel text for the purposes of this study. The identified language structures are compared with other Chadic languages. The results show that Matal is overall typical for the language family, except for the pronominal system, which lacks a clusivity distinction. Nouns and adjectives have a limited morphology, only expressing number as a grammatical category, whereas verbs have many categories that are expressed morphologically, by prefixation and suffixation. For finite verb forms, subject prefixes are obligatory. Tense is expressed either by altered tone in the stem vowel or morphologically. Several verbal suffixes with number and person variants have been identified, although their functions have not been entirely clarified. A system of complex adpositions that make extensive use of grammaticalized body concepts has also been inquired, within which the phenomenon of preposition agreement has been identified. Basic syntactic features, such as word order, negation and topicalization are also addressed. The analysis of the lexicon demonstrates that the basic vocabulary is mainly inherited from earlier stages of the language, but a large number of lexical loans in various semantic domains have also entered Matal. / Denna uppsats beskriver grundläggande grammatiska drag och ordförråd i Matal, ett tchadspråk som talas av omkring 18 000 personer i norra Kamerun. En översättning av Nya Testamentet används som parallelltext i denna studie. Identifierade språkliga strukturer jämförs med andra tchadspråk. Resultaten visar att Matal är på det stora hela typiskt för språkfamiljen, med undantag för det pronominella systemet, som inte uppvisar någon skillnad i klusivitet. Substantiv och adjektiv har en begränsad morfologi som endast uttrycker numerus som grammatisk kategori, medan verb har ett stort antal kategorier som uttrycks morfologiskt. Dessa har formen av affix som fogas både före och efterstammen. I finita verbformer är subjektprefix obligatoriska. Tempus kan uttryckas antingen genom ändrad ton i stamvokalen eller morfologiskt. Ett antal verbsuffix med varianter för numerus och person har identifierats, dock har deras funktion inte klarlagts helt. Ett system med komplexa adpositioner som i stor utsträckning använder sig av grammatikaliserade kroppsdelstermer har också undersökts, inom vilket fenomenet av prepositionskongruens i vissa komplexa adpositioner har påvisats. Grundläggande syntaktiska drag som ordföljd, negation och topikalisering tas också upp. Analysen av Matals lexikon visar att det grundläggande ordförrådet är företrädesvis nedärvt från tidigare språkstadier, men också att ett stort antal lånord i olika semantiska domäner har kommit in i språket.