A Reconstructive Historical Phonology of the North Central Chadic Languages of Nigeria: Towards a Proto-Language Description

This study advances a reconstructive historical phonological analysis of the North Central Chadic languages of Nigeria, with the goal of developing a partial proto-language phonological description that accounts for systematic correspondences documented across the language cluster. The North Central Chadic cluster, comprising languages spoken primarily in Borno, Yobe, and Gombe States, includes a number of poorly documented varieties whose genetic interrelationships and position within the broader Chadic sub-family remain contested in the Afro-Asianist literature. The research adopts the Comparative Method as its primary methodological framework, supplemented by internal reconstruction and mass comparison techniques drawn from the typological literature on Chadic. Primary data were collected during twelve months of fieldwork across seven North Central Chadic speech communities, using a modified Swadesh list of 207 items supplemented by a verb paradigm elicitation battery. The comparative phonological analysis identifies 34 regular correspondence sets among eight selected languages, from which 23 proto-phonemes are reconstructed with high confidence. The study documents a proto-language consonant inventory that challenges previous reconstructions, particularly in the treatment of the labio-velar and pharyngeal consonant series. The research makes an original theoretical contribution to Chadic historical phonology and provides the most systematic primary phonological dataset yet assembled for the North Central Chadic cluster. Keywords: historical phonology, Chadic languages, proto-language reconstruction, comparative method, North East Nigeria.