Daatsʼiin was first reported in 2013 and described by Colleen Ahland in 2014. Ahland has described it further in 2016. A comparative word list of Daatsʼiin, Northern Gumuz, and Southern Gumuz is available in Ahland & Kelly (2014).[3]
Of the other B'aga languages, Daatsʼíin has the greatest lexical similarity to Southern Gumuz, but the two groups communicate in Arabic or Amharic.[4]
The palatal stops /c/, /ɟ/, /cʼ/ can be also realized as palatalized velar stops [kʲ], [gʲ], [kʲʼ] in free variation.
[v] and [ʒ] are rare, both recorded only from one word so far. The former appears to be phonemic, but the latter might be an allophone of /z/.
The voiced pharyngeal fricative[ʕ] only occurs when following /l/ or /r/ and preceding /a/, and it can be analyzed as an allophone of the glottal stop /ʔ/.
Ahland analyzes [i], [e], [a], [o], [u] as phonemically long, and [ɨ], [wɨ], [ə] as phonemically short /i/, /u/, /a/ respectively.
Daatsʼíin is also a tonal language: vowels can bear high and low tone. Some examples of downstep occur.
Grammar
Daatsʼíin has several grammatical differences from other Gumuz languages. Verbs inflect for aspect (perfective–imperfective) rather than for tense (future–non-future). Verbs are polysynthetic in all languages, but the order of the morphemes differs in Daatsʼiin, and some morphemes that occur in one language do not occur in the other(s).[4] "The major constituent order in Daatsʼíin clauses tend to be AVO/SV."[7]
Ahland, Colleen (2016). "Daatsʼíin, a newly identified undocumented language of western Ethiopia: A preliminary examination". In Payne, Doris L.; Pacchiarotti, Sara; Bosire, Mokaya (eds.). Diversity in African languages. Berlin: Language Science Press. pp. 417–449.
