Babungo (language)

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Babungo (Vengo)

Spoken in

Cameroon
speaker 14000
Linguistic
classification
  • Niger-Congo
    Atlantic-Congo
    Volta-Congo
    Benue-Congo
    Bantoid
    Southern
    Wide grassfields
    Narrow Grassfields
    ring
    North
    Babungo
Official status
Official language in no country (the official languages ​​in Cameroon are French and English )
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

bnt

ISO 639-3

bav

Babungo is a language spoken by members of the " Babungo " tribe , who come from the homonymous village of " Babungo " in the Cameroon grasslands.

It is a grassland language within the Benue-Congo family of languages. The spelling Bamungo is also often found .

The members of the Babungo tribe refer to their village as vengo [vəŋóo] and their language as ghang vengo [gháŋ vəŋóo], i. H. "Language of vengo ". For this reason, the Babungo language is officially listed under the terms " Vengo " or " Vengoo ". Other alternative names for the Babungo language are: Vengi, Pengo, Ngo, Nguu, Ngwa, Nge.

Babungo is spoken by only about 14,000 people. Because the members of the Babungo tribe live very close together and focus more or less only on the village of Babungo, only the smallest dialect variants have developed that are hardly worth mentioning.

Like all other bantoid languages (except Swahili ), the Babungo language uses different pitches, which, similar to Chinese, have different meanings. The language has an extremely complex tone system: There are eight different pitches or pitch sequences for the vowels: high, medium, low, high-medium, high-low, low-falling, low-high, low-high-medium.

Babungo is no longer spoken by more and more people who originally come from the Babungo people. Most of the time, these people adopt English as their mother tongue if they stay mainly in the Anglophone Northwest of Cameroon, otherwise French if they orientate themselves in Francophone Cameroon. Most people in western Cameroon also speak Cameroonian Pidgin English anyway . Since more and more people are distancing themselves from the very traditional Babungo way of life and there are not inconsiderable socio-cultural problems in their region, Babungo is likely to be one of the languages ​​threatened with extinction in the not too distant future.

literature

  • Willi Schaub: Babungo . Croom Helm Descriptive Grammars. Croom Helm Ltd., Beckenham, Kent, UK 1985, ISBN 0-7099-3352-5 .

Web links