Documentary materials on the Kung language collected as part of the KPAAM-CAM project

Language	Kung
Depositor	Jeff Good, Tatang Joyce Yasho, Pierpaolo Di Carlo
Affiliation	University at Buffalo
Location	Cameroon
Collection ID	0773
Grant ID	NSF ID BCS-1360763
Funding Body	National Science Foundation
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/11d5b888-17a1-47fb-a7d1-efd8750a5f25

 

Podcast

https://fieldnotespod.com/ep-13-jeff-good-on-facilitating-language-documentation-in-cameroon/

 

Summary of the collection

This is the first collection of audio recordings in the Kung language, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken by fewer than 3,000 people scattered across several regions of Cameroon due to the ongoing conflict in anglophone areas as of 2023. It includes sessions of linguistic elicitation of a 200-item wordlist and both sociolinguistic and ethnographic interviews. This deposit is meant to provide the bases for further work towards a sociolinguistic language documentation of Kung. The research from which this collection originated was carried out in 2016 and funded by the KPAAM-CAM project through a U.S. NSF grant (BCS #1360763).

 

Group represented

The group represented in this deposit are the speakers of the Kung [kfl; kung1260] language. Kung is the name of both a village-chiefdom located at the northern edge of the Cameroonian Grassfields and the language associated with it. While group self-awareness is clearly present among the Kung, the fact that many Kung people are in fact fully proficient in other local languages and have both family and distinct personal names in other village-chiefdoms of the area associated with languages other than Kung makes it relatively arbitrary to use a label such as “ethnic group” to identify “the Kung people” as if they were a uniform group. This is a recurrent feature across the Grassfields, especially in smaller chiefdoms like Kung.

Data about the Kung community are found mostly in British colonial reports (cited below) and Di Carlo (2011). According to oral traditions, the founders of present-day Kung originally came from Mawas, in the vicinity of Oku (Bui Division, some 40 km to the south east of Kung). Oral histories collected in the villages of Fungom and Bum all agree and report that the ancestors to the Kung were living some 15 to 20 kilometers to the S-SE of where the present village is located, in a place called Tikum (Smith 1929:parr.34,37) or Chikon (Pollock 1927:par.24). At the beginning of the 19th century, frequent raids and pressure from the south pushed the ancestors of the Kung northward and oral traditions converge in saying that they occupied, perhaps for no more than one generation, the hilltop where the village-chiefdom of Fungom is now located (see Smith 1929: parr.40-41 and Chilver & Kaberry 1967:90-91).

This picture is corroborated by linguistic evidence: Kung has been classified with the Central Ring languages found to the south, which include Mmen [bfm] and Oku [oku].

From this perspective, it is interesting to note that such clear status as an immigrant to the area where it is currently located (i.e. Lower Fungom) is also reflected in sociocultural terms: Kung society is in fact one of the most divergent from the so-called “Lower Fungom Canon”, noticeably the only matrilineal society in a context of patrilineal societies (Di Carlo 2011:70-80).

At present, Kung is located in an area that has been heavily affected by the armed conflict between Ambazonian (anglophone) separatists and the Cameroon army (see Pommerolle & Heungoup 2017 for a general view of this political crisis). As a consequence, many Kung residents are currently displaced elsewhere in francophone areas of Cameroon, mainly in the West and in the Littoral Regions. While exact figures are lacking, it can be inferred that more than half of the Kung people are Internally Displaced Persons as of 2023.

 

Language information

Kung is spoken mostly by multilingual people who are also proficient in a number of other languages, both localized in the vicinity of Kung in the Lower Fungom area (e.g. Ajumbu [muc], Mmen [bfm], or Mungbam [mij]) and translocal languages (mainly Cameroon Pidgin English [wes], but also English [eng] and French [fra]). Until 2016 (i.e. the year before the political crisis escalated in Anglophone Cameroon), Kung was perhaps spoken by about 2,000 people, including both natives of Kung and second-language speakers. Many of these people left their area of origin due to the political and humanitarian crisis and are now dispersed in safer areas of Cameroon including towns like Bafoussam (West Region), Tiko (South West Region), and Souza (Littoral Region).

 

Special characteristics

This is one of the earliest attempts made by the KPAAM-CAM project aiming to design a project of sociolinguistic language documentation (Childs et al. 2014) that might be carried out by Cameroonian students in accordance with curricular requirements in a Cameroonian university. It is the first collection of publicly archived audio recordings of Kung and provides the basis for further documentary work on the language.

 

Collection contents

This is the collection of documentary materials produced by Tatang Joyce Yasho, a Master’s student in theoretical linguistics at the University of Buea at the time of collection (2016) who worked on the documentation of the Kung language with the support of the project “Key Pluridisciplinary Advances on African Multilingualism, Cameroon” (KPAAM-CAM). The collection contains audio recordings collected in both Kung and Wum, the nearest town where a number of Kung speakers resided at the time. All of the recordings were collected in either private or controlled environments and most of them feature one Kung speaker and the researcher. The collection includes recordings of three main genres:

-Sessions of linguistic elicitation (based on a 200-item wordlist selected from the SIL 1700 comparative African wordlist (Snider & Roberts 2006)

-Semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews with research participants, focused on he collection of data that would be useful to understand both local and individual multilingual patterns

-Conversations about Kung history and ethnography (mostly in Cameroon Pidgin English)

In its current version, the collection does not include annotations to the recordings. However, it includes Tatang’s Master’s thesis, which was developed on the basis of this collection and in which one can find phonological transcriptions of the words and sentences uttered by research participants.

 

Collection history

The project from which this collection originated was financed by a scholarship made available by the KPAAM-CAM project, an international research project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (BCS #1360763). The data collection took place in both Kung and Wum across three field trips spanning from April to September 2016.

 

References

Childs, Tucker, Jeff Good & Alice Mitchell. 2014. Beyond the ancestral code: Towards a model for sociolinguistic language documentation. Language Documentation & Conservation 8: 168–191. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24601.

Chilver, Elizabeth M. & Phyllis M. Kaberry. 1967. Traditional Bamenda. Buea: Government publisher.

Di Carlo, Pierpaolo. 2011. Lower Fungom linguistic diversity and its historical development: proposals from a multidisciplinary perspective. Africana Linguistica XVII: 39-86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/aflin.2011.994.

Pollock, J. 1927. An assessment report of the Bum area in the Bamenda Division, Cameroons Province. Unpublished Government file, Buea.

Pommerolle, Marie-Emmanuelle & Hans De Marie Heungoup. 2017. The ‘Anglophone crisis’: A tale of the Cameroonian postcolony. African Affairs 116(464). 526–538.

Smith, J. 1929. Fungom district assessment report. Unpublished Government file, Buea.

Snider, Keith & James Robert. 2006. SIL Comparative African wordlist (SILCAWL). URL: https://www.sil.org/system/files/reapdata/88/54/65/88546558467011236880873045745569794523/silewp2006_005.pdf (last accessed on November, 29 2023)

 

Acknowledgement and citation

Users of any part of this collection should acknowledge Tatang Joyce Yasho as the principal investigator and the U.S. National Science Foundation as the agency that funded this project. Uses of parts of the corpus should acknowledge by name the individuals appearing in the recordings whose words are used. The relevant information is available in the metadata.

The research from which this collection originated was made possible thanks to the collaboration of Pius W. Akumbu (Tatang’s thesis supervisor) and of the following Kung speakers: Mr. Kah Matthew, Mrs. Nalai Evelyn, Mrs. Tiang Theresia, Mr. Kai Pascal, Mr. Tem Abivah and Mr. Nji Isidore.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Yasho, Tatang Joyce. 2023. Documentary materials on the Kung language collected as part of the KPAAM-CAM project. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/482b9aae-6f5f-44a8-aded-d309f0b94508. Accessed on [insert date here].