Lower Fungom speech varieties from an individual-based perspective

Language	Naki, Ajumbu, Fang, Koshin, Mungbam, Mufu-Mundabli, Buu
Depositor	Jeff Good, Nelson C. Tschonghongei, Pierpaolo Di Carlo
Affiliation	University at Buffalo
Location	Cameroon
Collection ID	0787
Grant ID	NSF BCS-1761639
Funding Body	United States National Science Foundation
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/309e166f-695b-4f34-9422-e8671e41ebae

 

Podcast

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

 

Summary of the collection

This collection contains recordings that document the speech varieties of the villages of the Lower Fungom region of Northwest Cameroon. They have been collected specifically to document variation at the individual level with parallel data collected from multiple speakers of the same variety. For each speaker, detailed sociolinguistic information was also collected, in particular regarding their multilingual repertoires.

 

Group represented

The focus of this collection are the speech varieties of groups associated with the Lower Fungom region of Cameroon. From a linguistic perspective this includes speakers of languages classified within the Yemne-Kimbi group, namely Ajumbu, Fang, Koshin, Mungbam, Mufu-Mundabli, and Buu, as well as speakers of the Mashi variety of Naki and the Central Ring language Kung. From a sociopolitical perspective, this region consists of thirteen villages, each of which is associated with its own speech variety. Five of these varieties are languages associated with a single village, namely Ajumbu, Fang, Koshin, Kung, and Buu. Five villages, Abar, Biya, Missong, Munken, and Ngun, are associated with distinct, but closely related, varieties that are grouped together under the label Mungbam in scholarly sources, though this name is not recognized by inhabitants of the region. The villages of Mufu and Mundabli speak closely related varieties, referred to as Mufu-Mundabli here. The village of Mashi speaks a variety of the Naki. All of these groups have been in close contact within Lower Fungom.

Lower Fungom is located in an area that has been heavily affected by the armed conflict between Ambazonian separatists and the Cameroon army (see Pommerolle & Heungoup 2017 for a general view of this political crisis). As a consequence, many language community members are currently displaced in other areas Cameroon, mainly in the West and in the Littoral Regions. The majority of the recordings in this collection were collected by individuals displaced from Lower Fungom due to this conflict.

 

Language information

Further information on the languages and communities of this region can be found in Good et al. (2011) and Di Carlo (2011). The groups of focus of this collection are defined primarily in linguistic terms. As discussed above, languages covered within this collection include those of the referential Yemne-Kimbi group, namely Ajumbu, Fang, Koshin, Mungbam, Mufu-Mundabli, and Buu, as well as the Mashi variety of Naki and the Central Ring language Kung.

Since each village of Lower Fungom is associated with a distinct linguistic variety, linguistic groups overlap with sociopolitical groups. At the same time, individuals have traditionally been highly multilingual within Lower Fungom. So, an individual may have had affiliations with multiple linguistic and sociopolitical groups.

 

Special characteristics

This collection is distinctive for focusing on individual-level variation within a speech variety and across the varieties within a small linguistic area. In addition to collecting detailed sociolinguistic data, parallel data was collected from a large number of individuals as a means of understanding the extent and nature of linguistic variation within a context charactered by small-scale multilingualism. All of the materials were collected by a single linguist to help control one aspect of the data. To the best of our knowledge, this collection is unique in the context of language documentation for its focus on individual-level variation and the extent of the sociolinguistic data collected on each speaker.

 

Collection contents

The materials in this collection were collected as part of the KPAAM-CAM project (http://kpaam-cam.org). The collection consists primarily of audio recordings, with additional supporting documents in some cases. These recordings are mostly of sociolinguistic interviews and elicited speech to gather lexical and grammatical data.

 

Collection history

The data collection has taken place over a number of years, having begun in 2018. It is still continuing, and the current form of the collection represents an initial deposit of the materials. Much of the material has been transcribed in notebooks, but these are not yet fully available for archiving. Some of the lexical data has been transcribed and further processed and is available at https://github.com/kpaam-cam/lowerfungom-wordlists.

 

Other Information

Charles Nyoh Abang played a critical role in the data management for this collection. The work underlying this collection has been supported by various grants from the United National Science Foundation, including Award Nos. BCS-1761639 and BCS-2109620.

 

References

Di Carlo, Pierpaolo. 2011. Lower Fungom linguistic diversity and its historical development: Proposals from a multidisciplinary perspective. Africana Linguistica 17: 39-86. https://doi.org/10.3406/aflin.2011.994.

Good, Jeff, Jesse Lovegren, Jean Patrick Mve, Nganguep Carine Tchiemouo, Rebecca Voll & Pierpaolo Di Carlo. 2011. The languages of the Lower Fungom region of Cameroon: Grammatical overview. Africana Linguistica 17. 101–164. https://doi.org/10.3406/aflin.2011.995

Pommerolle, Marie-Emmanuelle & Hans De Marie Heungoup. 2017. The “Anglophone crisis”: A tale of the Cameroonian postcolony. African Affairs 116. 526–538. https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adx021

 

Acknowledgement and citation

Charles Nyoh Abang played a critical role in the data management for this collection.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Tschonghongei, Nelson C. 2024. Lower Fungom speech varieties from an individual-based perspective. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/f2bc0741-b5d2-4d5f-9071-1ab9cf109a94. Accessed on [insert date here].