Preliminary documentation of Nsiteu as spoken by residents of Kouba, Bazou subdivision of Cameroon

Language	Nsiteu (aka Kwa’)
Depositor	Jeff Good; Pierpaolo Di Carlo; Zo’o, Dany Gilbert Essam
Affiliation	KPAAM-CAM project, University of Yaounde 1
Location	Cameroon
Collection ID	0802
Grant ID	NSF ID BCS#1761639
Funding Body	U.S. National Science Foundation
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/45aa18ae-5386-4334-ac73-d236b383f495

 

Summary of the collection

English: This deposit is a preliminary documentation of Nsiteu (also known as Kwa’) as spoken in the village of Kouba, in western Cameroon, where it is moribund. The deposited data encompasses recordings of elicitation sessions and sociolinguistic interviews with the speakers. Despite the limited scope of the collection, it was decided to make this deposit accessible due to the potential uniqueness of the materials given that a majority of the semi-speakers of Nsiteu were already quite old at the time of recording. The project was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (BCS#1761639).

Français: Cette collection constitue une documentation préliminaire du nsiteu (également connu sous le nom de kwa’) tel qu’il est parlé dans le village de Kouba, à l’ouest du Cameroun, où il est moribond. Les données déposées comprennent des enregistrements de séances d’élicitation linguistique et d’entretiens sociolinguistiques avec les locuteurs. Malgré la portée limitée de la collection, il a été décidé de rendre cette collection accessible en raison du caractère potentiellement unique de ses matériaux. La majorité des semi-locuteurs du nsiteu enregistrés ici étaient déjà âgés au moment des enregistrements. Le projet a été financé par la National Science Foundation des États-Unis (BCS#1761639).

 

Group represented

This deposit includes materials meant to lay the foundations for the documentation of the variety of Nsiteu spoken in the area of the village of Kouba, in the West Region of Cameroon, Bazou subdivision. During the civil war known as the “Maquis”, “Maquisard”, or “Bamileke war” between around 1955 and 1971, several rebel groups established their strongholds in this as well as in neighboring rural or forested areas. As a consequence, these areas were heavily targeted by the national army and local populations have fled the conflict and sought refuge elsewhere. There are perhaps no more than twenty remaining speakers of Nsiteu in the Bazou subdivision. They cannot be considered an ethnic group nor remnants of an earlier ethnic group—the very concept of ethnic group is problematic throughout the Cameroonian Grassfields at the very least. However, it can be inferred that they are the descendants of populations that occupied the area before the arrival of groups speaking languages that we may consider as earlier forms of Nda’nda’ [ISO 639-3 nnz, Glottocode ndan1241].

I would like to thank the Key Pluridisciplinary Advances on African Multilingualism – Cameroon (KPAAM-CAM) under the U.S. National Science Foundation Grant BCS#1761639 for its generous financial support to carry out this research, and my supervisors prof. Gratien Atindogbe and prof. Florence Tabe for their patience and support. I want to deeply thank the King of Bazou, His Highness Tchoua Vincent for having graciously received me into his kingdom and Mr. Mi-Carême and Mr Tchoumi Bruno for being exceptionally supportive guides in Kouba. Finally, my thanks go to all of my consultants in Kouba.

 

Language information

Based on the still relatively limited evidence available, Nsiteu is classified as an Eastern Grassfields, Grassfields Bantu, Bamileke language. It is similar to Southern Nda’nda’ [ISO 639-3 nnz] and Medʉmbɑ [byv], though it is a distinct language from either (Taffre Douanla 2021, Ojong Diba, Faytak, and Di Carlo 2024).

As of now, varieties of Nsiteu are found in the Bazou subdivision and in the adjacent Nord-Makombe subdivision of the Littoral Region. Before 1955, Nsiteu was reportedly thriving throughout this geographically and ecologically diverse area. Nowadays, there are only few semi-speakers left in the Bazou subdivision and the language is not used except for interactions between a handful of elderly speakers. By contrast, in the Nord-Makombe subdivision, local varieties of the language are used on a daily basis by a total population ranging between 500 and 1,000 speakers. The language is also spoken by an unknown number of diaspora members living in cities like Yaounde and Douala.

Nsiteu is the language name that a good number of local speakers prefer over the otherwise more commonly used name “Kwa’ “, popularized by foreign institutions like CABTAL (Cameroon Association for Bible Translation And Literacy). In several of the surrounding Bamileke languages, there is a word nkwà meaning “slave” or “back” which is used to refer to people living in relatively remote rural areas, like Kouba. While it is unlikely that this term is etymologically linked to the language name Kwa’ (phonetically [kwaʔ]), many speakers connect the two terms and report that “Kwa’ ” feels like an offensive way to refer to their language, which is why they prefer to use the name Nsiteu. However, not all speakers of this language use the name Nsiteu, which makes it difficult to propose a single name for the language at present.

 

Special characteristics

The main special feature of this collection is that it provides significant information about the sociolinguistic life of each of the speakers who were recorded speaking Nsiteu. Given the fact that, at least in Kouba, Nsiteu is moribund and the time available was limited, the researcher was unable to record naturalistic interactions. At the time of creation of this collection (2020), the recordings contained in it were the only multimedia files existing in Nsiteu (we lack information on the data discussed in Sandeu 2020).

This deposit is the result of the initial phases of research towards a a Master’s Degree in Linguistics at the University of Yaounde 1.

 

Collection contents

In its current version, this collection contains over 40 hours of recorded wordlist elicitation sessions, carried out on the basis of the 1,700-item wordlist developed by James Roberts and Keith Snider also known as the “SIL comparative African wordlist (SILCAWL)”. These recordings have yet to be annotated.

The collection also contains recorded interviews where each of the people participating as linguistic consultants provided basic information in response to the questions of the KPAAM-CAM Sociolinguistic Interview Guide (SLIG). This is a type of interview guide that the KPAAM-CAM project has continuously developed in order to capture information that is relevant to understand the patterns of multilingualism of speakers in rural areas of Cameroon characterized by the persistence of pre-colonial traditions of small-scale multilingualism (Di Carlo 2023).

The collection also contains recordings of a few interviews and focus group sessions aiming to gather historiographical and ethnographic information about the Nsiteu speaker community before the Maquis period.

 

Collection history

The project from which this deposit originated was supported through funds from the U.S. NSF grant BCS#1761639 (under the aegis of the KPAAM-CAM project).

Data collection took place in Kouba and surrounding villages in the Bazou Subdivision, Ndé Division, West Region of Cameroon in the month of July 2020. While the extent of the data collected was limited, it was decided to make these materials accessible due to their potential uniquenesssince a majority of the semi-speakers of Nsiteu that have been recorded were already quite old at the time of recording.

 

References

Di Carlo, Pierpaolo. 2023. Reappraising survey tools in the study of multilingualism: Lessons from contexts of small-scale multilingualism. Journal of Language Contact 15.2: 376-403.

Douanla Taffre, Angèle. 2021. Etude comparative du point de vue lexicostatistique et morphologique des dialectes du nda’nda’. MA thesis, University of Yaoundé 1.

Ojong Diba, Rachel A., Matt Faytak & Pierpaolo Di Carlo. 2024. Factors in language loss and maintenance: a case study of Nsiteu. Paper presented at the 55th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL), McGill University (3 May 2024).

Sandeu, C. T. (2020). De la standardisation du kwáʔ: d’une esquisse morphologique à l’orthographe. MA Thesis, U. Yaoundé.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

Users of any part of this collection should acknowledge Essam Zo’o Dany Gilbert as the principal investigator and the U.S. National Science Foundation as the funder of this project. Pierpaolo Di Carlo and Jeff Good are the first and second Deputy Collectors.

The participants who provided in-depth data should be acknowledged by name.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Zo’o, Essam Dany Gilbert. 2024. Preliminary documentation of Nsiteu as spoken by residents of Kouba, Bazou Subdivision of Cameroon. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/3b45390e-737a-4dea-a688-e597e85479e1. Accessed on [insert date here].