- Babungo language
language
name=Babungo (Vengo)
familycolor=Niger-Congo
states=Cameroon
region=West Africa /Central Africa
speakers=14,000
fam2=Atlantic-Congo
fam3=Volta-Congo
fam4=Benue-Congo
fam5=Bantoid
fam6=Southern
fam7=Wide Grassfields
fam8=Narrow Grassfields
fam9=Ring
fam10=North
iso2=bnt|iso3=bavBabungo is the language of the
Babungo people originating from a village also called "Babungo" located in theCameroon ian Grassfields. It is a Grassfields Bantu language within the Benue-Congo language family. The spelling Bamungo is also often found.In their own language, the Babungo people call their village "vengo" [vəŋóo] and their language "ghang vengo" [gháŋ vəŋóo] , which means "language of the "vengo"; this is why the Babungo language is officially also listed under the names "Vengo" or "Vengoo". Other terms for the Babungo language are: Vengi, Pengo, Ngo, Nguu, Ngwa, Nge.
Babungo is spoken by about 14,000 people. Because the Babungo people all live closely together and concentrate only in and around the Babungo village, there are only small dialectical variations in their speech, which are negligible.
As it is the case for all other Bantu languages (except Swahili), the Babungo language uses different tone pitches, which, similar to the Chinese language, form a distinctive feature for the meaning of the words. Babungo has even got a very complex tone system: So for the vowels there are eight distinctive pitch types or pitch sequences: high, mid, low, high-mid, high-low, low-falling, low-high, low-high-mid.
More and more people originally descending from the Babungo tribe are not able to speak the Babungo language any more. In most cases, those people acquire English as mother tongue, if they stay predominantly in the anglophone Northwest of Cameroon, otherwise French if they orient themselves towards the francophone parts of Cameroon. Most of the people in Western Cameroon speak
Cameroonian Pidgin English anyway. Because more and more Babungo people distance themselves from the traditional Babungo way of life, and since there are not insignificant socio-culturally caused problems in that region, Babungo may belong to the languages threatened by extinction in the not too far future.Bibliography
*Willi Schaub: "Babungo". Croom Helm Descriptive Grammars. Croom Helm Ltd., Beckenham, Kent, UK 1985, ISBN 0-7099-3352-5.
External links
* [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=bav Ethnologue report for Babungo]
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