Mungbam
[aka Mijong, Missong, Abar]Classification: Niger-Congo
·threatened
Classification: Niger-Congo
·threatened
Mijong, Missong, Abar |
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Niger-Congo, Atlantic-Congo, Benue-Congo, Southern Bantoid |
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ISO 639-3 |
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mij |
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As csv |
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Information from: “What are we trying to preserve? Diversity, change, and ideology at the edge of the Cameroonian Grassfields” . Jeff Good and Pierpaolo DiCarlo (2012)
Due to traditional predominance of multilingualism, if we wanted to establish the number of total speakers of a given language of Lower Fungom, we would be obliged to consider the whole area and not confine ourselves to the village which gives the name to the language. This means that, at any given moment, the “speech community” associated with a particular language consists both of those resident in its associated village and of significant numbers of non-residents.
Lower Fungom region, Cameroon; villages of Abar, Munken, Ngun, Biya, and Missong.
Information from: “The languages of the Lower Fungom region of Cameroon: Grammatical overview” . Good, Jeff and Lovegren, Jesse and Mve, Patrick and Nguanguep, Carine and Voll, Rebecca and Dicarlo, Pierpaolo (2011)
Abar village: 650-850 speakers; Munken village: around 600 speakers; Ngun village: 150–200 speakers; Biya village: 50–100 speakes; Missong village: around 400 speakers. "It should also be noted that each of the villages... speaks an unambiguously distinct variety regardless of how one may group these varieties into languages"
"[Mungbam] comprises the varieties of the villages of Abar, Biya, Missong, Munken, and Ngun... Although these varieties are more or less mutually intelligible, speakers uniformly reject the notion that any of these five villages speak the same language. They further reject any notion of shared ethnicity with any of the other five villages. There is therefore no indigenous name for either the language or the people who speak it, and the name used in this paper has been coined for convenience. It is a quasi-acronym derived from the names of the five villages where it is spoken, specifically formed by the emphasized letters in the following list: Munken, Ngun, Biya, Abar, and Missong."
Information from: “Mungbam Grammar” (585) . Lovegren, Jesse (2013)
"All of the Mungbam varieties are spoken within their respective villages by all residents of all ages, and the language is being learned by children."
Pidgin English
"Mungbam is a name coined by the author to refer to the related lects spoken in the villages of MUnken, NGun, Biya, Abar and Missong, in Northwest Cameroon. Due to the differences between the lects, Mungbam would properly be referred to as a “dialect cluster” rather than as a “language” (Di Carlo and Pizziolo, 2012: 160), but the latter term will be retained for simplicity... Even though Munken, Ngun, Biya, Abar and Missong are treated in this dissertation as dialects of one language, people from the area where they are spoken would generally reject the idea that the people of say, Munken, speak the same language as the people of, say, Biya... Monolinguals... are generally not found in Lower Fungom, since most people have some familiarity with Pidgin English and may be capable of conversing in the other languages spoken in nearby villages. Contact between speakers of the five dialects is very frequent. A public primary school called Government School [GS] Abar-Missong is attended by mostly children of Abar, Missong, and Munken, placing them in daily contact. GS Bati enrolls many Biya and Ngun children."
"Mungbam is spoken in five villages in the Lower Fungom region of Cameroon, Northwest Region, Menchum Division, Wum Subdivision. The English names of the villages are Munken, Ngun, Biya, Abar and Missong. The Lower Fungom area... is host to at least seven different languages, five of which do not have close relatives outside of Lower Fungom... There are multiple footpaths connecting the five villages."