Jagham language
| Ekoi | |
|---|---|
| Ejagham | |
| Native to | Nigeria, Cameroon |
| Ethnicity | Ekoi people |
Native speakers | 120,000 (2000)[1] |
| Dialects |
|
| Latin script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
etu |
| Glottolog |
ejag1239[2] |
The Jagham language, Ejagham, also known as Ekoi, is an Ekoid language of Nigeria and Cameroon.
The Ekoi are one of several peoples who use nsibidi ideographs, and may be the ones that created them.
Dialects
Ekoi is dialectally diverse. The dialects of Ejagham are divided into Western and Eastern groups:
- Western varieties include Bendeghe, Northern and Southern Etung, Ekwe and Akamkpa-Ejagham;
- Eastern varieties include Keaka and Obang.[3]
Morphology
Ekoi has the following noun classes, listed here with their Bantu equivalents. Watters (1981) says there are fewer than in Bantu because of mergers (class 4 into 3, 7 into 6, etc.), though Blench notes that there is no reason to think that the common ancestral language had as many noun classes as proto-Bantu.
| Noun class | Prefix | Concord |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | N- | w, ɲ |
| 2 | a- | b |
| 3 | N- | m |
| 5 | ɛ- | j |
| 6 | a- | m |
| 8 | bi- | b |
| 9 | N- | j, ɲ |
| 14 | ɔ- | b |
| 19 | i- | f |
('N' stands for a homorganic nasal. 'j' is "y".)
References
- ↑ Ekoi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Ejagham". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- ↑ Blench, Roger. "Ekoid: Bantoid languages of the Nigeria-Cameroun borderland" (PDF). p. 1.
External links
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