Mboteni language

Mboteni or Baga Pokur is an endangered Rio Nunez language spoken in the coastal Rio Nunez region of Guinea. Speakers who have gone to school or work outside their villages are bilingual in Pokur and the Mande language Susu.[3]

Mboteni
Baga Pokur
Native toGuinea
Regioncoastal villages of Binari and Mboteni
Ethnicity3000 (no date)
Native speakers
< 100[1]
Dialects
  • Baga Mboteni
  • Baga Binari
Unwritten
Language codes
ISO 639-3bcg
Glottologbaga1275[2]

Pokur has lost the noun-class concord found in its relatives.[4]

Geographical distribution

According to Fields (2008:33-34), Mboteni is spoken exclusively in the two villages of Mboteni and Binari on a peninsula south of the mouth of the Nunez River. Mboteni speakers are surrounded by Sitem speakers.[1][5]

Classification

As one of the two Rio Nunez languages of Guinea, its closest relative is Mbulungish.[6]

Despite the name, Baga Mboteni is not one of the Baga languages, though speakers are ethnically Baga. The language is instead most closely related to Nalu and Mbulungish, though it shares a low percentage of cognate vocabulary with them.[3]

References
  1. Fields-Black, Edda L. 2008. Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. (Blacks in the Diaspora.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Baga Mboteni-Binari". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. Fields, E. L. (2004). Before" Baga": Settlement Chronologies of the Coastal Rio Nunez Region, Earliest Times to C. 1000 CE. International Journal of African Historical Studies, 229-253.
  4. Wilson, W. A. A. (1961). Numeration in the Languages of Guiné. Africa, 31(04), 372-377.
  5. "Guinea". Ethnologue, 22nd edition. Retrieved 2019-09-25.
  6. Güldemann, Tom (2018). "Historical linguistics and genealogical language classification in Africa". In Güldemann, Tom (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of Africa. The World of Linguistics series. 11. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 58–444. doi:10.1515/9783110421668-002. ISBN 978-3-11-042606-9.

Further reading
  • Baga Mboteni Profile (PDF), Go West Africa, 2009, retrieved February 12, 2015
  • Fields-Black, E. L. (2008). Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
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