| Fali | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in | Cameroon |
| Region | North |
| Ethnicity | Fali |
| Native speakers | unknown (36,000 cited 1982) |
| Language family | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | either: fal – South Fali fll – North Fali |
Fali is a language, or perhaps a pair of languages, of northern Cameroon. Included in Greenberg's Adamawa languages (as group G11), it was excluded from that family by Boyd (1989). Roger Blench suspects it may represent one of the earlier lineages to have branched off the Atlantic–Congo stock.
According to Ethnologue 15, the two varieties of Fali are "different," but it is not clear how distinct they are. Blench treats them as a single language. South Fali has 20,000 speakers, with several dialects. North Fali, with 16,000 speakers, also has several dialects; North Fali speakers were "rapidly" shifting to Adamawa Fulfulde by 1982.