Northwest Gbaya language
| Northwest Gbaya | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Cameroon, Central African Republic |
Native speakers |
unknown (65,000 in Cameroon cited 1980)[1] 200,000 in CAR (1996), 2,000 in Congo (1993) |
| Dialects |
Kàrà
Làì
(3rd variety)
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
gya |
| Glottolog |
nort2775[2] |
Northwest Gbaya is a Gbaya language spoken across a broad expanse of Cameroon and the Central African Republic. The principal variety is Kara (Kàrà, Gbaya Kara), a name shared with several neighboring languages; Lay (Làì) is restricted to a small area north of Mbodomo, with a third between it and Toongo that is not named in Moñino (2010), but is influenced by the Gbaya languages to the south.
For male initiation rites, the Gbaya Kara use a language called La'bi.
References
- ↑ Northwest Gbaya at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Northwest Gbaya". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.