Jagham language

Ekoi
Ejagham
Native to Nigeria, Cameroon
Ethnicity Ekoi people
Native speakers
120,000 (2000)[1]
Dialects
  • Bendeghe
  • Northern Etung
  • Southern Etung
  • Ekwe
  • Akamkpa-Ejagham
  • Keaka
  • Obang
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:

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 classPrefixConcord
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

  1. Ekoi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Ejagham". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. Blench, Roger. "Ekoid: Bantoid languages of the Nigeria-Cameroun borderland" (PDF). p. 1.


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