Eton, or Ìtón, is a
Bantu language spoken by the
Eton people of
Cameroon
Cameroon (; french: Cameroun, ff, Kamerun), officially the Republic of Cameroon (french: République du Cameroun, links=no), is a country in west-central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; the C ...
.
[Velde, Mark L. O. Van de. ''A Grammar of Eton'', p. 3]
It is mutually intelligible with
Ewondo, a fact which may have delayed its study for some time.
Eton speakers inhabit the
Lekié
Lekié is a department of Centre Province in Cameroon. The department covers an area of 2,989 km and had a total population of 354,864. The capital of the department lies at Monatélé.
It is named after the Lekié River.
Subdivisions
T ...
department of the
Centre Region of Cameroon, an area north of the capital
Yaoundé
Yaoundé (; , ) is the capital of Cameroon and, with a population of more than 2.8 million, the second-largest city in the country after the port city Douala. It lies in the Centre Region of the nation at an elevation of about 750 metres (2,50 ...
bounded in the north by the
Sanaga River
The Sanaga River (formerly german: Zannaga) is the largest river in Cameroon located in East Region, Centre Region and Littoral Region. Its length is about from the confluence of Djérem and Lom River. The total length of Sanaga-Djérem Rive ...
.
Ethnologue cites four dialects of Eton, but its speakers generally distinguish two, a northern and a southern dialect, the latter of which is closer to the Ewondo language.
The
Mengisa people have largely switched to Eton. A small number continue to speak their ancestral language,
Leti. It is not clear if the ISO code for "Mengisa" refers to Eton or Leti; ''Ethnologue'' classifies Mengisa with Eton, but the code is likely based on Guthrie, who classified it with Leti.
[
]
Phonology
Eton is a tone language
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
. It makes use of three tones (low, high and dissimilating high) and floating tones.
Grammar
Eton is an SVO language. As is common in Bantu, Eton has a noun class
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some a ...
system. There are twelve classes and the class of a noun determines which agreement prefix it receives and triggers. For instance, verbs agree with the subject's noun class.
References
*Velde, Mark L. O. Van de. ''A Grammar of Eton'', Mouton de Gruyter, 2008.
External links
*Velde, Mark L. O. Van de. (PDF
A Description of Eton: Phonology, morphology, basic syntax and lexicon
Available through the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven website.
*Materials on Eton are included in the open access Arthur Capell
Arthur Capell (28 March 1902 – 10 August 1986) was an Australian linguist, who made major contributions to the study of Australian languages, Austronesian languages and Papuan languages.
Early life
Capell was born in Newtown, New South Wales ...
collection
AC2
held by Paradisec
The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a cross-institutional project that supports work on endangered languages and cultures of the Pacific and the region around Australia. They digitise reel- ...
.
Beti languages
Languages of Cameroon
{{Bantu-lang-stub