The Jagham language, ''Ejagham'', also known as Ekoi, is an

Ekoid language The Ekoid languages are a dialect cluster of Southern Bantoid languages spoken principally in southeastern Nigeria and in adjacent regions of Cameroon. They have long been associated with the Bantu languages, without their status being precisely ...

Nigeria Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of G ...

and

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; th ...

spoken by the

Ekoi people Ekoi people, also known as Ejagham, are an ethnic group in the extreme south of Nigeria and extending eastward into the southwest region of Cameroon. They speak the Ejagham language. Other Ekoi languages are spoken by related groups, including ...

. The E- in Ejagham represents the class prefix for "language", analogous to the Bantu ki- in KiSwahili The Ekoi are one of several peoples who use

Nsibidi Nsibidi (also known as nsibiri, nchibiddi or nchibiddy) is a system of symbols or proto-writing developed in what is now the far South of Nigeria. They are classified as pictograms, though there have been suggestions that some are logograms or sy ...

ideographs, and may be the ones that created them.

Writing System

A Jagham alphabet was developed by John R. Watters and Kathie Watters in 1981.

Dialects

Ekoi is dialectally diverse. The dialects of Ejagham are divided into Western and Eastern groups: * Western varieties include Bendeghe, Northern and Southern Etung, Ekwe and Akamkpa-Ejagham; * Eastern varieties include Keaka and Obang. Blench (2019) also lists Ekin as an Ejagham dialect.

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 Proto-Bantu is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Bantu languages, a subgroup of the Southern Bantoid languages. It is thought to have originally been spoken in West/Central Africa in the area of what is now Cameroon.Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. ( ...

. ('N' stands for a

homorganic In phonetics, a homorganic consonant (from ''homo-'' "same" and ''organ'' "(speech) organ") is a consonant sound that is articulated in the same place of articulation as another. For example, , and are homorganic consonants of one another since ...

nasal. 'j' is "y".)

References

External links

Ejagham basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
Ekoid languages Languages of Nigeria Languages of Cameroon {{SBantoid-lang-stub