Duli (Gewe, Gueve, Gey) is an extinct

Adamawa language The Adamawa languages are a putative family of 80–90 languages scattered across the Adamawa Plateau in central Africa, in Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, and Chad, spoken altogether by only one and a half million people (as of ...

of northern

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 ...

. Blench (2004) links Duli to the extinct Gey (Gewe) language; ''

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute fo ...

'' states that Gey is undemonstrated as a distinct language. Duli and Gewe (Gey) were closely related language varieties, and were probably dialects of the same language according to Kleinewillinghöfer (2015). They were spoken around the confluence of the Benue and Mayo-Kebbi Rivers, and are documented by a word list in Strümpell (1922/23). Although Boyd (1989:184) had classified Duli as one of the

Duru languages The Duru languages are a group of Savanna languages spoken in northern Cameroon and eastern Nigeria. They were labeled "G4" in Joseph Greenberg's Adamawa language-family proposal. Kleinewillinghöfer (2012) also observes many morphological simil ...

, Kleinewillinghöfer finds no evidence of it being a Duru language and treats it as a separate group within the Adamawa–Gur continuum.Kleinewillinghöfer, Ulrich. 2015
Duli – Gewe (Gueve, Gey)
Adamawa Languages Project.

Distribution

Today, the Gey, who number about a 1,000 people in the east of

Pitoa Pitoa is a town and commune in Cameroon. See also *Communes of Cameroon The Arrondissements of Cameroon are the third-level units of administration in Cameroon. The arrondissements are organised by divisions and sub divisions of each province ...

(Pitoa commune,

Bénoué Bénoué is a department of North Province in Cameroon. The department covers an area of 13,614 km and as of 2005 had a total population of 1,781,955. The capital of the department lies at Garoua. Subdivisions The department is divided ad ...

department, North Region), according to the ORSTOM population map of 1964. SIL (1982) estimates the ethnic population as 1,900. The Gey now recognize the

Lamido Lamido (Adlam: , pl. Lamibe ) is the Anglicisation of a term from the Fula language or Fulfulde, used to refer to a ruler. In the language it is properly ''laamiiɗo'' (, pl. ''laamiiɓe'' ), derived from the verbal root ''laamu-'' meaning "leader ...

of Tchéboa as their ruler, and they currently speak only

Fulfulde Fula ,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh also known as Fulani or Fulah (, , ; Adlam: , , ), is a Senegambian language spoken by around 30 million people as a set of various dialects in a continuum that st ...

. Duli is spoken near

(Pitoa commune) and

Garoua Garoua or Garua (Fula: Garwa 𞤺𞤢𞤪𞤱𞤢) is a port city and the capital of the North Region of Cameroon, lying on the Benue River. A thriving centre of the textiles and cotton industries, the city has approximately 1,285,000 inhabita ...

(

department, North Region). Eldridge Mohammadou also notes that only a few Duli words had been collected. As a result, the language is essentially undocumented.

References

*Roger Blench, 2004
List of Adamawa languages
(ms) {{Languages of Cameroon Duru languages Languages of Nigeria Languages of Cameroon Extinct languages of Africa