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 de ...
of Nigeria and Cameroon spoken by the
Ekoi people
Ekoi people, also known as Ejagham, are an ethnic group in south east 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 Etung pe ...
. 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 by the Ekpe secret society that traversed the southeastern part of Nigeria.
They are classified as pictograms, though there have been sugges ...
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:
* 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.
Phonology
Consonants
* Stop sounds /b, ɡ/ are lenited to fricatives
, ɣwhen in intervocalic positions.
* Velar sounds
, ɡ; (ɣ)can be heard as uvular
, (ʁ)when in syllable-final position.
Vowels
Writing system
A Jagham alphabet was developed by John R. Watters and Kathie Watters in 1981.
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. (2 ...
.
('N' stands for a
homorganic
In phonetics, a homorganic consonant (from Latin and ) 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 they share the bilabial place of ...
nasal. 'j' is "y".)
References
Works cited
*
External links
Ejagham basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
Ekoid languages
Languages of Nigeria
Languages of Cameroon
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