Mvanip (Mvano), or Magu, is a minor

Mambiloid language The twelve Mambiloid languages are languages spoken by the Mambila and related peoples mostly in eastern Nigeria and in Cameroon. In Nigeria the largest group is Mambila (there is also a small Mambila population in Cameroon). In Cameroon the l ...

Nigeria Nigeria, 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 Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...

. Despite the small number of speakers, language use is vigorous. ''Ethnologue'' classifies Mvanip as threatened.

General information

As of 1964, Mvanip had 800 speakers in and around the town of Zongo Ajiya, which is located on the

Mambila Plateau The Mambilla Plateau is a plateau in the Taraba State of Nigeria. The Mambilla Plateau has an average elevation of about above sea level, making it the highest plateau in Nigeria. Some of its villages are situated on hills that are at least abov ...

. By 1999, however, the language was only spoken by about 100 speakers. Despite this, all of the children of Mvanip speakers still speak the language, meaning that it is still alive.

Fulfulde Fula ( ),Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student's Handbook'', Edinburgh also known as Fulani ( ) or Fulah (, , ; Adlam: , , ; Ajami: , , ), is a Senegambian language spoken by around 36.8 million people as a set of various diale ...

Mambila The Mambilla or Mambila people of Nigeria live on the Mambilla Plateau (in Sardauna, Nigeria, 'Sardauna' local government area (formerly, Mambilla LGA) of Taraba State in Nigeria). A small fraction of Mambilla migrants left the Mambilla Plateau fo ...

, and Ndoro are also spoken in Zongo Ajiya.Blench, R. (2012). An atlas of Nigerian languages. Many confuse Mvanip with the Kaka language, which is spoken in the southeastern Nigeria and the adjacent areas in

Cameroon Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the R ...

. Despite the confusion, these two languages are unrelated. The most closely related language is Ndunda, which is also located on the Mambila Plateau. Some other languages Mvanip is related to are Fam, Nizaa, Kwanja,

Vute Vute is a Mambiloid language of Cameroon and Gabon, with a thousand speakers in Nigeria. The orthography was standardized on March 9, 1979. Noted dialect clusters are eastern, central, and Doume. Phonology Consonants Consonants in Vute are ...

and Wawa, which all evolved from proto-Mambiloid.

Phonology

While not much information exists about the phonology of Mvanip itself, there is information about the phonology of its related languages. For example,

labialisation Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels invol ...

is used extensively in both Kwanja and Nizaa, two other Mambiloid Languages. Vowel merger in languages such as

suggest that Mvanip most likely also has less vowels than their common ancestor, proto-Mambiloid. It is unclear whether any vowels or consonants are

nasalised In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) is the production of a sound while the soft palate, velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal ...

in Mvanip, as some of its relatives have nasalised sounds and some do not. All Mambiloid languages seem to have very complex tonal systems. For example,

, Kwanja, Atta and Gembu Mambila all have a variety of level and glide tones that are incorporated into the speech. Mambiloid languages also have noun affix systems.

References

{{Northern Bantoid languages Mambiloid languages Languages of Nigeria