We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Janika Kunzmann (GU). Title: Describing an Understudied Language of Northern Cameroon: Prominent Phonetic and Phonological Features of Mbum (Adamawa) Date: Wednesday, 07.12.2022 Time: 16-18 Location: in person on campus IG 4.301 (if necessary, we will stream the talk via Zoom) If you are registered in Olat you'll find the Zoom link there. If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
Describing an Understudied Language of Northern Cameroon: Prominent Phonetic and Phonological Features of Mbum (Adamawa)
Mbum is a Kebi-Benue language classified by Boyd (1989) to be part of the Adamawa family. Like many languages of this group, which is highly disputed in its internal classification (cf. Kleinewillinghöfer 2014), Mbum lacks a detailed phonological description. Given this descriptive gap, my research aims to provide a general overview of the phonological and tonological characteristics of Mbum, as it is spoken today in Ngaoundéré and Nganha (Adamawa region, northern Cameroon). In my talk, I present data from recent research (digitally via social media and on-site fieldwork) and findings of preliminary analyses. I discuss selected prominent phonetic and phonological features of the Adamawa language and point out peculiarities of the sound inventory and the tone system. Among these hitherto undocumented matters are e.g. grammatical tone, the assignment of tones to suffixes, [-ATR] vowels and their arrangement in harmonic patterns and the distinctiveness of vowel length.
References
Boyd, Raymond (1989): Adamawa-Ubangi. In Bendor-Samuel, John (ed.): The Niger-Congo Languages. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. 178–215.
Kleinewillinghöfer, Ulrich (2014, 04 February): Adamawa. Presented in the colloquium “Linguistisches Kolloquium” at Humboldt-University Berlin [PPT].