Annotated Swadesh wordlists for the Ekoid group (Benue-Congo family).

Languages included: Western Ejagham (= Northern Etung) [eko-eja]; Nkem (= Nkim) [eko-nkm]; Abanyom [eko-abn]; Efutop [eko-efu]; Nde [eko-nde]; Nselle [eko-nse]; Nta [eko-nta]; Nkum [eko-nku]; Nnam [eko-nna]; Ekajuk [eko-eka]; Ekparabong [eko-ekp]; Balep [eko-bal].

DATA SOURCES

General.

Crabb 1965 = Crabb, David W. Ekoid Bantu Languages of Ogoja, Eastern Nigeria. Part I: Introduction, Phonology and Comparative Vocabulary. Cambridge University Press. // Brief comparative study of the phonology of 14 Ekoid Bantu languages, including Northern Etung (= Western Ejagham), Abanyom, Nkem, Efutop, Nde, Nselle, Nta, Nkum, Nnam, Ekajuk, and Ndoe (Ekparabong-Balep); accompanied by a detailed comparative vocabulary.

Yoder 2008 = Yoder, Zachariah; Hannelová, Katarína; Otronyi, Linus. A Summary of the Sociolinguistic Survey of the Bakor languages of Cross River State, Nigeria. SIL, 24 September 2008. // Web-document; Appendix A contains a large comparative wordlist of the "Bakor" languages of the Ekoid group, including Nkem, Abanyom, Efutop, Nde, Nselle, Nta, Nkum, Nnam, and Ekajuk.

I. Ejagham.

Main sources

Watters 1981 = Watters, John Robert. A Phonology and Morphology of Ejagham, with notes on dialect variation. Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics. Los Angeles: University of California. // Detailed description of the Northern sub-dialect of Western Ejagham; includes numerous examples of lexical data.

Additional sources

Watters 1980 = Watters, John Robert. The Ejagam noun class system: Ekoid Bantu revisited. In: Larry M. Hyman (ed.). Noun Classes in the Grassfields Bantu Borderland. Southern California Occasional Papers in Linguistics No. 8, pp. 99-137.

Watters 1983 = Watters, John Robert. The expression of the locative semantic function in (Western) Ejagham. Journal of West African Languages, XIII, 2, pp. 53-70.

Watters 2001 = Watters, John Robert. Some phonological characteristics of Ejagham (Etung), an Ekoid Bantu language of Cameroon and Nigeria. In: Harry van der Hulst, Norval Smith (eds.). Research mate in African linguistics: Focus on Cameroon. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, pp. 55-78.

II. Nkem.

Sibomana 1986 = Sibomana, Leo. An Outline of Nkem Language. Afrika und Übersee, 69, pp. 251-292. // A detailed grammatical description of the Nkem language; contains a large amount of illustrative lexical data.

NOTES

I. General.

There are currently very few Ekoid languages for which individual (and detailed) sources of data are available; most of the data have to be extracted from general survey literature, primarily [Crabb 1965] and [Yoder 2008]. There have been only two exceptions so far:

a) for Ejagham, the principal source of data has been defined as the series of works by J. R. Watters, rather than Crabb's monograph. However, for a few items on which the relevant data is missing in Watters' publications, data from Crabb's "Northern Etung" = Watters' "Western Ejagham" have been moved to top position, since the two described idioms seem to be almost completely identical;

b) for Nkem, [Sibomana 1986] is the default source; for items whose equivalents cannot be found in Sibomana's works, data from Crabb's "Nkim" have also been moved to top position.

Data from [Yoder 2008] are generally used as supportive and listed in the Notes sections. In a small handful of cases, however, such data turn out to be the only source on certain items in Bakor languages, whereupon they are also moved to top position. Note that for Ekajuk, [Yoder 2008] gives the equivalents from three (sub)dialects: Ekagongo, Mfom, and Esham. By default, the Ekagongo form is used in top position; elsewhere, all the dialectal equivalents are listed and marked wherever there is actual dialectal variance.

II. Transliteration.

Since most of the sources on Ekoid languages employ transcriptions that are very close to the IPA standard or even follow it precisely (e. g. [Yoder 2008]), transliteration into the UTS system is relatively straightforward.

Database compiled and annotated by: G. Starostin (latest version: February 2013).