Naki

Naki [mff] is currently classified by the Ethnologue as a member of the Eastern Beboid subgroup of Bantoid, though it is located in the western half of the Beboid area. However, detailed comparative work has yet to be done on the language and any classification must therefore be considered tentative. It is spoken in two divisions of the Northwest Province of Cameroon, Menchum and Furu Awa, in a number of villages including (Big) Mekaf, Small Mekaf, Mashi, Mashi Overside, Nser, Lebo, and Belogo. (These villages have many alternate names, as described in the SIL Electronic Survey Report SILESR 2002-014 available at http://www.sil.org/silesr/2002/014/SILESR2002-014.pdf.) It seems likely that the Nigerian language listed as Mashi [jms] in the Ethnologue is a variety of Naki, though the work necessary to establish this has not been done.

Accurate population figures are impossible to come by, but there appear to be at least a few thousand speakers of the language. The language is still actively learned by children living in the villages and, in some cases, in Naki households in larger cities and towns. Thus, the language is still quite vital. Speakers generally also speak the local English-based pidgin, and depending on their personal histories may speak several more local languages. Since Naki is spoken in the anglophone part of Cameroon, French is only commonly spoken by those who have received higher education or have moved to the country's French-speaking provinces.

The language is not formally written (though some speakers have tried to write it on occasion). Linguistic work on the language, outside of the materials deposited here, is limited to survey work done by SIL International, a wordlist collected in 1974 by the anthropologists Elizabeth M. Chilver and Phyllis M. Kaberry, titled "Western Grassfields (Cameroun Republic) linguistic notes" published as occasional publication no. 29 by Institute of African Studies of the University of Ibadan, discussion of the language's noun class system in Jean-Marie Hombert's 1980 survey of noun classes in Beboid published in the volume "Noun classes in the Grassfields Bantu borderlands" edited by Larry M. Hyman, and Nang Julius Kum's unpublished University of Yaounde thesis on Naki phonology.