Awing, or Mbwe'wi, is a
Grassfields language
The Grassfields languages (or Wide Grassfields languages) are a branch of the Southern Bantoid languages spoken in the Western High Plateau of Cameroon and some parts of Taraba state, Nigeria. Better known Grassfields languages include the Easter ...
spoken in
Cameroon
Cameroon (; french: Cameroun, ff, Kamerun), officially the Republic of Cameroon (french: République du Cameroun, links=no), is a country in west-central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; the C ...
.
Alphabet
The Awing alphabet was proposed by translation consultants for
SIL International
SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to ex ...
and the
Cameroon Association For Bible Translation and Literacy
Cameroon (; french: Cameroun, ff, Kamerun), officially the Republic of Cameroon (french: République du Cameroun, links=no), is a country in west-central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; the C ...
(CABTAL) in 2005. It was since then used for publishing Bible translations, Awing folk stories, and other materials.
The Awing alphabet is based on an adapted Latin script. It is made up of 9 vowel letters and 22 consonant letters. The letters H, Q, R, V, and X are dropped, and several special characters and digraphs, as well as the apostrophe are added to transcribe Awing phonetic sounds. The consonant phone
varies freely with
¾between vowels inside a root. Thus, the R-sound is denoted by the letter L.
Long vowels are indicated by repeating the vowel letter.
⟨n⟩, ⟨m⟩, ⟨ŋ⟩, and ⟨ny⟩ may be syllabic nasals (
Ì© Ì© ‹Ì© ²Ì©.
Tones are indicated using diacritics on the first vowel or nasal of the syllable. Both high and mid tone are marked with the acute accent, and the low tone is not explicitly written:
Diaeresis on the vowel before the verb marks the
habitual aspect
In linguistics, the aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in a given action, event, or state. As its name suggests, the habitual aspect (abbreviated ), not to be confused with iterative aspect ...
.
External links
*
References
Ngemba languages
Languages of Cameroon
{{gras-lang-stub