Mboteni, also known as Baga Mboteni, Baga Binari,
or Baga Pokur, is an endangered
Rio Nunez language spoken in the coastal
Rio Nunez region of Guinea. Speakers who have gone to school or work outside their villages are bilingual in Pokur and the Mande language
Susu.
[Fields, E. L. (2004). Before" Baga": Settlement Chronologies of the Coastal Rio Nunez Region, Earliest Times to C. 1000 CE. International Journal of African Historical Studies, 229-253.]
Pokur has lost the
noun-class
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some a ...
concord found in its relatives.
[Wilson, W. A. A. (1961). Numeration in the Languages of Guiné. Africa, 31(04), 372-377.]
Geographical distribution
According to Fields (2008:33-34), Mboteni is spoken exclusively in the two villages of Mboteni and Binari on a peninsula south of the mouth of the
Nunez River. Mboteni speakers are surrounded by Sitem speakers.
[Fields-Black, Edda L. 2008. ''Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora''. (Blacks in the Diaspora.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press.]
Wilson (2007), based on his field reports from the 1950s, reported that Baga Mboteni (called ''Pukur'' by the speakers) was spoken on Binari Island by two clans that were hostile to each other.
[Wilson, William André Auquier. 2007. ''Guinea Languages of the Atlantic group: description and internal classification''. (Schriften zur Afrikanistik, 12.) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.]
Classification
As one of the two
Rio Nunez languages
The Rio Nunez (Rio Nuñez) or Nunez River languages constitute a pair of Niger–Congo languages, Mbulungish and Baga Mboteni. They are spoken at the mouth of the Nunez River in Guinea, West Africa.
The Rio Nunez languages have been studied ...
of
Guinea, its closest relative is
Mbulungish.
Despite the name, Baga Mboteni is not one of the
Baga languages, though speakers are
ethnically Baga. The language is instead most closely related to Nalu and Mbulungish, though it shares a low percentage of cognate vocabulary with them.
References
Further reading
*
*Fields-Black, E. L. (2008). Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
External links
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsJI7r7zkA0
Endangered Languages Project Profile for Baga Mboteni
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Senegambian languages
Languages of Guinea