Vengo (), or Babungo, 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 ...

and the language of the

Vengo people The Vengo, or ''Babungos'', are an ethnic group of about 14,000 people who are resident in the anglophone Northwest Province of Cameroon. They live predominantly in the region of a village which is also called Vengo or "Babungo". This village is ...

from the village of Babungo in the

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 ...

ian Grassfields. The spelling Bamungo is also often found. In their own language, the Vengo people call their village ''vengo'' () and their language ''ghang vengo'' (), which means "language of the Vengo"; it is thus officially listed under the name ''Vengo'' or ''Vengoo''. Other names for the language are ''Vengi, Pengo, Ngo, Nguu, Ngwa, Nge''. Vengo is spoken by about 14,000 people. Because the Babungo people all live closely together and concentrate only in and around Vengo village, there are only small dialectical variations in their speech. The Vengo language uses different tone pitches, which form a distinctive feature for the meaning of the words. In the Vengo tone system, there are eight distinctive pitch types or pitch sequences on vowels: high, mid, low, high-mid, high-low, low-falling, low-high, low-high-mid. The use of the language (and traditional Babungo customs) is decreasing among the Babungo people due to not insignificant socio-cultural problems in that region. In most cases, those people acquire English as mother tongue, if they stay predominantly in the anglophone Northwest of Cameroon, otherwise French if they orient themselves towards the francophone parts of Cameroon. Most of the people in Western Cameroon speak Cameroonian Pidgin English anyway.

Bibliography

*Willi Schaub: ''Babungo''. Croom Helm Descriptive Grammars. Croom Helm Ltd., Beckenham, Kent, UK 1985, .

References

Endangered Niger–Congo languages Ring languages Languages of Cameroon {{gras-lang-stub