Mbe is a language spoken by the
Mbube people of the
Ogoja
Ogoja is a Local Government Areas of Nigeria, Local Government Area in Cross River State, Nigeria. Its headquarters is Ogoja town in the northeast of the area near the A4 highway (Nigeria), A4 highway at.
It has an area of 972 km² and a pop ...
,
Cross River State
)
, image_map = Nigeria - Cross River.svg
, map_alt =
, map_caption = Location of Cross River State in Nigeria
, coordinates =
, coor_pinpoint ...
region of
Nigeria
Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...
, numbering about 65,000 people in 2011.
[ As the closest relative of the Ekoid family of the ]Southern Bantoid languages
Southern Bantoid (or South Bantoid) is a branch of the Bantoid language family. It consists of the Bantu languages along with several small branches and isolates of eastern Nigeria and west-central Cameroon (though the affiliation of some branch ...
,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 ...
system.
Phonology
Vowels
Vowels are .
Consonants
Mbe has a rather elaborate consonant inventory compared to the Ekoid languages, presumably due to contact from neighbouring Upper Cross River languages
The Upper Cross River languages form a branch of the Cross River languages of Cross River State, Nigeria. The most populous languages are Loko and Mbembe, with 100,000 speakers.
Languages
The internal structure per Cornell (1994), reproduced i ...
.
All Mbe consonants apart from the labial–velars () and have labialised counterparts. ( is presumably .) In addition, the non-labialised peripheral stops (; palatalised would be ) and the liquids
A liquid is a nearly incompressible fluid that conforms to the shape of its container but retains a (nearly) constant volume independent of pressure. As such, it is one of the four fundamental states of matter (the others being solid, gas, a ...
() have palatalised counterparts.
There are a few consonants that only occur in ideophones, such as .
An interesting additional contrast is between fortis and lenis . Fortis (long?) half-rounds a following vowel such as , whereas lenis does not. This distinction may be being lost. (Blench)
Tone
Tones are high, low, rising, falling and a downstep
Downstep is a phenomenon in tone languages in which if two syllables have the same tone (for example, both with a high tone or both with a low tone), the second syllable is lower in pitch than the first.
Two main kinds of downstep can be distin ...
; rising and falling may be tone sequences.
References
* Roger Blench
'Ekoid'
(with Mbe)
External links
Global Recordings Network: Mbe
{{Languages of Nigeria
Ekoid languages
Languages of Nigeria
Southern Bantoid languages