Mbe is a language spoken by the
Mbube people of the
Ogoja,
Cross River State
Cross River State is a state in the South-South geopolitical zone of Nigeria. Named for the Cross River, the state was formed from the eastern part of the Eastern Region on 27 May 1967. The state has its capital as Calabar and is bordered to ...
region of
Nigeria
Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...
, 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 ...
,Bantu languages
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu language, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀), or Ntu languages are a language family of about 600 languages of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern, East Africa, Eastern and Southeast Africa, South ...
. It is tonal and has a typical Niger–Congo noun-class 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 language (Nigeria), Lokö and Mbembe language, Mbembe, with 100,000 speakers.
Languages
The internal s ...
.
All Mbe consonants apart from the labial–velars () and have labialised counterparts. ( is presumably .) In addition, the non-labialised peripheral
A peripheral device, or simply peripheral, is an auxiliary hardware device that a computer uses to transfer information externally. A peripheral is a hardware component that is accessible to and controlled by a computer but is not a core compo ...
stops (; palatalised would be ) and the liquids
Liquid is a state of matter with a definite volume but no fixed shape. Liquids adapt to the shape of their container and are nearly incompressible, maintaining their volume even under pressure. The density of a liquid is usually close to th ...
() have palatalised counterparts.
There are a few consonants that only occur in ideophones, such as .
An interesting additional contrast is between fortis and lenis
In linguistics, ''fortis'' ( ; Latin for 'strong') and ''lenis'' (, ; Latin for 'weak'), sometimes identified with 'tense' and 'lax', are pronunciations of consonants with relatively greater and lesser energy, respectively. English has fortis ...
. 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