Babanki language

Babanki, or Kejom (Babanki: Kəjòm [kɘ̀d͡ʒɔ́m]), is a Bantoid language that is spoken by the Babanki people of the Western Highlands of Cameroon.

Geography and classification
Babanki is a member of the Center Ring subfamily of the Grassfields languages, which is in turn a member of the extensive Southern Bantoid subfamily of the Atlantic-Congo branch of the hypothetical Niger-Congo language family.

According to Ethnologue, there were 39,000 speakers of Babanki as of 2011, although the Endangered Languages Project states that the 39,000 figure represents the ethnic population while actual speakers of the language number around 20,000.

It is mainly spoken in the villages of Kejom Ketinguh and Kejom Keku (also known as Babanki Tungo and Big Babanki, respectively), which are located in the Mezam department of the Northwest region of Cameroon. Languages spoken nearby include the closely related Ring languages Kom, Vengo, and Nsei to the east, and the more distantly related Eastern Grassfields languages Bafut, Mbili-Mbui, and Awing to the west. English, in particular Cameroonian Pidgin English, is commonly spoken as well, to the extent that the latter is beginning to replace Babanki in all domains, including the home. Additionally, some speakers may speak French, Cameroon's other official language besides English, and speakers living in Kejom Keku may also speak the nearby Kom language, depending on their level of interaction with the Kom community.

It has two main varieties, based on the two villages it is spoken in. They exhibit slight phonetic, phonological, and lexical differences but are mutually intelligible. A distinct variety spoken by some members of a group of ethnic Fula who live in the hills surrounding Kejom Ketinguh has also been attested.

Consonants
Babanki has 25 consonant phonemes. Most consonants also appear in phonemic prenasalized, labialized, and palatalized forms, although it remains ambiguous as to whether Babanki actually has these secondary articulations or if they are simply consonant clusters of simple consonants with placeless nasals,, or , respectively. Babanki has some allophonic palatalization before front vowels. The velar plosives are realized as palatalized [ ], respectively, and the labial-velar approximant  is realized as a labial-palatal approximant. This variation also applies to labialized consonants (e.g. "up"), although labialized bilabials and labiodentals retain labial-velar secondary articulation.

Prenasalized consonants in Babanki (all oral consonants but can appear as prenasalized) are realized in several ways depending upon the manner of articulation of the consonant in question. Preceding an obstruent and following a vowel, prenasalization is generally realized as a homorganic nasal stop (e.g. /kɘ̀ⁿt͡ʃík/→[kɘ̀ɲt͡ʃíʔ] "lid"), while preceding a sonorant and following a vowel, prenasalization is generally realized without full oral closure which tends to cause the preceding vowel to be nasalized (e.g. "grass beetle"). Additionally, when a prenasalized consonant is word initial and has no preceding vowel, the nasal portion is often audibly syllabic and using the low tone (e.g. "potato").

Vowels
Babanki has eight vowel phonemes contrasting in height, roundness, and backing. Length distinction and nasalization also occur non-contrastively. Babanki is unusual in that it contrasts both the rounded and the unrounded close central vowels and the close and close-mid central unrounded vowels.

In open syllables, vowels and  are realized as close-mid  and, while in closed syllables they are realized as open-mid  and  (compare  "liver" and  "snatch",  "money" and  "chop").

Tone
Babanki has both lexical tone and grammatical tone. At the phonological level it is described as simply having a distinction between low /˨/ and high /˦/ tonemes, although a number of derived surface tonal sequences have been observed. Rarely, contour tones can occur in non-derived environments. The downstepped high and mid tones are phonetically identical, but are otherwise distinct; the downstepped high tone occurs much more freely and creates a tone ceiling for successive high tones in the same tonal phrase, while the mid tone  must precede a high tone and is restricted to a few specific environments.

Phonotactics
Typically, Babanki words are composed of a CV(C) stem with optional (C)V prefixes and suffixes. The stem-initial onset is where the majority of Babanki consonants occur exclusively; onsets of affixes and function words only permit the phonemes, and the only permissible coda consonants are. Allophony is much more distinct in coda consonants; is realized as a glottal stop, and rimes ending in the alveolar nasal  whose nuclei are the non-high vowels  (i.e. ) diphthongize, surfacing as.

Vowel coalescence is also quite significant in Babanki. It occurs in and  sequences (excluding those where  is ), where the final close-mid central unrounded vowel and (in the case of the latter) the coda consonant coalesce to a single phonetically long vowel, the quality of which cannot necessarily be determined by either vowel (although in  sequences the phonetic long vowel is usually of the same quality as the phonemic first vowel). For example, the phrase "my speargrass" would be phonemically parsed:

C7-speargrass ASS 1SG.POSS

"my speargrass" Here, the sequence coalesces into the long vowel. Although virtually all long vowels that occur in Babanki are due to this process, there are a few instances of long vowels that are not clearly derived, such as in the words "which" and  "term of address for fon".

Linguistic studies
Linguistic research has been conducted in the Babanki community since the late 1970s. SIL Cameroon and the Cameroon Association for Bible Translation and Literacy (CABTAL) have been actively engaged with the Babanki language and community since 1988 and 2004, respectively.

Babanki grammar
Fungeh Abongkeyung Landeà. (2022). Babanki for beginners.