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LEARNING THE BAKWERI LANGUAGE

Bakwerirama Adopts Orthography Standard

Unlike the Duala language which has been written in standardized form for over a century, the Bakweri language still suffers from a lack of uniformity in its written form. So far, different attempts at the codification of Bakweri are largely unknown, with little system efforts being made to harmonize these disparate standards.

As Gertrude Ekobena points out in her book Okoa li langa na litila Mokpe,

there has been no systematic and sustained effort to write the Mokpe language… Proper co-ordination has been lacking as well as institutional support. As a result the existing works on the language lack uniformity and there is a strong need to standardize the written Bakweri.

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The Mokpe Alphabet

Culled from "Okoa li lánga na litila Mokpe (learn to read and write Bakweri)" by G. E. Ekobena

The Mokpe Alphabet is similar to that of English with the exception of three strange characters, which will be brought to you later. There are 21 consonants and 7 vowels. Here below is the Mokpe alphabet.

a mb ch nd e є

f gb i j nj ŋ k

kp l m mgb mw n ny

o c (reversed c or open O)

s t u v w y

The 21 consonants have the same sounds as in English, but four of them pose a problem of pronunciation to young speakers and writers of the Mokpe language.

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Bakweri Word Games

Jean-Marie Hombert, 1973, "Speaking backwards in Bakwiri", Studies in African Linguistics 4, pp. 277-35

This paper presents a word game played by Young Bakwiri speakers on the southern slopes of Mount Cameroon. The game consists basically of taking the last syllable of a word and transposing it before the first one.

http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/PDF/hombert/SpeakingbackwardsinB.pdf

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