Text of a paper presented at the 26th Colloquium
on African Languages and Linguistics, Leiden, The Netherlands,
Sept. 5–7 1996.
Comments and discussion welcome
The Mambila language
comprises a cluster of dialects which straddle the
Nigeria–Cameroon border. One of the striking aspects of
Mambila is its apparent internal diversity – Blench (1993),
for example, regards it as the most diverse of the Mambiloid
languages. The accepted view regarding this heterogeneity,
established by Perrin & Hill (1969) and fostered by Zeitlyn
(1994) as well as Blench, is that there is a basic division among
the dialects giving two clusters. The boundary between the two
essentially corresponds to the major geographical division
between the Mambila Plateau and the Tikar Plain. Earlier, Meek
(1931) had also suggested a fundamental two-way split, though one
that had little in common with that eventually proposed in Perrin
& Hill. New research suggests that earlier divisions of
Mambila were premature; at least by some criteria, Mambila does
comprise two major dialect clusters, though the division is not
that envisaged by previous researchers. This paper provides
evidence of the division among Mambila dialects and then goes on
to explore two issues: the relative roles of divergence and
convergence in the rise of the present Mambila situation, and
what the Mambila situation can tell us about the dynamics of
language change more generally.
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