The people who speak it originate from the Nde division of the West Region of the country, with their main settlements in Bangangté, Bakong, Bangoulap, Bahouoc, Bagnoun and Tonga.
It is a major Bamileke language, and is located in an area where sacred kingship played a pivotal role in government, justice, and diplomacy.
[3][4] The modern history of the Bamileke area, which was a German colony placed under French trusteeship by the League of Nations in 1919, is closely associated with the nationalist movement of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), which developed primarily in the coastal hinterland (Bassa) and the western highlands (Bamileke).
From 1956 to the late 1960s, this area of Cameroon experienced a period of unrest;[5] this episode continues to shape Bamileke political culture, and has an impact on language identity[6] and the linguistic landscape.
Medumba is part of the Eastern Group of the Bamileke Cluster, which also include Fe'fe', Ghomálá', Kwa', and Nda'nda'.
Some of these publications include: Also notable are the scholarly contributions of Medumba speaker-linguists, including (in chronological order): Recent work on Medumba is part of a more general push towards documenting the languages of Africa, in the face of rising levels of language endangerment.
[21] Cameroon — along with Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia — is reported to have one of the highest language mortality rates in Africa.
[22] Efforts to develop a Medumba orthography date back to the beginning of the 20th century,[23] and are associated with the following milestones: Currently, educational materials, literature and dictionaries for the language are produced by CEPOM, based in Bangangte.
Over time, publications in Medumba have used six different orthographies:[24] The current alphabet is given in the following table.
Stops and fricatives can be pre-nasalized; in the orthography this is represented as an NC digraph or an NCW trigraph.
Orthographic conventions for tone-marking are as follows: Recent developments in digital literacy have had an impact on Medumba.
For example, a seven-language electronic calendar — in French, English, and the five national languages (Medumba, Ghomala, Yemba, Meta, Kom) — sends information on time and date to an LCD screen via a VGA controller.
The following table gives the simple phonemic consonants in Medumba according to Voorhoeve (1965).
The inventory of complex consonants according to Voorhoeve (1965) is: Medumba has several affixes including: 2. to separate from each other 2.
Voorhoeve identifies two characteristics of noun classes that surface in Medumba:[13] Voorhoeve also assumes that pronominal prefixes exist within the noun class system, with these prefixes consisting of inherent tone morphemes such as the left-edge floating tone.
[31] Voorhoeve ascertains that the nasal prefix serves as a distinguishing factor between singular and plural noun pairs.
For example, látrɨ́, the loan word for "light" from English, can either be viewed as a mass noun or not, depending on the speaker.
[31] In looking at interspeaker variation on the addition of loan words in Medumba noun classes, the instability of a formal noun class allows flexibility with speakers of various dialects This could be due to disagreement on how to lexicalize a new loan word between the various dialects.
[31] Bamileke distinguishes four sets of personal pronouns: simplex, possessive, complex, and reciprocal.
see child'It was us who saw the child'Examples of tone variation of pronoun in object position ((provide fuller description, edit examples put both IPA and orthography).
He bought some books, but he did not sell pens); CP-scope negation denies the truth of a proposition p (e.g. NOT-p = it is not the case that p).
For example, in (1), the first line represents the theorized underlying tonal melody of the two nouns, with the L tone associative marker in bold.
Likewise in (2), the first line shows the theoretical tonal melody of what at the surface are pronounced as a LH contour on Noun1 and a down-stepped high tone on Noun2.
?cən mbwo bun kua liDEM A N NUM {}DEM.PRX beautiful children four ??
?cən bun sɛŋkɛd kua liDEM N A NUM {}DEM.PRX children black four ??
?cən bun kua sɛŋkɛd liDEM N NUM A {}DEM.PRX children four black ??
'these four black children'There are three kinds of adjective classes in Medumba, which differ in their order relative to the noun they modify.
The interpretation of a noun marked with this tone is variable and context dependent, generally corresponding to prepositions like on, at, or in.