Sawabantu languages
language family
The Sawabantu languages are a group of Bantu languages that are spoken in Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.
The group consists mostly of zones A.20 and A.30 of Guthrie's classification, and most likely also part of zone A.10. According to Nurse and Philipps on (2003), the A.20 and A.30 languages, apart from the Bubi language, form a valid node. The most important of these languages is Duala, which is a vehicular language.
Etymology
The name Sawabantu is made up of two words: sawa, which means "coast" in Duala, and Bantu. The name was proposed in 1989 by the Cameroonian linguist Carl Ebobissé.
Languages
Besides the A.20 and A.30 languages, the Oroko dialect cluster of A.10 seems to be clearly connected to the Sawabantu group:
(A.10) Oroko; (A.20) Kpwe (Mokpwe, Bakweri)–Mboko (Bomboko, Wumboko)–Kole (Bakole), Duala (incl. Mungo dialect), Suwu (Isuwu/Isubu), Limba (Malimba); (A.30) Tanga (Batanga), Yasa–Kombe, Benga
The A.20 languages are spoken around the Wouri estuary and in the anglophone region around Mount Cameroon. The A.30 languages are spoken along the Atlantic coast of southern Cameroon down to northern Gabon. These two geographic groups are clearly related; for example, Limba (Malimba, A.26) report some degree of mutual intelligibility with Tanga (Batanga, A.32), which they call "Old Malimba".
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This entry incorporates text from “Sawabantu languages” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.