Projekt

Beezen, a completely undescribed Benue-Congo language of probably Jukunoid affiliation, is spoken by no more than 450 individuals in the remote village of Kpwep (Furu-Awa, Menchum Division, NW Region of Cameroon). Restricted to intraethnic communication in contexts of family and village life, farm work, local council meetings and some traditional ceremonies, ongoing processes of shift towards languages of wider communication such as Jukun and Pidgin English expose Beezen to serious endangerment by severely eroding its internal register diversity and the mother tongue-competence of speakers of all generations. Bringing together scholars of anthropology and linguistics from the Universities of Buea and Hamburg, the project aims at an ethnolinguistic documentation of Beezen by providing a corpus of narrative and dialogic texts of various genres in a sustainable multi-media format that satisfies both practical and scientific concerns. Beyond an understanding of Beezen grammar, the project will hopefully contribute to preserving the endangered cultural knowledge enshrined in the Beezen language and thereby generating resources for language learning.

• Prof. Dr. Roland Kießling

  Universität Hamburg
  Asien-Afrika-Institut
  Abteilung für Afrikanistik und Äthiopistik
  Hamburg
  

• Dr. Evelyn Fogwe née Chibaka

  University of Buea
  Department of Linguistics
  Buea
  Kamerun (Cameroun)