Twendi language

Mambiloid language of Cameroon

Twendi
Cambap
Native to	Cameroon
Ethnicity	one thousand (1991)^[1]
Native speakers	30 (2000)^[1]
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo Benue–Congo Mambiloid Mambila–Konja Konja Twendi
Language codes
ISO 639-3	`twn`
Glottolog	`twen1242`
ELP	Twendi

Twendi, or Cambap as it is also known, is a nearly extinct Mambiloid language of Cameroon. Speakers have largely shifted to the closely related language Kwanja, and Twendi has not been passed down to children for decades. The language is spoken in the villages of Cambap and Sanga on the Tikar Plain by no more than 30 people, the youngest of whom were born in the 1940s.^[2]

Classification

Twendi is a Mambiloid language belonging to the Mambila group. Speakers consider Twendi to be a dialect of Kwanja, but lexical evidence from a variety of Mambiloid languages, especially Kabri, indicates its affinity to the Mambila group.^[3]

References

^ ^a ^b Twendi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
^ Connell, B. (2002). Aspects of the phonetics of Cambap. Studies in African Linguistics, 31 (1 & 2)
^ Blench, R. M. (1993). An outline classification of the Mambiloid languages. Journal of West African Languages, 23(1), 105-118.