Towards a linguistic analysis of conative animal calls in Babanki and Bum (Grassfields languages of Cameroon)
Abstract
This article offers a systematic analysis of conative animal calls (CACs) in Babanki and Bum—two Central Ring Grassfields Bantu languages of North-West Cameroon. The authors analyze the semantics, phonetics, morphology, ecolinguistics, and cognancy of 39 Babanki and 20 Bum CACs and conclude the following: (a) in both languages CACs largely instantiate the prototype of a CAC with regard to semantics, phonetics, and morphology; (b) several linguistic properties exhibited by CACs have their source in the ecosystems inhabited by the respective communities of speakers; (c) the similarity of the CACs in Babanki and Bum is low and their cognancy minimal despite the two languages being closely related.