SIL International Media Release

Grammar of Akoose: A Northwest Bantu Language

(May 2009) SIL International Publications is now shipping a 303-page book, A Grammar of Akoose. Akoose is the language spoken by 100,000 Bakoosi people who live in southwest Cameroon. The language is located at the northwestern reaches of the Narrow Bantu language family.

This book by Robert Hedinger describes the grammatical structure of Akoose, an SVO language. It has a typical noun-class concord system with agreement in noun class within the noun phrase and subject-verb agreement marked on the verb.

The book will appeal to a local audience interested in their own language as well as to linguists with an interest in African languages. It is published jointly by SIL International and the University of Texas at Arlington.

Topics covered

• Phonology sketch.
• Nouns, including the typical Bantu noun class system.
• Noun phrase, including various noun phrase types, noun modifiers—both those that agree with the head noun and those not manifesting any agreement—associative noun phrase and the semantic relations expressed.
• Verbs, with derivational suffixes and their effect on valence, tense, aspect, mood and negation. All verb forms are illustrated with paradigms, showing a complex verbal system.
• Verb phrase, including auxiliary verbs, which have an interesting range of functions.
• Clause types and their constituents.
• Sentence modifications, such as questions, topicalization and relative clauses.
• Complex sentences: reported speech, indirect questions and other clause combinations.
• Negation: clausal, non-clausal and lexical.
• Appendices, giving lists of ideophones, exclamations, comparative wordlists, loanwords and an interlinerized text.

Related links of interest

• Bantu languages listed in the Ethnologue
• A Survey Report for the Bantu Languages, by Derek Nurse, 2001
• Documentary linguistics seminar in Bantu languages (June 2008 media release)
• SIL FieldWorks software, which contains a tutorial of Sena, a Bantu language
• Software presented at symposium on Bantu languages (August 2008 media release)
• Other publications by Robert Hedinger
• Other academic publications from SIL International Publications