Bamoun

Where and by whom it is spoken

Bamum, which its speakers call Shüpamom ("the language of the Bamum"), is the language of the Bamum people, whose kingdom has its capital at Foumban, in the Noun division of the West region. It is a Grassfields language with tones, long vowels and diphthongs. Today it is written in the Latin alphabet, notably following the General Alphabet of Cameroonian Languages, but it is best known for the script of its own created by King Ibrahim Njoya.

History and writing

Around 1895-1896, King Njoya and his palace circle, including the notable Nji Mama, devised a script of several hundred signs, at first pictographic. Njoya simplified it several times: by around 1910 it had become a syllabary, called a-ka-u-ku after its first four characters, and the final 1918 version has 80 signs. It was used to record births, marriages and deaths, to deliver court rulings and to write the history of the kingdom, then fell out of use after Njoya's exile to Yaoundé in 1931. It was added to the Unicode standard in 2009.

Where to hear it today

• The everyday language of Foumban and the Bamum country, and a language of song: the musician Claude Ndam sang in his mother tongue, Bamum.
• A language of cinema: Daniel Kamwa's "Mâh Saah-Sah", shot entirely in Bamum, opened FESPACO in 2009.
• King Njoya's script is taught again at the Foumban palace, which holds its archives: in December 2024, more than 85 learners received a certificate of apprenticeship there.

What sources disagree on

The date the script was created varies between sources: a dream of the king in 1894 and a first version in 1895 according to French Wikipedia, around 1895 or 1896-1897 according to the English Wikipedia articles. Its origin is also debated: the ethnologist Claude Tardits saw it as inspired by Arabic script, which other authors dispute. Finally, depending on the source, the name "Shümom" refers either to the Bamum language itself or to a court language invented by Njoya.