Bulu
The language of Bulu country, around Ebolowa and Sangmélima
Family : Niger-Congo, Bantu (Zone A, Beti-Fang group, A.74)
Speakers : About 860,000 speakers according to Ethnologue (2007 figure).
Also called : Boulou, Bulu-Bene
Where and by whom it is spoken
Bulu is the Bantu language of the Bulu people of southern Cameroon. According to the Linguistic Atlas of Cameroon (2012), it is spoken in the Mvila and Dja-et-Lobo divisions, as well as in the south of Haute-Sanaga, the north of Nyong-et-Mfoumou and part of Haut-Nyong. It belongs to the Beti group and is mutually intelligible with Ewondo, Eton and Fang; its dialects include Bene, Yelinda, Yembana, Yengono and Zaman.
History and writing
Bulu was first written down by American Presbyterian missionaries, who made it a language of religious instruction in colonial times. The Bulu New Testament appeared in 1909 and the translation of the whole Bible was completed in 1940. The language has a Bulu-French dictionary co-written by Moïse Eyinga, and its first novel is "Nnanga Kôn".
Where to hear it today
- A church language: the Presbyterian Church of Cameroon has its own 24-letter Bulu alphabet.
- A former lingua franca of trade and schooling in the South, used by colonial and missionary bodies, though less and less in these fields today.
- A language of mvet, the sung epic of the Ekang peoples: in Bulu, the word also refers to the griot who performs it.
A few words
- mbolo
- Hello.
- mvo'e
- Peace.
- ndɔ́g
- Mango.
What sources disagree on
Figures differ: English Wikipedia cites 174,000 native speakers in 1982 and some 800,000 second-language speakers in 1991, French Wikipedia 800,000 native speakers out of 1.6 million in all.