Toupouri

Where and by whom it is spoken

Tupuri is the language of the Tupuri people, who live in both Chad (Mayo-Kebbi Est) and Cameroon's Far North. In Cameroon it is spoken in the south-east of the Moulvouday plain: around Kaélé, in the Guidiguis commune (Mayo-Kani) and in the Kar-Hay, Kalfou, Datcheka and Tchatibali communes (Mayo-Danay). It is written in the Latin alphabet, with tones marked by accents.

History and writing

The linguist Joseph Greenberg wrongly classified it as a Chadic language, on the basis of a word list that actually belonged to Kera, a neighbouring language; the error was shown by K. Ebert in 1974. Tupuri has since been placed among the Adamawa languages, in the Mbum group. Reference works have been devoted to it, such as Suzanne Ruelland's "Dictionnaire tupuri-français-anglais" (1988) and Kolyang Dina Taïwé's "Parlons tpuri" (2010).

Where to hear it today

• The everyday language around Kaélé and in the Mayo-Danay, in close contact with neighbouring Chadic languages such as Massa.
• The language of the chicken festival, held every October by the lineages that claim descent from the mythical ancestor Doré, and presided over by the chief of Doré, in Chad, the political and religious authority of the Tupuri.

What sources disagree on

Figures are old and vary between sources: 125,000 speakers in Cameroon according to SIL (2000), 130,000 according to French Wikipedia. The Tupuri people also outnumber the speakers of the language: the Viri, or Wina, who are ethnically Tupuri, now speak a dialect of Massa.