1 CLASSIFICATION AND WHERE SPOKEN 

The language/dialect cluster known as Bamileke belongs to the group that has been termed "Eastern Grassfields Bantu" or, more currently, "Mbam-Nkam," which is a branch of Benue-Congo. With this in mind, Larry Hyman (personal communication, 1986) states the following:

Bamileke is a term somewhat arbitrarily referring to some of the grassfields languages spoken in the French side of Cameroon, excluding related languages on the English side (e.g. the Ngemba dialects). It is arbitrary for your purposes or ours to disassociate them from the other languages except for the fact that the term "Bamileke" is accepted by what people told me was approximately 1/6 the population of Cameroon, as their first or ancestral language ("ancestral" because so many displaced young people in the major centers, i.e. Douala and Yaounde, do not speak Bamileke, or at least not well).

2 NUMBER OF SPEAKERS

WTRP (1982) lists 210,000, while 313,200 are given by Voegelin and Voegelin (1977). Alexandre (1981) estimates 750,000 speakers. Larry Hyman believes "there are clearly in excess of one million speakers of Bamileke and there may be many more in fact." The following table summarizes estimates cited in Ethnologue (Grimes 1996): Dialect

Number

Source Fe'fe' 123,700 SIL 1982 Dschang(Yemba) 300,000+ SIL 1992 Ghomala' 260,000 SIL 1982 Kwa' 8,600 SIL 1982 Medumba 210,000 UBS 1991 Mengaka 20,000 SIL 1993 Nda'nda' 10,000+ ALCAM 1984 Ngiemboon 100,000 SIL 1987 Ngomba 10-20,000 SIL 1994 Ngombale 45,000 SIL 1993 Ngwe 50,000 SIL 1992

 1,137,800 or more 

3 DIALECT SITUATION

Bamileke is a local language. Radio transmissions in Bamileke are heard on Radio Douala in Cameroon.

4 USAGE

LACITO has been researching the Bamileke languages/dialect situation for several years. Larry Hyman groups "what passes as `Bamileke'" into four groups: Fe'fe', Ghomala, Medyumba, and Dschang. Grimes (1996) lists eleven dialects: Fe'fe', Dschang (Yemba), Ghomala', Kwa', Medyumba (Medumba), Mengaka, Nda'nda', Ngiemboon, Ngomba, Ngombale, and Ngwe.

5 ORTHOGRAPHIC STATUS

No information is available to us on this topic.

6 SETS OF LEARNING MATERIALS

The number of sets needed for Bamileke is unclear at this time.