Introduction

Babungo is a Grassfields Bantu language within the Benue – Congo language family (ISO 639-3 language code: bav). Along with languages such as Kom, Lamnsoˈ and Babanki, it belongs to the Ring subgroup of Western Grassfields Bantu (Hyman, 1979). The Ethnologue gives the following classification: Niger-Congo, Atlantic-Congo, Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern, Wide Grassfields, Narrow Grassfields, Ring, South. (Simons and  Fennig, eds. 2018.)

There are approximately 27,000 speakers of the Babungo language. They live in one large village on the Ndop plain, Ngoketunjia Division of the North West Region of Cameroon. The Babungo people call their village və̀ŋóo and their language gháŋ və̀ŋóo (i.e. language of və̀ŋóo).

Since the Babungo people all live closely together, there are only small dialectal variations in their speech. For example, there are speakers who pronounce double plosives ([gb] or [kp]) in a few words where other speakers pronounce plain velar ones ([g] or [k]). There are some differences in preference of vocabulary as well.

The Babungo alphabet follows the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages, which was adopted in 1979 by the National Committee for the unification and harmonisation of the alphabets of Cameroon languages.

The dictionary is divided into three parts: the Babungo-English Dictionary which is the main section, the English-Babungo Index which is intended for those who want to find a Babungo word via the English translation. The third part is a lists of proper names of people with explanations of their meaning in English (go to the Language tab, Appendix: List of Babungo names. The main part contains just under 3,000 main entries.