Bendi materials

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The Bendi languages are located in the northern part of Cross River State in southeastern Nigeria and adjacent parts of Cameroon (Crozier and Blench 1992; Dieu & Renaud 1983). The name Bendi (Bɛ̀-ndì) was originally proposed by David Crabb (1967) from the word for ‘person’. Winston (1964, 1965) referred to them as ‘Boki-Sbɛkwara’ on the basis of their most well-known members, but this name has not been adopted. Greenberg (1966) classified them as part of Cross River, and this has been accepted by subsequent authors (e.g. in the influential Williamson 1971) which also reviews previous scholarship. The absence of published data may well explain why their classification has generally been repeated without comment.

Very little research has been conducted on Bendi languages and modern work that does exist, mostly on Bekwara, and Bokyi, remains unpublished or inaccessible. Early materials can be found in Koelle (1854), Mansfield (1908), Thomas (1914)[1] and Johnston (1919-22) (see Table 12 for a synopsis of sources). Modern, linguistically-informed material begins with the Benue-Congo Comparative Wordlist (Williamson and Shimizu 1968; Williamson 1973), which lists only three or four languages. Apart from these, the only major publications are the Bokyi Dictionary (Bruns 1975) and an introduction to the language (Tǎwo-Ásu 1977) both of which are far from accessible. The Bendi group is notable for having one language (Ubang) that has male and female speech-forms, although documentation for this comes from a newspaper feature (Umoh 1989), which does, however, include a wordlist. Kay Williamson also has some mss. giving student orthographic wordlists for otherwise completely unrecorded languages such as Bumaji and Afrike. Table 1 lists the presently known Bendi languages with population figures and dialects (largely from Lewis 2009).

Table 1. The Bendi languages
			Comment
Afrike		3500
Alege	Ugbe	1200
Bekwara	Yakoro	100,000
Bete-Bendi	Dama	36,800
Bokyi	Ŋki	144,000	also in Cameroun
Bumaji		?	twelve villages
Obanliku		65000	includes Basang, Bebi, Bishiri, Bisu (=Gayi), Busi
Ubang (m./ f.)		?
Ukpe-Bayobiri		12000
Utugwong		?	includes Obe, Oboso, Okorogung, Okorotung

Many of these figures are very old and have been repeated from one reference book to another.

Documents

Title	Author	Status
Comparative Bendi	Roger Blench	Unpublished
Obe cluster survey	P. Otronyi et al.	Unpublished
Obe Wordlists	P. Otronyi et al.	Unpublished
Bekwara grammar	Ron Stanford	Unpublished
Bokyi wordlist	H. Jungraithmayr	Published

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[1] The three Bendi vocabularies given in Thomas (Dama, Gayi and Yakoro) were ‘forwarded from the Provincial Office’ rather than collected directly by him.