A (micro-)accretion zone in a remnant zone?

Lower Fungom in areal-historical perspective

Jeff Good | University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

The Lower Fungom region of Northwest Cameroon is one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the Cameroonian Grassfields. Seven languages, or small language clusters, are spoken in its thirteen recognized villages. While the languages are all recognizably Bantoid, most of them do not otherwise have any established close relatives. Lower Fungom, therefore, shares a number of characteristics with parts of the world that Nichols has classified as accretion zones. However, it differs from canonical accretion zones in its very small size and in the fact that all of its languages are uncontroversially related to each other at some level. This paper explores the multifaceted notion of an accretion zone, examining how the linguistic situation of Lower Fungom allows us to refine Nichols’s typology of linguistic areas and also suggests new kinds of research questions for areal typology.

Published online: 13 December 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.104.11goo

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Derungs, Curdin, Martina Köhl, Robert Weibel & Balthasar Bickel

2018. Environmental factors drive language density more in food-producing than in hunter–gatherer populations. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 285:1885 ► pp. 20172851 ff.

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