An overview of Bamum phonology and orthography, with an additional focus on character and word frequencies in recent poetry

Abstract While the history of the Bamum language has been well documented, the particulars of its phonology and orthography have received fragmentary treatment. Our contribution to the literature is an attempt to synthesize from the works that have gone before, to pull together disparate threads that have arisen from the influences of German, French, and English traditions. We discuss in turn phonology (noting in particular discrepancies in the accounting for the vowel inventory between sources), analysis of the writing system, and frequency distribution of characters and words. Discussion on historical phonology might shed some light on the development of orthographic principles while the preliminary exploration of the observed statistical patterns of the latest phase of the script, known as A ka u ku mfɛmfɛ , would be useful for future reference. We also offer indications for directions for future research on a wider scale, that would incorporate corpus studies of both the Bamum language and the invented Shümom language that also uses the Bamum script.