MYENE CLUSTER, GABON
The Myene cluster is a group of six closely related Northwestern Bantu
language varieties: Mpongwe, Orungu, Galwa, Adyumba, Nkomi and Enenga. All
Myene varieties are endangered, but in different ways and to a different
extent. Myene is not used in the media, nor in education and official
documents. Enenga was claimed to be dead. Persons who identify themselves
as being Enenga usually speak Galwa today. Fortunately, the team around
Mark Van de Velde was able to locate one speaker. The Adyumba variety is
moribund, being spoken only by isolated groups of older speakers. The
other varieties were thought to be vigorous at the outset of the
documentation project, but plans to document language acquisition had to
be abandoned when it turned out that no children learning a Myene variety
as their mother tongue could be found. The documentation effort was
therefore enlarged from its original focus on Adyumba, to encompass the
six Myene varieties. The documentation gathered in 2010-2013 is currently
exploited for grammatical analysis and will be used as a test case for the
application of speech recognition and machine translation to the field of
documentary linguistics.
