Baa (Kwa)
(Ulrich Kleinewillinghöfer 2011)
a. Baa of Djakan (Gyakan)
b. Baa of Kwa
Nyaa Báà, language of the Baa, also known as Kwa, is spoken in Kwa, a village on a hill in the floodplains at the northern bank of the Benue and in Djakan (also spelled Jakan, Gyakan on maps) a village some miles to the northwest, at the foothills of the southern ridge of the Muri Mountains. The varieties spoken in the two settlements differ mainly in phonology.
Classification:
Baa is distinct from all the other Adamawa languages and thus forms a group of its own. A comparison of basic vocabularies shows, however, a higher number of cognates with the Longuda cluster than with any other Adamawa group. It remains open if this is genetically relevant or else the result of a recent contact situation. Typologically Baa has more in common with languages of the Bikwin-Jen Group: no noun class system, nominal plurals are marked by a prefix.
Williamson & Blench 2000 and the Ethnologue (Lewis 2009) list Kwa or Baa as an Adamawa Branch of its own.
References:
Kleinewillinghöfer, Ulrich. 1996. Die nordwestlichen Adamawa-Sprachen - Eine Übersicht. In: Seibert, Uwe (ed). Afrikanische Sprachen zwischen Gestern und Morgen. Frankfurter Afrikanistische Blätter, 8: 80-103.
Lewis, M. Paul (ed). 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/.
Williamson, Kay & Roger Blench. 2000. Niger-Congo. In: Heine, Bernd & Derek Nurse (eds). African Languages. An Introduction. Cambridge Unversity Press. pp. 11-42.