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Defaka

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: African Geography

   The Defaka (sometimes called Afakani) are a small ethnic group of
   south-western Nigeria, numbering less than a thousand people. They live
   in the eastern part of the Niger Delta, Rivers State, Bonny District;
   part of them in the Afakani quarter of Nkoroo town in close
   relationship with the Nkoroo people, and another part of them on the
   isolated island of Iwoma Nkoro, near Kono. Present neighbours of the
   Defaka, apart from the Nkoroo people, are: at Iwoma, the Ogoni people
   (speakers of Ogoni/Kana/Khana), and to the east, the Obolo. The Defaka
   have a less cordial relationship with these peoples than with the
   Nkoroo.

   The Defaka language is being gradually pushed to extinction as they are
   shifting to the language of the Nkoroo people. At most 200 speakers of
   Defaka, all elderly people, are left.

History

   The Defaka have always been a people small in number, and their history
   is a long narrative of harassments by numerically superior neighbours
   and subsequent migrations. According to oral histories reported in
   Jenewari (1983), the original home of the Defaka was in the Iselema
   area (present-day Delta State). From there, they moved via the Central
   Delta into the Eastern Delta region, where they lived close to the
   Abuloma people in the Okrika territory. Later they lived close to the
   Udekama (Degema) people in the Engenni area, and subsequently they
   entered the Bonny territory to live at Abalama Olotombia, and later
   near Bodo in Ogoni. They moved to Iyoba in the Andoni country before
   establishing Olomama Nkoroo (Old town). From there, they finally moved
   to the present-day Nkoroo town. The Nkoroo people, neighbours of the
   Defaka and numbering about 4500, relate a similar tradition of
   migration. Thus, the Defaka and Nkoroo peoples have presumably been
   living together as neighbours prior to the establishment of Nkoroo
   town, perhaps even since the time that both of them were in the Okrika
   territory.

Language

   Defaka
   Spoken in: Nigeria
   Region: Rivers State, Bonny District
   Total speakers: 200 (2003 Blench)
   Language family: Niger-Congo
     Atlantic-Congo
      Ijoid
      Defaka
       Defaka
   Language codes
   ISO 639-1: none
   ISO 639-2: nic
   ISO/FDIS 639-3: afn
   Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA
   chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

   Ethnically, the Defaka are distinct from the Nkoroo, but they have
   assimilated to Nkoroo culture to such a degree that their language
   seems to be the only sign of a distinct Defaka identity. Use of the
   Defaka language however is quickly receding in favour of the language
   of the Nkoroo. Nowadays, most Defaka speakers are elderly people, and
   even among these, Defaka is rarely spoken — the total number of Defaka
   speakers is at most 200 nowadays (SIL/Ethnologue 15th ed.). The
   decrease in use of Defaka is stronger in Nkoroo town than in the Iwoma
   area. All children grow up speaking Nkoroo (an Ijo language) as a first
   language. The next most used language among the Defaka is Igbo, owing
   to the political influence of the Opobo since the days of the Oil
   Rivers Trade. Igbo has been a language of instruction in many schools
   in the region and still functions as a regional trade language.

   The Defaka language is related to the Ijo languages, showing quite a
   lot of lexical similarities, some shared regular sound correspondences
   and some grammatical similarities with proto-Ijo. While some of the
   lexical similarities can be attributed to borrowing (as Defaka has been
   in close contact with Ijo for more than 300 years), especially the
   sound correspondences and the grammatical similarities point to a
   (somewhat distant) genetic relationship. For example, both languages
   have a Subject Object Verb basic word order, which is otherwise
   extremely rare in the Niger-Congo language family, being found only in
   the Mande and Dogon branches.
     * a ebere ko̘ a okuna b̘ááma   (the dog SUBJECT the fowl kill:PAST)
       The dog killed the fowl (Defaka)
     * obiri b̘é o̘b̘ó̘kō̘ b̘é b̘ám̄   (dog the fowl the kill:PAST)   The
       dog killed the fowl (I̘jo̘, Kalab̘ari̘ dialect)

   Also, Defaka has a sex-gender system distinguishing at least between
   masculine and feminine, once again a rarity among South Central
   Niger-Congo languages other than Ijoid and Defaka. These similarities
   have led to the inclusion of Defaka in the Ijoid branch of Niger-Congo.
   Within Ijoid, Defaka constitutes a branch distinct from the main group
   of Ijoid languages, Ijo.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defaka"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
