Nigeria

Cameroon

There are 1700 Tiv households with approximately 11,000 people at the south-western border of Cameroon, Manyu division, north east of Akwaya on the Nigerian border, and bordering the Iyom tribes of Cameroon. Their paramount ruler is Zaki Abaajul, who has the Tiv and Ulitsi as his subjects. The Cameronian Tiv are well educated and live in anglophone Cameroon as their ancestral land, while a few others live in the francophone region. They are mostly farmers but others work in the government.

Vowels

• Vowel sounds are phonetically nasalized before nasal consonants.
• /a/ can be freely heard as [æ̃] or [ɑ̃] before a nasal consonant.

Consonants

• /ɣ/ is heard phonetically as [x], but is often voiced as [ɣ].
• [ɱ] is heard in free variation in word-final positions.
• [d͡z] occurs in other dialects.^[3]

Tone

Tiv has three main tones (five if rising and falling are counted as separate tones instead of composites of existing tones). They are most importantly used in inflection.^[2]

Accents

The accents of Tiv are as follows:

• Ityoisha, spoken in the southeast, noted for its exaggerated palatalisation of vowels;
• Shitile, spoken by most Tiv east of the Katsina Ala River, apparently slower sounding than the other Tiv accents and slurs vowels into their neighbouring consonant;
• Iharev, which gives an exaggerated roll to the phoneme [r]~[l]
• Kparev, spoken in the centre and south-centre;
  • Kunav, a sub-accent of Kparev, noted for its preference for [d͡ʒ] sounds where other Kparev use [d͡z].^[2]

Vocabulary, particularly plant and tool names, changes from one part of Tiv territory to the other.^[2]