How do you signal the end to a story?
In an interview by colleagues, Matthew Harley reports about "one of the most marvelous linguistic sounds in the world," used in the "Kamwe language of Nigeria, as the traditional way to end a story":
It consists of a disyllablc ‘ng-ng’ sound, with low-high tone, whilst simultaneously pinching your nose with your forefinger and thumb, and pulling downwards, like pulling a clothes peg off a washing line. The sound was unforgettably first described by a linguist as, “the nasalised nose twang”, and one of my first three students in Nigeria asked me how it could be written. Linguistics doesn’t get much better than that!
For more on the Kamwe, read this 2022 article in Christianity Today.
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