Bassa

Bassa, more fully Basaa, is a Bantu language of coastal Cameroon, spoken by the Bassa people of the lower Sanaga valley and the Wouri estuary. Its speakers belong to the Bantu farming peoples who settled the Atlantic coast of central Africa in the last centuries before Christ.

Bassa oral tradition remembers a migration through the interior to the rock sanctuary of Ngog Lituba, and around 1400 its clans spread from there to the lower Sanaga and the banks of the Wouri, where they lived by farming and fishing.

Like other Bantu tongues the language is built on a system of noun classes, and its coastal dialects were shaped by trade in the Cameroon estuary, where the neighbouring Duala rose as merchant middlemen.