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Wapan
Wapan
Jukun
Native to	Nigeria
Region	Taraba State, Plateau State, Nasarawa State
Native speakers	(100,000 cited 1994)
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo languages Benue–Congo Jukunoid Central Kororofa Wapan; ; ; ; ; ;
Dialects	Wukan;
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	juk
Glottolog	wapa1235
ELP	Wapan

Wapan (Jukun Wapan) or Kororofa,^[2] also known as Wukari after the local town of Wukari, is a major Jukunoid language of Nigeria.

Varieties

Blench (2019) lists the following varieties as part of the Kororofa (Jukun Wapan) cluster:^[2]

Abinsi
Wapan proper
Hõne
Dampar (spoken at Dampar, Wukari LGA)

Phonology

Wapan and other Jukunoid languages are interesting in the development of asymmetrical patterns of nasal and oral consonants in West Africa.

One could posit that voiced oral stops become nasal before nasal vowels, sometimes at the expense of having more nasal than oral vowels, which is typologically odd, or that nasal stops denasalise before oral vowels, which is typologically odd as well.

Oral vowels are allowed only in syllables like ba, mba, nasal vowels in bã, mã.

Historically, however, the consonants nasalized: *mb became **mm before nasal vowels and then reduced to *m, leaving the current asymmetric distribution.^[3]

allophonic Ṽ next to N	*mã	*mãm	*mba	*mbãm	*ba	*bãm
mb → mm/_Ṽ	*mã	*mãm	*mba	*mmãm	*ba	*bãm
mm → m	*mã	*mãm	*mba	*mãm	*ba	*bãm
loss of final C	mã	mã	mba	mã	ba	bã

References

^ Wapan at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
^ ^a ^b Blench, Roger (2019). An Atlas of Nigerian Languages (4th ed.). Cambridge: Kay Williamson Educational Foundation.
^ Larry Hyman, 1975. "Nasal states and nasal processes." In Nasalfest: Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization, pp. 249–264