אפיק

Efik is a Lower Cross Niger-Congo language of southeastern Nigeria, the historic literary lingua franca of the Old Calabar region (the historic Efik kingdom of Calabar, which was the major Atlantic slave trade port and palm oil/ivory trade center 17th-19th centuries). The Calabar Efik literary tradition began in 1846 with Hope Waddell's Presbyterian missionary work and the 1862 Goldie Dictionary, making Efik one of the longest-continuously-written sub-Saharan African languages. Modern Efik has ~2 million speakers and serves as a shared lingua franca with the related Ibibio (ibb) and Anaang languages within the Ibibio-Efik dialect continuum. Linguistically, Efik shares Cross River features: noun-class system, tonal (high/low/mid), and SVO order with elaborate verb extension morphology.