FUB-Narratives

Language

Adamawa Fulfulde (also referred to simply as Fulfulde) is one of several varieties of Fulfulde, or Puular, or Fula spoken troughout the Sahel region in Africa. Adamawa Fulfulde is native to a population located in the Adamawa, North and Far-North Regions of Cameroon.

Variants

The Adamawa Fulfulde language is often subdivided into three dialects, each representing a different main settlement area: Maroua, Garoua and Ngaoundéré. It is difficult to specify which dialect is represented in each text in the dataset, as this information was not recorded or preserved when the oral performances were recorded.

Writing System

1. Basic Latin letters

Consonants: b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, w, y
Vowels: a, e, i, o, u

2. Extended letters & diacritics

ɓ, ɗ, ƴ, ŋ, ñ, ŋg, ŋk, ’ (glottal stop/apostrophe), Ɓ, Ɗ, Ƴ

3. Common multigraphs

nd, ng, nj, ny, mb, cw, gw, hw, sh (less common)

4. Full alphabet

a, b, ɓ, c, d, ɗ, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, ñ, ŋ, o, p, r, s, t, u, w, y, ƴ

5. Notes

• ɓ, ɗ, ƴ = implosive and palatalized consonants central to Fulfulde phonology.

• ŋ, ñ mark nasal sounds [ŋ], [ɲ].

• Tone is not marked in standard orthography but is phonemic in speech.

• Glottal apostrophe (’) often indicates elision or morphological boundary.

• Orthography follows conventions of the Nigerian–Cameroon Adamawa Fulfulde standard

Source

Who wrote/created the text and When?

The texts in this dataset were transcribed from orchestrated oral performances of literary experts from the Fulani community in the Adamawa Futa. The term 'Futa' refers to an area where the Fulani people settled. These performances were recorded in the 1970s by Catholic missionaries, who were seeking to understand the worldview of Fulani society and African societies more broadly. The transcription work was started by the Catholic missionaries and continued by the Fulfulde Language Academy, for which Hubert Nkoumou was consultant from 2003 to 2008. He was responsible for revising the transcriptions and disseminating the texts, either through publications or otherwise. These texts had been kept with Hubert Nkoumou for many years. He was therefore greatly relieved when approached with the proposal to publish the texts on the Mozilla Data Collective Platform, as this would finally enable him to bring them to a wider audience.

Domain

The texts in this dataset are orchestrated performances of oral literary genres, such as folktales, hymns, songs and riddles.