Babute-Njore_ALCAM-MultimodalDataset

Language

Babouté (also known as Vute, Bamboute, Boute, Bute, Foute, Pute, Voute, Voutere, Woute, Wute; ISO 639-3: vut) is a Bantoid language (Niger-Congo > Atlantic-Congo > Benue-Congo > Mambiloid > Mambila-Vute > Vute) spoken by roughly 21,000 people (1997 estimate) mainly in Cameroon, with some speakers reported in Nigeria. Speakers are distributed across three areas: the Mayo-Banyo and Djérem divisions of the Adamawa Region (near Banyo and Tibati); the Mbam-et-Kim, Mbam-et-Inoubou and Haute-Sanaga divisions of the Centre Region (near Ngoro, Nanga-Eboko and Mbandjock); and the Lom-et-Djérem division of the East Region (near Doumé). This dataset documents the variety spoken in Njoré, a Vute-speaking locality in the Mbandjock area of the Haute-Sanaga division, Centre Region, founded historically by settlers associated with the broader Vuté migration across the Sanaga river.

Variants

Published descriptions of Babouté (Vute) distinguish three broader dialect clusters — Eastern, Central and Doumé — that differ in vowel/diphthong inventory and in the preservation of certain labialized consonants. This release documents a single, localized variety as elicited from a native speaker in Njoré; no formal correspondence between the Njoré variety and the Eastern/Central/Doumé dialect clusters described in the literature has been established here, and this should be clarified with the dataset's creator before downstream use. Unlike the multi-dialect structure adopted for some other languages in the same ALCAM series (e.g. Batanga, which documents the distinct Banoho and Bapuku varieties separately), no further dialect-internal split is documented within this dataset.

Writing System

The writing system used for the transcription of Babouté in this dataset is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), as reflected in the Word, LangEx and LangPars columns of the datasheet and in the sentence field of the audio-sentence mapping files. The phonological inventory below draws on the 374 datasheet entries and the 245 unique audio-aligned sentences (the mapping.tsv files across the dataset's four recording batches). A standardized practical orthography for Babouté (Vute), based on the General Alphabet of Cameroonian Languages (GACEL), has existed since 1979, but is not the transcription system used in this dataset.

1. Vowels

The data attests seven oral vowel qualities: a, e, ə, i, o, ɔ, u. Note that this transcription uses the central vowel ə (schwa) where some published descriptions of Babouté (Vute) instead report ɨ or ɛ; no nasalized vowels or diphthongs are systematically marked in the transcribed data, in contrast to the fuller vowel inventory (including nasal vowels and diphthongs such as /ei/, /ai/, /ɨi/, /əi/, /oi/) reported for Vute in the wider literature. A combining tilde-below diacritic (◌̰), which in IPA conventionally marks creaky voice, occurs on 135 tokens across the Word, LangEx and LangPars columns; its precise phonetic conditioning has not been established here and should be clarified with the dataset's creator before downstream use.

2. Consonants

The consonant inventory attested in the datasheet and mapping files includes:

b, d, g, j, k, l, m, n, p, s, t, w, y — the core set of simple consonants, plus two implosives, ɓ (voiced bilabial implosive, 138 tokens) and ɗ (voiced alveolar implosive, 60 tokens), alongside the nasals ŋ (96 tokens) and ɲ (20 tokens).

A glottal stop ʔ (23 tokens) is also attested, alongside an apostrophe (') that recurs independently across 56 tokens in the transcribed sentences; as with the glottal stop, its precise grammatical or phonetic function relative to ʔ has not been formally documented and should be clarified with the dataset's creator.

Complex onsets and prenasalized consonants are attested: mb, nd, ng (ŋg), nj, kp, gb, matching the prenasalized and complex-onset series independently documented for Babouté (Vute) in the linguistic literature; the additional prenasalized labial-velar mgb, attested in some other datasets of the same ALCAM series, does not occur here.

A labialized consonant series is also attested — kw, gw, ngw (ŋgw), cw, jw, ndw — consistent with the phonemic labialization independently reported for Babouté (Vute) consonants. Vowel length is marked with a colon diacritic (:), consistent with the long/short vowel contrast reported for the language.

3. Tone system

Three level tones are marked in the datasheet and mapping files:

• High tone (H): á

• Mid tone (M): ā

• Low tone (L): à

Unmarked vowels represent tonally neutral or contextually determined syllables. Published descriptions of Babouté (Vute) additionally attest several contour-tone categories (e.g. mid-high rising, low-high, high-low, high-mid, high-low-high), which are not distinguished in this transcription; this simplification should be taken into account when using the dataset for tonal analysis.

Source

The dataset was collected through a questionnaire designed to gather basic information about the Babouté lexicon and grammar. This was done as part of the Atlas Linguistique du Cameroun (ALCAM) project.

Domain

The dataset represents a linguistic questionnaire designed to elicit the basic lexicon and grammatical information of Babouté as spoken in Njoré.

Size

The datasheet comprises 374 elicited lexical/example-sentence entries. The audio subfolder contains 245 audio files distributed across four recording batches (72, 43, 74 and 56 clips respectively; 5m 11s, 2m 37s, 5m 34s and 4m 08s of speech, measured directly from the audio files), for a total of 17 minutes 32 seconds of speech across 245 files. Unlike some other datasets in the same ALCAM series, no cross-batch redundancy (repeated sentences recorded across more than one batch) was found: all 245 recorded sentences are distinct, so the dataset contains 245 unique sentence-audio pairs.

Structure

The dataset comprises: 1) a datasheet (ALCAM_dataset_bàbútè-njorè.tsv) with lexical entries, French glosses, and example sentences with word-for-word parsing; 2) voice clips read by a native speaker of Babouté, organized into four recording batches under the audio subfolder; 3) sentence-to-audio mapping files (mapping.tsv, one per recording batch).

Description of columns

Datasheet (ALCAM_dataset_bàbútè-njorè.tsv):

• OrigID: original number of lexical entry on paper questionnaire

• EditID: modification of OrigID

• FrenchRef: reference entry (originally provided in French)

• FrenchComm: original comments about reference entry (FrenchRef)

• French: lexical entry in French (overlaps with FrenchRef)

• Note: note of researcher on the lexical entry

• POS: part of speech

• Class: noun class (where applicable); not populated in this release — Babouté (Vute) is a Bantoid language and does retain a reduced noun-class-related morphology in the broader literature, but this was not annotated as part of the present questionnaire

• Morf: morphological attribute (e.g. plural, singular)

• Var: dialect variant tag; not populated in this release, since the dataset represents a single, localized variety (see Variants above)

• Word: lexical entry in Babouté (IPA)

• CrossRef: cross-referencing of lexical entry number

• FrenchEx: example sentence in French

• LangEx: example sentence in Babouté (IPA)

• LangExEdit: manual editing of LangEx

• FrenchExEdit: edited French equivalent of FrenchEx

• LangPars: word-for-word parsing in Babouté

• LangParsEdit: editing of LangPars

• FrenchPars: French equivalent of LangParsEdit

• FrenchParsEdit: editing of FrenchPars

_ marks fields left empty in the source questionnaire. Of the 374 entries, 373 have a French gloss, 246 have a Babouté Word, 254 have a French example sentence, 191 have a Babouté example sentence, and 191 have word-for-word parsing. The audio subfolder separately provides recordings for 245 unique sentence-level items overall (see Size, above); a spot-check confirms 183 of these correspond exactly to LangEx entries in the datasheet (see Sample, below), but an exhaustive row-by-row correspondence between every audio clip and a specific datasheet entry has not been established.

Sample

The excerpt below shows 5 of the 374 datasheet entries (OrigID x1–x8) for which the Babouté example sentence (LangEx) has an exact, verified match in one of the audio-sentence mapping files, illustrating the parallel Babouté/French structure together with the aligned audio.