A Baka Sociocultural Dataset

Community

The Baka (self-designation Baka, glossed by the community as “freedom, a people of great mobility”) are administratively recorded as Pygmée and live integrated with neighbouring Nzimé and Mpoupieng communities. Oral tradition places their point of departure near Yokadouma, with intermediate stays at Lomié and Mindourou and continuing clientelistic and economic ties to those areas.

Location & Social Organization

Standing within the group is tied to hunting achievement — having killed an elephant, gorilla, chimpanzee or wild boar — and collective decisions are taken by a council of four notables: the hunter, the eldest woman and the healer. Descent is patrilineal, and marriage begins with an informal meeting between young people, followed by a multi-year bride-service period during which the groom works for his in-laws.

Religious & Symbolic Life

The ndjengui ceremony is the group's principal ancestral rite, performed according to the will of the elders and involving both spirits and the community. Several animal species are subject to food taboos whose transgression is believed to cause serious illness.

Economic & Cultural Life

Subsistence combines farming, hunting, fishing and gathering, with wild yam (sapa), wild mango (pekè) and honey (poki) among the principal foods. Traditional dances include Essongo and Ebouma, accompanied by tam-tam and drum.

Linguistic Note

The interview was conducted with the local expert speaking Baka. Rubrique 4 of the questionnaire elicited 157 common bilingual expressions (salutations, politeness formulas and everyday phrases), of which 139 have an endogenous-language form recorded to date; rubrique 5 elicited a 107-item numeral system, of which 70 have an endogenous-language form recorded to date. Together with the anthroponyms, ethnonyms and toponyms in rubrique 3, these fields constitute the dataset's linguistic component and are transcribed, where possible, in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA/API), per the questionnaire's instructions; where a fieldworker was not proficient in IPA, a Latin-alphabet approximation was used instead. No audio recordings are included in this release, although the questionnaire's protocol called for the full interview to be captured on dictaphone.

Source

The dataset was collected through a questionnaire designed to gather sociocultural and onomastic information about the Baka community. This was done during the pilot data-collection phase (March-April 2020) of the "Projet de confection d'un didacticiel sur la composition des peuplements au Cameroun," coordinated by Prof. Emmanuel Ngue Um for CERDOTOLA (Centre International des Civilisations Bantu / Institution Inter-Etats de cooperation scientifique pour la preservation, la diffusion et la mise en valeur du patrimoine africain), in partnership with the Ecole normale superieure de Bertoua. Record identifier: BAKA_2020_001.

Domain

The dataset represents a sociocultural and onomastic questionnaire designed to elicit the identity, history, social organisation, religious life, economy and material culture of a named community in Cameroon, together with a structured record of its personal names, ethnic names and place names, common bilingual expressions, and numeral system. The questionnaire was developed for the pilot phase of a project building educational (“didacticiel”) material on the composition of Cameroon's settled peoples; unlike a purely linguistic questionnaire, its entry point and primary unit of documentation is the community, not its language or dialect, although a linguistic component (onomastics, common expressions, numeral system) is elicited throughout in the community's own speech.

Size

The dataset comprises 51 narrative question/answer entries (rubriques 2 and 3.1-3.6); 15 anthroponym entries, 10 ethnonym entries and 5 toponym entries (rubrique 3); 139 of 157 common expressions with an endogenous-language form recorded (rubrique 4); 70 of 107 numeral-system entries with an endogenous-language form recorded (rubrique 5); and a fixed 65-item reference table of NSM semantic primitives (annex).

Structure

This release comprises six related tables, distributed here as separate tab-separated-value (TSV) files (one per original spreadsheet sheet) alongside the PDF version of this submission form:

• 1_Metadonnees_Enquete.tsv: One row of administrative metadata for the questionnaire: record identifier, questionnaire title/version/author, the group's administrative and emic (self-given) names and their meaning, names given by/to neighbouring groups, location, fieldwork date, language(s) used, and consultant information.

• 2_Reponses_Ouvertes.tsv: Question/answer pairs for the open-ended narrative sub-sections of rubriques 2 (sociocultural profile: identity, residence and mobility, social and political organisation and kinship, religious life, socio-economic and sociocultural life) and 3.1.1-3.1.6 (general anthroponymic structure), with the original French question, the free-text answer, and the language(s) in which the answer was given.

• 3_Onomastique.tsv: One row per onomastic entry (anthroponym, ethnonym or toponym): orthographic form, IPA transcription where available, literal meaning/etymology, an associated NSM semantic primitive and grammatical category, and (for anthroponyms) the type of name.

• 4_Expressions_Usuelles.tsv: One row per common bilingual expression (greetings, politeness formulas and everyday phrases): the French prompt, the endogenous-language form where recorded, an IPA transcription where available, and a word-for-word gloss.

• 5_Systeme_Numeral.tsv: One row per numeral (1 upward): the French label, the endogenous-language form where recorded, an IPA transcription where available, and a compositional gloss (e.g. 7 = 6+1).

• 6_Annexe_Primitifs.tsv: The fixed reference table of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) primitives (Goddard & Wierzbicka) used to tag onomastic entries in sheet 3.

Sample

Anthroponyms (from 3_Onomastique.tsv):

Common expressions (from 4_Expressions_Usuelles.tsv):

Numeral system (from 5_Systeme_Numeral.tsv):