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License:
NOODL-1.0
Steward:
Institute of African Digital HumanitiesDataset ID:
cmtr7ro9005brny071h9p44a4
Release Date: 9/7/2026
Format: TSV, PDF
Size: 71.40 KB
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A Balengou Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Balengou community of Cameroon (the second-degree chiefdom of Balengou/Ntumbo in the Ndé division), collected under the project "Projet de confection d'un didacticiel sur la composition des peuplements au Cameroun" (a didactic-software project on the composition of Cameroon's settled peoples), coordinated by Prof. Emmanuel Ngue Um for CERDOTOLA (the Inter-State Institution of scientific co-operation for the preservation, diffusion and valorization of the African cultural heritage) during the project's pilot data-collection phase in March-April 2020. The interview was conducted at Balengou, Ndé, Balengou / Ntumbo (chefferie de 2e degré). Unlike a purely linguistic corpus, the dataset foregrounds the community itself as the unit of documentation: its history, social organisation, religious life and material culture, with onomastics, common expressions and a numeral system providing a linguistic component elicited in the community's own speech (recorded in the International Phonetic Alphabet, or in a Latin-based approximation where IPA was not available to the fieldworker). Balengou is a second-degree chiefdom of the Ndé division (West region) whose autochthonous population was joined by settlers from Baleng (near Bafang); the group overlaps and intermarries with the Bamena, Baiok, Bangwa, Bafang and Mbouda. Both endogamous and exogamous marriage are practised today, a shift from the more strictly endogamous marriages of earlier generations. Society retains a class structure of royal family, notables, blacksmiths and artisans and age grades (young, adult, elder), though this structure has weakened across the wider Ndé division; decisions move both from family and quarter level up to the chief and back down again, and descent is patrilineal. Marriage proceeds through a meeting of the two families, engagement and customary marriage, sealed with an exchange of kola and raphia wine witnessed by both families and the ancestors. Sacred sites are found throughout Balengou territory, and the group describes a close, land-bound relationship with the sacred; ancestor-honouring rites are generally performed at family gatherings, especially at year's end, and may also be performed individually at any time. Taboos include cross-generational bed-sharing within a household and incest. Historically men built and fenced homesteads and raised livestock while women farmed; today's staples include sweet potato and melon, and raphia wine is the traditional drink. A distinctive local custom is a three-day widowhood period — shorter than the seven-to-nine days reported elsewhere in the region — observed immediately after burial, with continued material support for the widow; the founding ancestor is named Tchana. The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Balengou community's own self-description — its social organisation, kinship and marriage practices, religious and symbolic life, economy and material culture, and internal system of personal, ethnic and place names — rather than only its named language or dialect. This community-centred, ethnographic design distinguishes it from language-only documentation, while the accompanying onomastic, common-expression and numeral-system data still make the dataset usable for lexicographic and comparative linguistic work on the Balengou variety. For Balengou, the informant completed the narrative sections of the questionnaire (rubriques 2 and 3.1-3.6) in full, including thirty endogenous personal names, but the common-expressions and numeral-system tables (rubriques 4 and 5) were not elicited from a native speaker in this round and remain to be completed.
Licensing
Nwulite Obodo Open Data Licence 1.0 (NOODL-1.0)
https://licensingafricandatasets.com/nwulite-obodo-licenseRestrictions/Special Constraints
By downloading this dataset, you agree: - To use it for research and scientific use only - that you will not re-host or re-share this dataset
Forbidden Usage
You agree not to use the data for: profiling, surveillance or any purpose prejudicial to the interests of the individuals or community described; caricaturing, stereotyping, or otherwise misrepresenting the community documented; Generative AI; reproduction; duplication; modification; augmentation; copying; distribution; transmission; display; sale; transfer; publication or creation of derivative works without the explicit permission of the legal owner of the dataset.
Intended Use
(a) Ethnographic and cultural documentation: - Sociocultural and anthropological research: The narrative responses (identity, residence and mobility, social and political organisation, kinship and marriage, religious and symbolic life, economy and material culture) support ethnographic, anthropological and sociolinguistic research on the Balengou community, and complement rather than replace existing ethnographic and anthropological scholarship. (b) Onomastic and toponymic research: - Personal-name, ethnonym and toponym documentation: The structured onomastic entries, each tagged with a semantic primitive and grammatical category, support onomastic and lexicographic research and comparative naming-practice studies across Cameroonian communities. (c) Linguistic and lexicographic tasks: - Lexicon documentation and comparative numeral typology: The common-expression and numeral-system tables, transcribed where possible in IPA, are useful for building basic lexical resources for the Balengou variety and for comparative numeral-system typology across Cameroonian languages. (d) Pedagogical and educational-software use: - Didactic-software content: As part of the pilot phase of a project building educational (“didacticiel”) material on the composition of Cameroon's settled peoples, the dataset supports the development of teaching content on the Balengou community's history, culture and onomastics.
Balengou is a second-degree chiefdom of the Ndé division (West region) whose autochthonous population was joined by settlers from Baleng (near Bafang); the group overlaps and intermarries with the Bamena, Baiok, Bangwa, Bafang and Mbouda. Both endogamous and exogamous marriage are practised today, a shift from the more strictly endogamous marriages of earlier generations.
Society retains a class structure of royal family, notables, blacksmiths and artisans and age grades (young, adult, elder), though this structure has weakened across the wider Ndé division; decisions move both from family and quarter level up to the chief and back down again, and descent is patrilineal. Marriage proceeds through a meeting of the two families, engagement and customary marriage, sealed with an exchange of kola and raphia wine witnessed by both families and the ancestors.
Sacred sites are found throughout Balengou territory, and the group describes a close, land-bound relationship with the sacred; ancestor-honouring rites are generally performed at family gatherings, especially at year's end, and may also be performed individually at any time. Taboos include cross-generational bed-sharing within a household and incest.
Historically men built and fenced homesteads and raised livestock while women farmed; today's staples include sweet potato and melon, and raphia wine is the traditional drink. A distinctive local custom is a three-day widowhood period — shorter than the seven-to-nine days reported elsewhere in the region — observed immediately after burial, with continued material support for the widow; the founding ancestor is named Tchana.
The interview was conducted with the local expert speaking Balengou, with French used during the interview itself. This release comes from the typeset (directly transcribed, non-OCR) version of the questionnaire; the anthroponym list (rubrique 3.1.7) was completed with 30 endogenous names, but the common-expressions (rubrique 4) and numeral-system (rubrique 5) tables, and the ethnonym and toponym lists, were not filled in with endogenous-language forms in this round and remain to be elicited from a native speaker. No audio recordings are included in this release.
The dataset was collected through a questionnaire designed to gather sociocultural and onomastic information about the Balengou 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: BLNG_2020_001.
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.
The dataset comprises 49 narrative question/answer entries (rubriques 2 and 3.1-3.6); 30 anthroponym entries, 0 ethnonym entries and 0 toponym entries (rubrique 3); 0 of 176 common expressions with an endogenous-language form recorded (rubrique 4); 0 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).
Because this community's questionnaire was received as a typeset Word document rather than a pre-digitised spreadsheet, its data have been transcribed here directly into the same six-table schema used across the rest of the collection, distributed as TSV files 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.
Anthroponyms (from 3_Onomastique.tsv):
| Anthroponym | Meaning / notes |
|---|---|
| Tchienkoula | |
| Tchapda | |
| Djiognwo | |
| Fondio | |
| Tanya |