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License:
NOODL-1.0
Steward:
Institute of African Digital HumanitiesDataset ID:
cmu1iu4op001ynv076vecqaa2
Release Date: 9/14/2026
Format: TSV, PDF
Size: 80.46 KB
A Podoko Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Podoko community of Cameroon (the Podoko (also Arba, Parkwa), “those of the plain,” of the Mandara mountains), 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. 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). Self-designated Arba, Podoko or Parkwa (“those of the plain”), the group describes itself as homogeneous with the Podoko of Oudjila and southern Podoko and integrated with the Mouktele; its speech is also found at Garoua, Douala and Yaoundé. Oral tradition traces migration from Gaza, with intermediate stays at Waza and along the Logone, to the Mandara mountains, which the group regards as both its cradle and a historical place of refuge. Authority is exercised by the chief and third-degree *lawan* chiefs, with decisions taken at the chiefdom but grounded in community-wide consensus; descent is patrilineal. Marriage combines a year of bride-service, staged cash payments (for utensils and clothing) and livestock gifts to the bride's family, culminating in a goat-based rite symbolising the reopening of the in-laws' door. Two ancestral rites are recognised: *tsaltiwa* (a water libation performed in times of misfortune) and *toulimouta* (an honour rite performed at death). Discussing sex openly and physically punishing a daughter are among the recognised taboos. Men farm, herd and trade; women grow beans, trade fried snacks and raise small ruminants; bean sauce, vegetables, millet and okra are staple foods, and *bil-bil* and *dolo* traditional drinks. Dress has evolved from the sleeveless gandoura and long-sleeved boubou to include jeans and the *kaba*, and the group notes shared and distinct religious practices with its Mandara and Kanuri neighbours. The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Podoko 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 Podoko variety.
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 Podoko 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 Podoko 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 Podoko community's history, culture and onomastics. (e) Cultural modeling and intercultural dialogue: - Cultural modeling: The sociocultural, onomastic and linguistic data in this dataset can be used to build and enrich interactive network-based representations of cultural communities, modeling the relationships and affinities between Cameroonian communities across historical, linguistic, geographic, social and cognitive dimensions. An example of such cultural modeling in the African multicultural and multilingual context is the CamRhizome interactive visualization, accessible at https://ngue-um.github.io/Enseignement-Apprentissage-LN/#/reseau, which maps intercommunal connections among 20 Cameroonian language communities and can serve as a tool for enhancing intercultural dialogue in African multicultural and multilingual spaces.
This dataset is distributed as a .tar.gz archive (A_Podoko_Sociocultural_Dataset.tar.gz) with the following contents:
A_Podoko_Sociocultural_Dataset/
├── 1_Metadonnees_Enquete.tsv — administrative metadata (1 row)
├── 2_Reponses_Ouvertes.tsv — open-ended narrative Q&A responses
├── 3_Onomastique.tsv — onomastic entries (anthroponyms, ethnonyms, toponyms)
├── 4_Expressions_Usuelles.tsv — common bilingual expressions
├── 5_Systeme_Numeral.tsv — numeral system entries
├── 6_Annexe_Primitifs.tsv — NSM semantic primitives reference table (65 items)
└── A_Podoko_Sociocultural_Dataset.pdf — PDF version of the questionnaire
Note: The fieldwork interview audio recording is not yet included in this release. It will be added in a subsequent update. Recordings were collected on the fieldwork sites and document the interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee.
Self-designated Arba, Podoko or Parkwa (“those of the plain”), the group describes itself as homogeneous with the Podoko of Oudjila and southern Podoko and integrated with the Mouktele; its speech is also found at Garoua, Douala and Yaoundé. Oral tradition traces migration from Gaza, with intermediate stays at Waza and along the Logone, to the Mandara mountains, which the group regards as both its cradle and a historical place of refuge.
Authority is exercised by the chief and third-degree lawan chiefs, with decisions taken at the chiefdom but grounded in community-wide consensus; descent is patrilineal. Marriage combines a year of bride-service, staged cash payments (for utensils and clothing) and livestock gifts to the bride's family, culminating in a goat-based rite symbolising the reopening of the in-laws' door.
Two ancestral rites are recognised: tsaltiwa (a water libation performed in times of misfortune) and toulimouta (an honour rite performed at death). Discussing sex openly and physically punishing a daughter are among the recognised taboos.
Men farm, herd and trade; women grow beans, trade fried snacks and raise small ruminants; bean sauce, vegetables, millet and okra are staple foods, and bil-bil and dolo traditional drinks. Dress has evolved from the sleeveless gandoura and long-sleeved boubou to include jeans and the kaba, and the group notes shared and distinct religious practices with its Mandara and Kanuri neighbours.
The interview was conducted with the local expert speaking Podoko. Rubrique 4 of the questionnaire elicited 157 common bilingual expressions (salutations, politeness formulas and everyday phrases), of which 157 have an endogenous-language form recorded to date; rubrique 5 elicited a 107-item numeral system, of which 107 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.
The dataset was collected through a questionnaire designed to gather sociocultural and onomastic information about the Podoko 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: PODO_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 51 narrative question/answer entries (rubriques 2 and 3.1-3.6); 26 anthroponym entries, 15 ethnonym entries and 21 toponym entries (rubrique 3); 157 of 157 common expressions with an endogenous-language form recorded (rubrique 4); 107 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).
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.
Anthroponyms (from 3_Onomastique.tsv):
| Anthroponym | Meaning / notes |
|---|---|
| Wàsa [wàsa] | « jumeaux» |
| Namba[nam.ba] | «successeur des jumeaux » |
| Haya[hajà] | «la terre» |
| Maltaka[ma.ltaka] | «qu’on laisse dans le ventre» |
| kambà[kam-bà] | «qu’il est né en brousse» |
Common expressions (from 4_Expressions_Usuelles.tsv):
| French | Podoko | Word-for-word gloss |
|---|---|---|
| Salut (formule neutre, à toute heure) | Balapia, balapiaka | Tu vas bien |
| salutations du matin (une personne) | Hn balapiaka | Tu as bien passé la nuit |
| salutations du matin (plusieurs personnes) | Hn balapiakwa | Vous avez bien passé la nuit |
| salutations du matin (en signe de déférence/respect) | ambaikanga | Grâce à votre volonté |
| salutations de la mi-journée (une personne) | Wak balapiaka | Tu as bien passé la journée |
Numeral system (from 5_Systeme_Numeral.tsv):
| French | Podoko |
|---|---|
| Un | Tanga /tra |
| Deux | Srā |
| Trois | makra |
| Quatre | Oufada |
| Cinq | Ldma |
| Six | Oumkwa |