Documentation of the Bantu language Mpiemo of the Central African Republic (A86c)_4

The overall aim of the study has been to document and preserve the minority language Mpiemo as well as to analyse it from a linguistic perspective. The language is spoken in some regions of the Central African Republic and Cameroon. The language is classified as A86c according to the Guthrie system and has approximately 29,000 speakers. When the project started there was a translation of the four gospels with a French-based orthography, but no other texts. The documentation has spanned several projects from 1998 onwards and has resulted in, amongst other things, a number of articles on Mpiemo phonetics, phonology, morphology as well as the publication of recorded speech together with transcripts and annotations and texts about the local wild plant life.

Purpose:

The purpose of the project has been to document and linguistically analyse the Central African language Mpiemo by means of varying subprojects.

The dataset contains recordings of elicitation sessions that deal with vowel quality, vowel quantity and tones.