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

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.

Trilingual word list Mpiemo-French-English containing roughly 1,900 words and grammatical information like word class and noun class. The word list is an updated and extended version of the unpublished lists put together by Laurent Wanabetsina, Keith Beavon and Nkali Lazaro Mbaro (1986) and Lydia Lundström (197?). For the updates a number of native Mpiemo speakers, among others Abel Mabessimo and Zacharie Metekouli, have been consulted. They spoke the Mpiakoumbo and Kwabili dialects. The words in this list are phonological transcriptions. The dataset consists of the word list in an Excel file and sound recordings of the words.