Documentation of the Bantu language Mpiemo of the Central African Republic (A86c)_3

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 soud recordings of several texts. Matthew chapter 8 is read by a Mpiemo speaker (Mathurin Mpatoumbo). There are also PDF files of the text which follow the translation made by Gilbert Ankouma, Joseph Apang and Lydia Lundström (1978).
The fable Mpi na kubɔ (The dog and the hen) was written down by a native speaker of Mpiemo (Jean-Charles Ankouma) and was then edited together with him and another person (Mathurin Mpatoumbo). The fable was then recorded. Both a sound recording and a transcript with annotation are available.
There are also some proverbs collected by Mathurin Mpatoumbo. They are only available as sound recordings. The proverbs are translated into the Sango language but not into French. The reason for this is that they exist in the Sango culture but not in the French.