Documentation of the Bantu language Mpiemo of the Central African Republic (A86c)_2

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 phonological system of the Bantu language Mpiemo (A86c) features a combination of nasals and stops both word-initially and medially. These nasals are phonetically more or less opaque. The question is whether these nasals should be interpreted as phonemes of their own or as a prenasalisation of the following stop. The recordings in this dataset form the basis of (acoustic) phonetic studies of this question. The study also takes into account the morphological function of the nasal and the syllabic structure in Mpiemo.