A Bamvele Sociocultural Dataset

A Bamvele Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Bamvele community of Cameroon (administratively known as bamvələ, self-designated bamvələ/osak bassam), 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). The Bamvele are a majority community who regard their current territory as their ancestral homeland; oral tradition does not record migration from elsewhere. Community decisions are reached by assembly in consultation with the chief. The kinship system is patrilineal and accommodates both endogamous and exogamous marriage alliances. The founding ancestors Dang and Sazang are honoured in oral tradition. The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Bamvele 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 Bamvele variety.