First session of wordlist collection in Mbay-Bati Mba-Wordlist-01 Documentation of Bati Language and Oral Traditions

Wordlist elicitation is based on SIL's Comparative Wordlist for Africa (Keith Snider and James Roberts 2004). Emmanuel Ngué Um (the main researcher) is the collector, while Mbombog Liyep li Djom André, and Madame Nkoloo are the consultants. The session takes place at Mbombod Liyep's residence. Her wife and daughter-in-law are also attending part of the session, but do not verbaly contribute to it. The documentation of Bati language and oral traditions aims at creating a repository of language and cultural data representative of the five varieties spoken in the Bati Canton, in the Littoral region of Cameroon. Number of Bati speakers is estimated at 800. The resulting corpus will lay the empirical ground for cross-dialectal studies in linguistics and others fields in the humanities such as anthropology, which will better inform on the bi-vectorial dynamics of Bati language and identity, torn as they are, between the Mbam and the Basaa groups respectively. Basaa is the main language of elicitation, and French is called to rescue whenever the meaning of a given word or expression in not explicit in Basaa. Mbaa is the language being elicited.