A Bulu Sociocultural Dataset

A Bulu Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Bulu community of Cameroon (administratively known as groupement Yekombo, self-designated Mboŋgui), 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 Bulu are a majority community on their ancestral land, organized patrilineally with exogamous marriage rules. The *adum* tree serves as a ritual medium for communication with ancestral spirits. Principal taboos are incest and public nudity. The founding ancestor is Ndəmba Owutu. The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Bulu 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 Bulu variety.