A Chadian Arabic Sociocultural Dataset

A Chadian Arabic Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Chadian Arabic community of Cameroon — known locally as *Arabe Choua*, and in Arabic as *Al-arabi al-Tachaadi* (العربية‎, العربية التشادية‎), self-designated simply as *arabe* — 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). Self-designated *arabe* and widely known as *Arabe Choua* (Al-arabi al-Tachaadi / العربية التشادية‎), the Chadian Arabic community of Cameroon is integrated with Fali, Guiziga, Bata and Foulbe neighbours and its speech is represented across several regions: Logone-et-Chari, Diamaré, Mayo-Danay, Vina and Bénoué. Oral tradition traces the group's origin to the Wadaï region (Abéché) in Chad, with an intermediate stay at Mora in the Mayo-Sava, before settling in the Far North and Adamawa regions; the land has been occupied for some three centuries and is regarded as ancestral. A three-century-old mosque and the chieftaincy compound are significant historical landmarks. Authority rests on royalty and land tenure, with decisions reached by consensus among community members, though the chief's word is ultimately paramount. The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Chadian Arabic 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 Chadian Arabic variety spoken in Cameroon.