A Foulbe / Pular Sociocultural Dataset

A Foulbe / Pular Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Foulbe / Pular community of Cameroon (the Walarbe Foulbé (Fulani) of northern Cameroon), 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). Recorded administratively as Walarbe and self-identified as Foulbé, the group is integrated with the Fali and Bata and its speech is found across the North, Far North and Adamaoua regions. Oral tradition traces migration from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, with intermediate stays at Baschéo, Demsa and the Mandara mountains, and land was progressively acquired through settlement and intermarriage with Peul hosts. The group is led by a Lamido whose accession is hereditary, assisted by an Alkali; descent is patrilineal. Marriage proceeds through a hand-request (accompanied by kola and salt), engagement gifts, a monetary bridewealth, and a celebration with clothing gifts for the bride. The mosque is the group's principal religious site, and no ancestral cult is reported; cousin marriage is religiously sanctioned and no taboo is recognised in this respect under Islamic law. Men herd cattle, sheep and goats, farm and trade, or teach in Qur'anic schools, while women weave and sell cloth or teach; millet, baobab leaf and curdled milk are staple foods, and boubous and wrappers the everyday dress. Traditional music (Wadou'el, Sorol) is performed with tam-tam, griot song and signal horns. The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Foulbe / Pular 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 Foulbe / Pular variety.