A Gbaya Sociocultural Dataset

A Gbaya Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Gbaya community of Cameroon (a widely dispersed group whose biennial gathering (mòinam) reunites Gbaya communities across borders), 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). Gbaya (self-designation “the big ant”) lives in conviviality with neighbouring Makaa, Bobilis, Kapéré, Kakɔ and Bamvələ communities, and its speech is reported across eight Cameroonian regions as well as in Sudan, Liberia and Nigeria. Oral tradition traces a distant origin to Egypt by way of Sudan and the Central African Republic; the group still gathers every two years (*mɔinam*), including across the Central African border, to renew these ties. Society is patriarchal and patrilineal, with decisions historically taken within the family under the father's authority. Marriage begins with observation and a formal approach by the groom's aunts; rather than bridewealth, symbolic gifts — a chicken, a spear, a mat, a knife — mark the union. The former *Labi* initiation rite supplied the group's main symbolic and religious framework; most Gbaya are now Catholic, though family-based ancestral observance continues. Incest is the principal recognised taboo. Men hunt, clear land and herd, while women farm and trade; cassava couscous with pepper-salt sauce (*tɔ́ŋ nɛ ndónge*) is a staple dish and *ndolo* (corn beer) a traditional drink. The Labi and Patenge dances, accompanied by the *bīo* drum, remain central to community celebration. The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Gbaya 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 Gbaya variety.