A Ghomala Sociocultural Dataset

A Ghomala Sociocultural Dataset is a sociocultural and onomastic dataset documenting the Ghomala (self-designation pepa, "sentinelles de guèrre") of 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). The Ghomala (Bapa) are a majority community who trace their origin to Batie, as part of a network of sister chieftaincies. Both endogamy and exogamy are practised. Ancestor cults are maintained; the *kan* festival is held biennially. The founding ancestor is Youdom. The dataset's primary added value lies in documenting the Ghomala 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 Ghomala variety.