Documentation and description of the linguistic repertoires, culture, and oral tradition of the Nsua of Semuliki Forest (Amba)
| Language | Amba (Uganda) |
| Depositor | Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Saudah Namyalo |
| Affiliation | Makerere University |
| Location | Uganda |
| Collection ID | 0819 |
| Grant ID | MDP1021 |
| Funding Body | ELDP |
| Collection Status | Collection online |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/9822f346-b1fa-4706-b813-ac90d7efeed6 |
Summary of the collection
The deposit is one of the results of the project Documentation and description of the linguistic repertoires, culture, and oral tradition of the Nsua of Semuliki Forest, funded by ELDP in 2025–2027.
Group represented
The group represented in this deposit are speakers of the language Amba and are known as Bamba or Baamba. It is a Bantu ethnic group located on the border area between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda south of Lake Albert in the northern foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains. There are over 40,000 speakers of Amba. The Bamba farmers are the so-called forest neighbors of the Basua, a group which traditionally subsisted on a forager and hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Kusua, the language spoken by the Basua, is the focus of a different collection. The two languages have a high degree of mutual intelligibility.
Language information
The deposit includes recordings collected with the speakers of Amba who live in in Bundibugyo District (Uganda). Amba is a Central-Western Bantu language and belongs to the Komoic group of languages. These two collections will inform our understanding of how and when the Kusua hunter-gatherers adopted the language of its forest neighbors, and which linguistic adaptations took place since.
Acknowledgement and citation
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Namyalo, Saudah and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich. 2025. Documentation and description of the linguistic repertoires, culture, and oral tradition of the Nsua of Semuliki Forest (Amba). Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/a705d5b2-98f2-4f14-8ea9-202d79f94782. Accessed on [insert date here].
