Documentation of Bum

Cross View of Fonfuka Market, at the Subdivisional Headquarters of Bum Subdivision. Photo by Kwa Fidelis, 2023. Click on image to access collection.

Summary of the collection

The deposit results from a documentation of Bum language and culture, funded by ELDP between March 2025 and February 2026. The project is a collaborative effort of an outside linguist and a group of native-speaker researchers who are involved in the design of the deposit content as well as in the collection, transcription and translation of the data. The deposited data encompasses a variety of genres and topics and contains large amounts of interactions between native speakers, all of which are recorded on video, as well as audio. The information about the sessions, as well as topics and keywords, are available in English.

 
Group represented

The group represented in this deposit are the Bum, who call themselves ‘Ghita Buma’ (lit. people of Bum), and their language – ‘Jisi Bumi’ (“Bum language”). The Bum people trace their historical origins back to the Tikari. On August 21, 1986, a catastrophic explosion of natural gas escaping from the nearby volcanic Lake Nyos traumatized the Bum people. The largest Bum community at that time, Su-Bum, was in the area affected by the disaster. Most of the people and animals present in the town at that time were killed, and Su-Bum now lies uninhabited. Those who survived the disaster have been resettled by the government in the villages of Kimbi and Buabua. This documentation project will be carried out predominantly in Yaoundé, the capital city of Cameroon where many people have fled to because of the Anglophone crisis which started in 2017. I am grateful to all Bum people for their kindness and collaboration.

 
Language information

Bum is a member of the Ring subgroup of Grassfields Bantu, with close relatives such as Babanki, Kom, Mmen, Kuk, Kung, and Oku in Central Ring. Bum is spoken in approximately 20 villages, including those who claim to have had separate languages when they migrated to Bum land, e.g., Fio, Mungong, Mbuk and Faat. The number of speakers is estimated around 15,000 – 21,000, although we cannot be sure of the actual number of speakers due to lack of census figures for speaker communities.

 
Special characteristics

This deposit derives from a collaborative effort of an outside linguist, Pius Akumbu, and a native speaker linguist, Wilfred Bangsi, with collaboration from Ntang Julius Meleng. The topics for documentation were selected by the whole research team, and Bum people resident in Yaoundé contributed to the project with their time and knowledge.

 
Collection contents

In its current version, the corpus contains more than 50 hours of recorded language use.
The naturalistic language use documented in the deposit includes, among others:
– life stories, community histories, proverbs, riddles, myths and legends;
– community and political events;
– demonstration of practices related to cooking;
– elicited wordlists;
– everyday conversation.

 
Collection history

The project from which the deposit originated was a one-year pilot phase (March 2025 to February 2026) of a Major Documentation Grant (MDP1004), awarded to Pius Akumbu by the ELDP.

Pius Akumbu and Wilfred Bangsi made two trips to Yaoundé to meet Julius Ntang and work with Bum speakers resident in Yaoundé. The first trip took place in April-May 2025 and the second in September 2025.

Some recordings in the collection have been made by Julius Ntang in March 2024 in Bafoussam and in July 2025 in Yaoundé. A number of legacy recordings made in Bamenda in 2007 are included in the collection.
 
Other Information

The IPA is used in the transcriptions contained in this collection.

 
Acknowledgement and citation

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Akumbu, Pius and Wilfred Bangsi. 2025. Documentation of Bum. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/e8298bc7-9379-4a45-85a7-8d4596310c9a. Accessed on [insert date here].