We aim at recording a diverse as possible set of communicative events in all three speech communities. Special attention will be paid to speech forms linked with traditional knowledge and lore, which are also endangered. We think of genres of oral literature, such as proverbs, tales, riddles, praise poems, origin myths, historical accounts, traditional folk songs.

Literary genres involving paralinguistic performance will be video recorded. Such is the case for rites and ceremonies, such as name giving, marriages and funerals, which involve aesthetic and conventionalised forms of speech. It is obvious that community members will be heard when they oppose themselves to the recording of certain events, but they will also be invited to suggest themes or speech forms they want to see documented.

Kikwit-based radios will be involved in raising awareness of our project among community members and in inciting people to contribute to the documentation of certain forms of orature.

Furthermore, our fieldwork will target the systematic documentation of ethnobiological knowledge, together with a systematic scientific identification of the species concerned as well of their daily (culinary, medicinal, ritual, etc.) uses among the peoples concerned. Special attention will be paid to hunting, gathering and fishing. These activities involve not only specialised vocabulary, but also characteristic forms of language use, such as ritual formulas, codified speech and chants, and a strong labour division involving specific discourse.

Through the recording of considerable amounts of spontaneous speech, we will compile an extensive corpus, which a good database for the study of information structure in these languages. A special effort will be made to safeguard audio and video recordings of this endangered knowledge. Discussing these data with community members will be a good way to collect further texts.

In 2013, initial fieldwork was conducted on Nsong.

In 2014, further fieldwork was conducted on Nsambaan.

 2014 Fieldwork on Nsambaan

Nsambaan chief Ngolo Lakuba (JKM, 2014).