Introduction

 

The Gbaya Yaayuwee [gya] language of this dictionary belongs to the Gbaya macrolanguage [gba]. It is a member of the immense Niger-Congo language family, part of the Adamawa-Ubangi branch in an extensive language group named Gbaya-Mandja-Ngbaka. Speakers of Gbaya Yaayuwee live on both sides of the Cameroon-Central African Republic border, with Yaayuwee spoken in Cameroon being close to the Kara language of Bouar. Yaayuwee, Lai, Dɔɔka, and Mbodɔmɔ are very closely related to each other, and are sometimes referred to as Northwest Gbaya. The population of Gbaya speakers is estimated at about three hundred thousand in the two countries.

Madel Nostbakken, a Canadian linguist, created the first bilingual Gbaya dictionary, a 116-page mimeographed document entitled Dictionary Baya-English English Baya, during her missionary service in Cameroon and the Central African Republic (French Equatorial Africa) from 1937 to 1975.

Printed in 1982, Dictionnaire Gbaya-Français: Dialecte Yaayuwee prepared by the Roman Catholic priest, Yves Blanchard, and the American missionary, Philip Noss, was the first Gbaya dictionary to be published. Reprinted in 2006, it has been revised and expanded in the present project. This bilingual dictionary is the second edition of the original 1982 dictionary.

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