Introduction

Naami is a language spoken in the Misaje Sub-Division, Donga-Mantung Division, North West Region of Cameroon, West Africa. Dieu and Renaud (1983) in the Atlas Linquistique du Cameroun (ALCAM 2012) list the language as: Bebe [871]. The Ethnologue (Eberhard 2023) has Naami as language name, and lists the following as alternate language names: Bebe, Yi Be Wu (ISO 639-3 language code: bzv).

The Naami language is spoken by the Bebe people, who live north of the Ring road, west of Nkambe, predominately in Bebejama and Bebejato villages. There are approximately 3,550 (Eberhard 2023) speakers of the language, although the exact number is unknown as there are reportedly sizable clusters of people living outside the area, particularly in the Southwest Region.

There are some variations in the Naami language, notably the Sabongida and Mayokila dialects.  The Sabongida dialect was chosen for the New Testament translation and was used as the main dialect in this dictionary.

Approximately 18,000 words and phrases were collected by ca. 60 speakers of the language during a Rapid Word Collection workshop in 2016. In 2023, the single-word entries were checked for duplicates, spelling and glosses.  Plural and Perfective forms were added for nouns and verbs respectively, resulting in a database of 3743 words and important phrases.

There remains many phrases that should be checked to find important compound words, but the most common words of the Naami language, used to build those compounds, should be found in this dictionary.

Citations:

Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2023. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Twenty-sixth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.