Introduction

Nchane 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) list the language as: Ncane [873]. The Ethnologue (Eberhard 2022) has Nchane as language name, and includes Mungong lists the following as alternate language names: Cane, Ncane, Nchaney, Nchanti, Ntshanti (ISO 639-3 language code: ncr).

The language is spoken by the Nchane people, who live predominately in Bem, Chunghe, Kibbo, Nfume, and Nkanchi villages. There are approximately 13,200 (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2022) speakers of the language, although the exact number is unknown.

There are some variations in the Nchane language including the Nkanchi dialect spoken by Nchane people nearer Misaje town. While the database contains words in more variations, the Nkanchi dialect which was used for the New Testament translation, was also used as the standard spelling. Variations used other villages noted as variants of the Nkanchi dialect.

This is the first attempt to compile a bilingual dictionary for the Nchane language. More than 14,000 words and phrases were collected by ca. 80 speakers of the language during three weeks of a Rapid Word Collection workshop in 2015. All of those words were glossed and typed. Some cleanup was done and then merged with an existing word list of 2,000 words.

In November of 2022, Samuel Kilese from the Kamala village, and Soka Syverius from the Nkanchi village took three weeks to go through approximately 5000 single-word entries. Duplicates were merged, spellings and glosses updated, and then the words were divided into nouns and verbs. Plural forms were identified for nouns, and the progressive form identified for verbs. A final spelling check of the single-word pronouns, question words, quantifiers, proper nouns, adverbs, prepositions and a few verbal particles brought us to the resulting list of 3130 checked entries.

There is still much work to do to correct spellings and add compound words and phrases, but this makes a first set of Nchane words available to anyone on the internet.