Introduction

Sari 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: Nsari [874]. The Ethnologue (Lewis 2015) has Sari as language name, and lists the following as alternate language names: Akweto, Nsari, Pesaa, Saari, Sali (ISO 639-3 language code: asj).

The language is spoken by the Besaa people, who live predominately in Akweto, Kamine, and Mbissa. There are approximately 7,600 (Lewis, 2015) 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 Sari language. At this moment the database contains words in both variations, and the spelling has not yet been fully standardized. This means that some words occur with a long and with a short vowel, and other words with a nd and an nt sequence, an nj and nch sequence, or a ŋg and ŋk sequence.

About 16,000 words and phrases were collected by ca. 50 speakers of the language during a Rapid Word Collection workshop in 2015. This included many doubles, words that are used in different semantic domains. These doubles were later deleted, resulting in a database of 5400 words and important phrases.

After the Rapid Word Collection workshop a first spelling check was done for words, and plurals were added for nouns. The dictionary (words and selected phrases) was checked for spelling and glosses in 2022-2024, and for verbs multiple forms have been entered. At this stage the English-Sari index needs updating, and irregular variants of verbs and nouns need to be added as searchable entries. This all should be done in 2024. For this website the pages 'Abbreviations', 'Entries explained', and a downloadable PDF of the dictionary should be added by end of 2024.