Sifra Van Acker Did Fieldwork on West-Coastal Bantu Plant Vocabulary around Idiofa – BantuFirst: The first Bantu speakers south of the rainforest

Despite the global Covid-19 pandemic, Sifra Van Acker carried out linguistic fieldwork in and around Idiofa (Kwilu Province, DRC) in February 2021 as part of her PhD research project which focuses on the historical-comparative linguistic study of subsistence-related plant vocabulary in West-Coastal Bantu (WCB), a major branch of the Bantu language family. During her one-month fieldwork mission, she collected new plant vocabulary in Nzadi B865, Lwel B862, Ngwi B861 and Ding B86, four languages forming the first paraphyletic grade to split from the ancestral WCB node (Pacchiarotti et al. 2019), as well as in Mbuun B87 as spoken in Idiofa (WCB, KLC extended) Besides the specialized plant vocabulary collected by Koni Muluwa (2010) in Nsong B85d, Ngong B864, Mpiin B863, Mbuun Imbongo B87 and Hungan H42, this kind of vocabulary is usually poorly documented in the available sources. The description of plant names in the existing literature on these little described languages is poor (cf. Mertens 1939; Mula 1977; Khang Levy 1979; Niendéka & Djedje 1986; Nsumuki 1993; Crane et al. 2011).

To collect this specialized vocabulary, Sifra designed a survey containing useful plants occuring in the region. For each plant, she included pictures, a description as well as its noun in the surrounding WCB languages to help the consultant recognize the plant in question. Beside this survey, she also collected plant terminology by taking walks in the garden and forest, but this method proved difficult, as the consultants did not find many additional plants. Finally, she also collected the names of the medicinal plants collected by Emiel De Meyer and the tropical trees observed by Prof. Joris Van Acker during their joint fieldwork trip to Idiofa.