Acknowledgments
I am extremely grateful to Lazare Wambadang, a native speaker of Pévé who is also fluent in French and English and without whom the present project could not have been accomplished. Wambadang has selflessly devoted a great amount of time and energy to describing and analyzing Pévé and creating the present volume, and his enthusiasm has been an important part of the project. I am also grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies, which provided significant financial support for the project. I sincerely thank Henry Tourneux, who provided essential logistical and personal support before and during the fieldwork; Venasius Lendzemo and Noë Woin of the Institute de Récherche Agricole pour le Développement (IRAD) in Cameroon, who also provided logistical support for the fieldwork; Rodney Venberg, who has very generously shared his own work on Pévé and provided many helpful comments regarding the present work; the kind and supportive staff at Le Relais de la Porte Mayo in Maroua; and Zygmunt Frajzyngier, whose assistance was crucial before, during, and after the fieldwork and who provided much thoughtful and detailed advice concerning the present work. Praat software (
I greatly admire the Pévé people for striving to maintain their language and culture through peaceful measures despite social, political and changes of a kind that have led to the loss of languages over centuries and across the world. I sincerely hope that the present volume will be of use to native and non-native speakers of Pévé and to speakers of languages that are related to, or have been in contact with, the Pévé language. Because collaborator Wambadang is a native speaker of Pévé, any errors in the transcription, translation or analysis of Pévé are mine.