We report on the progress made and methods used to record, transcribe, and annotate an extensive inventory of proverbs in Ebembe (bmb; Bantu, D54) through work with members of the refugee Babembe community in Boise, Idaho. In this project, we document not only the proverbs themselves (nearly 300 so far from a single speaker), but also spontaneous discussions between native speakers as they negotiate the translation of each proverb and describe the various contexts for their use.

Following the completion of an undergraduate field methods course involving five speakers of Ebembe (bmb; Bantu, D54), they and other members of the refugee Babembe community in Boise, Idaho, identified the documentation of proverbs as a preferred follow-up project. As refugees living in a "preferred resettlement community" like Boise, the Babembe express alarm that the language is not being passed on to younger generations, who have quickly come to retain mostly passive knowledge of it.

While the proverbs themselves are rich in cultural and pragmatic content, the recorded meta-discussions of them provide opportunities to explore Ebembe grammatical structures occurring in natural speech.

Alongside structures that make Bantu languages “famous”—rich noun class and agreement systems, subtle TAM distinctions, grammatical tone, and a wide array of verbal derivational processes (extensions)—the recording of informal conversation has brought forward more hard-to-elicit features, such as direct quote phonation, contextually rich gesture, and difficult-to-translate metaphors, as well as some unexpected variation in the application of formal noun class prefixes.