I conducted research for two months in Mbenguedjé, a small, rural village in Cameroon. People are multilingual, speaking a number of indigenous, regional, and national languages. I focused on Wawa, considered an endangered language.

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I went to Cameroon with lots of assumptions on endangered languages and ethnobotanical knowledge based on non-African settings. I assumed ethnobotanical knowledge was being lost, but when speakers are shifting to other indigenous and regional languages, while also not shifting cultural practices, ethnobotanical knowledge does not decline in conjunction with language loss.

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I documented plant names and uses in situ by walking around with people in fields and forests as they showed me plants they know and we collected plant specimens. Plants were scientifically identified in the field and verified in collaboration with Cameroon's National Herbarium and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

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For more details, check out my dissertation* abstract.

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*Yea, I did my degrees in England, so rolling with their switching of dissertation and thesis.