A Kenyang sentence is built from parts, in a fixed order. Change who, when, whether it happened, or where, and watch it rebuild. If you grew up hearing this language but never learned to say it, start here.
WHO
DOING WHAT
WHEN
DID IT HAPPEN
WHERE
The order never changes:
A crossword nobody in the world has been able to do before, and a duel you can lose to your eight year old. Both work on one screen between two people.
Each one ends with something to go and say to a person. That last part is the point, whether you are nine or thirty nine.
Nobody has written these down, so Nɛpɛm cannot help with them yet. Anyone who speaks Kenyang can fix that in about ten seconds. Six new ones appear every Monday.
If you do not know these, that is the point. Go and ask somebody who does, then come back and write it in. That is how a language gets written down for the next person.
Two things are worth sending. A word he does not have, and an answer he got wrong. The second is rarer and more valuable.
Every word he knows came from a person. These are the people who gave one.
Submissions are read by a verified contributor before Nɛpɛm learns anything. If that is you, this is the way in.
This project exists because AI was careless with a language. Being careless with the people teaching it would be the same mistake.
Nɛpɛm is not trained on what people send. There is no learning that happens on its own. A speaker confirms a word, writes it into the material by hand, and only then can Nɛpɛm say it. That is slower than an AI that teaches itself, and it is the reason this one can be trusted with a child.
Pick a thing and how many. The number comes after the thing, and the thing itself changes shape. This is the part that surprises people who thought they already knew the language.
I am Agbor Edouard Ransome, from Bachou Ntai in the Manyu Division of Cameroon. Kenyang is my mother tongue.
I study Applied Human-Centered AI at Syracuse University and I build AI for people the technology usually skips. I founded GritGateway, which connects African students to universities and scholarships. I have been a Chevening Scholar and a Mandela Washington Fellow.
I built this because a machine that speaks a hundred languages had never heard mine. I recovered Kenyang from old dictionaries and grammars no computer could read, then checked every word and every rule myself. A tool that invents your language is worse than no tool at all.
What I actually want is a father and a child arguing over a crossword clue in Kenyang, and one of them going to ask the grandmother who is right.
Connect on LinkedIn →Ask a general purpose AI for Kenyang and it answers confidently and wrongly, because it has never seen the language. For anyone learning, that is worse than no answer. The invented words get learned as real ones.
Everything here comes from Kenyang recovered from old sources and then confirmed by a native speaker. When Nɛpɛm does not know something, it says so. That is why there is a whole section above of words it cannot help you with yet.
Kenyang is spoken by about 65,000 people in the Southwest Region of Cameroon. It has never had an app, a course, or a crossword. This is the first.
Mba'aaah!
I am Nɛpɛm. I only speak Kenyang that a real speaker has checked, and I say so when I do not know something.
here with you
Waking up. He sleeps when nobody is talking to him,
so the first few seconds are slow.