This book belongs to a series of works dedicated to the forest populations of Central Africa, and more specifically to the Aka pygmies. It is the first part of a multidisciplinary study centered around the linguistic approach to different aspects of the social reality of this ethnic group. In this perspective, the language serves both as an aspect of this social reality and as its thesaurus and vehicle. The work is the outcome of a study group officially formed in 1977, whose coordinated activities, however, reach as far back as 1971. It gathers knowledge of this pygmy population and their natural and social habitat, acquired by researchers from different disciplines: linguistics, ethnology, ethnolinguistics, ethnobotany, ethnozoology, ethnomedicine, ethnopharmacology, ecology and ethnomusicology.