Los tiempos de nuestra lengua

The vital core of this website is this space dedicated to essential words. In its first installment, this glossary compiles terms written in Ngiba, Spanish, and English, accompanied by contextual testimonies and audio recordings in the voices of Ngiba speakers.

Each word has been carefully selected for its ability to reveal profound aspects of life, spirituality, nature, and existence. This glossary, which is constantly growing, is a way to share not only the meanings but also the living memory of those who still name the world in our language.

More than a linguistic archive, this collection is a constellation of words that seeks to highlight the intellectual richness involved in living on different linguistic margins. It explores the nature of testimony, understood not as a simple confirmation of truth, but as a tense confrontation with other realities, other languages, and other ways of feeling.

The typefaces used on this site are original designs, created from various hand-drawn alphabets by community members, including the artist Ulises Matamoros Ascención himself. These typefaces do not merely serve an aesthetic function; they embody a political gesture of visual recovery and reappropriation of our language. They are living signs emerging from communal strokes, inscribing Ngiba into contemporary graphics from an expressive autonomy.

Writing words in Ngiba is also the implementation of a collectively systematized writing proposal. This exercise, born of dialogue, listening, and agreement, has profound pedagogical value: it invites new generations to read, write, and think in their language in ways that are their own, reconfiguring their relationship with language and the world. Leading this proposal are Gonzalo Valencia Durango, Ulises Matamoros Ascención, Natalia Colmena, and Alejandra Ascención.

Our sincerest gratitude to Gwaertler Stiftung, whose valuable funding through the Gwaertler Grant 2025 made the creation and realization of this website possible.

Thank you for trusting this project and allowing it to take shape from its roots.