Documenting multilingualism in Lower Fungom (Cameroon): language use and ideologies

Language	Mungbam, Naki
Depositor	Angiachi Demetris Esene Agwara, Pierpaolo Di Carlo, Jeff Good
Affiliation	University of Bamenda, University at Buffalo
Location	Cameroon
Collection ID	0781
Grant ID	NSF ID BCS-1360763
Funding Body	U.S. National Science Foundation & University of Bayreuth
Collection Status	Collection online
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/c1f10619-0479-4eb3-95f8-960f55c1c9cd

 

Summary of the collection

This deposit is the outcome of a documentary project targeting traditional multilingual practices in Lower Fungom, a linguistically highly diverse region in western Cameroon. The deposited data encompasses recordings of natural multilingual speech and also a sizable amount of recordings meant to document and analyze the language ideologies that support local multilingual behaviors. The latter also include both the materials used for a Matched-Guise Technique test on some of the local lects and recordings of the MGT sessions. The project was co-funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (BCS#1360763) and the University of Bayreuth (2017-2021).

 

Group represented

This deposit includes materials meant to lay the foundations for the documentation of multilingualism in Lower Fungom, a linguistically highly diverse rural region of western Cameroon. The researcher did not select a specific group or language to target but, rather, adopted different methods to try and document the locale-specific language ecosystem of Lower Fungom.

This being said, there is one group that is more represented than any other: the speakers of Missong, a variety of Mungbam [ISO 639-3 mij]. Evidence gathered from ethnohistories and colonial archives confirms that the village-chiefdom of Missong was founded no earlier than 1830 by an ethnically composite group coming from surrounding areas of the Nigeria-Cameroon borderland (Di Carlo 2011; Di Carlo & Good 2014). Until the beginning of the political crisis in anglophone Cameroon in 2017, Missong was inhabited by about 800 people. Since then, many residents have sought refuge elsewhere.

I would like to thank the Key Pluridisciplinary Advances on African Multilingualism – Cameroon (KPAAM-CAM) under the U.S. National Science Foundation Grant BCS#1360763 and the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) for their generous financial support to carry out this research. I want to deeply thank all of my consultants, whom I cannot list here in full as they are in the dozens. My gratitude also goes to my field guides: Njing Simon, Apkwe Sung, Meh Scolarstica, and Tchuh Eveline for their constant support during my stay in the field. I also would like to thank my mentors, i.e., Pierpaolo Di Carlo, Jeff Good, Atindogbe Gratien and Gabriele Sommer for their scientific and moral input.

 

Language information

As is normal across Lower Fungom, monolinguals in Missong are the exception and everyone speaks at least also Cameroon Pidgin English—in fact, as an average, men master no less than five distinct languages and women around four languages (Esene Agwara 2020). Local languages are non-Bantu Bantoid, and not straightforwardly related to Grassfields Bantu with the exception of Kung [kfl]. For this reason, they have been grouped under the referential label “Yemne-Kimbi” from the names of the two rivers delimiting the area (Good et al. 2011).
Until the beginning of the political crisis in anglophone Cameroon in 2016, the area was inhabited by about 15,000 people. As of early 2024, the majority of the population is now settled elsewhere in Cameroon and a minority in neighboring Nigeria.

 

Special characteristics

This deposit is the outcome of one of the first projects meant to document communicative practices rather than ancestral codes (e.g. Woodbury 2011; Di Carlo 2016). The content of the deposit (see previous box) reflects this orientation. Recordings of natural speech contain mostly multilingual interactions, especially in the rural market of Abar and in the presbyterian church of Missong. No selection was made by the researcher as to the language(s) recorded.

Relatedly, this collection stands out for the amount of recordings devoted to the documentation of local language ideologies. On top of the interviews through which each research participant was provided with a sociolinguistic profile, one can find in this collections also the pieces composing a Matched Guise Technique test targeting the local lects of Missong (glottocode miss1255), Ngun (glottocode ngun1279) and Mashi (glottocode naki1238) and the recordings of the MGT sessions that were carried out.

 

Collection contents

Documenting multilingualism entails collecting a significant amount of information about language ideologies on top of records of actual multilingual speech (e.g. Esene Agwara 2020; Di Carlo, Ojong Diba, Good 2021; Pakendorf et al. 2021; Di Carlo 2023). In its current version, the corpus contains 4 hours and 14 minutes of recorded language use in spontaneous interactions, mainly from market transactions and religious performances. Of the deposited data, 2 hours and 13 minutes have time-aligned transcriptions and translations into English.

Other types of recordings present in the deposit include also materials from sessions making use of the Matched-Guise Technique—a research technique in which a bilingual or bidialectal person speaks the same words in two or more different languages in order to compare listeners’ responses and infer, on these bases, their “real” attitudes towards the different languages.
The collection also contains recordings of the following:

• Sociolinguistic interviews of all the recorded speakers
• Recordings that were used as stimuli in Matched-Guise Test sessions
• Recordings of Matched-Guise Test sessions
• Focus group sessions about secret associations and their functions
• Recordings of traditional dances of various savings groups

 

Collection history

The project from which this deposit originated was financed by a BIGSAS (Bayreuth International Graduate School on African Studies) fieldwork grant and also supported through funds from the U.S. NSF grant BCS#1360763.

Data collection took place in several locations in Lower Fungom in March-May 2017 and January – May 2018. Soon after Angiachi left, the area became extremely insecure. To date (early 2024), Angiachi is the last outside researcher who has visited Lower Fungom. As a consequence, none of the planned activities of redistribution of documentary materials have taken place.

Before being archived in ELAR, part of this collection had been archived at the University of Buffalo Institutional Repository (https://ubir.buffalo.edu/) where it is still accessible.

Except for sociolinguistic interviews, all the audio recordings were originally in WAV format. Due to a technical error and to the failure of the master hard disk drive, all the audio files are now in MP3 format. Also, some of the recordings for the MGT stimuli are replacements for the files that were actually used in the field and that were lost.

All the transcriptions and annotations on natural speech were made using ELAN.

 

References

Di Carlo, Pierpaolo. 2011. Lower Fungom linguistic diversity and its historical development: proposals from a multidisciplinary perspective. Africana Linguistica XVII: 39-86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3406/aflin.2011.994.

Di Carlo, Pierpaolo. 2016. Multilingualism, affiliation and spiritual insecurity. From phenomena to processes in language documentation. In African language documentation: new data, methods and approaches, Special Publication No.10 of Language Documentation & Conservation, edited by Mandana Seyfeddinipur: 71–104. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24649

Di Carlo, Pierpaolo. 2023. Reappraising survey tools in the study of multilingualism: Lessons from contexts of small-scale multilingualism. Journal of Language Contact 15.2: 376-403.

Di Carlo, Pierpaolo and Jeff Good. 2014. What are we trying to preserve? Diversity, change, and ideology at the edge of the Cameroonian Grassfields. In P. K. Austin & J. Sallabank (eds.), Endangered languages: Beliefs and ideologies in language documentation and revitalization, 229-262. London: British Academy.

Di Carlo, Pierpaolo, Rachel A. Ojong Diba, and Jeff Good. 2021. Towards a coherent methodology for the documentation of small-scale multilingualism: Dealing with speech data. International Journal of Bilingualism 25.4: 860-877.

Esene Agwara, Angiachi D. 2020. What an Ethnographically Informed Questionnaire Can Contribute to the Understanding of Traditional Multilingualism Research. In P. Di Carlo & J. Good (eds.), African Multilingualisms: Rural Linguistic and Cultural Diversity, 181-205. Lanham MD: Lexington.

Pakendorf, Brigitte, Nina Dobrushina, and Olesya Khanina. 2021. A typology of small-scale multilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism 25(4): 835–859.

Woodbury, Anthony C. 2011. Language documentation. In P. K. Austin & J. Sallabank (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, 159–186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Acknowledgement and citation

Users of any part of this collection should acknowledge Angiachi Demetris Esene Agwara as the principal investigator and both the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Bayreuth International Graduate School on African Studies as the funders of this project. Jeff Good, Pierpaolo Di Carlo and Angiachi Demetris are the first, second and third Deputy Collectors.
The participants who provided in-depth data should be acknowledged by name.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Esene Agwara, Angiachi D. 2024. Documenting multilingualism in Lower Fungom (Cameroon): language use and ideologies. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/dfed9c55-e4f9-4a57-bcd4-8a1148a56e86. Accessed on [insert date here].