Sociolinguistic interviews from Lower Fungom migrants living in the area of Souza in Cameroon

Language	Ajumbu, Buu, Fang, Koshin, Kung, Mufu-Mundabli, Mungbam, Naki
Depositor	Jeff Good, Pierpaolo Di Carlo, Menguie Yollande Magrece
Affiliation	University of Bamenda, University at Buffalo
Location	Cameroon
Collection ID	0783
Funding Body	United States National Science Foundation
Collection Status	Forthcoming
Landing Page Handle	http://hdl.handle.net/2196/09a229eb-ac0b-41f2-b393-c707e4d551e5

 

Podcast

https://fieldnotespod.com/ep-13-jeff-good-on-facilitating-language-documentation-in-cameroon/

 

Summary of the collection

This collection consists of a set of sociolinguistic interviews collected from multilingual speakers originally from the Lower Fungom area of the Northwest Region of Cameroon who have migrated to the Souza area in the Littoral Region. These recordings were collected by Menguie Yollande Magrece as part of an MA research project examining the relationship between multilingualism and social networks.

 

Group represented

The group represented in this dataset are individuals from the Lower Fungom area of the Northwest Region of Cameroon who have migrated to the Souza area in the Littoral Region. These individuals have different linguistic repertoires and different primary languages, including Mungbam, Ajumbu, Kung, and Mundabli-Mufu. These individuals did not move as a group and had different reasons for relocating to the Souza area.

 

Language information

This project was not focused on a specific language but, rather, the multilingual repertoires of individuals. However, since the individuals involved are all from Lower Fungom, the focus language communities are those associated with that region and these are: Ajumbu; Buu; Fang; Koshin; Kung; Mufu-Mundabli, Mungbam, and Naki. General information about the languages of Lower Fungom can be found in Good et al. (2011) and Di Carlo (2011).

 

Special characteristics

These sociolinguistic interviews were collected a part of the KPAAM-CAM project (http://kpaam-cam.org), which represents one of the most extensive efforts to document patterns of multilingualism associated with a rural African setting. This specific project was focused on individuals who had moved from the rural setting of Lower Fungom to a more urbanized area of Cameroon not far from the country’s largest city of Douala and was part of efforts to specifically examine multilingual repertoires of individuals living outside of the areas that they are originally from.

 

Collection contents

This collection contains around twenty recordings of sociolinguistic interviews of multilingual individuals from Lower Fungom that follow a common interview guide. It also includes a spreadsheet containing metadata and information about these individuals that was extracted from the recordings.

 

Collection history

This data was collected in May 2021 as part of the MA research of Menguie Yollande Magrece. The data was collected in the context of the KPAAM-CAM project.

 

References

Di Carlo, Pierpaolo. 2011. Lower Fungom linguistic diversity and its historical development: Proposals from a multidisciplinary perspective. Africana Linguistica 17: 39-86. https://doi.org/10.3406/aflin.2011.994.

Good, Jeff, Jesse Lovegren, Jean Patrick Mve, Nganguep Carine Tchiemouo, Re- becca Voll & Pierpaolo Di Carlo. 2011. The languages of the Lower Fungom region of Cameroon: Grammatical overview. Africana Linguistica 17. 101–164. https://doi.org/10.3406/aflin.2011.995

 

Acknowledgement and citation

This work was supported by United States National Science Foundation Award No. BCS-1761639.

To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Magrece, Menguie Yollande. 2024. Sociolinguistic interviews from Lower Fungom migrants living in the area of Souza in Cameroon. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00b1981a-be5b-467f-9049-80044a2c0e40. Accessed on [insert date here].