Community language promotion in remote contexts: case study on Cameroon

Abstract

In situations of extreme linguistic diversity, language promotion can be a very challenging undertaking. Decades of educational colonisation and foreign language dominance have produced inferiority complexes so that local or indigenous languages (Cameroonian mother tongues), because of their unofficial status, are perceived as liabilities rather than assets. Governments are either cautious or lukewarm, while the general public is resistant and, quite often, hostile to local language use in education. It is in similar circumstances that the promotion of Cameroonian languages in formal learning and non-formal literacy has been conducted. For more than three decades, researchers have laboured to transform local languages into actual learning tools. Faced with the multiplicity of languages and coupled with government neutrality, researchers have resorted to a grassroots approach that places local communities at the centre of the language promotion enterprise. The establishment of language committees has been a major link in this process.