Abstract
AbstractAs a contribution to the more general discussion on causes of language endangerment and death, we describe the language ecologies of four related languages (Bà Mambila [mzk]/[mcu], Sombә (Somyev or Kila) [kgt], Oumyari Wawa [www], Njanga (Kwanja) [knp]) of the Cameroon-Nigeria borderland to reach an understanding of the factors and circumstances that have brought two of these languages, Sombә and Njanga, to the brink of extinction; a third, Oumyari, is unstable/eroded, while Bà Mambila is stable. Other related languages of the area, also endangered and in one case extinct, fit into our discussion, though with less focus. We argue that an understanding of the language ecology of a region (or of a given language) leads to an understanding of the vitality of a language. Language ecology seen as a multilayered phenomenon can help explain why the four languages of our case studies have different degrees of vitality. This has implications for how language change is conceptualised: we see multilingualism and change (sometimes including extinction) as normative.
Highlights
A commonly cited cause of language endangerment across the globe is the dominance of a colonial language
Following Silverstein (1998: 407) and Grinevald and Bert (2011), we distinguish between language community and speech community – the latter being a group who speak to one another using whatever “linguistic resources” are locally available, and the members of which are intimately familiar with the “rules” for using language appropriate to a given situation; the former is a group defined by the use of a particular language
Based on our collective field research and following the considerations of language ecology as presented, for example, in Haugen (1972), elaborated in Edwards (1992) and endorsed in, e.g. Mühlhäusler (1992) and LMP (2019), we have developed the following list of parameters which, when applied to the situations of the four different languages in our study, form an “ecological matrix” that characterises each speech
Summary
A commonly cited cause of language endangerment across the globe is the dominance of a colonial language. We think that understanding language ecology can help analyse the processes that Croft identifies as working in the longer term to produce linguistic evolution As we will demonstrate, the rich linguistic diversity of the Mambiloid region (see Figure 5) is being challenged by changes in the language ecology of the speech communities studied This has led to the endangerment of some lects and, in the longer term, will contribute to the evolution of the languages in the area
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