Kingdom of Mankon: Aspects of History, Language, Culture, Flora and Fauna

Introduction

 xxv Introduction Kingdom of Mankon: Aspect of History, Language, Culture, Flora and Fauna is a documentary and analytic showcase of the Mankon socio-politico-economic and linguistic landscape. A wealth of cultural, historical, religious, political, geographical, linguistic, etc wisdom exists in Mankon but which hitherto is being passed on “orally from generation to generation” (Jick, 2006:1). This folklore exist in forms such as riddles and jokes, folktales, folk songs and dance, myths and legends, proverbs, arts and crafts, etc. Our fear is that if this “wisdom literature” is not harnessed, analysed and documented for posterity, this ‘metalinguistic knowledge’ (Himmelmann 1998: 9) of “little known” Mankon may become ‘endangered’. However, with a thorough linguistic documentation of taxonomies and ‘morphological paradigms’ (Ibid) such as plants, animals, names, expression of numbers and measures, artefacts; social organisation, history, geography as well as aspects of its I-language and E-language, ‘… future generations will have a literary means of sustenance and a full understanding of their roots” (Jick 2006:9). We feel there is an urgent need to boost and revitalise the Mankon Language because it is fast eroding due the following: (1) Urbanisation and the cosmopolitan nature of Mankon, Kingdom of Mankon  xxvi (2) Linguistic interference (French, English and other contiguous languages), (3) Attitudes and language apathy especially by the youths, (4) Lack of language contact in the Diaspora (both within and without Cameroon), and (5) The current needs of education and globalisation. In order to realise our objectives of revitalising the Mankon Language, we have adopted the approaches in ‘documentary and descriptive linguistics’ of Himmelmann 1998, Everett 2004, Woodbury 1998, 2003, 2004, 2007 and Foley, 2007. Essentially, language documentation and description according to Himmelmann (1998) are two distinct activities involving on the one hand, the collection, transcription, and translation of ‘primary data’ and on the other, the analysis of such data. The documentary activity leads to ‘language documentation’ and the field of study is ‘documentary linguistics’. The next activity is the synchronic ‘language description’ whose field is ‘descriptive linguistics’. He further argues that Conventionally, the documentary activity has been seen as ancillary to the descriptive activity (i.e. primary data are collected in order to make a descriptive statement of the language). Conceiving of documentary linguistics as a fairly independent field of linguistic inquiry means viewing the Introduction  xxvii descriptive activity as ancillary to the documentary activity (i.e. descriptive techniques are part of a broad set of techniques applied in compiling and presenting a useful and representative corpus of primary documents of the linguistic practices found in a given speech community).P.2. We deduce from Himmelmann’s analysis that documentary and descriptive linguistics are two sides to a coin: in order to analyse, we must collect and after analysis, we have to document i.e. store for future use. The two are inter-dependent. We are going to use the two in the analysis of Mankon. The field methodologies used in this work are: - Elicitation of verbal (linguistic) communicative acts through interviews and questioning. - Tape-recording of verbal (linguistic) communicative acts through interviewing or simply recording a speech event in action. - Photographing of non-verbal (non- linguistic) events. - Consulting any relevant documented material. A fifth method of data collection which is rather bourgeois and where equipment are difficult to procure would have been through video-taping and computing of both linguistic and non-linguistic staged communicative events like rituals, pantomime, etc. However, we made use of Kingdom of Mankon  xxviii the feasible resources at our disposal. In the cases of rituals and incantations, we described the ritualistic or incantative paraphernalia and transcribed the accompanying words on the spot. The data collected on the field were then transcribed and a gloss provided before analysis. Several of the methodologies used are shared by Foley (2007) when he says: A common language may be used in simply asking questions, or recordings may be made of common discourse genres, played back and transcribed. An example of the minimal approach without a common language is the use of gesture and pantomime in an equipment free situation. Locally available props may be used, of course, but the main stimuli proceed directly from the investigator. More contextualized elicitation may take place by, for example, participating in and recording local activities and events, which in turn could be videotaped and serve as further stimuli, even for checking on reliability, a particular concern in eliciting endangered languages...