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53 Chapter Three Language and the Linguistic Question in the Bicultural Project If other social phenomena can easily fuse or dissolve into each other easily language is the one of the most impermeable, the most resilient to compromise and the most distinguishing feature of human communities in the tendency for human societies to acquire distinctive identities or adopt attitudes of particularism. It is therefore normal that language becomes a key factor in disputes in national communities where linguistic features are significant markers of difference. It is often said that old habits die hard. Language is the hardest to die evidently because it is the oldest form of human habits. The central question in our analysis here is: just how do human communities cope with language differences when in contact? More precisely, how has the Cameroon situation of two official languages of European extraction evolved in the midst of an extremely plural linguistic context of indigenous languages? What is going to follow is not a classical linguistic analysis myself not being a linguist by training. Neither am I attempting a complete sociolinguistic profile of language co-existence, my initiation into socio- or ethnolinguistics being rather summary. What I intend to do in this chapter is to propose, by way of conclusions from observations of a more general nature (macro-level), novel ways of understanding the language situation of Cameroon through the prism of its bicultural experience. In an analytical model which seeks to combine an understanding of the effects of policy with the logic of actors out of the confines of the state, I intend to demonstrate that the linguistic situation reflects the general context of patchwork or mix of hesitant policies and official manipulative practices, a bifurcated national existence and hybrids. The Politics of Language: The Option and Experimentation with Bilingualism The most evident official strategy that was adopted as a result of the union and which still lingers on is the option of bilingualism. It was – to use Ahidjo’s words quoted above – adopted as a historical compromise to the imperative of “difference of language” (op. cit.) and was concomitant, at the 54 beginning, with the imperative of the federation and the spirit of a “one – country – two - systems” policy. In operational terms, however, it functioned at federal level on the basis of either a crop of bilinguals who were trained specifically for the purpose or a corps of translators in a situation of near lack of linguistic intelligibility. At federated state levels the languages of the colonial extraction continued to operate in near isolation with virtually no communication with each other. What made matters more complicated was the rapid development of administrative structures (creation of bureaucracies and administrative units) operating in a near unilinear manner and the development of unilingual schools in each federated state. As such, the bilingual option came to imply functional elitist usage of two languages at the apex (central administration) and separate development of each language in its former colonial sphere. In that way, the problem of complicated language usage was a federal issue, that is, the problem of those who were in contact with the ensuing consequences in terms of managing the polity from the top. The eleven years of the federal experiment (peculiar in its centrist vision) saw a crystallisation of these trends which have persisted right into the fifth decade of the union. The institution of the unitary state in 1972 did not put an end to this situation. Although it dissolved the plural form of the state (federalism), it left the plural mode of operation intact. Each territorial unit maintained its language of administration and its school system which produced and reproduced its future personnel by an expanded use of the language. The precipitated merger of the civil service, where state employees could work anywhere, meant that erstwhile monolinguals could work in areas where their language of initial training was never that of their new work places. This is true of English speaking peoples who were sent to the Francophone areas (especially Yaoundé) as of Francophones who had to move to the Englishspeaking side of the country. This also meant that the children of such persons had no option than to take up education in and they themselves worship in the languages of the churches in the new work places. This is precisely the dilemma born of the disorder in which the precipitated introduction of the so-called unitary state suddenly placed the average civil servant. So-called necessity of...

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