Language Diversity and Language Choice: A View from a Cameroon Market

The immediate goal of the research reported here is to explore constraints on choice of language in the market of a small, highly multilingual village in Cameroon. In so doing, insight is provided both on the language ecology of the region in which the village is situated and on conditions of multilingualism in rural Africa, where the large majority of such research has been urban-based. Two investigative methods are used. The first documents the language encounters of an individual visit to market; the second involves analyzing language choice in a large number of transactions over the course of a single market day. Fourteen different languages were recorded with two, the primary language of the village and the regional lingua franca, vying for predominance.