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41 4 The linguistic situation and the history of the Grassfields(1) The linguistic situation in the Grassfields of Cameroon poses a problem, indeed a challenge. Basic vocabulary counts and shared lexical innovations point to one language classification and historical interpretation; but innovations in noun classes do not agree and point to another (Voorhoeve 1976). To reconcile these findings in a consistent historical explanation, one must have recourse to some hypothesis as to the past relationships among the speakers of the languages. Such a hypothesis must be controlled by whatever can be known about the sociolinguistic history, as it were, of the area. In recent ethno-historical research, I have been able to reconstruct a 19th -century pattern of multilingualism as an essential part of the social and political fabric of the Grassfields. Of the three hypotheses that might be advanced to explain the present language situation, the third is best supported by this reconstruction and other evidence. The case shows the necessity of sociolinguistic as well as narrowly linguistic reconstruction in explanation of actual cases of change. Multilingualism in the 19th -century Grassfields The contact situation in the nineteenth-century Grassfields The Grassfields of Western Cameroon are an intermediate plateau about 1000 meters in altitude, with volcanic mountain ranges rising up to 2500 and even 3000 meters. It is surrounded on its western and southern sides by lowland rain forest. The topography had two important consequences: first, it created much ecological diversity over a rather restricted area, resulting in different regional factor endowments. The oil palm grows best on the southern and western fringes of the plateau. The plateau is well suited for the raising of small livestock (pigs, goats, sheep, dwarf cows, fowls), and for an agricultural production based on both forest and savannah crops. The central part of the plateau specialized in the production of iron that was traded towards the oilproducing areas. Local specialization in the production of tobacco, hides, raffia bags, wooden carvings, earthen wares, etc., depended on locally available resources but seems to have gone far beyond what could be predicted on such a basis. In the 19th century, the peoples inhabiting the Grassfields and their fringes depended heavily upon each other’s production and formed a self-contained symbiotic community. The intense internal trade of which we have evidence from the early German and English travel accounts and administrative documents, from oral tradition, and from what is left of it nowadays, was described by Chilver (1961), Wilhelm (1981) and Warnier (1975). The second consequence of the topography was that it channeled internal trade along well-defined routes, on which a number of chiefdoms acted as middlemen. In the 19th century, the Grassfields internal trade was linked by long distance trade to Calabar, the coast of Cameroon, and the Fulani Emirates to the north (Chilver 1961; Wilhelm 1981; Warnier 1975, 1985). The Grassfields were (and still are) densely populated. The mountainous setting favored the fragmentation of the population in numerous independent communities, except in open, flat plateau areas that tended 42 Part I -The historical background to promote the constitution of rather large chiefdoms and confederacies. Altogether there were a couple of hundred independent communities ranging from 1000 to some 60,000 people each. The types of political organization ranged from segmentary societies to centralized states, all of them combining in various patterns some fundamental elements such as patri- and matrilineages, sacred leadership, and men’s regulatory societies. Research by the Grassfields Bantu Working Group (summarized by Stallcup and Hyman 1975) shows the existence in the Grassfields of two major linguistic groups; a group that Voorhoeve (1971) named MbamNkam and that occupies the eastern and south-eastern part of the highlands, and the Western Grassfields group that occupies the rest (see Fig.1 on page 40). The language density, within the Mbam-Nkam and the Western Grassfields groups, was and still is considerable, both in terms of the small geographical area for each variety and the relatively small numbers of speakers of each variety. There was no lingua franca in the 19th -century Grassfields. The Bali language (or Munggaka) spread as a lingua franca in the Bamenda area only after the Germans had established Bali as the paramount authority over most of its neighbors, and after the Basel Mission had subsequently selected it as a teaching medium. Pidgin English started being spoken in Bali when Zintgraff, the first German to reach the Grassfields arrived in 1889 with carriers and interpreters from the coast(2...

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