Mother-tongue literacy and language maintenance

164 local denominations, Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist and Church of Christ churches were observed in this study to be interested in development of the written mother tongue. 159 The complementary interests of these institutions allow them to collaborate in the various mother-tongue literacy initiatives available in the homelands. Together they have created an environment for local language development that is based in linguistic research and focused on sustained use of the mother tongue in oral and written forms. The overtly Christian character of some of the partner institutions also gives a Christian flavour to the programme aspects they are responsible for; on the other hand, it does not inhibit partnership between secular and religious institutions. Indeed, as was described in chapter three, such secular-religious partnerships are common in the educational history of Northwest Cameroon. 5.2.3. Summary: acquiring literacy in the mother tongue As Figures 5.1-5.3 indicate, approximately 5,000 Bafut, 5,000 Kom and 2,500 Nso children and adults are now participating in mother-tongue literacy acquisition activities, with an estimated one-third of those numbers becoming literate in the mother tongue each year. These literacy acquisition programmes are regularly offered, and, according to the data available in Figures 5.1-5.3, the number of people who participate in them is increasing. The mother-tongue literacy programmes are supported by a range of institutions, although in each community the language committee is the lead agency for programme implementation.

5.3. Mother-tongue literacy and language maintenance

In the language communities under study, the process of learning to read and write the mother tongue has had multiple effects on use and understanding of the language itself. Olson 1994:139 has noted the impact of literacy on language understanding, observing that it is knowledge of the alphabet that makes the speaker aware of phonemes and that a consciousness of the structures of a language is enhanced by learning its writing system. For the Bafut, Kom and Nso learners, literacy in the mother tongue is accompanied by improved linguistic competence and an increased understanding of the linguistic features of the language. Mother-tongue literacy programmes also provide the platform where language standardisation efforts are taking place. All these activities promote the maintenance of these languages. 159 Islam, the other major religion in the area, has very slight representation in the Kom or Bafut language communities. In Nso, the Muslim population is larger but there has been little interaction between the language committee and members of that community. See section 4.6.4. 165 5.3.1. Improved language competence In several instances in this study it became clear that, at least for children, learning to read and write in the mother tongue was also a means of learning to speak the language better - that is, with the pronunciation and discourse patterns typical of a fluent adult speaker of the language. This phenomenon was directly observed in classrooms, reported in the survey of PROPELCA alumni and reported in individual interviews. In the survey of PROPELCA alumni, many of the 36 adult respondents, when asked what advantages they saw to the PROPELCA mother-tongue education programme they had attended, responded in terms of both written and oral competence in the mother tongue see responses in Appendix 3. Nineteen of the 36 mentioned specifically that the programme taught them to speak the mother tongue better. For example: Attending PROPELCA classes helped mould my tongue [researchers note: i.e. pronunciation] to suit a typical Banso indigene PAS: Nso 01. It has made me to be able to express myself in public PAS: Kom 12. It has made me to love the mother tongue and to speak it well PAS: Kom 20. It has helped me to express myself in communities and in our tribe as a Nso man [researchers note: i.e. Nso person] 160 PAS: Nso 02. PROPELCA teachers corroborated this phenomenon. Bafut PROPELCA teacher Raphael Ngwa described the effect on peoples use of proper traditional greetings and grammar: Learning to read and write helps people to understand and know Bafut grammar. If a person speaks you can tell right away if he can read and write Bafut. Mainly it is that they apply tenses correctly, and they know the greetings that are appropriate to the context OI: Ngwa 21 March 03. Along with tenses and appropriate discourse, the PROPELCA classes teach phonemic awareness. One observation of a Bafut literacy lesson demonstrated the latter: The teacher asks students to say the learned sentences from memory; she says one of the content words and the student has to say the whole sentence. At one point the student are mispronouncing the word tswe has, saying [tsee]. She drills them on the correct pronunciation, saying [tswe], [tswe] over and over CO: PS Manji class 5, 25 Feb 03. 160 This respondent was in fact a young woman see Appendix 2. The use of man here is the result of influence of Lamnso. 166 As the children learn, their parents also learn - or are reminded of - aspects of the mother tongue which they had not been speaking correctly. In the current study, this phenomenon was encountered most often in Bafut, where the proximity to the provincial capital of Bamenda causes the mother tongue to be more mixed with English and French than is the case in the Kom and Lamnso homelands. Raphael Ngwa, a Bafut PROPELCA teacher, has observed: Classes teach students the correct way to speak Bafut, not just read and write it. Pupils will then go back and challenge their parents on how Bafut should be spoken. The parents will come back to the teachers and say, Is Bafut really this way? OI: Ngwa 21 March 03. Another Bafut PROPELCA teacher, Rosa Alangeh, reported similar occurrences in her classes: Students in class 5 are now correcting their parents grammar and pronunciation [of Bafut language]. They correct parents when they mix English in their Bafut. Alangeh noted that, far from being displeased about being corrected, the Bafut parents approve of what their children are learning: The parents are happy when that happens; it makes them support the language teaching. Parents may not know all the days of the week in Bafut, or the months of the year. Now they are ashamed to ask their child; after all, [they think,] Who was born first? OI: Alangeh 25 Feb 03. The language standardisation taking place here among children and adults of the community is significant. The language committees are working against both language shift and language change, 161 which they see as leading to loss of the cultural and linguistic distinctiveness of the language community. Language shift is not in this case seen as a natural stage in the evolution of a language Crystal 2000:108; rather, it is seen as a threat to the survival of the local language. 162 Language change, though natural enough wherever language communities come into contact Nettle 1999, is similarly seen by the language committees as posing a threat to the local language. Thus, although the language committees demonstrate awareness of the need for modernising the language, particularly for its use in 161 Language shift occurs when bilingual speakers of a language increasingly choose to speak another language instead. Language change is a characteristic of the language itself - the addition, loss or modification of particular linguistic features Crystal 2000:23. Language shift and language change occurring together result in what Crystal terms language decline or - at the extreme - extinction. 162 Indeed, May 2001: 146 notes that language shift is often not a neutral process at all, but rather accompanies sociopolitical inequalities. 167 formal education, their efforts to promote language maintenance are more oriented towards rescuing - or resurrecting - vocabulary and speech patterns which are going out of use. The standard language which the language committees are trying to reinforce in this way is the variety spoken in traditional contexts: public discussions, traditional greetings, and so on. Hudson 1996:240 notes that the term standard language is often given to the language variety spoken by speakers of high social status and power. In the homelands, this would most likely be the traditional leaders who are seen as having maintained correct Bafut, Kom or Lamnso. The data also highlights the role that writing, or codification Cooper 1989:144, plays in standardising the language, due to its ability to promote stability of a particular set of linguistic norms. As Crystal 2000:138 notes, an endangered languages chances for survival are increased if it is written. 5.3.2. Corpus planning The corpus planning Cooper 1989; section 2.1.2 activities of the language committees promote language maintenance in three ways: extending the language for new functions and topics also called language modernisation; see Cooper 1989:149; the re- establishment or rescue of vocabulary which is in danger of being forgotten; and the regularisation of spellings. For the language committees, modernisation and awareness building of mother- tongue vocabulary is a priority particularly in primary school science and mathematics. In one PROPELCA teacher training course observed in Banso, a mid-course exam had two questions: 1. Write in Lamnso the words for a +; b - ; c [division sign]; d [multiplication sign]. 2. List six words in Lamnso that describe quantity. TTO: Nso 4 Jan 03 Knowledge of such specialised vocabulary is necessary for any mathematics teacher who hopes to teach the subject in the mother tongue. However it is not standard vocabulary for most Lamnso speakers, who would have learned mathematics in English. 163 163 Actually, this problem of technical terminology confronts the English-language teacher as well. PROPELCA advocates maintain that one significant advantage of using the mother tongue for maths and science is that the children can be helped to understand a concept rather than to just memorise an English word for that concept. One English-language grade 1 teacher told me: for arithmetic, I hardly use Bafut at all. This prompted a later comment from John Ambe, the BALA PROPELCA supervisor: He is [now] in class 1, second term. But he 168 An instance of vocabulary rescue was observed in one teacher refresher course in Bafut, where the class of 14 teachers compiled a comprehensive list of animal names in the mother tongue: A male teacher not a trainer is leading the class in an exercise of writing the names of animals - wild and domestic - in Bafut. [BALA literacy supervisor] Ambe tells me that the purpose of this is that people normally learn the names in English, and they dont always remember them in Bafut: if you ask someone, maybe they can only name five [animals] in Bafut. So we are working together here to remember them and write them down correctly in Bafut language. We did [the same process for] plants yesterday. TTO 164 : Bafut 4 July 03 More than 40 wild animals were named during the session. At one point, there was some uncertainty about the precise spelling of the Bafut word for pangolin: Is it mbarangaa or ambarangaa? They say it over and over to each other and finally decide on the first spelling. Then they talk about what the animal looks like…. It occurs to me that I am watching the standardisation of the Bafut language in progress TTO: Bafut 4 July 03. Regularisation of spellings is considered by the language committees to be part of their ongoing responsibility. At one meeting of the literacy sub-committee of the KLDC the chairman noted that the current Kom-English dictionary has spelling errors in it, and he asked committee members to bring in words that you feel are not spelled right and see how to resolve [the spellings] LCO: KLDC 30 July 03. 5.3.3. Increased linguistic understanding Participating in formal mother-tongue literacy instruction in Bafut, Kom and Banso also involves gaining an understanding of the linguistic structures of the language. This can be seen in the PROPELCA teacher training, the content of PROPELCA lessons themselves, and the structure of the literacy primers. The PROPELCA teacher training syllabus focuses heavily on topics such as rules for writing mother tongue, features of the phonology and grammar of the language, and tone awareness TTO: Kom 3 July 03; OI: Ambe 9 July 03. These aspects of the Bafut, Kom and Nso language have been investigated by linguists in the University of Yaoundé and SIL, and their analyses form the basis of the PROPELCA training on these topics. 165 Indeed, some hasnt come to the four operations [addition, subtraction, multiplication and division], and [when he does] he will forced to use the mother tongue OI: Mbolifor 25 Feb 03. 164 Teacher training event observation. See Appendix 5. 165 See Appendix 14 for a list of linguistic publications and manuscripts on Bafut, Kom and Lamnso. 169 people attend the PROPELCA teacher training courses primarily in order to learn more about the language LCO: KLDC 30 July 03. In PROPELCA classes themselves, significant time is spent on mastery of the grammar and alphabet of the mother tongue. The PROPELCA primers include a page devoted to grammatical features in each lesson see Appendix 16, Figure 2. For the higher grades, grammar teaching is even more explicit. In one grade 7 class observed, BALA literacy supervisor John Ambe taught the 12 verb tenses in Bafut first by eliciting them from the students, then asking for the English names of those which correspond to English verb tenses. It became clear that Bafut has more verb tenses than English does. Ambe pointed this out at the end of the class: Bafut does have grammar, just as English has. In fact, it has a more complex system of tenses CO: GS Manji class 7, 12 March 03. 5.3.4. Summary: mother-tongue literacy and language maintenance In the Bafut, Kom and Nso language communities, mother-tongue literacy acquisition entails more than simply learning a code for written expression of the language. For the individual learner, a process of language learning accompanies mother-tongue literacy acquisition as well. On a broader scale, the processes of language standardisation which form part of the mother-tongue literacy programmes have implications for the stability and maintenance of the language across the community. Learning to read and write in the mother tongue thus facilitates language maintenance at individual and community levels.

5.4. Use of the written mother tongue