The Bafaw Language (Bantu A10) is a product of the language research programme of the Department of Linguistics of the University of Buea. It is the first serious piece of work on this highly endangered language, and aims to account generally for the data of Bafaw. The work therefore lays the foundation for more advanced work in the future. It provides a description of: the phonology, i.e. the sound system; the morphology or lexis; and the syntax of the Bafaw language. The work goes far beyond to provide a sociolinguistic survey of the Bafaw language community, and offers a discussion of functional literacy in Bafaw, the development of an orthography and the thematic glossary of the language. The book provides a useful resource for the Bafaw language development and an inspiration for further research and scholarship.

In this ground-breaking collection of essays, the editors and authors develop the idea of Linguistic Citizenship. This notion highlights the importance of practices whereby vulnerable speakers themselves exercise control over their languages, and draws attention to the ways in which alternative voices can be inserted into processes and structures that otherwise alienate those they were designed to support. The chapters discuss issues of decoloniality and multilingualism in the global South, and together retheorize how to accommodate diversity in complexly multilingual/ multicultural societies. Offering a framework anchored in transformative notions of democratic and reflexive citizenship, it prompts readers to critically rethink how existing contemporary frameworks such as Linguistic Human Rights rest on disempowering forms of multilingualism that channel discourses of diversity into specific predetermined cultural and linguistic identities.

The (dis)empowerment of languages through language policy in multilingual postcolonial communities often shapes speakers’ identification with these languages, their attitude towards other languages in the community, and their choices in interpersonal and intergroup communication. Focusing on the dynamics of Cameroon’s multilingualism, this book contributes to current debates on the impact of politic language policy on daily language use in sociocultural and interpersonal interactions, multiple identity construction, indigenous language teaching and empowerment, the use of Cameroon Pidgin English in certain formal institutional domains initially dominated by the official languages, and linguistic patterns of social interaction for politeness, respect, and in-group bonding. Due to the multiple perspectives adopted, the book will be of interest to sociolinguists, applied linguists, pragmaticians, Afrikanists, and scholars of postcolonial linguistics.

This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of current-day Bantu languages. While Bantu is a low-level branch of Niger-Congo, the world’s biggest phylum, it is still Africa’s biggest language family. This edited volume attempts to retrieve the phonology, morphology and syntax used by the earliest Bantu speakers to communicate with each other, discusses methods to do so, and looks at issues raised by these academic endeavours. It is a collective effort involving a fine mix of junior and senior scholars representing several generations of expert historical-comparative Bantu research. It is the first systematic approach to Proto-Bantu grammar since Meeussen’s Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967). Based on new bodies of evidence from the last five decades, most notably from northwestern Bantu languages, this book considerably transforms our understanding of Proto-Bantu grammar and offers new methodological approaches to Bantu grammatical reconstruction.

Cameroon is a land of much promise, but a land of unfulfilled promises. It has the potential to be an economically developed and democratic society but the struggle to live up to its potential has not gone well. Since independence there have been only two presidents of Cameroon; the current one has been in office since 1982. Endowed with a variety of climates and agricultural environments, numerous minerals and substantial forests, and a dynamic population, this is a country that should be a leader of Africa. Instead, we find a country almost paralyzed by corruption and poor management, a country with a low life expectancy and serious health problems, and a country from which the most talented and highly educated members of the population are emigrating in large numbers. To all of this is recently added a serious terrorism problem, Boko Haram, in the north, a separatist movement in the Anglophone west, refugee influxes in the north and east, and bandits from the Central African Republic attacking eastern villages. This fifth edition of Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Republic of Cameroon.

Social Capital and Schooling Decisions: a Multi-level Comparison with Selected Cases in Cameroon and Germany is a book written in a time when global political and economic organizations put education in front of their agenda and set up agencies in different educational institutions for reforming the current society. This volume examines the educational problem of difficult participation in formal education and the non-possession of educational certificates in a global and multi-level perspective - with reference to Cameroon and Germany as two distinct places within the modern world system. The author, with her transnational experiences in both countries uses a data set of 138 at-risk young adults to highlight the specific educational meaning of social capital and to underline the need for analyzing educational problems in a multi-level comparative perspective. The book concludes that context matters and emphasizes on the need for the creation of a more equitable social and economic development policy which counteracts the inequality that is inherent in most centre - peripheral relations. About the Author: Brendan Ngeloo Abamukong holds a PhD in Educational Science and has worked as a research and teaching assistant at the Faculty of Human Sciences, department of Education at the Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Germany. She has currently moved to the Netherlands where she intends to continue her carrier in both educational research and practice.

The Mbos are a large ethnic group in present day Cameroon and were an important and powerful group until the Anglo-French partition. Following the defeat of the colonial power, Germany, in the First World War, the League of Nations in a March 1916 Mandate, partitioned the territory into two unequal halves among the victorious imperial powers of England and France, to be governed in trust as from 1922. As a result of the partition, the Mbos, who happened to find themselves right along the lines of division, were thrust under French and English administrations. Roughly two thirds of the Mbos found themselves in what had then become French (East) Cameroon, while the remaining one third was placed under British (West) Cameroon rule. Today the Mbos, as a whole, occupy parts of the Littoral and Western (Francophone) and Southwest (Anglophone) regions of Cameroon. While the Francophone Mbos have, over the decades, benefited from all aspects of economic, social, political, and agricultural development, the Anglophone Mbos have been isolated and deprived of all the outward and physical - tangible - aspects of socio-economic and political progress. The persistence of such colonial divisions makes for inequality among the Mbos, despite their common ancestry, ethnicity and cultural heritage. This book seeks to update diverse aspects of the study conducted on the British Mbos by J.W.C. Rutherford and others as a first step toward a comprehensive publication on the Anglophone Mbos.

Published in 2004, The Manenguba Languages of Cameroon is a valuable contribution to the field of Asian Studies.

Although Cameroon’s image as a stable nation with a strong economy may have mitigated against any large-scale migration by Cameroonians following independence, the economic collapse beginning in the mid-1980s and the coerced implementation of democratic reforms in the early 1990s exposed fault lines in the nation’s economic and political institutions. As a result, thousands of Cameroonians have left the country in search of a better life abroad. While Europe remains the favorite destination for many of these migrants, a significant number have also come to the United States. Cameroonian Immigrants in the United States examines the increase in the population of Cameroonians in the United States in the last two decades, the difficulties that many of them must endure in order to come to America, and the challenges they face adapting to their new environment. Despite the problems they face, these new immigrants are creating a home in America. At the same time, however, they remain connected to their country of birth through remittances to friends and family members and other forms of investments and development projects in their communities.