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Drawing language maps is not normally considered an important part of linguists’ work. Nonetheless, language maps influence their users’ perceptions and understandings of the characteristics of the languages that they represent. Therefore, given their communicative power, wide accessibility, and generalized use for educational purposes, attention must be paid as to what messages language maps convey about the languages that they visualize since different cartographic styles can be suited to representing some language ecologies better than others. However, decisions at this level are not normally made explicit by cartographers, and the ways in which certain ideologies surface in language maps can escape the attention of both linguists and cartographers alike. This article clarifies why these issues are especially relevant in a domain such as that of the study of Bantoid languages and proposes some novel cartographic models that have been used for representing the languages of Lower Fungom in western Cameroon. These include some cartographic strategies for the representation of the language ideologies of speaker communities and of individual multilingualism. The latter is both a key and under-researched feature in Bantoid sociolinguistics and the article suggests how scholars who are not sociolinguists may nevertheless contribute to its exploration.
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Towards an understanding of African endogenous multilingualism: ethnography, language ideologies, and the supernatural
Abstract In a globalised sociolinguistics “[d]ifferent types of societies must give rise to different types of sociolinguistic study”, as Dick Smakman and Patrick Heinrich argue in the concluding remarks of their (Smakman, Dick. 2015. The westernising mechanisms in sociolinguistics. In Dick Smakman & Patrick Heinrich (eds.), Globalising sociolinguistics. Challenging and expanding theory , 16–35. London: Routledge) book Globalising sociolinguistics. Challenging and expanding theory . To this end, a basic condition must be met: both target languages and societies must be well known. This is not the case in much of Central and West Africa: with only few exceptions, here local languages and societies are generally under-researched and sociolinguistic studies have focused mainly on urban contexts, in most cases targeting the interaction between local and colonial languages. With regard to individual multilingualism, this urban-centered perspective risks to limit scholarly attention on processes that, while valid in cities, may not apply everywhere. For one thing, there might still be areas where one can find instances of endogenous multilingualism, where speakers’ language repertoires and ideologies are largely localised. The case in point is offered by the sociolinguistic situation found in Lower Fungom, a rural, marginal, and linguistically highly diverse area of North West Cameroon. The analyses proposed, stemming from a strongly ethnographic approach, lead to reconsider basic notions in mainstream sociolinguistics – such as that of the target of an index – crucially adding spiritual anxieties among the factors conditioning the development of individual multilingual repertoires in local languages.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1761639
- PAR ID:
- 10093198
- Publisher / Repository:
- De Gruyter
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of the Sociology of Language
- Volume:
- 2018
- Issue:
- 254
- ISSN:
- 0165-2516
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 139 to 163
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2018-0037
