Paper short abstract:

The paper illustrates recent research identifying two ideological layers informing linguistic behaviors of multilinguals in rural Cameroon. One, more recent, includes English and its identity-related notions. The other, endogenous, stresses security over status as the main drive for multilingualism.

Paper long abstract:

The paper is rooted in language documentation projects focused on the speech communities of Lower Fungom, a linguistically highly diverse region located at the northwestern edge of the Cameroonian Grassfields, where most of the 12,000 residents are speakers of multiple local languages plus Pidgin English, with only a minority speaking the local variety of English.

Insights from sociolinguistic surveys and research on language use are reviewed, illustrating how English and Pidgin English are locally conceptualized and used in ways that clearly differ from local languages. English, known by a minority of adult speakers, is mostly used to construct prestige and authority, and Pidgin English, known by all adults, is often used to ensure listeners that the communication is not secret. By contrast, a significant amount of ethnographic data allows to recognize that acquisition and usage of local languages are not driven by considerations of prestige but, rather, of material and spiritual security, thus exemplifying non-essentialist ideologies that are still to find full recognition in sociolinguistic scholarship. This brings, on the one hand, to consider the limits of Fishman's (1967) extended diglossia theory in doing research on rural settings and, on the other, to draw a possibly supraregional model based on ethnographic data in which an endogenous pre-colonial layer of language ideologies can be distinguished from a colonial / post-colonial ideological layer (see Lüpke 2016 for analogous proposals about rural areas of southern Senegal).