The Flaming Lips

There are an estimated 237 languages in Cameroon. The original Bantu Expansion began on the border of Nigeria and Cameroon, placing me pretty much at the linguistic epicenter of Africa. Bantoid groups have been migrating across the country continuously for millennia, settling in small isolated fondoms. With a surplus of mountains and a shortage of roads these different tongues diverged from each other rapidly, creating a patchwork of similar sounding dialects in different pockets of the nation. The language my people speak, Moghamo, is really similar to Meta; the language people speak in the neighboring community of Mbengwi. If you go just down the road, even closer to me then Mbengwi, you get to Bali which speaks a language completely different from the two. Through different periods of migration, displacement, warfare, and trade, the various peoples of Cameroon have created a linguistic quilt that seemingly has no distinct pattern. Unless you attempt to study the migration histories which are very poorly recorded, why couldn’t you damn Bantus have had a written language? Cameroon has the second most number of languages of any country. The country with the most languages, Papua New Guinea, beats them by miles with over 1,000 languages that were developed in a similar fashion and for similar reasons.

There are an estimated 237 languages in Cameroon and I feel like I can’t speak any of them. I remember writing in an older post about how happy I was to be going to an Anglophone region, one of the few places in the world where a Peace Corps Volunteer can speak English. I think I even used the term “King’s English”. What a fool I was, I take everything back. The word “English” doesn’t really describe what’s going on here well enough. I sometimes think that I would have been able to communicate more effectively in a Francophone region.

Any Frenchman will tell you that French is the greatest language humanity has ever devised. They may or may not be right, who’s to say? Regardless, France loved French (and being French for that matter) so much it wanted to export it to all the people it happened to be sovereign over. Especially in Africa, certainly in Cameroon, there seems to have been a more concentrated effort on behalf of the French to sew their language into the fabric of the nation. The best way to alter a people’s culture or a person’s outlook is to change the way they communicate about life and the world, the French seemed to take this to heart. People in all 8 Francophone regions speak their local dialects also, and Cameroonian French is not the same as French French, but I’ve never heard of Pidgin French. France used their language as a means to knit its African colonial subjects together and the result is the pretty unadulterated version spoken in Cameroon today. The emphasis on language is also presently evident in the names of the “ghosts of empire” international associations; whereas the British have the Commonwealth of Nations, the French have Le Francophonie.

While the French liked making Frenchmen, the British liked making money. The British Empire was always more like the British Empire, Inc. and instead of exporting the culture of their homeland they wanted to import the wealth of their colonies. (Not like the French didn’t but the British seemed to be more overt and direct about what they wanted from the whole colonial situation.) Instead of developing the infrastructure for regimented teaching of English to the populace in once clean sweep, English was grafted on to existing linguistic structures in many places over a stretched out period of time. Why teach everybody English when that one guy speaks it well enough? The others can pick up as we go along. If the French sewed themselves into that linguistic quilt I was talking about, the British just kind of embroidered over it. British association with its Cameroonian holdings was so indirect that the colony was governed from Nigeria, a colony itself passively ruled by the British and far away from the Southern and Eastern nucleus of British colonialism in Africa. Being the “colony of a colony” probably curbed the dissemination of English in Cameroon too, but who knows?

Pidgin started developing as soon as the Portuguese arrived along the coasts of West Africa; it was developed as a trading language and is still used as such today. Coastal tribes would barter with Europeans for weapons and goods in exchange for slaves they had taken from interior tribes. Coastal languages began to adopt foreign words over time and the languages learned directly by foreigners were augmented with local words and flavor. Eventually this developed into the strange lingua franca I speak regularly, Pidgin.

Pidgin technically isn’t a patua of English; it’s an African language with African structure that has gradually adopted words from different languages. Even so, English has had the largest influence on Pidgin by far and to any average listener it sounds like broken English. Looking at some words though, it’s easy to see the living history that pidgin represents, and I think that’s pretty awesome:

Pikin – means “child”, from the Portuguese “pequeno” meaning small. [Small pikin yi cutlass na sharp for morning time.]

Sabi – means “to know”, from Portuguese “saber” meaning to know. [My name na Sean. You sabi me, no?]

Shwine – means “pig”, from the German “schwein” meaning pig. The Germans were here for a while and basically invented Cameroon. So far this is the only word I know that they left behind. [Pa yi di build small small house for shwine.]

Massa – means “husband” or “my dude”, from the English “master”. This is probably the most evident example of Pidgin’s origins in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. [Massa, I tell you, it’s not easy.]

Okada – means “motorcycle”, from I don’t know where meaning I don’t know what. [Okada! I want reach market square, two-two hundred!]

Mbanga – means dried fish, marijuana, at least two dishes, a village, and I’m pretty sure a type of fence. Mbanga means like twenty different things in Pidgin. [Dat man yi comot Mbanga fit smoke plenty mbanga so yi go for chop plenty mbanga dem.]

Dey – means the conditional “do” and “there” from English. [How you dey? I dey fine! Wuside Pa dey? Pa dey for house.]

Chop – means “food” and “to eat”. From English, not sure why. [Tonight we go chop fine]

Comot – means “from” or to go someplace, literally “come out”. [Wuside you comot? I comot Guzang. I comot for Bamenda.]

Wuside – means “where”, literally “what side?” [Wuside wuna go for mimbo?]

Jesus, these sentences keep making me think of more words.

Wuna – means “y’all”. [Wuna, good afternoon.}

Mimbo – means “booze” (generally palm wine) but can also mean soda. [Dat man yi di tap fine white mimbo]

My personal favorite word, and I think that of many other volunteers, is “ashia”. Literally “I share”, it’s used as a greeting, as a way of saying sorry, and just as a form of acknowledgment. I’m pretty sure it’s the most empathetic word in the world, no wonder it’s in an African language. I use ashia sarcastically a lot but I try to think about how cool the word is regularly and take stock when I hear and say it.

By now I’m really getting the hang of Pidgin. I understand it perfectly if it’s annunciated well. I’m sure most westerners would say I speak it well, but most Cameroonians would say I don’t. Just like every language there’s a level of understanding you just aren’t going to obtain unless you were born into it. There’s the added factor of embarrassment; it’s a variation of English so my tongue is really shy to change words, structures, and inflections. My brain keeps detecting “wrongness”; it recognizes it as me speaking English poorly rather than me speaking Pidgin. To tell you the truth I hope that doesn’t go away, my English is starting to suffer as it is. Either way, I try to speak pidgin when I can. I definitely speak pidgin when I have to. For everything else, there’s “special English”.

Special English is probably the most popular way for non-West Africans to communicate with West Africans in English. Basically you avoid contractions, simplify your language, and add an African accent. In a lot of ways it sounds more proper than American English. There are also a lot of grammar changes and focusing on different subject pronouns; “What do you want?” becomes “I should give what?”  “Do you want more?” becomes “Should I add?” It might sound irregular to an American because African English is derived from British English. Actually in the countryside they always add “-o” to every greeting (e.g. Morning-o! Afternoon-o! I salute-o! Ashia-o!) and it always reminds me of “Cheerio!”

Picture a big ol’ Nigerian guy speaking to you in English. Better yet get on YouTube and watch a Nigerian film. That’s special English, to me at least. It’s more aptly called West African English.

I try to avoid special English whenever I can, I feel condescending using it. You wouldn’t go to Australia and start speaking in an Australian accent so people would understand you better. If you had a Japanese friend learning English you aren’t going to speak English in a Japanese accent so he feels more comfortable. You’ll slow down your speech and annunciate clearly, sure, but not change inflection. Alas, it actually helps and most Cameroonians seem to encourage you to talk in their accent. But if I say “water” and not “wata” you should be able to understand me, right? Come on, guys.

Which brings me to the predominant linguistic predicament for any Anglophone volunteer: you have three types of English, when do you use which? I actually haven’t talked about this much with other PCVs but I think its nightmare. Most people in the country and the city speak Pidgin; if they’re talking to their friends they’re talking Pidgin. The people who only speak Pidgin will only speak to you in Pidgin so you must speak to them in Pidgin. No problem there, I get to practice a new language and they get a kick out of it because whitemen don’t speak Pidgin. Those are usually really young kids and really old adults. People who speak Pidgin and English will also know that whitemen don’t speak Pidgin and will speak to you in English, facilitating the need to speak in special English so the everyman can understand you well. That’s fine, I get the benefit of speaking Pidgin sometimes, you get the benefit of speaking English sometimes, but I can still tell a lot of people would rather just speak Pidgin to me. And they can because I understand it. But they don’t know I know. Or they want to make me feel more comfortable. So I don’t get the practice I need with Pidgin to speak more effectively to the people that only speak Pidgin.

The third group, and I think the worst of all, are the people that can understand you perfectly in your American accent. People that have been abroad living in the US or UK, the Middle East or Europe, people that have a high level of education or have worked with Western English speakers extensively, public officials. People like my counterpart, a few friends I have in the city, and a few friends I have in village I know can understand me well so there’s no problem. So why is it the worst of all? You never know who is going to take offense to you speaking to them in Pidgin or special English. I’ve met a few people like this and as soon as I picked up a hint that they felt insulted I switched to speaking normally, one lady called me out on it too.

Dealing with languages in Cameroon is weird, but it isn’t necessarily bad. I just think that these are really unique problems that pretty much only exist here so I have to learn as I go. It’s hard to complain so much when I realize that Cameroonians also have to deal with these unique linguistic problems, and for a lot longer than two years. Being an officially bilingual nation looks great on paper. In theory you should have an entire citizenry able to communicate more effectively, by default, than that of the majority of other nations. Sadly, that’s almost never the de facto situation. It looks pretty good in countries like Canada and Switzerland, but in Cameroon bilingualism is more like a novelty title that gives a neat historical head nod to its split colonial past. “The country is bilingual, but the people are not bilingual” is a phrase heard commonly. There are a very large amount of bilingual schools at every level of study, and the government continually places emphasis on the importance of bilingualism. Even so, Cameroon mainly exists as a nation with two provinces that speak “English”, eight that speak French, and a central government that uses English and French letterhead. With holidays like Reunification Day and Bilingual Day, there is no doubt that each region of Cameroon identifies with the national structure as a whole, but the national linguistic divide still remains largely unsurpassed. This has probably been the primary cause for political strife within the nation throughout its independent history, especially owing to the fact that a far greater majority of Cameroonians speak French. There is no doubt that the government is overwhelmingly dominated by the French speakers, leaving an Anglophone minority feeling historically underrepresented. Still, relatively recent gestures towards liberalizing the political structure seem to be good steps towards fair representation. And with a push on bilingualism that never really lets up, maybe one day the people of Cameroon can be as bilingual as their country.

And the really crazy thing about Cameroon is that everybody really is bilingual! They just don’t speak two western languages. One thing that certainly accounts for the variations in Cameroonian English and French is that they are almost always learned as second languages. Unless you live in a big city, and your parents grew up in that big city too, the first words you will learn will be in your local dialect. I can’t have a post on language without a little bit on Moghamo, the name of the people in my area and their language. It’s a Bantoid language and sounds African in every sense of the word. Accents on so many different parts of words, vowels flying everywhere, random breaks and pauses, intonations that are so strange you can’t follow the sound of the voice to follow the sentence structure (i.e. what sounds like a definitive statement could be a question or a bitter tone could be sympathetic). It sounds really cool though. I kind of mentally file it under Asiatic languages because it sounds as foreign and unattainable. Still, I’m making progress. I can at least give em’ the old “Hey, how are you?” (Ano, masaiagoh?) People in the community seem to have this crazy unrealistic expectation that I’m going to be fluent in Moghamo by the time I leave. As nice as that would be, I think if I’m ever actually fluent in another language it will be something more…relevant. I broaden my Moghamo when I can, try to learn a new phrase when I have the opportunity, and I have a nice spreadsheet with a ridiculous amount of translations that I use to brush up with or surprise someone by saying something new. They’ll have to be content with that for now.

Moghamo is by far the most widely used language in my village. I think that’s great. No country ever went through the same style of colonialism and sadly some were a lot harsher than others. Whereas the British were content to make money off their African holdings, for some reason they really wanted to wipe Aboriginal Austrailian culture and language off the map. In the Americas as well, both the English, Spanish, and later Americans went out of their way to destroy the languages of the people they conquered. Today, most indigenous groups in the Americas have to actively work towards remembering their native languages. The vast majority certainly do not speak their native languages on a day to day basis. For some reason, maybe it was a weird European attitude towards Africa as being a more familiar part of the “Old World”, the intentional destruction of indigenous language and culture never really took hold in West Africa. Sure, they took people and individually destroyed their languages and cultures, but for the most part left the homeland intact. It’s sad to go to places like the Blackfeet Reservation and see that the native language is not widely known and almost never used on a day to day basis among the general population; it’s really nice to hear the streets of this village constantly alive and teeming with an African babble I can’t understand.

There are an estimated 237 languages in Cameroon. The Bible says that when man was banished from Eden, Satan (or God, I forget, they had similar personalities back then) separated man with different tongues as a way to confuse him. If that’s the case then I’m glad he did, it may be confusing but it’s a lot more interesting. Africa is the real Eden, if there are this many languages here it’s probably the natural condition.

Bonus Linguistic Coolness (BLC): The word for “elder brother” in the dialect is “ni”. In pidgin, when you want to ask how someone is doing, you just say “how?” So whether I’m in Guzang or Beijing I can greet you the same.