The Lower Fungom region of Cameroon is one of the most linguistically fragmented areas of one of the most linguistically diverse countries on the planet. In an area around half the size of Chicago, one finds at least seven indigenous languages, five of which are not spoken elsewhere. The region's languages are not well studied, and their names--Abar [mij], Fang [fak], Koshin [kid], Kung [kfl], Mbu' [muc], Mundabli [boe], and Naki [mff]--are virtually unknown, even to other linguists working in Cameroon. These languages are clearly related to the Bantu languages that dominate Subsaharan Africa, but the details of their genetic affiliations otherwise remain largely obscure.
Based on the results of fieldwork conducted since 2004, it has become clear that an important feature of the Lower Fungom region is the nature of the communicative network holding among its thirteen villages that has allowed such extensive linguistic diversity to flourish. Thus, in addition to the traditional issues encountered when doing grammatical description and comparative work on any group of understudied languages, a second set of questions is raised when conducting fieldwork in Lower Fungom regarding the sociolinguistic and historical forces that have created such extreme diversity within such a small area. This project will, therefore, continue the research already begun on the grammar and lexicon of the languages of Lower Fungom and extend it by adding a sociolinguistic and anthropological component to the work.The project will result in the creation of a sociolinguistic survey of the region as well as detailed documentation and description of three of its speech varieties that are only minimally described.
The primary goal of the project entitled Towards an Areal grammar of Lower Fungom has been to document the essentially unknown languages of the Lower Fungom region of Northwest Cameroon in order to understand why it is so linguistically diverse. In an area about one third the size of the city of Chicago, one finds seven languages spoken. Five of these have no known close relatives, though their general affiliation as part of the Bantoid subgroup of Benue-Congo seems reasonably clear. Lower Fungom as a whole has, perhaps, 12,000 inhabitants, and the number of speakers of each of its languages ranges from a few hundred to a few thousand. The area is economically isolated and most peoples' primary occupation is subsistence agriculture. In this era of global-scale language endangerment and extinction, areas like Lower Fungom which run counter to worldwide trends are of interest because they help us understand more precisely the forces that cause small communities to maintain "hyper-local" languages that are not associated with significant socioeconomic opportunities. This project has undertaken foundational work to better understand the special language dynamics of Lower Fungom by (i) improving our knowledge of the grammatical patterns of its languages, with a particular interest in linguistic variation and (ii) conducting investigation into the cultural contexts in which these languages are situated through the collection of ethnographic, geographic, archaeological, and historical data. In addition to producing new works of language description for a number of languages which had scarcely been described previously, a key result of this project was the development of a model which suggests that, unlike in the West, languages are not associated with deep-rooted ethnic identities in Lower Fungom but, rather, are considered to be markers of transient sociopolitical configurations. To illustrate this using a hypothetical example grounded in the sociopolitical structures of the United States, it is as if each city were to have its own language and, if one chose to move from one city to another, one would shift their primary language. However, in doing so, one would not suddenly claim a core identity as a "Chicagoan" or a "Bostonian" but, rather, simply be indicating that, at this particular moment, one's primary residence is in Chicago or Boston. This linkage between language and local community seems to facilitate language maintenance since, even though all inhabitants of Lower Fungom are multilingual and many speak English, they can only mark their primary village affiliation through their use of a local language. If someone only ever spoke English, for instance, no one would ever know which village they belonged to, which would be a problem since villages offer various important kinds of social protection. In addition to its research aims, this project also worked to build capacity in Cameroon by including local Cameroonian students in the research and hosting training workshops. This will allow Cameroonians to more effectively document their own languages in the future even if outside assistance is not available. When possible without violating copyright restrictions, copies of publications resulting from the project are posted at http://buffalo.edu/~jcgood/lowerfungom.html.
