Language Policy in a Quandary: The Case of Cameroon

Cameroon is a multilingual country. In spite of the existence of over 286 indigenous languages spoken as mother tongues within her national territory, the country officially speaks in two exoglossic and exonormative languages. This official bilingual policy was chosen as a strategy towards achieving national integration and national unity. Bilingualism was expected to birth a unique cultural brand called Cameroonianism which would be neither wholly English nor entirely French but Cameroonian. Unfortunately, the intentions and expectations of the founding fathers have not been realized. More than 60 years after independence, only an insignificant percentage of Cameroonians are functionally competent in both English and French Ayufor (Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism. Cascadilla Press, 2015). English has turned out to be a minority official language Yuka (Journal of the Linguistic Association of Nigeria, 13(1), 221–228, 2010). Today Cameroonians are divided first by the Anglophone or Francophone tag, then by membership of any of the 10 administrative Regions; thirdly along ethnic enclaves. This chapter attempts to trace the historical linguistic interactions between Cameroon and the outside world. It discusses the management of linguistic diversity during and after colonization. The linguistic choices made at independence are examined and the consequences of those choices on multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual Cameroon are interrogated. The major claim here is that the failure to institute a rational language policy in Cameroon is not wholly the source of the current linguistic conflict in the country; the quest for selfidentity and the equitable distribution of national resources have surfaced in the guise of a poorly conceived and mismanaged language policy.