Do you understand me?
With a lot of interest I look at all new projects at betterplace from different corners of the world and I wonder how many languages we all speak, understand, use to communicate. For me, coming from Cameroon, I get so interested in it because we speak 273 languages - according to recent research.
Personally, I am very proud when I communicate with my own two children and the kids of my extended family like Marie-Benedict and Amslem in my language and when I see other people admiring us speak.
The only problem - it seems to me - is that there are so many languages spoken in the North West Province of Cameroon, like the Bali, the Mankon, the Bafut, the Lamnso, the Widikum, the Metta, just to name these few, and in the West, there are the Mbouda, Bangang, Baham, Babadjou, the Bafang, the Bagangte, and a lot of others. You see all of them are diversified as well. Each is a language on its own, and in most cases there is nothing similar.
I am a field worker working in villages of the North West and West Provinces of Cameroon. Most of the time, we use interpreters whom we sometimes doubt. However, to work with these interpreters, prior work is done in explaining to them what we want to do, and get them repeat what we tell them in their own words. By so doing, we have trust that they will put these same words in their language. The feedback from the people is equally translated to us. We have been succeeding in getting the message across because at the end of the day, we succeed in what we want to do with the people.
But, this is time and energy consuming leading to slowness in achieving results, because a meeting that would normally take 2 hours becomes a meeting of 4 hours or even more.
Getting interested in this is because one could imagine that UNESCO can help in finding a way out in cases where communication with the usage of languages is very problematic. May be to set up a literacy program to get the older generation to know and to be able to communicate in one language (e.g, like the Pidgin) for English speaking people.
This says, identifying in the world and in each region a cross-cutting language that could be promoted to facilitate communication. Another way of helping the situation would be to get girls and boys, to school at young age to learn another language like French and / or English, in order to aspire to have access to another world.
A language is supposed to be the prior identity of every individual. The first pride of everyone lies in that he or she can communicate in his/or her mother’s tongue.
Nevertheless, Cameroon is one of the countries with so much diversified languages and it makes our pride and dignity. If we do not longer use them we loose our heritage and a lot of knowledge too. What to do? And what about you?
