L’imaginaire linguistique et culturel des individus multilingues du Lower Fungom

Abstract

Our topic, the linguistic and cultural mental representations of multilingual people in Lower Fungom, sets out to disclose multilingual people’s behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and mental representations of people living in a multilingual environment as is the case in Lower Fungom, a small rural area in the north-west region of Cameroon with a high rate of multilingualism. In this work, we explore the attitudes and motivations of these people and the impact of multilingualism in their daily activities.To reach our objectives, we carried out a sociolinguistic survey with the use of pre-established questionnaires and indirect observation for testing the thoughts and behaviors of those multilingual speakers in seven villages of Lower Fungom. These research instruments helped us collect our ethnographic, linguistic and cultural data that we scrutinize in this work.The originality of our analysis lies in adapting the so-called Optimality theory, originally used to solve problems in phonology and also in syntax, by showing how it can be used as a theoretical framework in sociolinguistics as well. Basically, our contention for the use of the optimality theory is that the surface manifestations of people’s behavior are the result of two types of constraints: faithfulness constraints and markedness constraints. The faithfulness constraints can be equated with the need for individuals to act like their ancestors in terms of keeping their cultural traditions and customs. The markedness constraints are oriented towards the satisfaction of the personal needs of individuals. These constraints are universal in the sense that every human society reflects them. The two types of constraints are inherently in conflict and are violable. What differentiates different societies is their ranking, that is, a given society, or individuals in the society may have certain constraints highly ranked so as to come out as the optimal candidate that reflects this constraint ranking. In this thesis, we propose the relevant constraints likely to explain the behavior of the Lower Fungom people with respect to their mental representations, their linguistic behavior as multilinguals and the cultures in which they live. The traditional chiefs (called the fons), their notables, the members of secret societies (male or female), the foreigners who feel integrated as near-natives of the Lower Fungom and those who still feel estranged although they may speak several languages will be found to reflect, at various degrees, the ranking of the constraints that are illustrated in tableaux to encapsulate the surface manifestations of the linguistic and cultural mental representations of the multilingual speakers of Lower Fungom.As a result of our findings, we make proposals about the future perspectives of the use of the Optimality Theory in sociolinguistics, in some domains. We think particularly about a more operational use of the concept of multilingualism; pursuing research to find out how to harness constraints likely to help our African cultural values resist the negative influences of foreign cultures while integrating the positive ones as innovations in African traditional lore like tales, legends and myths; create computer applications that use the constraint of avoiding mixing languages in the Lower Fungom and encourage more sub-Saharan African people to easily learn the oral skills of other African languages of their choices.