**7.3 Gender and linguistic expression of village and country**

One of the key concept that emerged from **Table 2** was related to gender. Villages are referred to as homeland and/or motherland. The Moto of Cameroon is Peace-Work-Fatherland. In French it is *Paix-Travail-Patrie*. The notion of fatherland is also inscribed on the national anthem of Cameroon and other national symbols. The French and English cultures from which modern Cameroon was crafted lay emphasis on fatherland being paternalistic. Through local languages spoken in Cameroon it is the notion of motherland that dominates local dialogs though many of the people claim belonging to paternal than maternal societies. The Cameroon administration refers to its territory as fatherland but local linguistic lexicons lay emphasis on motherland. The multitude of languages in Cameroon create linguistic ecologies and also country ecologies shaped by these languages. Language ecology [21] perspective is created such that it results in shaping a people's thought around their villages and ethnic groups making these to be countries. They naturally stress diverging points of belonging to many countries as the rather than seek common ground'.


#### *Multilingualism in Cameroon: An Expression of Many Countries in One Country DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99703*

#### **Table 1.**

*The naming of villages and countries and villages in some local languages of Cameroon.*

#### **7.4 An example of negotiated ethnic identities and renegotiated new countries**

The socio-cultural or identity dimensions of people shape the negotiation of ethnic identities. There are a few glaring examples in Cameroon. This situation has created what has come to be known as Sawa, Laakam, Bamenda, Nordist and Essingan



#### **Table 2.**

*How people say in their local languages that they are going to their villages as opposed to I am going to my country.*

awareness where they respectively represent people belonging to languages groups of the Coastal, Bamileke Grassfields, Bamenda Grassfields, Sudano-Sahel and Forest cultural ecologies. Let us take the case of the Sawa. Sawa was originally used by the Duala to refer to themselves as seashore dwellers but in the context of the 1996 post council electoral crisis it was extended to related peoples such as the Bakweri, Mongo, Pongo, Malimba, the Bakoko and Bassa of Douala city, Bodiman and Ewudi. Sawa became a political and social movement and eventually carved out and denoted a territory. This territory eventually included other peoples in the Littoral and South West Provinces1 not necessarily located along or near the coast were also integrated in the movement. These included the Mbo, Bakossi, Yabassi, Balong, Oroko and Bafaw and far off Bayang in Manyu Division. Prior to 1996 therefore the term Sawa was almost inexistent as a term to describe a local regional and cross regional awareness. The French colonial administration had prohibited any such initiatives and favored fragmented identities. Before this, in 1992, after the parliamentary elections when a representative from the southwest was a migrant from Bassaland but representing the people of Tiko, he led a movement to unite the Bassa ethnic groups into creating a Bassa country called *Pays Bassa*. The Sawa and Bassa initiatives are identity awareness motivated crisis expressed through protests. At this stage none of these groups of ethnic entities thought of Cameroon but as being countries that needed to expand their territories using political and social protest against other ethnic entities which they thought were dominating and making gains out of the minorities. Yenshu-Vubo [22] thinks that an awareness of political marginalization is definitely at the basis of the protests but in its original form, it does not exist as an ethnic movement. Before colonization territorial expansion of countries was negotiated through war. But the Duala, Bassa, Beti, Bamileke, Nordists expansion was negotiated via political and social protest using the weaknesses in state legislations to gain territory and expand their respective countries within a larger concept of a country, Cameroon. To legitimize this and satisfy these movements of ethnic renegotiation and territorial expansion, the revised Cameroon constitution of 1996 enshrined the natives and settlers concepts. This gave the idea to the natives that they were minority and could only gain protection if they supported the governing party and were loyal to state institutions and the settlers to be considered by natives as majority and usurpers of their political power and opportunities.

<sup>1</sup> What is now called Regions were called Provinces at the time of the 1996 post-electoral council election crises.

Language sets a platform of unity [23] and translates into regional movements by elites who stress a convergence of interests through language and equate similarity of predicament with similarity of identity [24]. One cannot doubt that there is a degree of similarity in culture and language within the region but that does not translate automatically into a collective awareness but is constructed to trace new political boundaries and interest. For the Sawa, it is the convergence of the crisis of modernization that forged the new ethnic identity by building it into a common cultural heritage symbolized by the *ngondo* festival. But this has hatched other parallel festivals with new country boundaries drawn within the Sawa country. The *Ngondo* was initially a Duala festival but the aftermath of the 1996 protests translated it into an assembly uniting such peoples as were perceived as related to the former.

It is this invented Sawa identity that transforms a political movement into a cultural one and uses the cultural to consolidate the basis for political claims. The Duala elite, who invented this term, as the leading faction of the coastal peoples, thus attempted to carve an ethnic political base for themselves which their members could not guarantee in the geopolitics of Cameroon. It is in this sense that Yenshu Vubu's [22] assertion that dominant classes are the agents of cultural models gains all its meaning. Varieties of a language serve as the base of the construction.

### **7.5 Village, country and motherland: Implications for national unity**

Cameroon exist in a context of fragmented ethnic entities. These are expressed in the disconnection between the Moto of the country and the linguistic expressions of naming villages and a country as being the same. Firstly, when the Moto of Cameroon is written, it refers to Cameroon as fatherland but when people talk about the village and country they mean motherland as opposed to fatherland. Secondly, people call their villages, countries, paradoxically, not drawing a distinction. When people from respective villages say they are going to their village, they mean that they are going to their land of birth.
