‘Community’ collaboration in Africa: Experiences from Northwest Cameroon
- Jeff Good
Abstract
This paper explores the problem of community collaboration in applied language documentation in Africa, drawing on experiences from a documentation project currently underway in Cameroon. Three points will be highlighted: (i) the fact that outside linguists benefit from the support of a number of distinct communities, all of which are under-resourced and which can be assisted in ways specific to their needs, (ii) the importance of coming to a detailed understanding of the social significance of a given language in its local context in order to discover the most appropriate ways to support its maintenance, and (iii) the extent to which the primary assistance offered to a community should be narrowly ‘linguistic’ in nature.
Keywords: language documentation, endangered languages, community collaboration, Africa, Cameroon, cultural context
How to Cite:
Good, J., (2012) “‘Community’ collaboration in Africa: Experiences from Northwest Cameroon”, Language Documentation and Description 11, 28-58. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd177
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