A Diasystematic Approach to Multilingual Ecology: The Case of Mbum Speakers in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon

Abstract

Speakers of the minority language Mbum (Cameroon) live in a multilingual ecology coping with different degrees of interferences from a wide variety of other languages and dialects. They consciously and/or unconsciously insert constructions from different languages in different communicative contexts and often apply mixed codes altogether. Sometimes, they reckon that a given linguistic unit does not belong to one specific language from their repertoire but feel that it is somehow ‘around’ in the multilingual space they navigate. Such statements highlight an epistemological dilemma that becomes more and more apparent in language contact theory: While it is evident that in multilingual ecologies assumptions of single, articulate, static, and ideally variation-free language systems do not at all reflect speakers’ realities, the concept of individual languages that influence each other to various degrees while keeping their grammars neatly apart is generally presupposed for descriptive and analytic purposes. A possible solution for the dilemma lies in the Diasystematic Construction Grammar approach which conceives of a grammar as community specific and not as language specific.