Language, Religion and Cosmopolitanism: Language Use in the Catholic Church in Yaounde, Cameroon

Abstract

This paper presents the beginning of an approach to the study of language use and religion, a sub-area of language and religion that has been little explored. Essential features of the approach include segmenting a religious service into its constituent parts and checking what language is used in what part and for what purpose. The proposed framework has been applied to the Catholic mass service in a cosmopolitan set-up and it will be modified as more empirical evidence is gathered. Criticisms are welcome, as they will contribute to refining the framework if it resists empirical tests. The corpus examined consisted of 60 mass services offered in 20 of the 65 parishes of Yaounde, the capital city of Cameroon. The analysis showed that while French and English Á the country's joint official languages Á and Beti and Bassa Á two minority languages spoken in the Centre province of Cameroon 1 Á are liturgical languages i.e. used for the Gospel, sermons etc, the other minority languages spoken by the inhabitants of the capital city are used mainly for singing and occasionally for epistle reading. Interestingly, the choice of these minority languages is determined by various nonsociolinguistic factors including the degree of their speakers' involvement in church issues. IntroductionThis paper describes language use and religion in a multilingual setting, with the aim of establishing the connections that are made in specific congregations between language use and religious practices. The congregation chosen for the study is the Catholic Church in Yaounde, the capital city of Cameroon, a cosmopolitan city where various world religions (see a short list in Kouega, 2007: 46) and religious practices coexist peacefully, with the Catholic faith having the greatest number of followers. 2 Several languages exist in the country (the Ethnologue identified 286 in 2005) but only a limited number are used by missionaries. The present work dwells on language use in one city Á Yaounde Á and in one congregation Á the Catholic Mission; it first gives background information on the Catholic Mission in Cameroon, then the research methodology is discussed and finally the data collected are analysed.

Language choice in multilingual socio‐religious settings in southwest Cameroon

“…The informants were priests, catechists, choir leaders and Catholic faithful residing in these two localities. As outlined in the review of Kouega () above, data collection was done in two stages. In the first stage, a combination of the participant observation, interview and informal discussion methods was used in order to work out the constituent parts of a church service.…”

“…Studies on language and religion that adopt a sociolinguistic approach include Das Gupta (), Bitjaa‐Kody (), Omoniyi (), and Albakry and Ofori (). A structural‐functional approach is used in Kouega (). Studies which have focused on religious services like the present one are reviewed here.…”

“…Kouega () looked into language use in the Catholic Church. In the absence of a model to follow, he designed a frame that comprises two stages.…”

“…It occurred in choirs’ songs in Kumba but not in Mundemba. This term was found to be used in Yaounde to refer to the speakers of these five languages (see Kouega ). It is now evident that among Catholics in Cameroon as a whole, this term refers globally to the speakers of these five languages.…”

Language Management in a Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the City of Maroua: Default Language Policy and Historical Factors

“…In Africa where the study of language and religion is gaining ground, Cameroon has been on the fore for the last twelve years. The publication of Kouega (2008) which looked into language use in an urban Catholic Church in Yaoundé [7], the capital city of Cameroon set the scene for a thought-provoking series of papers and books in connection to religious language management. A good number of papers have used different case studies to account for the interplay between language and religion and to try to determine the language policy used by each religion or church.…”