Publish at August 02 2023 Updated August 02 2023
Africa accounts for more than half of the world's linguistic heritage. As a result, languages of great communication, such as French, English, Spanish and, little by little, Chinese, can be found alongside other languages existing on the territory, still referred to as minority languages or national languages in a particular context.
Today, many people transmitting local knowledge in a multilingual environment; planning innovative ideas and building their identity prefer to use their national languages. In this sense, Anderson (2020) asserts: "Language has thus become an instrument of communication and an instrument of social interaction".
Tourneux (2019) sees local knowledge as "the knowledge available to localized human groups, independently of ongoing external contributions". Such knowledge cannot be mastered if one is a stranger to the language. Increasingly, stakeholders are developing strategies to promote minority languages (Kouesso et al. 2021), understood as languages without social status, because they are seen as important new cultural heritages.
These languages reveal local knowledge that cannot be expressed in the languages of mass communication. This knowledge is generally focused on the treatment of tropical illnesses that cannot necessarily be solved by modern medicine. Teaching in these languages enables learners to be clearly situated in their environment, while explaining in their mother tongue or national language how concepts are perceived in their cultural area. What's more, they allow us to experience childhood through the tales, proverbs and other oral literature that were told around the fire by grandmothers in their mother tongue.
It is commonly said in Africa, and particularly in Cameroon, that "if you think about an exercise or a given subject in a foreign language and you don't understand anything, you should try to bring it back to your mother tongue to get the gist of it". This situation clearly shows that the person facing this problem is better off working in their mother tongue than in other languages of wide communication.
It's obvious to see that the mother tongue is the key to finding one's place in the world of empirical knowledge. The mother tongue is the object of mastery of a new science buried in the natural environment of a given population. This science may be linked to the counting system in the culture, to the organization of a traditional society, as in the case of the Bamiléké structuring of the Grassfields, or to knowledge of botany or the type of agriculture according to the prevailing climate, to name but a few.
To recognize yourself and make yourself known in this context of globalization, where barriers have been broken down, you need to go back to your roots, i.e. use your mother tongue. Our identity is linked to a set of elements with which we are identified. This identification is mainly based on language. In Africa, for example, some people may ask, what language do you speak apart from the languages of colonization? It's a question that goes back to the identification of one's linguistic heritage. The answers will go something like this: I'm Congolese, I live in Congo, in Central Africa, and I speak Lingala.
The question here is: is "Lingala", the language spoken in Congo, a language of global communication? The negation will simply identify someone as living in this locality. For this reason, communication will be more fluid between two Lingala-speaking Congolese than between a Congolese who speaks French and his interlocutor. Those with a high level of linguistic inter-comprehension will therefore feel a certain closeness to the other, who does not have this language in common.
References
Anderson P. (2020) " Lorsque la langue est devenue un instrument de communication ", in La clinique lacanienne 2020/2 (n° 32), pages 91 to 103. Online at https://www.cairn.info/revue-la-clinique-lacanienne-2020-2-page-91.htm
Kouesso J.R, Djoumene K. J. & Ngopog T. I. (2022) Modernisation de la terminologie des mathématiques en classe de section d'initiation au langage (sil) en langue mə̀dʉ̂mbὰ (Cameroun) in Akofena spécial n°07, Vol.2 onlinehttps://www.revue-akofena.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/01-T07-SpL-36-Jean-Romain-KOUESSO-Juvelos-DJOUMENE-KUETE-Idriss-NGOPOG-TEMEJIE-pp.07-24.pdf
Tourneux H. (2019) "Les savoirs locaux: comment les découvrir et comment les transmettre", in https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02377229/document accessed on 27 /7 /2023
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