Citizen Outreach Coalition is based in Faraway UK, why did you decide to come and carry out this campaign in Cameroon? That is the main reason most parents give for discouraging their children from speaking any other language, excerpt English. We want parents to understand children can pick up languages very easily and a mother tongue or a dialect will not corrupt their English. We don’t want parents to discourage their children from speaking any other language apart from English or French. Our present campaign is to encourage parents to teach their mother tongues to their children and also make them understand pidgin or creole is a normal language like English, French or German. I noticed some parents are actively discouraging their children from speaking their local languages and pidgin English. I have been in Cameroon and what I have seen happening to our local languages, I think is completely wrong. What exactly is the new campaign your organisation has launched across Cameroon? Mokun Njouny Nelson has been talking to Francis Ngwa Niba, Chairman of COC in Bamenda, Cameroon. Uk based Charity Citizen Outreach Coalition COC has launched a mass media sensitisation campaign across Cameroon to encourage parents to teach their children their mother tongue and not to stop them from speaking creole (pidgin English) the most widely spoken lingua franca in West Africa. More and more parents prefer their children to speak the more dominant English and deliberately do not teach them their local language, or in some cases, cannot speak the language themselves. With more than 250 local languages or dialects, Cameroon has some of the languages UNESCO classifies as threatened as fewer people speak them. ![]() The lose of languages affects cultural diversity s most local customs and traditions are embodied and encoded in the languageĪccording to Wikipedia, more than 50% of the world’s 6500 languages are located in just eight countries, India, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Indonesia, Papua New guinea and Cameroon. Languages usually reach a point of crisis after being displaced by a socially, politically and economically dominant one. Linguists describe this as a language shift. ![]() UNESCO’s Atlas of the world’s languages in Danger lists 576 critically endangered languages with thousands more categorized as threatened.
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