‘Community’ collaboration in Africa: Experiences from Northwest Cameroon

A prominent feature of the literature on language documentation has been the importance of designing documentary projects in ways that allow speaker communities to benefit from the work of an outside researcher. Canonical examples of useful activities in this regard tend to involve things like the creation of materials that can be used for language development or offering training opportunities to assist local language maintenance programs. The idea that activities like these are appropriate has generally emanated from linguists’ experiences in places like the Americas and Australia, and it is important to examine the extent to which models coming out of such parts of the world are appropriate in the very different contexts of sub-Saharan Africa. 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. 1 ‘Canonical’ collaboration and ‘African’ collaboration A prominent feature of the literature on language documentation—at least when opposed to other areas of linguistic research—is the idea that it is important to design documentary projects with the ‘community’ in mind. Indeed, linguist-community collaborations are the prototypical means through which applied language documentation is practiced. The topic is included in the seminal 1 The research on which this paper is based has been supported by generous funding from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Department of Linguistics, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (under NEH fellowship #500006 and NEH grant RZ-50817-07), the U.S. National Science Foundation (under NSF Grant BCS-0853981), and the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences and Humanities Institute. I would like to thank the many linguistic consultants who made this work possible, in particular Ngong George Bwei Kum, whose support of the research described here since 2004 has been invaluable. I also thank audience members at the