Tomedes Insights. Translation News. Supported file formats. Our Translators. Translation Conferences. Customer Reviews. Summary Tool. Word Count Ratio. Who We Are. Our Quality Guarantee. All Rights Reserved. Sign In. Shall we dive in? Is There an Official Cameroon Language? French The French spoken in Cameroon is largely similar to that spoken in France, with the addition of some local influences on accents and vocabulary. English Likewise, Cameroonian English has its own distinctive accent and words borrowed from local tongues.
Read more: African Languages: A Detailed Look into the Languages of Africa Cameroon Pidgin Languages As so often happens when imported languages meet indigenous tongues, pidgin languages have been born in Cameroon to aid communication. Bassa Around , Cameroonians speak Bassa as their mother tongue. Fulfulde Considered the lingua franca of northern Cameroon, Fulfulde is a dialect continuum that spans 20 West and Central African countries.
Hausa Spoken in Chad, Ghana and Nigeria, as well as being one of the indigenous languages in Cameroon, Hausa is a Chadic language that is estimated to have between million total speakers. Other Languages of Cameroon The complete list of languages spoken in Cameroon includes languages. Kindly enter your email.
Keep Me Updated. Thank you! Mbom says he is confused about which language to teach his children because his language is Sawa, spoken in the Littoral and Southwest regions of Cameroon, and his wife is from the Northwestern town of Nkambe, where the Limbum language is spoken. Cameroon's secretary of state in the ministry of basic education, Asheri Kilo, says she is satisfied with the level of interest the children display at speaking their national language.
Cameroon has national languages spoken by an estimated 25 million people in the 10 regions of the country. However, the central African state inherited two foreign languages from its French and English colonial masters as official languages, with 80 percent of the population speaking French and 20 percent English. Fabienne Freeland, director general of the nongovernmental organization Summer Institute of Linguistics that helps Cameroon in promoting the teaching and learning of its national languages, says the official languages have not been effective tools of communication.
Cameroon's national institute of statistics reports that four percent of the central African states' local languages — including the Mbiame language spoken in the country's English-speaking Northwest Region and the Ekung language in the South — have disappeared since Ten percent of the languages are neglected and seven percent are threatened.
Seraphine Ben Boli, who heads the program to promote the use of Cameroon national languages, says a pilot program that is being implemented in the 10 regions of the country to save the remaining mother tongues from disappearing. She says the ministry of basic or elementary education is experimenting with the teaching of five national languages in 43 schools throughout Cameroon.
During parliamentary debates members speak the language of their choice French or English , but due to the law of numbers deliberations usually proceed in French, with a system of simultaneous interpretation in place in the Chamber.
In order to respect a certain form of bilingualism, the Cameroonian government is — in principle — made up of Francophone and Anglophone ministers, both Muslim and Christian, when possible representing each of the ten regions.
But Francophone ministers are not always bilingual, unlike their Anglophone counterparts. It is clear that in this regard the Cameroonian system shares certain similarities with Canada. When it comes to the justice system, the two English regions function exclusively in English under a legal system based on the British common-law tradition.
In the rest of the country French civil law and the French language are in effect. The superior courts are bilingual, but Law No. In theory, Supreme Court judgements must be made available to the public in both official languages as soon as possible, but it is often the case that the English version is significantly delayed. Assessors, that is professional jurists in law, must be proficient in one of the two official languages, not necessarily both of them. In general, French is sufficient as long as assessors do not need to communicate with citizens in the Anglophone regions.
Because Cameroon is a bilingual state, one would expect the public service to be bilingual. They need to know French or Pidgin English, although generally speaking French occupies a prominent place in the capital.
The situation is similar in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, where only institutions of the federal government offer services in both official languages. In Cameroon there is no official languages act as there is in Canada.
A circular from , signed by the prime minister at the time, Sadou Hayatou, serves as the policy for the use of official languages in administrative matters. It is Circular No. It includes the following measures:. However, it is the responsibility of public servants who work directly with the public to make themselves understood in their dealings with the latter. Of course the ultimate goal is that all public servants who work directly with the public will be able to make themselves understood when dealing with them.
This text shows that all Cameroonian citizens have the right to demand public services in either official language; that all public servants have the right to work in the language of their choice; that all official documents must be available in both languages; and that posters, billboards signs etc. Aware of the minority status of Anglophones and their feelings of exclusion, the Cameroonian government has adopted a system of regional balance, coupled with the selection of candidates admitted to professional schools and the recruitment of public officials and employees.
The government has also tried to assign Francophone public servants to the Anglophone zones and Anglophone public servants to the Francophone zones. Signs on roads, at airports, train stations and ports, as well as posters, road signs, labels on consumer products, etc. As for bank notes, the French is written in large letters and the English is of a smaller size.
Moreover, the Cameroonian government adopted the Decree of 23 January to lay down the establishment, organization and functioning of the National Commission on the Promotion of Bilingualism and Multiculturalism. One of the major elements of its mission is to ensure follow-up on the implementation of constitutional provisions making English and French two official languages with equal value, in particular the use of both languages in the public service and semi-public bodies, as well as all other organizations which receive funding from the State.
In regional administration, English is normally used in the Southwestern and Northwestern regions. Citizen can speak to the regional government in English and are guaranteed services in that language. However, it is not possible to ask for services in English in the rest of the country, although Francophones may be able to obtain services in French in the Anglophone zone, because even in the Anglophone zones the language of the administration may be French. In municipal administration the use of Cameroonian national languages is permitted.
Article 22 of Law No. Thus, in offices under the jurisdiction of a municipal or local administration, Cameroonian languages can be used in spoken, but not written communication. Given the fact that most national languages are not written, they cannot be used in forms or in messages addressed to citizens, and even less so in print media. For the written word, by necessity French is used in the French regions and English in the English regions.
Although Cameroonian languages may be permitted in oral communication, they have been supplanted by Pidgin English, which serves as a lingua franca, especially in the south of the country. Despite the efforts of the Cameroonian government, the application of institutional bilingualism has not yielded the anticipated results.
English continues to be extremely rare in public institutions and organizations outside the English regions. There are few bilingual public servants, even though bilingualism is one of the hiring criteria. Generally speaking, French and sometimes Ewondo are spoken in the different ministries in the capital.
Most texts that the president signs, especially presidential decrees, are often written only in French. In the army, only French is allowed, and Anglophone public servants are obliged to assume the burden of institutional bilingualism. The strategy of sending Francophone civil servants to the English zone and vice versa has not been a success, because Anglophones feel as if their territory has been invaded by a massive influx of Francophone civil servants, and that they are in the minority when they work in a Francophone milieu.
In other words, Francophones have continued to speak French in the English zone and Anglophones are being assimilated in the French zone. However, French-English bilingualism has a certain visibility on government forms, but many Anglophone lawyers and other legal practitioners complain that there are no English translations of laws and other legal documents when they are first published.
They also protest the nomination of jurists in the Anglophone regions who are not proficient in English. They also believe that the State wants to replace British common law by imposing the system of civil law in force in the Francophone regions. It is often the case that magistrates, commanders of the Gendarmerie, and police commissioners assigned to Anglophone regions only speak French. Turning to education, courses in English as a second language in the French zone are often cancelled due to the lack of qualified teachers.
Even in the Anglophone regions, examinations, which are supposed to be published and presented in English to Anglophone students, are sometimes replaced by examinations in French rather than the original language. Many Anglophones wonder how the government can honestly promote bilingualism if public figures who are the leaders of the country—the president, prime minister, ministers, chief justice, etc. Few Francophone ministers can speak English. In short, these numerous shortcomings in bilingualism policy in Cameroon accentuate the uneasiness and the marginalization of Anglophones.
The institutional bilingualism provided for in the Constitution gives Cameroon good reason to train translators and interpreters to translate texts and official speeches written in one of the two official languages.
However, these institutions struggle to train competent professionals, and the conditions for acting as an interpreter do not appear to be as rigorous as they are in Canada. Judges regularly make ex officio appointments of individuals in the courtroom who is at least 21 years old and have them swear to accurately interpret accurately the words of individuals on trial who speak a different language, or to accurately translate a document in question.
Pidgin English is widely spoken, particularly in coastal areas, and Spanish is spoken in some urban centres. More than different African languages are also spoken in the country. Introducing Cameroon. Plan your trip. Travel to Cameroon Where to stay.
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