Gratien Atindogbe | University of Buea (original) (raw)

Papers by Gratien Atindogbe

African Books Collective, 2016

This book is a composite of 40 purely scientific and peer-reviewed papers presented during the Se... more This book is a composite of 40 purely scientific and peer-reviewed papers presented during the Seventh World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL7) at the University of Buea, Cameroon, in 2012. The different chapters of the volume fall within the scope of African languages in relation to linguistics and other related disciplines, where a varied range of theoretical examinations, investigations and/or discussions as well as pure description of aspects of language are offered. For the purpose of clarity and easy accessibility of the content, the chapters are further subcategorized into nine sections, which include: Borrowing, Discourse Analysis, Historical Linguistics, Intercultural Communication, Language Documentation, Language in Education, Morpho-syntax, Phonetics and Phonology, and Sociolinguistics.

Forensic linguistics is the study of language and the law to examine the language related issues ... more Forensic linguistics is the study of language and the law to examine the language related issues within legal settings. Cameroon is a multilingual nation with 2 exoglossic official languages and more than 250 national languages. There are communication problems in its legal milieu as all laws are written and spoken in English and French only and not in any of the national languages. Consequently, illiterate Cameroonians involved in legal encounters of arrests, interrogations, and trials experience genuine communication barriers in police stations and courtrooms, as do their legal advisers and the community interpreters. This paper advocates the introduction of national languages into the legal settings in order to ensure linguistic accommodation for suspects and convicts with poor language proficiency in both English and French. The authors embarked on developing key legal terms in Tunen, a language spoken in the Littoral and Central Regions of Cameroon using five terminology development strategies, namely semantic extension, compounding, translational equivalence, phrasing, and transplanation. In doing so, the authors refute the fallacy that African languages cannot express abstract realities and pave the way for terminology development in any African language.

De Gruyter eBooks, Sep 11, 2017

De Gruyter eBooks, Sep 13, 2012

Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives of Youth Language Practices in Africa, 2019

Traduction et Langues

The “language of geniuses or genisti”: On the tracks of an emerging young language in Cameroon Th... more The “language of geniuses or genisti”: On the tracks of an emerging young language in Cameroon The technological changes that societies are currently undergoing, characterized, among other things, by ease of communication in the world of mediated electronic discourse (DEM), have direct consequences on our linguistic behaviors. As a result, sociolinguists have plenty to do because they are faced with linguistic phenomena that call into question, and render obsolete the truths of yesteryear, or that suggest new avenues of research. In sociolinguistics, this is felt more and more by the new language forms that emerge due to certain cultural and sociological changes. The present study focuses on the analysis of a new language form, in particular “the language of geniuses”, a young speech form that is budding in the city of Yaoundé. This sociolect, which arises from the desire of cloth sellers in a sector of the Mokolo market called “South Africa”, invented to distinguish themselves from...

Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Tenth Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that documentary linguistics (DL), through its object... more The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that documentary linguistics (DL), through its objectives (safeguard endogen knowledge), tools (digital technologies), methods (collaborative research), and results (digital archiving of data for posterity), constitutes a stable base onto which African education systems must reform. Admitting that a young Africa rich in natural and human resources but living in abject poverty is a paradox that can only be broken through education (Nana Akufo-Ado, pc), then, there is need to invent new ways to “do education” on the continent, in other to achieve sustainable development. Remote working and online education imposed on the world by the Covid-19 pandemic has come to exacerbate Africa's digital divide (DD). Despite the reality that close to 90% of students in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to learning tools like computers at home, and 82% lack access to the internet (Sikiti Da Silva, 2020), I argue that DL, as an academic discipline o...

With the demographic explosion of young people in major African cities, we are witnessing the eme... more With the demographic explosion of young people in major African cities, we are witnessing the emergence of youth languages and new speech forms. In search of well-being, these young people, plagued by poverty, social injustice, unemployment and idleness, invent linguistic codes that allow them to find themselves. The linguistic and sociolinguistic description of these youth languages is the object of this volume. The contributions inform on the statutes and functions of the youth languages of Africa, their forms and structures, their representations, and envisage perspectives and prospective didactics

This work, (Bakweri), is a linguistic description that emphasizes data showing the basic and rele... more This work, (Bakweri), is a linguistic description that emphasizes data showing the basic and relevant structures of the language. It covers four aspects: phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax. Phonology studies the sound and tone systems of a language and revealed that Mokpe has seven vowels and 23 consonants, although Connell (1997) states 21. The phonological rules noted include: deletion, epenthesis, affricate and glide formation, and vowel assimilation. Tonally, Mokpe exhibits two lexical tones (low and high) and a grammatical high tone. The two basic tones combine to form either a rising or falling tone. The most prominent tonological processes are tone deletion, tone copy, tone simplification, an Meeussen's Rule. Base on the phonological study, 26 graphemes (unigraphs only) are proposed for writing the Mokpe language. These include 18 consonants, seven vowels, and two tones. The morphological study of the nominal and verbal systems of Mokpe revealed that the language retains many intrinsic traits of Narrow Bantu. The structure of the noun is a noun class prefix followed by a root. There are 13 noun classes numbered consecutively from 1 to 10, 13 to 14 and 19. They are grouped into nine genders (singular/plural pairs), with the odd-numbered classes being singular and even-numbered classes being plural:

Language documentation (LD) is a relatively new concept in linguistic research in Cameroon in par... more Language documentation (LD) is a relatively new concept in linguistic research in Cameroon in particular and maybe in Africa in general. So far, with the generally high numbers of languages spoken in the African countries, researchers have been solely or most involved in language description, a term which was, for long, interchangeable with language documentation. However, since Himmelmann (1998), these two terms refer to distinct realities and language researchers are quickly adapting to the requirements of LD. Thus, it is clear that LD demands more sophisticated and up-to-date technology, as well as more specific attitudes in the interaction with the informants and the speech community. This implies new teaching modules (appropriate training), new types of technological devices and a completely new mentality for the researcher, his institution and the speech community investigated. In fact, there is a need for an appropriate qualitative adjustment of all stakeholders for a success...

Generally, noun class prefixes of Bantu languages have two or more variants which can be accounte... more Generally, noun class prefixes of Bantu languages have two or more variants which can be accounted for by phonological and/or morphological rules. These rules might be straightforward, natural and psychologically real, or sometimes complicated and less natural in that it is not always clear what phonological processes are involved. These complications have been noticed with gender 1/2 prefixes of the Bantu languages of Zone A. This paper examines the alternations noted in classes 1 and 2 (for the lexemes "man," "woman" and "child") of two Bantu languages, Bankon (A42) and Mokpe (A22) to demonstrate the difficulty in accounting for those alternations. A detailed analysis is provided with a wide range of alternative hypotheses.

Structural and Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Indigenisation, 2014