At a loss for words

At slightly larger than California, the African nation of Cameroon is home to roughly 30 million people and more than 300 indigenous languages. But a long-lasting civil war and other humanitarian crises have made the future of those languages uncertain.

Today, most Cameroonians in their 40s and 50s are as proficient in their indigenous languages (including Lamnso’, Oroko, and Batanga) as they are in a colonial language such as English or French. Their parents, in contrast, spoke indigenous languages more dominantly.

And for linguists like Assistant Professor of Linguistics Kathryn Franich, the question is whether this trend will accelerate. Quoting Anna Belew of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Franich said many of Cameroon’s indigenous languages — which sociolinguist Max Weinreich defined as “a dialect with an army and a navy” defined by political power, national identity, and institutional support — today stand at a “critical tipping point.”

“We could see very rapid attrition happening because speakers are multilingual, and there is a lot more economic pressure to move away from indigenous languages and toward colonial languages,” Franich said.

Native language contributes to indigenous culture in the same way that food, farming, rituals, or music do. The Harvard PhonLab’s website, “Voices of the Displaced,” launched in November to help educate the public and “sound the alarm” about language loss, features information about mass displacement as well as audio clips of migrants speaking their native languages.

“Even for languages with tens of thousands of speakers, it only takes a generation of parents making different decisions — sometimes out of necessity — for a language to lose very many speakers in a short amount of time,” said Franich. “It’s a highly personal choice how we speak to our kids, and it has massive consequences.”

For months, Franich and her team in the PhonLab, in collaboration with Howard University Assistant Professor of French Ariane Ngabeu, have been studying how forced displacement due to Cameroon’s political conflicts is impacting indigenous language attrition.

“The hope is that we’ll be able to highlight — for people across the world, but especially for linguists — what the situation really is so that we take seriously this question of language attrition and study its dynamics more depth,” Franich said.

An estimated 334,098 Cameroonians have been displaced since 2017, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Protests by Anglophone citizens against the Francophone-dominated government escalated that year into armed conflict. Clashes between government forces and English-speaking Ambazonian separatists have continued since then, leaving civilians in the country’s Northwest and Southwest administrative regions at acute risk. Separate challenges, including climate change and violence driven largely by Boko Haram extremists, beset the Far North region.

Last January, Franich and Ngabeu traveled to Cameroon with Harvard students Lexi Williams ’26, Sam Lyczkowski ’26, and Xiaotian (Alice) Wang, a linguistics Ph.D. candidate in the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, to interview migrants in Yaoundé and smaller cities throughout the West Region.

Franich and the students asked demographic questions to get a sense of their subjects’ backgrounds, then asked them to describe their language use before and after migrating. Williams, an undergraduate research assistant in the PhonLab since her sophomore year, also helped document many of the 33 indigenous languages the group heard, recording short clips of participants telling stories, or just talking.

“You could really see how people tended to animate more when speaking in their local language versus speaking in English or French,” said Williams, a social anthropology concentrator with a secondary in Human Biology, Behavior and Evolution. “It kind of solidified for me this connection that people have with their language that was endearing to see, especially when they’ve migrated to a place where they’re not speaking their language as much anymore.”

Many Cameroonians learned new local languages after relocating, either to ingratiate themselves with the community or to access resources more easily. Wang, who worked on transcribing and translating the stories told by the interviewees, said it was common to encounter someone who spoke five to six different languages.

“Something I found really surprising is how fast people can adjust to a new linguistic environment,” said Wang. “A lot of them came to the area speaking no French or any of the local languages, but reported that they started speaking French a couple of months after they came to the area, and then started learning the local languages. It sounded like a very fast transition into this new linguistic environment, which I found really impressive.”

The researchers also learned about co-workers who chose a common language — usually Fulani or French — for communication on the job. For example, four road construction workers originally from the Far North each spoke a different indigenous language (Tupuri, Giziga, Baia, and Mundang), but learned to speak each other’s tongues over time while using Fulani as a lingua franca at work.

“We often tell people it’s not a zero-sum game. You don’t necessarily have to sacrifice one language to use another,” Franich said. “But when you’re this highly multilingual, there does come a point where you have to decide which languages are for home and which are the ones for out and about. Displaced people often end up living in areas where they don’t necessarily have a lot of neighbors or family nearby speaking their primary indigenous languages.”

Even before the war, Franich said, parents in the country faced pressure to prioritize colonial languages, as there are more job opportunities in English or French.

Cameroon has a tradition of “associations,” community groups that connect fellow language-speakers, and Franich sees additional potential in digital tools such as WhatsApp. But because many Cameroonians learned their indigenous languages orally, writing can be trickier. The PhonLab is working with local language preservation groups to offer classes that ensure the next generation can write as well as speak indigenous languages.

With National Science Foundation funding, Babanki/Kejom language courses were organized in 2023 and ’24 with Pius Akumbu, Ndifon James Vibime, and Cornelius Wuchu from the language preservation group Kejom Cultural and Development Association. This year the PhonLab team co-taught a Medʉmba course with Basile Benga from the Comité de Langue pour l’Etude et la Production des Œuvres Bamiléké-Medʉmba.

The PhonLab team hopes their website contributes as well.

“There are very few personal accounts of people who are living through this conflict, discussing what they’ve experienced and what the impact is on their languages,” Franich said. “We’re hoping that the website is going to provide an accessible way to learn about this through the people themselves. Educating the public on all fronts is our goal.”