AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	58. Language in African cities
Paper ID	203
Author(s)	Moore, Leslie C.
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	In Maroua, Cameroon, a linguistically and culturally heterogeneous urban setting, many Fulbe are concerned that their children are not learning to speak Fulfulde laamnde (‘pure, clear Fulfulde’) and that they are ignorant of many Fulbe oral traditions. These concerns are not unfounded. Fulfulde is the lingua franca in northern Cameroon and is undergoing significant simplification of its phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and pragmatics, and many younger Fulbe in Maroua speak Fulfulde ɗelemre (‘Fulfulde light’). Thirty years ago, linguist, folklorist, and missionary Dominique Noye (1971) argued that the oral traditions of the Fulbe of Maroua, Cameroon were a significant force for the maintenance of their conservative dialect of Fulfulde. He also predicted their imminent demise under the pressure of schooling, mass media, and urbanization. I found that the folktale tradition endures but that folktale socialization patterns are changing in ways that may preserve the oral tradition but do not appear to promote the acquisition of morphosyntactic features of conservative Fulfulde that distinguish it from simplified varieties used widely in northern Cameroon. Traditionally, a Fulbe child learned folktales by observing performances by experts, typically older women of the family. A child would observe multiple tellings of the same tale during her childhood before ever attempting her own telling in public. In the past decade, Koranic and public school patterns of language socialization have been adopted and adapted for the learning and teaching of folktales. In addition to telling folktales to an audience of children and women, expert tellers are explicitly teaching folktales to children using an asymmetric, alternating interactional structure that is characteristic of Koranic and French language socialization. This structure, which I call guided repetition, is a practice for teaching and learning new skills that involve (i) modeling by an expert, (ii) imitation of that model by a novice, followed by (iii) rehearsal and (iv) performance by the novice. In each of these four phases, the expert supervises the novice and may assist, evaluate, and correct her efforts so that the novice may master the new skill. Guided repetition is a practice with which nearly all Maroua Fulbe are well acquainted through oral text memorization in Koranic and public schools. The structure would seem well suited to the transmission of conservative linguistic forms, providing turn-by-turn opportunities for adults to assess and correct children’s less than ‘pure’ Fulfulde. However, the experts I observed tended to focus their attention less on grammatical or lexical forms than on genre constraints, interactional norms, and storyline authenticity. Young children assumed more vocal, active roles in the learning and telling of folktales at a much earlier age than in traditional folktale socialization. Such precocious tellership does not appear to promote the appropriation of conservative Fulfulde morphosyntax by the next generation, but it may help sustain the folktale tradition. This paper is based on longitudinal research on Fulbe children’s socialization into competence in three codes – Fulfulde, Arabic, and French – and three genres – Fulbe folktales, Koranic recitation, and French school dialogues.

Fulbe Folktale Socialization and the Maintenance of Conservative Fulfulde