Identity and Minority Cues Within Multiculturalism in Northern Cameroon

There are various languages spoken in the far-north region. In that respect, apart from English and French which are languages maintained for official communication, the Fulfulde language appears to be a very useful lingua franca. Alongside Fulfulde, we still have other home languages spoken in the region; these are guiziga, tupuri, massa, mundang, kanuri, shoa-arabic, mussey, mafa, mada, kapsiki, musgum, mandara, etc. These identity languages with different Sociolinguistic statuses and various functions call for a particular attention. The above topic has 100 participants sampled in far-north Cameroon, especially Maroua town. The study follows both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The instruments and technique used are direct observation, recording and questionnaire. The theory is Gumperz's 1982 contextualisation cues. The study is influenced by various studies in the same vicinity with following stands:Early studies on language and the negotiation of ethnic identity focused on code-switching (see, for instance, Blom & Gumperz, 1972; Gumperz, 1982; Auer, 1984). As Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz (1982, p. 1) have argued, "to understand issues of identity and how they affect and are affected by social, political and ethnic divisions we need to gain insights into the communicative processes by which they arise." In their classic study of a bi-dialectal community in Hemnesberget, Norway, Blom and Gumperz (1972) observed the everyday language use of individual speakers across different interactional contexts and identified two types of code-switching practices, namely situational and metaphorical. The former refers to a switch from one language to another as the outcome of a change in the situational context.The latter refers to a change in language in order to achieve a particular communicative effect.