Local Languages Dynamics during COVID-19 Times in Cameroon

Abstract

This paper attempts to show that the surge of a world pandemic known as COVID-19 has allowed the local languages of Cameroon to supplant the official languages, English and French in their daily use to fight against the pandemic or to prevent the population from the threat. To reach the people at the grassroots, local languages have been used as the main channel. The pandemic is therefore looked at as a contributor to the dynamics of small languages, mainly in Cameroon, favouring their greater use for better communication and sensitisation. Relying on the community-based approach, triggered by personal observation and community involvement, the paper demonstrates that COVID-19 has allowed the enrichment of the local languages or national languages of Cameroon with new words, and has vivified their use in an environment where they are dominated by some world killer languages like English and French. The paper concludes that the dynamics of the local languages would also benefit a lot from an interconnectedness among language committees and health care specialists who will develop entangled discourses in the local languages to reach a larger majority of peoples at the grassroots, and by doing so, creating more new words that will perpetuate the lexical dynamics of the involved languages.