Kenmogne, Michel

Flourishing and Language Michel Kenmogne 0. Introduction: In 2019, the SIL Board reframed its vision statement as follows: “we long to see people flourishing in community using the languages they value most”. In this, the Board sought to recapture the ultimate impact that SIL aims for through its various activities. Three key words stand out in this statement: flourishing, community and languages. While these concepts meaningfully relate to SIL’s core commitments over the past century, they still beg for an explanation about how these fit into the overall context of what God does to accomplish his plans and purposes in the world. Put differently, there is a need to articulate the missional content of these concepts in order to provide a solid foundation to our language related pursuits as a valid part of God’s mission. This is a daunting goal that can hardly be achieved within the limits of this paper. However, building on two vignettes that depict issues and consequences of language use among minority speaking communities, the paper briefly examines language as an attribute of God, a distinctive of human beings, and a defining marker of the communities that use it. Moreover, it portrays flourishing as part of God’s missional intent for humanity as depicted through the grand narrative of the Bible. Therefore, the concept of flourishing is likened to blessing, shalom, justice and reconciliation. It argues that, in pursuing these, God centrally uses language, thereby providing a missional basis for SIL’s engagement with language. 1. Two stories of the denial of language use Never again use your mother tongue in the church! It was barely the first milestone in the Bakoko language development project in Cameroon. Aer months of working with the speakers of the various dialects of the language, a preliminary alphabet of the Bakoko was available for the first time. Several community members gathered to launch and celebrate the creation of their writing system. Obviously, the advent of this alphabet gave people the hope that some of their deepest yearnings might soon come true. As a people group, they would be able to preserve in writing their ancestral knowledge and wisdom in order to transmit it to other generations. They would create the needed literature to affirm themselves as a people, and increase and own any relevant knowledge that would further their thriving as individuals and community. When the alphabet was launched and the first demonstration of its use made in public, an old man named Dinjeke burst into tears. When asked later on why he got so emotional, he told the story of the humiliation that he and his Bakoko people had suffered for decades. While the other two major languages of the region had been written and had the Scriptures translated therein, Bakoko1 had never 1 In 1989, as a postgraduate student, I was part of a major survey that one of our professors carried out on the Coastal Bantu languages of Cameroon. In the course of this, it occurred to me that Bakoko, with its many 1 deserved any attention. As a result, the evangelisation among the Bakoko people was done in the neighboring Bassa language. One day when he was a young adult, Dinjeke was asked to pray during the church service. He stood up, decided to break the church tradition and pray in his native Bakoko language. While he was standing and praying, somebody rebuked him from the back, ‘pulled his cloth downward’, thereby requesting that he shut up and sit down. Following that, the church leadership warned him to never use his mother tongue again in the context of worship and church service. Dinjeke was hurt in his innermost being. He lived the remaining decades of his life with the shame and feeling that the Bakoko people were undeserving of the same dignity as other people. For this reason, the development of a writing system for his language was more than a scientific achievement. It was a symbolic affirmation that speakers of this language are not second-class citizens of the world. It was also the seeds of the hope that his people might some day enjoy the same prestige as others, using their God-given language. A traumatic schooling experience Eken spoke only his mother tongue until he reached school age. Like all children in the community, he was pretty fluent, could count and tell the stories that he had heard in his family context. As such, he was pretty confident because he had a clear frame of reference in life. But entering the classroom, Eken, like all other children in the community, were exposed to a foreign language that they neither spoke nor understood. Worse still, speaking the mother tongue on the school campus was forbidden. This was a traumatic experience for many children who had to learn both the skill of reading and writing, and the language of instruction itself at the same time. To these children, education was not a process of going from what they knew to a gradual discovery of the unknown. It was rather a radical and abrupt disruption of their daily reality that made education a painful and sudden adjustment to a foreign and mysterious reality. As such, education violently disconnected the child from his community. As a result, he was obliged to exchange his identity throughout the education process. It is not surprising that many children were thought to be dull, and the majority dropped out of the school system over the years. It remains a miracle that a few in the community did go through such an arduous system and eventually learned to read and write. However, the majority missed the possibility to achieve their full potential in life. Such people constitute the critical mass of the population who are reduced to menial jobs and see themselves as second-class citizens with respect to the minority of those who were able to make it through the arduous system. dialects, had never been given any attention since the early missionary days. Inquiring about the reason behind the neglect of this language and its speakers, I was told that, in the early days of mission in Cameroon, the Bakoko people strongly opposed the missionaries efforts to develop their language and introduce Christianity. They claimed that their language was one that would be used to keep their ancestral practices and safeguard their magical rites and witchcra against any corruption. It was this discovery that led to my decision to study the Bakoko language for my doctoral research, resulting in The Lexical Phonology of Bakoko. To date, a Bakoko language and Bible translation project is nearing completion, under the auspices of CABTAL. 2 The stories of the Bakoko alphabet and the traumatic schooling experience point to one basic fact: the language that has framed someone’s early encounter with the world needs to be taken into account in any process that requires the deepest levels of one's personality. The failure to do this results in a profound alteration of the self-image, disrupts the group’s sense of community, furthers an unethical discrimination among human beings, and thwarts the ability to have a healthy relationship with God. The end result is a deep injustice. 1. Language and Minority language communities Many controversies surround language and its use. Language diversity is oen viewed as a curse or a blessing, a unifying or dividing factor among communities and nations. Over the past five centuries, the processes of colonisation (imposition of colonial languages), nationalisation (choice and enforcement of official languages to further a national integration) and todays’ globalization (rush towards languages that offer more socio-political and economic power) have had a remarkable effect on the condition of the world’s languages. As people approach language issues from a pragmatic perspective, they tend to pay little attention to its intrinsic nature, its relationship to life and its centrality in all human undertakings. In hindsight, human beings and the communities they form cannot be dissociated from their languages. Language is so essential to human beings that it would be fitting to refer to people as ‘linguistic beings’ because language uniquely defines and distinguishes them. Language: an extraordinary endowment When we use the word ‘language’ in English, we constantly refer to two realities: 1) the faculty that humans have to speak or sign languages and 2) the actual system of sounds and symbols that people use to make meaning and communicate among themselves. This unique ability to use language is inherent to human beings and has been a matter of wonderment for various observers and thinkers. In a festschri in honour of Sherwood Lingenfelter, John Watters wrote a contribution entitled ‘The State of Minority Languages in the 21st Century: In praise of language, in search of compassion’ (Watters, 2019, 30-49). This paper provides an accurate appraisal of the condition of minority languages and explores original considerations relative to the nature and centrality of language in human life. Much has been written about the theory of language. But in the interest of the further development in this paper, I will hold the following tenets about language: ● Origin of language: While many opinions have surrounded the origin of language, it is evident that it has no plausible evolutionary origin. It has a transcendent nature that is asserted in various ways. For Noam Chomsky, it is an ‘innate’ reality, while Soren Kierkegaard construes it as ‘something originally given and partly which develops freely’. Ben Elson’s Linguistic Creed (1987) clearly holds that language is “one of God’s most important gis to man”. 3 ● Language is a distinctly human attribute: While communication systems exist among animals, human language is unique in its complexity and generative capacity.

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