The Multilingual Nature of Cameroonians Living abroad: a curse or blessing in Language Attrition

Abstract

The motivational factor of this paper stems from the diversity of voices, characters and personalities; I came to meet through telephone conversations of friends and relatives who have lived in Europe and America for quite some time. The multilingual landscape of the 21^st century is a product of continuing transnational and translocal mobility and exchange of people’s information and products across physical and virtual boundaries. Knowledge of local and global international languages and cultures is necessary in order to gain access to a society’s information, for the exchange of materials and to be able to communicate with people in our immediate social space and beyond. The problem that emanates from this paper is the claim that immigrants are cut off from Social Cognitive Casual Chains (SCCC) of the L1 community and no longer have support in stabilizing their L1 both in representations and practice. This has resulted in the problem of remembering some words being “blocked” by a word from the other language and also unable to retrieve the native one. The attriter becomes hesitant and disfluent, using a lot of pauses like “erm” and “ulms”, repetition and self-correction in certain cases and collocation difficulties. Monika Schmid 2007 Language Attrition theoretical perspectives was used to guide this investigation for data collection and analysis.....