Beschreibung
This book investigates the speech of non-ethnic Fulfulde speakers in Maroua, Northern Cameroon, focussed on the
Christian community, where the language is adopted as evangelistic instrument beside French. Three key reasons
motivate our investigation. First: Context Fulfulde is embedded in a multilingual contact situation with
Indo-European languages (French, English) and many other local languages belonging to Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan
and Niger-Congo phyla. Second: Fulfulde as lingua franca in the region. This status is unique compared to the
situation in other countries such as Senegal, Chad or Sudan where it is mainly an intraethnic medium of communication.
Third: In contrast to the common perception of Fulfulde as the language of a Muslim community here we are targeting
the Christian Fulfulde speakers who share the language as well as the Bible (translated into Fulfulde) as common
goods for interethnic communication in their religious activities.
Dr Jean Pierre Boutché is currently a lecturer of Linguistics and Language Teaching at the University of Maroua,
which he returned to after his doctoral studies at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies
(BIGSAS) of the University of Bayreuth (Germany). His areas of research are linguistic variation, functional grammar,
contrastive linguistics as well as approaches and methods of language teaching.
