Most people would argue that the colonial era is over and African countries, which gained their independence throughout the second half of the twentieth century, are free. However, the legacy of European imperialism on the African continent is still very apparent in different aspects of society. Most french-speaking West and Central African countries use the Francs, a currency owned by France, and thus have to pay taxes to France every year. The most obvious of these legacies are the colonial languages. In his paper, “Language attitudes in West Africa,” Efurosibina Adegbija refers to the dominance of colonial languages in many west African countries as “the unsevered or supposedly unseverable umbilical cord” (Adegbija 2000) This imagery is powerful because it suggests that colonial languages continue to connect many African countries to their ex-colonial masters.

Cameroon is a developing country with many of the issues that developing countries face (high unemployment rate, corruption, etc..). Thus, many young adults want to go Europe or North America to continue their education (and many are able to through different opportunities). Also, because of the way that Western countries are portrayed in the media (everyone is rich) people who live in these countries are generally regarded as above those who do not. Cameroon was colonized by French and England (and Germany and Spain) so these are the official languages of the country. The Cameroonian accent is very different from the French accent, which is generally regarded by most Cameroonians as sophisticated. This stereotype is very pervasive as people outwardly admire the French accent and try to copy it when they become wealthy, or after spending as little as one month in France. When Cameroonians children who were born in France come to visit, most children want to play with them. I adopted that attitude myself and grew up considering the French accent as more beautiful than mine.

Multiple studies have examined different aspects of children’s dialect perception, from their ability to detect the difference between two accents to their attitudes regarding those different accents. Laura Wagner found that five- to six-year-old American children can categorize speakers based on their accents, especially when asked to differentiate native-accented speakers from foreign accented-speakers (Wagner 2014). These results replicated experiments conducted by Girard and colleagues who found that five- to six-year-old French speakers could not distinguish between their native accent and a regional variant but could distinguish their own accent from a foreign one (Girard, Foccia and Goslin 2008). Kinzler and colleagues found that infants as young as five-month-old can differentiate their own accents from foreign accents (Kinzler, Dupoux and Spelke 2007). These studies show that children develop the ability to detect the difference between their native accent and a foreign accent from a very young age.

Being able to detect the difference between two accents does not imply that children have attitudes towards these accents. Studies have shown though that children prefer speakers of their native language. In the study conducted by Kinzler and colleagues mentioned above, they found that children preferred to look at picture of a person who had previously spoken in their native accent compared to someone who spoke in a foreign accent (Kinzler, Dupoux and Spelke 2007). Another study conducted by Kinzler and colleagues found that children five-years-old prefer other children of their own race when they are silent but prefer speakers with their native accents, even when they are of a difference race (Kinzler et al. 2007). This showed that young children use accent as a salient social cue, to a greater extent than race.

These studies show that children tend to prefer speakers of their native accent over foreign accents. However, I do not suspect these studies to show the same results for five-years-old children in Cameroon, due to the colonial background and the present situation. For my project I plan to replicate the magic box experiment (Rosenthal 1974) on 5 to 6 years old children to determine their attitudes towards each accent. I predict that five-year-old children will prefer speakers with the French accent. Based on my prediction, I will to conduct a similar study on younger children to determine the age at which they make the switch from preferring their own accent to preferring the French accent.

Multiple studies have examined language attitudes in Africa but most of them compare colonial languages to indigenous African languages. Most of the studies suggest that the dominance of colonial languages is due to their association with prosperity and upward mobility. Nkonko Kamwangamulu and Alla Tovares discuss the ideology of development and argue that English is dominant over indigenous languages within Kenya and South Africa because of policies that makes Engligh speakers more competitive in terms of employment and personal success (Kamwangamulu and Tovares 2016). They discuss the fact that some native speakers of indigenous languages hold negative attitudes towards them and consider them worthless (Kamwangamulu and Tovares 2016). This dominance can sometimes be directly influenced by ex-colonial masters. For example the British Council, in collaboration with the Nigerian Federal Government, funded a Communication Skills project between 1988 and 1993, aimed at improving English standards within Nigerian universities by sending books and boosting projects regarding the image of English in Nigeria (Adegbija 2000). In that same paper, Adegbija asked Nigerian respondents what they think about the use of Nigeria or other indigenous languages for education. While 57.1% of respondents believed that nigerians could learn better if taught in their mother tongue (indigenous languages),73.4% of respondents believed that Nigerian languages could not cope with modern sciences (Adegbija 2000). This study shows again, that native speakers of indigenous languages have negative attitudes towards these in terms of their ability to compete with English within the country and at the global level.

The only study that examined accents is a very recent study conducted by Pedro Álvarez-Mosquera and Alejandro Marín-Gutiérrez in 2018. They use the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to examine the attitudes of young LI South Africans indigenous speakers towards the standard South African English and Afrikaans-accented English (Álvarez-Mosquera and Marín-Gutiérrez 2018). The authors measured reaction times to the association of standard South African English and Afrikaans-accented English to positive and negative words on 81 young college students. They found that participants have statistically significant negative attitudes towards Afrikaans-accented English speakers (Álvarez-Mosquera and Marín-Gutiérrez 2018). In the background section, the authors discuss the history of the two languages in the country as a potential explanation for the predicted results. Due to the Bantu Education Act (1953), Afrikaans became known as the language of oppression and after the end of Apartheid, it was downgraded in sociopolitical and educational terms (Álvarez-Mosquera and Marín-Gutiérrez 2018). For example, it was removed as a language of instruction in many higher education institutions (Álvarez-Mosquera and Marín-Gutiérrez 2018). Conversely, the Bantu Education Act led to the enhancement of the status of English in the country. It dominated parliament, government institutions, media, etc (Álvarez-Mosquera and Marín-Gutiérrez 2018). Thus the association of Afrikaans with oppression and English with advancement within the country contributes to the negative attitudes towards Afrikaans-accented English.

From the results of most of the studies examining language attitudes in African countries, we can conclude that the association of a certain language with development and prosperity leads people to have positive attitudes towards that language, and subsequently towards the accent associated with that language. In Cameroon, English and French are used in higher institutions. Most employers require people to have at least a baccalaureate degree, which is the equivalent of a high school diploma. That exam is only offered in English or French within the country and not in one of the many indigenous languages. English and French are thus associated with development and upward mobility. Based on the results from cited studies, I children will have positive attitudes towards French-accented French compared to Cameroon-accented French.

This project is important because it will potentially add to the body of evidence showing that a country’s history can have a significant effect on the type of language attitudes that people within that country hold. Additionally, it will also show that the extent to which the results of studies conducted in the Western world are generalizable might be very limited and studies specific to each region must be conducted before big statements can be made. This project is also important because it is novel. It is the first attempt to examine attitudes between ex-colonial accents and regional accents within a country.

Words Cited:

Adegbija, Efurosibina. “Language Attitudes in West Africa.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, vol. 141, no. 1, 2000, doi:10.1515/ijsl.2000.141.75.

Álvarez-Mosquera, Pedro, and Alejandro Marín-Gutiérrez. “Implicit Language Attitudes Toward Historically White Accents in the South African Context.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology, vol. 37, no. 2, 2017, pp. 238–248., doi:10.1177/0261927×17718349.

Girard, F., Floccia, C. & Goslin, J. (2008). Perception and awareness of accents in young children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 26, 409–33.

Kamwangamalu, Nkonko, and Alla Tovares. “English in Language Ideologies, Attitudes, and Educational Practices in Kenya and South Africa.” World Englishes, vol. 35, no. 3, 2016, pp. 421–439., doi:10.1111/weng.12207.

Kinzler, K. D., Dupoux, E. & Spelke, E. S. (2007). The native language of social cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, 12577–80.

Kinzler, K. D., Shutts, K., DeJesus, J., & Spelke, E. S. (2009). Accent trumps race in guiding children’s social preferences. Social cognition, 27(4), 623-634.

Wagner, L., Clopper, C. G., & Pate, J. K. (2014). Children’s perception of dialect variation. Journal of child language, 41(5), 1062-1084.