Acceso usuarios
Antoine Willy Ndzotom Mbakop, Alex Kamgang Ndada
Correction:
Table 2 published in the article is incorrect. Table 2 is replaced with correct version of Table 2 along with other corrections.
List of corrections done to this article is given below:
Figure 9, on page 17 should be located below the paragraph that precedes it— The first line of text in the paragraph above the figure 9 as follows: Figure 9 below shows that … change the word “above” to “below” Figure 11 is placed at the top of page 19 to place figure 11 to its nearest citation Figure 12 is placed at the top of page 19 to place figure 12 to its nearest citation Table 2 is placed at the bottom of page 20.
Attempts to prevent language endangerment seem to have overlooked how families proceed in surrendering the language whose intergenerational transmission is their main responsibility. The present paper envisages language maintenance or loss from the vantage point that beliefs about language are the main referents of language use in the family in multilingual settings, and can, therefore, explain the protracting process of language death. The data were collected through a questionnaire adapted from the BALLI [Horwitz, E. K. (1988). The beliefs about language learning of beginning university foreign language students. Modern Language Journal, 72(3), 283–294.], which was administered in fifty families. These were then analysed through a logistical regression. The findings revealed, among many other things, a strong correlation between the referents people attribute to their indigenous languages and the likelihood of the use of those languages with their children. Some of these included ethnic language acquisition difficulty, the nature of mother tongue acquisition, transmission strategies, acquisition aptitude, and reward. Negative beliefs about indigenous languages, as well as lack of language consciousness as underscored by this study are real matters for concern as these beliefs, more than any other external factor, may accelerate the vanishing of indigenous languages in the world.
