Diosdado Nguere Manga Edeguedegue and Scott Smith
In 2018 and 2019, the Equatorial Guinean government Council of
Scientific and Technological Research (CICTE) worked with five
non-governmental cultural and development agencies, to co-host two
sociolinguistic workshops focused on community-based language and
identity development. The language communities involved were six Bantu
languages from continental Equatorial Guinea (EG): Balengue, Basek,
Benga. Bisio, Fang, Kombe.
The five non-governmental organizations were: Asociación Cultural Ndowe
Tata Ngangwe, Asociación Cultural Nlar Bisió, Casa Cultural Basek,
Asociación Cristiana de Traducciones Bíblicas (ACTB), and SIL International.
The 2018 pre-symposium workshop was hosted at the Equatorial Guinean
Cultural Center in Bata, and the 2019 symposium workshop was hosted at
the Linguistic Center of ACTB. Both events were covered by national
radio and television. There were 24 participants in the first workshop,
and 33 in the second, including key leaders of each language community.
Some of the activities involved: our group history timeline, our
cultural identity markers, the Sustainable Use Model of language
development (Lewis, Simons, 2015), the four sustainable levels of
language use, the EGIDS scale of language vitality, evaluating our
language’s vitality, our ecology of language, our domains of use, our
important bodies of knowledge, our multilingualism.
The CICTE is committed to translation, protection, promotion, and the
growth of EG’s African languages. Language policies include: a) granting
authority to national and international entities that work in the area
of mother tongues, b) partnering closely with linguistic and cultural
associations that work in the development of local languages, c)
sensitizing society in the conservation, use, and study of EG languages,
d) sponsoring development projects in EG languages, e) celebrating
International Mother Language Day every February 21, f) translating into
EG languages texts of universal value written in other languages.
