Language Management in a Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the City of Maroua: Default Language Policy and Historical Factors

Abstract

This paper looks into language management and factors affecting language use in a Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the city of Maroua. The methodology consists of observation followed by a pre-prepared questionnaire supplemented with personal interviews with church faithful and rulers. The approach used to analyse the data is the structural-functional approach propounded by Kouega (2008) and successfully applied to some Christian Churches and to Islam. The findings show that, contrary to previous works, this Seventh-Day Adventist Church adopts only a default language policy as its religious language management strategy. The use of Fulfulde and French as the two default languages was found to be motivated by the wish to follow a neutral policy due to cosmopolitanism of the polity but also to keep the historical tradition. This policy is in total contradiction with what obtains in Catholic masses whose language policies were deeply influenced by the resolutions Council Vatican II authorizing the use of vernaculars in religious services and in Protestant churches where the sociolinguistic identities of the worshipers matter in the choice of the language in which some activities should be conducted.