Strategies de promotion et de revitalisation des langues minoritaires autochtones au Cameroun et au Canada

The present thesis analyses some promotion and revitalization strategies of minority languages in Cameroon and Canada and shows some paths of improvement of such strategies with the goal of making those languages more dynamic. It is based on the observation that local languages are rather worse off in Cameroon and Canada under the pressure of the official languages, English and French. Thus, this study tries to answer the following two questions: what are the strategies that are currently used to revitalise minority languages in Cameroon and Canada? How can those strategies be upgraded, from a sociolinguistic perspective? These questions imply that national languages in Cameroon and aboriginal languages in Canada do not have the ethnolinguistic vitality necessary for their long-term survival. Although several initiatives are seized by the State (particularly in Canada) and by the private sector (especially in Cameroon) to revitalise those languages, revitalisation strategies of those languages are sometimes incomplete, inappropriate, unsuitable or simply hard to apply.;This work, which falls within the general framework of language planning theories, is inspired by the critical language policy theory, more especially by the historical-structural approach, ethnographic approach and governmentality, all of them based on acquisition planning. The data to be analysed were collected from primary and especially secondary sources. The primary sources were made up of some public, private and community media programs and the secondary sources of library work. To analyse our data, national languages of Cameroon were grouped together and aboriginal languages of Canada were grouped together too in order to better study their promotion and revitalisation strategies. Hence, we have compared, contrasted, critiqued, evaluated and finally suggested some possibilities of improvement of those strategies. One of the conclusions this thesis arrived at is that minority languages can be better revitalised through a model based on a bottom-up approach and thus on individual and collective efforts of community members to better promote minority languages through the school system and through the media.