The pervasiveness of multilingualism throughout the African continent has led it to be viewed as Africa’s “lingua franca.” Nevertheless, sociolinguistic research on this topic has concentrated mostly on urbanized areas, even though the majority of Africans still live in rural regions, and rural multilingualism is clearly of much older provenance than its urban counterpart. In urban domains, individual language repertoires are dominated by the interplay between European ex-colonial languages, African lingua francas, and local languages, and language ideologies emphasize the ordering of languages in a hierarchy that is tied to social status. The situation in rural areas is clearly distinct, though it has yet to be thoroughly investigated. Early work on language use in rural Africa tended to background the presence of multilingualism and was dominated by an approach that viewed each community (or “tribe”) as having its own language. Thanks to the progressive adoption of ethnographic methods of inquiry, facilitated by language documentation research especially since the beginning of the 21st century, it has been possible to more effectively study areas of high linguistic diversity in West and Central Africa which demonstrate that multilingualism plays an integral role in structuring social relations. Available case studies document the presence of individuals with linguistic repertoires that are primarily oriented around local languages, ideologies, and practices and that do not clearly fit with what is known from urban environments. The most important theme that emerges from this work is the extent to which rural multilingualism is linked to the specific dynamics holding among communities that are near to each other rather than being a reflection of a more general, externally imposed value system. While this result makes it difficult to characterize rural multilingualism as a single, coherent phenomenon, it does point to the utility of a shared toolkit of research strategies for exploring it in more detail. In particular, ethnographic methods are required in order to ascertain the major local social divisions which language choice both reflects and constructs in these areas, and it is additionally important to focus on how individual repertoires are tied to specific life histories rather than to assume that groupings that are salient to the outside researcher (e.g., “villages” or “compounds”) are the relevant units of analysis. Finally, investigation of multilingualism in rural Africa is not only valuable for what it reveals about social dynamics on the continent, but it also seems likely to yield important insights for the study of sociolinguistics more broadly.

Located at the northwestern edge of the Cameroonian Grassfields, Lower Fungom is a rural, linguistically highly diverse region (pop. ca. 12,000) where individual multilingualism in three local languages plus Cameroonian Pidgin English (henceforth CPE) is the norm, with a minority also speaking Cameroonian English. This article focuses on the different types of identity that can be projected via the use of English, CPE, and the local languages. Data come from language documentation projects and include self-reports, ethnographic observations, and analysis of language use. Such a diverse dataset allows us to uncover and discuss a number of aspects of the local language ideologies. Key here is the recognition that only exoglossic languages allow the representation of different identities qua membership in stereotypical categories – such as the case of English, which calls up stereotypes connected with authority and prestige – whereas the use of local languages is associated with village affiliation and, hence, relational rather than categorical identities. This ideological layer is not regimented by any form of prestige- or domain-based compartmentalization and, therefore, can hardly be captured by classical theories such as Fishman’s (1967) extended diglossia theory, whose limits in doing research on African rural settings are highlighted. Also, inspired by Jenks and Lee (2016), this article suggests the existence of a heteroglossia of ideologies of personal identity (relational vs. categorical) most likely determined by the relatively recent entry of English in the local language ecology.