Abstract
Judicial discourse can grant or deprive liberty to litigants. It is, therefore, important to ensure fair hearing during trials and even more as courtrooms have become multilingual settings. In the Court of First Instance of Bafoussam, French (one of the official languages of Cameroon) often come into contact with more than 250 national languages. Generally, lay-litigants (accused, plaintiff and witness) language proficiency in French is poor because they have national languages as their first language. The law entitles judges to determine whether or not a witness needs the assistance of an interpreter. In Bafoussam, judges determine litigant’s language proficiency through Language Self-Assessment, a method mainly used in the educational milieu to enable learners to assess their language skills. Through the non-participant's observation method, I recorded three court cases in the Court of First Instance of Bafoussam. The data reveals that judge’s usage of the self-assessment method does not follow any standard, and this uncommon use harms court hearings.
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Notes
Our point of focus in this article.
Misdemeanour: it is an offence punishable with loss of liberty from 10 days to 10 years or with a fine of more than 25.000 FCFA.
Simple Offence: It is an offence punishable with a term of imprisonment of up to 10 days or a fine of not more than 25.000 FCFA.
Though this article describes Courts of First Instance judicial proceedings, for an international readership we will refer to Bench Magistrates as Judges.
Participants roles were abbreviated as such: J for judge; IN for interpreter; W for witness; and PL for plaintiff. The symbols are designed as: (.) for silence; and the author explanations are enclosed in / /.
Ghomala’ is the autonym and Bamenjou an alternate name. Ghomala’ is a Cameroon national language spoken in the west region by the Bamileke tribe (Eberhard et al., 2019).
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Dissake, E.M.K. Assessing litigant’s language proficiency: the case of the Bafoussam Court of First Instance. Lang Policy 21, 217–234 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-021-09603-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-021-09603-2