Talk:Kom people (Cameroon)

>this is just the start of this page, soon i'll have more info, pics etc for this one as well as the North-West province page.

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Discussion on "tribe" and "dialect"
Nice to see a Kom article. Since there should be No Original Research in Wikipedia, some references should be added (like oficial publications of Cameroon, Maps, historical and geographical books and the like). A separate article about the Kom language should be added, referenced from here. There are lots of language articles in Wikipedia setting a standard for how this should be done.

I have removed the term "tribe". The term "tribe" is often used when refering to Africans, as well as the term "dialect" when referring to African languages. This is wrong! I regard this to be racist terminology (I don't imply the author of this page was a racist, it is just a bad habit). Try using it on Europeans thaan you will see how funny it sounds: "The Germans are a large tribe in northern europe. They speak a dialect belonging to the germanic language family...". Nannus 22:47, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi Nick, sorry if my previous comment sounded harsh. It was not meant to be. I am not atacking you. I am happy someone started an article about Kom. Please continue! Nannus 16:16, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I suppose words mean different things to different people. I grew up in Kom, and "dialect" is by far the most common English word used by the Kom and other ethnic groups to refer to Cameroonian languages. I know it's not the most accurate word in western English by I didn't realise it was politically incorrect. When I get time I'll find some references for the stuff I wrote, I think I've got a few books lying around the house that include that information.Nick.annejohn 16:30, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

It would indeed be very interesting to research this issue and maybe write an article about it. I have just noticed that there is a tendency to call african languages "dialects" and african peoples "tribes". This usage of these words is indeed very common among Africans themselves but I belive it was started by the europeans and has a racist background historically. Therefore, I suppose these words should be avoided where they are not scientifically appropriate. In German it is the same: people talk about "Stämme" (tribes) and "Dialekte" (dialects). For example, you can hear people talk about "der Stam der Yoruba" (the Yoruba tribe). This is a people with more than 40 million people. But nobody talks about the "tribe of the french" for example. Referring to com, if theö term tribe means a society "consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states" (from the wikipedia article on tribe) then they are definitely not a tribe. Kom is a small kingdom, i.e. before the Germans invented Cameroon and made Kom a part of it, it was an independent state. Even this definition of "tribe" seems propblematic to me. Were is the boundry between tribe and state? Obviously, there are societies of different complexity but why do we make a distinction with two different concepts (tribal societies vs. states)? This distinction is not natural, it is an artefact of western culture. Nannus 09:39, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

so maybe we should actually go 2 the european country articles and change "country" 2 "tribe"...just kidding. thanks 4 fixing up this article, nannus.Nick.annejohn 03:02, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: African Art
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