Camfranglais: A novel slang in Cameroon schools

Abstract

Camfranglais is a newly created language, a composite slang used by secondary school pupils in Cameroon, West Africa. It draws its lexicon from French, English, West African Pidgin, various Cameroonian indigenous languages, Latin, and Spanish. Secondary school pupils use it among themselves to exclude outsiders while talking about such matters of adolescent interest as food, drinks, money, sex, and physical looks. There are four sections: language in the Cameroon educational system; Camfranglais defined; an analysis of a sample Camfranglais text; and the semantic domains of Camfranglais. There is a glossary of the terms cited.

On Context and Second Language Acquisition: The Rural Urban Dichotomy in Cameroon

“…After an in depth inspect of results from various researchers on the question, Atechi (2006) purports that a good number of them consider 248 as a plausible number of languages spoken in Cameroon. It is worth noting that present day Cameroon has witnessed some evolution in its linguistic panorama with the development of Pidgin English as a national lingua franca (Fonka 2011, Kouega 2015, Ngefac 2016 with its various corollaries as well as camfranglais (a mixture of English French and some local languages) that is also attracting attention (Kouega 2003) In the rural areas where part of this study is carried out, various languages are used with the following estimated frequencies; local languages 60%, pidgin English 20%, English 15% and French 5%. The reverse of this frequency is true for urban centres where Pidgin English is domineering with an estimated frequency of 50% (see Fonka 2011) English 30%, French 15% and local languages 5%.…”

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“…Nevertheless some Anglophones clung to an ideology that an official policy of bilingualism could create some form of equality between the two languages in Cameroon. However, as the history of the country since independence and various studies (Mbuangbaw 2000, Kouega 2003, Mforteh 2006) including this one have http://spil.journals.ac.za…”

“…Underlying these largely negative attitudes are the ideologies of a language hierarchy (with French, followed by English, rated as the most important languages in Cameroon) as well as the standard language ideology -the notion that languages which have been standardised enjoy a much greater prestige than other languages or varieties (Weber and Horner 2012:11-16). One major concern here was the fact that there were many indigenous languages and choosing which ones could be developed to serve as official languages or MOIs constituted a major headache for language policy makers after the country's independence in 1961 (Chumbow 1980, Kouega 2003.…”

Perception of focus prosody in the English speech of Bangou speakers

“…[6]. Pidgin as well as Bangou is a significant influence for the Cameroon speakers, as well as the prosody of Cameroon English [7] [8], and both of these languages might influence their L2 prosody in English. This study focuses on speakers of the Bangou language which has around 12,000 speakers in the west Francophone region, and many more in the cities such as Limbe in an Anglophone area, the capital Yaoundé and main port and largest city, Douala.…”