SOME LEXICO-GRAMMATICAL FEATURES OF CAMEROON FRANCOPHONE ENGLISH

Gilbert Tagne Safotso

Abstract


In Cameroon, the complexity of the linguistic landscape has led to the speaking of two non-native varieties of English to express the country’s realities. Cameroon English is spoken by Anglophone Cameroonians of the North/South West Regions of the country. Cameroon Francophone English is spoken by Francophones in the remaining eight regions of Cameroon. The phonological features of the two varieties of English have been extensively studied and are quite stable, but their lexical, syntactical and grammatical characteristics, among others, still need a lot of investigation. They are full of innovations, neologisms, and coinage (Simo Bobda 1994; Safotso 2020) that some students’ dissertations continue to consider as errors, though many of them are very regular. This study analyses data gathered from university students’ essays (N=600), classroom presentations and discussions, debates on various national radio stations and TV channels (Safotso 2022) to highlight some lexico-grammatical features of Cameroon Francophone English. Results show that, like its phonological aspects, Cameroon Francophone English has lexico-grammatical hallmarks despite the ample teaching of Standard English to its speakers.

 

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Keywords


CamFE, lexical, grammatical, coin, French, feature, user, speaker, New Englishes

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejel.v10i4.6363

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