Revue Hybrides (Dec 2023)
Le camfranglais comme reflet du dialogue des cultures dans l’espace francophone camerounais : repères lexicologique, sémantique et morphosyntaxique
Abstract
Cameroon is a country whose inhabitants belong to miscellaneous cultures and ethnicities and different geographical areas. One of the factors that helps to decode an individual’s belonging to a culture is the national language. This situation is not favorable to conversations between citizens who do not belong to the same culture. Even if the problem seems to have been solved by the decisions-makers through the choice of French and English as official languages, the difference of level and language register is still a hindrance to exchange amongst the citizen. In a bid to tackle this matter, Cameroonian speakers created the camfranglais, which is a vernacular language derived from French, English and local languages. This reflection, which analyzes the formal and the semantic means of camfranglais, is based on a central issue: how the structure of a language can justify the dialogism which animates the speakers? How do the morphosyntaxic constructions of camfranglais and its concepts can shed light on its polyphonic character? This questioning will find its answers in a development in two parts enlightened by sociolinguistics. It will therefore be suitable to show, on the both sides, that camfranglais is made up of the languages established in Cameroon. At the end of the analysis, we noticed that the linguistic elements of this hybrid language reflect the dialogism which characterizes Cameroonian speakers.
