Campus English: lexical variations in Cameroon
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Jean Paul Kouega
Abstract
This article examines the secret language of Anglophone students in the State universities of Cameroon. To show group solidarity and, incidentally, to render their informal English speech incomprehensible to non-members, these students season it with non-standard lexical items. These items are obtained from a variety of processes such as borrowing (from existing languages and language variants including West African varieties of Englishes and Pidgins, French and Camfranglais), coinage, compounding, meaning change, to name only these few processes. Semantically, these new words fall into the same domains as other common youth slangs i.e. sex, physical look, food, drinks, clothing, money and education.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Multilingualism: the case for a new research focus
- Language politics and policy in the United States: implications for the immigration debate
- Polish Canadians and Polish immigrants in Canada: self-identity and language attitude
- Languages in the Canton of Grisons
- Campus English: lexical variations in Cameroon
- Codeswitching and ethnicity: grammatical types of codeswitching in the Afrikaans speech community
- Book reviews
- Is there an educational advantage to speaking Irish? An investigation of the relationship between education and ability to speak Irish
