THE PRAGMATICS OF CAMEROON ENGLISH

The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the meaning of a number of speech acts in Cameroon English (CamE) cannot be got from the linguistic elements used but from the context of use. The data are analysed using the speech act theory as propounded by Austin (1962) and defended by pragmaticians such as Searle (1969), Mey (1993), and Martinez-Flor and Uso-Juan (2010). Using the above theory, a number of speech acts were collected from the day-to-day interactions of Cameroonians between 2020 and 2023 and were analysed following their locutionary aspects, their illocutionary effects, and their perlocutionary force. The analysis shows that as the years go by, English-speaking Cameroonians become even more and more creative in the way they construct and use their utterances. The meaning of these utterances is never dependent on the surface meaning of the wordings used but on the shared contextual knowledge of both the speaker and the audience. For example, in the sentence “has Fame Ndongo spoken to you?”, one might be tempted to think that the Cameroonian Minister of higher education (at least by the time this article was being written) had to talk to someone. Interestingly, this has nothing to do with someone speaking (verbally) to another. Rather, from the context of university lecturers in Cameroon, it is about the payment of research allowance by the government. The findings of the study therefore intimate that in order to understand most of the speech acts in CamE, we have to rely more on the intentions of the speaker and the shared contextual knowledge of both the speaker and the listener