According to Francis Ngwa Niba, "New language for divided Cameroon", BBC News 2/20/2007,
Teachers in Cameroon are concerned that the new language frananglais - a mixture of French, English and Creole - is affecting the way students speak and write the country's two official languages. [...]
From nursery to primary and secondary schools, frananglais is fast becoming the lingua franca over Creole (pidgin English) which until recently was the best-known and widely used language across the country.
Some linguistic examples from the article:
Tu as go au school - Did you go to school?
Tu as sleep hier? - Did you sleep well last night?
Tout le monde hate me, wey I no know - Everybody hates me, I don't know why
Je veux go - I want to go
Il est come - He has come
Tu play le damba tous les jours? - Do you play football every day?
The article is interesting, but I'm really puzzled, because unless something has changed recently, it makes a mistake about the most basic point: the name of this way of talking, which is generally known as Camfranglais, not Frananglais!
This morning, Google finds only 103 references to {frananglais} -- and half of them are references to the BBC article, while many others are from Canada, e.g. a comment on a 10/12/2006 article in Voir:
Mais, on sent l'énigmatique personnage, faire exprès, dans un : «FranAnglais», tout à fait harmonieux!
In contrast, {camfranglais} has 11,000 hits.
The hits for camfranglais include a wikipedia article (in French), and several scholarly publications, e.g. Jean-Paul Kouega, "Camfranglais: A novel slang in Cameroon schools", English Today 19(2) 2003; Jean-Paul Kouega, "Word formative processes in Camfranglais", World Englishes 22(4) 2003. The second of those papers explains that
Camfranglais is a term that was coined by Professor Ze Amvela (1989) to differentiate between a new speech form that was developing in Cameroon and what was then known as Franglais, the unconsious transference of English items into French -- including code-mixing and code-switching -- by bilinguals in Canada and France. It is a composite language which resembles a pidgin in that it results from contacts between several languages (Downes, 1984) and has a simplified grammatical structure; it differs from Pidgin, however, n that its speakers are proficient in one of more shared languages (Crystal, 1987). Funcationally, it can be regarded as a slang (Longe, 1999; Görlach, 2000); Lillo, 2001); actually it is spoken by secondary school pupils when they want to freely communicate among themselves in the presence of other members of the community without the latter being capable of making sense of the linguistic interactions going on.
The coining of the term is attributed more specifically to Etienne Ze Amvela, "Reflexions on social implications of bilingualism in the Republic of Cameroon", Annals of the Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences, University of Yaounde, 1989.
Kouega gives this striking account of the social distribution of Camfranglais:
An impressionistic inspection of the profession of fluent Camfranglais speakers outside school premises reveals that they are peddlers, and labourers, hair stylists and barbers, prostitutes and vagabonds, rank and file soldiers and policemen, thieves and prisoners, gamblers and con men, musicians and comedians, to name just the most popular ones.
R. Kiessling suggests a slightly different perspective on the sociology of Camfranglais in "Bak mwa me do': Camfranglais in Cameroon", Lingua Posnaniensis, 47, 2005:
...Camfranglais [is] a highly hybrid sociolect of the urban youth type in Cameroon's big cities Yaoundé and Douala, This language variety serves its adolescent speakers as an icon of 'resistance identity' (Castells 1997), i.e. they consciously create and constantly transform this sociolect of theirs by manipulating lexical items from various Cameroonian and European sources, in an effort to mark off their identity as a new social group, the modern Cameroonian urban youth, in opposition to established groups such as the older generation, the rural population and the Cameroonian elites who have subscribed to the norms of 'la francophonie'. The linguistic strategies preferably applied in this lexical manipulation, i.e. phonological truncation, morphological hybridization, hyperbolic and dysphemistic extensions, reflect the provocative attitude of its speakers and their jocular disrespect of linguistic norms and purity, clearly revealing its function as an anti-language (Halliday 1978). From a socio-political perspective, the creation of Camfranglais represents the appropriation of an imported language, French, under strong pressure of an exoglossic language policy which excludes the majority of the population from national discourse and upward social mobility. Being born as an anti-language, Camfranglais seems to be growing into an icon of the emerging new 'project identity' (Castells 1997) of modern Cameroonian urbanity.
And on the Camerounian soccer discussion site camfoot.com, there are 80 instances of {camfranglais} and only one of {frananglais}. The term usually comes up, of course, in the context of meta-discussion about whether using Camfranglais is OK; for example: "Le shabbaeur dit thanks à 'Monsieur But' et au Minsep" 9/26/2005, with English words indicated:
Si j’ai décidé de vous tchatte today, c’est qu’il y’a un diblo qui est venu me commot le nyé en travestissant mon kallang et surtout en utilisant le gros french pour essayer de me tchatte que j’étais pire que les plus dangereux des xénophobes (est ce que moi je know ce que ce big word veut dire).
Note that tchatte is a wider French borrowing for instant messaging "chat", spelled so as to distinguish it from the French word for "cat", and commot is a pidgin word from "come out".
Si vous voulez que je commence à write comme un adepte de la mariologie je me ferais un plaisir de respecter vos desideratas. Par contre si vous voulez que votre rubrique demeure le vrai shabba n’est ce pas je vais do comme vous voulez je vais continuer à vous send l’info ultralapante.
(I'm not going to translate these passages -- to paraphrase Roman Jakobson, "read, and try to understand".)
The whole discussion, including the readers' responses, is worth reading. I'll quote just two responses. Eva answered:
Nooooooooooonnnnnnnnnn ! ne nous lâches pas ce gars, c’est trop lapant de te read, ton style est vraiment space !!! n’y change rien, et continues de nous faxer les A1 !!!!
And "Wandaful" gets explicit about the linguistic politics as (s)he sees it: "when we read his posts, we're so proud we get goose bumps, especially when he talks camfranglais, the language of independence and decolonialization":
Le tara qu’on call SHABAEUR là c’est le genre de représentant qu’il nous faut. Les nga ya mò un mollah comme ça mal mauvais ! Nous qui vivons à Mbengue quand on lit ses topos, on est fiers jusqu’à ça nous gui la chair de poule. Surtout quand il tok (le camfranglais) la langue de l’independance et de la décolonisation. Je suis sùr que là où il est là, il a Mboundja le bèlè à une Mbindi à Abidjan. Il fia quoi ? il acolonisé le secto. Les gars ne peuvent rien lui do !Les Mboutoukous qui traitent le sujet de popluliste n’ont rien ya ! c’est ça qui va nous help à bien préparer l’échéance du 8 octobre quand on va NIOXER L’EGYPTE. A propos, Shabaeur, C’est how l’ambiance du Mboa non ? Toli-nous les Afs.
On se ya !
Getting back to that BBC article, how did it go so far wrong with the name of this style of speech? The article is datedlined Douala, which is Cameroon's largest city, and written by someone who name suggests local origin. So I'm at a loss to see why the article got the terminology wrong -- maybe an editor back in England decided that "frananglais" would be a better blend than "camfranglais"?
Of course, maybe I'm the one who's wrong -- along with Jean-Paul Kouega, the wikipedia, and the folks at camfoot.com, among others. I'll check into this with Cameroonian acquantainces, and update this post based on what I learn.
[ Here are a couple of other interesting comments on camfranglais from the discussion forums at camfoot.com. Ntang wrote on 12/17/2003 that "the more I visit, the less I talk", because "this is the best way to bridge the generation gap that separates a dinosaur like me from the homo sapiens sapiens of camfranglais":
Sans condescendance aucune, je me permets de t'appeler "fiston". J'ai décidé de regagner pendant un bon moment la masse invisible mais ô combien paisible des lecteurs anonymes de ce site. On ne se refait pas. Surtout à mon âge.
Il m'a semblé que je devais choisir entre l'anonymat et la critique acerbe de certaines contributions. Mais le silence est d'or. Mon mutisme est inversement proportionnel à ma présence. Plus je visite et moins je cause.
Cela peut susciter la réprobation de certains, mais croyez-moi, c'était le meilleur moyen de combler le fossé des générations qui sépare le dinosaure que je suis désormais des homo sapiens sapiens du camfranglais. Je vous suis en repérage.
To which Pinox responded:
Si tu fuis le Toli parce qu'on utilise le camfranglais que tu dis ne pas connaitre, sache que tu ne seras jamais plus un vrai Kamer.
If you run away from the discussion because we use Camfranglais that you say you don't understand, you should know that you will never again be a true Cameroonian.
And on 10/17/2006, Sipandang Boy observed that "these whites will never stop surprising me -- here I was thinking that among Cameroonians we could speak our Camfranglais without risk of being understood, and now I discover that they're working on that too":
Ces blancs n'en finiront pas de me surprendre, et moi qui pensait qu'entre Kmer on pouvait parler notre Camfranglais sans risque d'etre compris, voila que je decouvre qu'ils s'y sont mis aussi, et de quelle maniere. Ainsi donc, aide du frere BILOA, Edmond (1999) : "Structure phrastique du camfranglais" --FERAL, Carole de (2005) : « Décrire un « parler jeune » : la cas du camfranglais
LABOV, William (1976) : Sociolinguistique, Paris, Editions de Minuit.--SEGUIN, Boris et TEILLARD, Frédéric (1996) : Les Céfrans parlent aux Français, Paris, Calmann-Lévy.
Ces cinq ''Larons'' ont publie Étudier le Camfranglais : recueil des données et transcription (Carole de Féral, juillet 2005), dans lequel ils decryptent notre parler local......
He adds "you should know that you are richer than you thought. It's always the others who show us the value of what we don't use much, like the Saudis' oil, the blacks' diamonds, your wife if you're a cuckold lol ...":
Et vous doutiez de vos richesses ?........Eh bien desormais vous saurez que vous êtes plus riche que vous ne le pensiez.
Comme quoi ce sont toujours les autres qui nous font decouvrir la valeur de ce dont on ne se sert peu pas ou plus. Pour exemple le petrole aux saoudiens, le diamant aux noir, ta femme quant tu es cocu lol........
Rafraîchissant hein.......
And back on on 2/21/2004, Munabangan wrote:
Si tu voudrais parler de l'argo utilisé sur ce Toli et par la plus part des Camer (Du moins ceux qui ont vécu au pays), c'est du CAMFRANGLAIS qu'il te faudrait chercher et pas le Franglais qui est plus tôt canadien. [...]
Pour le reste debrouilles toi, avec un moteur comme Google, tu trouveras certainement des sites pas mal.
If you want to speak of the argot used on this forum and by most of Cameroonians (at least those who have lived in the country), you need to look for CAMFRANGLAIS and not for Franglais, which is more Canadian. [...]
Beyond that, work it out yourself, with an engine like Google, you'll certainly find plenty of sites.
So don't the editors at the BBC News know how to use Google?]
[Update -- David Williams writes:
I'm from a bilingual Montreal family, and used to both Franglais and frequent code switching/mixing and so on. What struck me about your Camfranglais cites is how they incorporate infinitives: in the first quotation, both tchatte and commot are infinitive; in the second, write, do and send are; and in the third there's read, followed later by faxer. Now, faxer is a perfectly acceptable anglicism to me, being a versed Franglais speaker. But the infinitives that do not take the French -er sound completely foreign to me. Appending -er wouldn't be normal for those verbs (except tchatter, I suspect), but it would be regular and recognizably Franglais. Just one of I suspect very many differences between Franglais and Camfranglais. (Why not Cameranglais?)
D.
My favourite Acadien quotation, recorded and often retold by my grandfather, illustrates this. It has to do with the incorporation of "get off" as a regular 1st declension verb: apparently a man is calling to another, on a ladder, saying "j't'ai dit d'guetoffer, mais tu guetoffes pas!"
One of the early Language Log posts was about preposition stranding in Canadian French ("Quoi ce-qu'elle a parlé about?", 10/10/2003), and cited a set of examples from Prince Edward Island where the preposition was not included in the borrowed verb stem -- most but not all of those were intransitive prepositions, though. I suspect that someone has investigated the situation in detail, and if someone tells me who and where, I'll post it.]
Posted by Mark Liberman at February 22, 2007 06:32 AM