Acceso usuarios
Jean-Paul Kouega
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.
