Translanguaging patterns in everyday urban conversations in Cameroon

Abstract

Abstract This study analyses the translanguaging patterns of urban Cameroonians’ linguistic choices (e.g. lexical or phonological) in everyday conversations in Cameroon. Using observation and audio-recordings of 20 naturally occurring conversations as data, a descriptive corpus-based methodology was adopted for analysis. The quantitative approach utilises AntConc (Version 3.5.8) with descriptive analytical tools to identify the speakers’ idiolectal choices in meaning-making translanguaging patterns. The results revealed salient patterns of the speakers’ deployed lexical, grammatical, morphological, phonological and syntactical forms as an integrated system of language. It revealed the speakers preference for polysemous words (e.g. repe) over less polysemous words (e.g. father); choice for shorter lexical words (e.g. man) over longer words (e.g. manpikin); a preference for specialised gender-neutral markers (e.g. ih, which refers to both male and female) over gender-specific forms (e.g. he/she); a preference for voiceless interdental fricatives (e.g. dem, dey) over voiced interdental fricatives (e.g. them, they) and where the choice of inflectional morpheme expressing tense (e.g. ed) is one that can either be omitted or added to a word, the presence of this inflectional morpheme is sometimes fairly used. Such results have practical implications for understanding peoples’ language use as a translanguaging act in bi/multilingual contexts.