{"id":22,"date":"2008-02-01T12:57:19","date_gmt":"2008-02-01T10:57:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=22"},"modified":"2008-06-01T16:49:28","modified_gmt":"2008-06-01T14:49:28","slug":"le-francais-en-contact-avec-l%e2%80%99anglais-au-cameroun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=22","title":{"rendered":"Le fran\u00e7ais en contact avec l\u2019anglais au Cameroun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Le fran\u00e7ais en contact avec l\u2019anglais au Cameroun<\/strong><\/span>.<\/strong><\/span> <\/span>By <\/span>Edmond Biloa<\/strong><\/span>. (LINCOM studies in French linguistics 4.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2006. Pp. iv, 194. ISBN 3895864897<\/a>. <\/span>$69.60.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Angela Bartens<\/strong>, University of Helsinki<\/em><\/p>\n

With 279 living languages according to the Ethnologue<\/em> database, Cameroon features a singularly high degree of linguistic diversity. While one might expect that the engineers of Cameroonian independence would have opted for one official language to unite the nation, colonial history and the initially federal union of the Cameroons dictated otherwise: in 1961, both English and French were declared official languages. In his most recent monograph, Edmond Biloa, best known for his work on the Cameroonian Bantu language Tuki and on Cameroonian French, tackles the ensuing situation of language contact and conflict.<\/p>\n

The volume begins with a general discussion of language contact and conflict, followed by a short chapter on the French-English bilingualism of Cameroon. Chs. 3 and 4 deal with Cameroonian English and French, respectively. When discussing the tense-mood-aspect (TMA) system and other structures of Pidgin English (50\u201354), B notes parallel structures from the Grassfields Bantu language Lamso but ignores the fact that the structures in question are shared by most Atlantic English-based creoles. Several of the examples cited as typical of Cameroonian English are not exclusive to it and some are even acceptable in Standard English. Likewise, lexical items and structures shared by other varieties of French are not recognized in a satisfactory manner: recognition occurs to some degree as far as European French is concerned, but not at all in the case of other African varieties. Chs. 5\u20137 deal with the sociolinguistic and didactic aspects of the contact situation and the mutual influence of one language on the other. For sociolinguistic reasons, the French influence on English is much stronger than vice versa. There is considerable overlap between these and preceding chapters: many of the examples given in Chs. 6 and 7 are repetitions from Chs. 3 and 4, and one wonders why the corresponding chapters were not merged in the first place. One may also note that, oddly, Camfranglais is not recognized as an instance of code-switching but is considered a result of imperfect language acquisition (143).<\/p>\n

Apart from sometimes unfortunate typographic errors that are not the author\u2019s responsibility, certain passages suffer from the fact that B relies too heavily on the work of colleagues. It should be said to his credit that it is always difficult to produce accurate panoramic descriptions that go beyond one\u2019s original area of specialization. To my knowledge, no single researcher has attempted to tackle the entire language-contact scenario in question. The volume under review constitutes an important contribution that will doubtlessly motivate others to look deeper into the intricacies of Cameroonian French-English contact.<\/p>\n

The enlightening postscript by George Echu<\/strong>, \u2018Official bilingualism in Cameroon: From myth to reality\u2019 (175\u201387), demonstrates that it will still take effort and time to reconcile the theory and practice of bilingualism in Cameroon so that it can become an effective tool of national unity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Le fran\u00e7ais en contact avec l\u2019anglais au Cameroun. By Edmond Biloa. (LINCOM studies in French linguistics 4.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2006. Pp. iv, 194. ISBN 3895864897. $69.60. Reviewed by Angela Bartens, University of Helsinki With 279 living languages according to the Ethnologue database, Cameroon features a singularly high degree of linguistic diversity. While one might […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}