The world is changing rapidly in terms of technology and the question of appropriate terminology to disseminate these developments become very acute in a multilingual and multicultural country like Cameroon where less than 30% of Cameroonians are educated in the European languages (English and French) which are used officially in the country, meaning that not up to one third of the population understands scientific and technological terms and expressions which essentially have European languages as modes of expression. Cameroon Pidgin English has thus continued to adapt itself to the changing sociocultural, scientific and technological context of Cameroon. When the Europeans first came to the coast of Cameroon, communication between them and the indigenous people was ensured through pidginized English. Ethnologue (2005) puts the number of home languages at 279 alongside Pidgin English and the two official languages (English and French). Keywords: Lingua Franca, Potential and Capacity, Majority Language, Local Culture, KnowledgeĬameroon has been described as the most linguistically complex country in Africa (Tadadjeu, 1983) and on the basis of its linguistic, cultural and climatic diversity, has been referred to by many scholars and researchers as Africa in miniature.
The data will be analysed using the Domain Analysis approach propounded by James Bradley (1980). Data will be collected through participant observation, literary works of arts, local newspapers published in English and from Kouega’s (2008) dictionary on Cameroon Pidgin English. In this paper, I am examining how widespread CPE is, as well as the potential and capacity of the language in expressing local cultural, scientific and technical knowledge and how such knowledge could be captured in CPE. Consequently, most cultural, scientific and technological knowledge is concealed from the majority of speakers since it is essentially available in English or French, languages they are not very conversant with. From the statistics above, it is evident that more people are proficient in CPE, feel at home with it, and use it more than the official languages (English and French).
Equally, Mbangwana (2004:23) posits that 97.8% Anglophone and 61.8% francophone Cameroonian urban dwellers speak CPE. Alobwede (1998: 54) carried out a survey on the acquisition of Pidgin English and English as a first language in some major towns in Cameroon and indicates that CPE is the majority language in Bamenda, Mamfe, Kumba, Buea, Limbe, Douala and Yaounde when compared to the acquisition of English. Kouega (2008), came up with a dictionary of Cameroon Pidgin English to buttress the fact that it is an autonomous language which has attained maturity. are nevertheless unanimous that the language is the most widely spoken lingua franca in the country. Abstract: Despite divergent views about the status of Cameroon Pidgin English (henceforth CPE), some researchers such as Atechi (2011) Chia (1983) Mbangwana (2004) etc.
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