Camfranglais

[alixtii]

I don't get this. According to one paper cited by the post, Camfranglais "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." And one speaker is quoted as saying, "I was thinking that among Cameroonians we could speak our Camfranglais without risk of being understood."

But as I understand it, Camfranglais is simply a mix of French and English, with simplified grammatical structures, as spoken in Cameroon--I understood the proffered examples without too much difficulty. I probably wouldn't be able to understand a Camfranglaphone speaking quickly, but I'd attribute that to my poor mastery of French rather than any inherent incomprehensability to the language. Am I missing something?

Comments

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

But that article also says that the former dominant language was Pidgin, not English, so that may have something to do with it. I also suspect that the typed examples are much cleaner than spoken word. Have you ever heard French rap music? Or even just seen slangy French typed out semiphonetically? There are dropped and slurred syllables all over the place. That, combined with insertion of vocabulary at unexpected intervals, to me would suggest difficulties in oral comprehension for someone not prepared to hear camfranglais, as opposed to Pidgin or French.

Also, I suspect there are differences in vocabulary and emphasis which also cut old people out of the loop. Valley girls and Surf dudes are only speaking English, but the slang definitions they've assigned standard terms would have made parsing difficult before those dialects were nationally publicized.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

My comprehension of spoken French is nit, so I don't doubt that I wouldn't be able to understand spoken camfranglais. But I still wonder about someone who spoke French and English both fluently--after all, are valley girl and surfer dude really that incomprehensible? (I don't know.) Can the French really not understand their own rap music? (I don't know the answer to that either.) But in the end, I suppose you are right.

[(Anonymous)]

the camfranglais as noticed by some of you is spoken at various extends by young people in cameroun as a ligua franca. I personnally think that the exiting thing about that language is it's versatility because the speaker can at any moment create a new word or expression or even use a well known french or english words and expressions but just create a new neaning to then. at it current state, francamglais is not a language because it still uses extensive french vocabulary but the current processes of word creation or adoption is refining what will one day be a stand alone language.i just want to add that there are camfranglais words that doen't belong to french, english, pidgin english or any camerounian vernacular language.