Cameroon English: phonology

Cameroon English (CamE) will be understood in the present study as the English of the educated Anglophone Cameroonian. Although the notion of education is vague and elusive, the data for the analyses are generally taken from the speech production of university graduates and professionals of all walks of life. CamE is meant to be clearly distinct from Cameroon Pidgin English, and from the speech of the typical Francophone which can be considered a performance variety, even though it is largely influenced by the English of the Anglophone compatriots. By the turn of the century, CamE has been shown by various authors, starting with Todd (1982), to have a high degree of stability. Despite some predictable ethnic and educational variations, CamE is fairly homogeneous, due partly to the relatively small size of the Anglophone population on which it is basically modelled; the two Anglophone provinces cover 9% of the national territory with 42,210 square km, and have about three million inhabitants, which represents about 20% of the country’s population.