This chapter explores language use that incites laughter in Cameroon e-mail, Facebook, Yahoo Messenger and mobile telephone SMS. The incongruity and the incongruity-resolution theory (Ritchie, 1999; Mulder & Nijholt, 2002) and Gricean maxims were useful in the analysis of 270 electronic chats and messages. Results indicate patterns of language that create humour like flouting of Gricean maxims, special repetition of punctuation marks, sound devices, emoticons and hyperbole. Cameroonians employ these humorous linguistic forms for pleasure, intimacy and to maintain cultural values. It was established that the Facebook platform was more hospitable to humour than the others because all the linguistic markers that were detected to generate humour were found in it with high rates of occurrences.

Globalisation, which is facilitated by technological development, has led to an increasing proportion of informal communication on social media platforms. The growing interactions on these platforms have led to tremendous changes in the way English is written. The aim of this study is to investigate the changing forms of English spelling on e-messages on Facebook (FBK), Messenger (MSG) and WhatsApp (WHAP) chats by Cameroonians. The paper identifies and describes the different spellings for specific words or abbreviations and their frequencies in the corpora. The researchers explore the patterns of spelling that are atypical in English. Insights are drawn from Crystal (2006) and Thurlow (2006) who put forth views on language alterations in the context of the internet. Data for the study consists of a convenient sample of 300 e-messages from Facebook (50), Messenger (100) and WhatsApp (150). Findings show that many Cameroonians use innovative spellings on social media. They use a variety of casual and regional spellings that reflect their illocutionary force, intention and identity. It was established that globalisation and social media have intensified changes in English spelling, and it is a positive growth in the English language as a whole.

This study examines code-mixing and code-switching in Cameroon social media to find out the languages that are mixed or switched to and the reasons for the phenomenon. Insights came from the structural approach to code-switching, which measures the degree to which an L2 is incorporated into an L1 or vice versa (Poplack, 1980, 2000; Poplack & Meechan, 1995; Myers-Scotton, 1993b, 2002). Data comprises 245 e-messages which were drawn from e-mail(s) (100), Facebook (60) and WhatsApp (85). The data were collected through screenshots with the use of android phones. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of data show the presence of code-mixing and code-switching from English to French (48%), English to Cameroon Pidgin English (18.4%) and English to home languages (11.5%). It was construed that Cameroons mix or switch codes because of their multicultural and multilingual backgrounds.

This paper examines hedging as a rhetorical resource employed by fifth year (DIPES II) students of the Higher Teacher Training College of Maroua in Cameroon to show politeness, respect, humility and tentativeness in presenting their arguments or stating facts and subjective opinions. A specialized corpus of 46.368 tokens was used and hedges were retrieved using AntConc 3.4.4. Data were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The analysis shows that there is generally an unsatisfactory representation of hedges in the abstracts. The findings further reveal that markers of intentional vagueness, accuracy hedges and writer-oriented hedges are the most common hedging strategies. Students seemingly rely on relatively simpler types of hedging like some, few, may, could, a number of. Conversely, more complicated constructions such as it appears that, it is possible that seem virtually inexistent. Students in the Department of Bilingual Letters were found to be more tentative than their counterparts of other disciplines. It is equally observed that more hedging strategies are used in stating research findings than in any other communicative purpose of the abstracts. In substance, the innovation in this paper may lie on its artful combination of disciplinary investigation with move analysis of hedging in a seemingly ‘marginalized’ academic genre, and its exclusive focus on novice writing in a non-native professional academic institution. This has led to the conclusion that the use of hedging can now be regarded as not only discipline-specific but also move-specific.

The aim of this paper is to examine how Cameroonians form words in social media (SM) contexts. The study explores the kind of morphological processes they adopt and the extent to which these word formation processes occur in the platforms under study (e-mail, Facebook, and Yahoo Messenger). Analysis of 230 informal e-mails and chats revealed that Cameroonians espouse and alter some of the English word formation mechanisms to suit the context of SM. The following morphological processes were found in the data: accent stylizations, clipping, borrowing, neologisms, clitics, onomatopoeia, substitution, abbreviations, compounding, conversion/inflection, reduplication, hybrid, blending, slang, and smileys. Facebook tops the lead in terms of the number and frequency of occurrence of the word formation processes, as all are found in it with some reaching 100% frequency.