This article reports on the construction of a 240,000‐word pilot corpus of spoken Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), a widely‐used yet stigmatised and largely uncodified written pidgin/creole variety. The corpus consists of private and public dialogues and monologues, with mark‐up and POS‐tagging. Text categories and the proportions of monologue and dialogue are guided by those of the International Corpus of English project, which makes the corpus immediately comparable with existing corpora of post‐colonial varieties of English. We discuss the extent to which this corpus can be regarded as an ICE component, and illustrate the relation between CPE and standardised Nigerian and Cameroonian varieties of English in Africa by means of case studies employing ICE‐NIGERIA and the Corpus of Cameroon English.

A proposal for a standard script for Cameroonian Pidgin English

One of the ways a language is learned, especially a foreign language, is by personal extensive reading. When people read widely, they are exposed to the linguistic structure of what they read and so learn it consciously or unconsciously. What they come across in their reading remains in their minds and adds to their general knowledge. This includes knowledge of the language they read. General wide reading reinforces the language students have been formally taught in their language classes. Exposure to grammatically correct language would improve their language skills. On the other hand, exposure to incorrect language would negatively affect the language skills of foreign learners and cause them to use wrong language comfortably, not knowing that they are erroneous in their usage.

Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) is an English-lexified Atlantic expanded pidgin/creole spoken in some form by an estimated 50% of Cameroon’s population, primarily in the anglophone west regions, but also in urban centres throughout the country. Primarily a spoken language, CPE enjoys a vigorous oral presence in Cameroon, and the linguistic examples illustrating this description are drawn from a spoken corpus consisting of a range of text types, including oral narratives, radio broadcasts and spontaneous conversation. The authors’ typologically-framed investigation of the features of the language, from its phonetics, phonology and lexicon to its syntax and discourse structure, allows the reader a clear view of the linguistic character of CPE, offering a comprehensive description of the language that will be of interest to creolists as well as linguists interested in African languages, contact linguistics and comparative linguistics.

Kamtok, an English-based expanded pidgin/creole in Cameroon, has many of the grammatical structures of its lexifier language. However, there are certain grammatical structures in this contact language which are not so obvious in its lexifier, though they may exist sparingly in spoken forms of the production of some native speakers. One of these is the serial verb construction (SVC). SVCs are ‘a series of two (or more) verbs [that] have the same subject and are not joined by a conjunction … or a complementiser … as they would be in European languages (Holm, 1988: 183).