A Speech Act Analysis of Greetings in Cameroon Social Media

Abstract

Various language practices occur in computer Mediated Communication era. E-greeting is singled out as a particular practice with its own linguistic forms on social media platforms. Among the social media users in Cameroon, it is undoubtedly observed that greeting is shared depending on the context, the social background, the space and familiarities of the interlocutors. Each speaker might find himself/herself tending to undertake this practice several times daily or occasionally once in contact with the audience. In this respect, greeting becomes one of the expressive acts mostly used in our daily life to acknowledge the presence of the addressee(s). The present work investigates the speech act of greetings in Cameroon Social Media. It aims at analyzing the most frequent verbal behaviours (greeting) associated with Francophone Cameroonian greetings which occur on Social Media platforms. The method used to elicit data were screenshots of messages on Meta (hereafter Facebook), WhatsApp and Messenger for statistical analysis. The corpus of the study forms a total of 436 both individual and group chats collected between 2020-2022.The results indicate that the type of greeting ‘good morning’ which is under time-bound greeting is the most frequently used form in Cameroon social media.