Pragmatic negotiations in digital grief: multimodal mourning practices in Cameroonian WhatsApp communities

This study examines naturally occurring language use in Cameroonian WhatsApp condolence discourse, with particular attention to three African-language phenomena: Cameroonian Pidgin English exclamations, transliterated vernacular vocalisations, and English-French-Pidgin code-switching. Drawing on 413 messages across 209 condolence exchanges collected from seven Cameroonian WhatsApp groups, the paper documents how speakers deploy indigenous linguistic resources, including the high-frequency vocalisation 'Weeeiiiii' (over 190 attestations), Pidgin exclamatives such as 'Chaii' and 'Nawaaaaa', and Beti-language expressions such as 'Ma wouuyaaa', alongside Standard English and French, to perform mourning in digitally mediated contexts. The analysis demonstrates that these African-language resources are not residual or ornamental but carry primary indexical work: they mark cultural authenticity, signal communal belonging, and calibrate emotional intensity in ways that monolingual English alternatives cannot achieve. The paper further examines how orthographic strategies unique to WhatsApp, such as vowel elongation, capitalisation, and punctuation multiplication, extend the prosodic and paralinguistic properties of these African-language forms into written digital space. The concept of 'pragmatic grief work' is proposed to capture the communicative labour involved in deploying these multilingual resources within the constraints of digital platforms. The findings contribute empirically grounded data on Cameroonian Pidgin English and vernacular mourning language in a domain previously undocumented in the literature on African language use.