Addressing a coverage gap in African Englishes

Abstract This paper illustrates the uses of a tagged corpus of spoken Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), which has recently been finalised ( Ozón et al. 2017 ) and made available online ( Green et al. 2016 ). The corpus consists of 240,000 words, with mark-up and part-of-speech-tagging. Text categories and proportions of monologue/dialogue are guided by those of the ICE project ( Nelson 1996 ), making the CPE corpus comparable with existing corpora of post-colonial Englishes. This tagged corpus offers an invaluable resource for the investigation of CPE, particularly in addressing issues of multifunctionality in pidgin or creole languages. We introduce the dataset and present case studies illustrating its potential uses, in order to highlight the usefulness of this freely accessible resource for research on African languages.