Invitation refusals in Cameroon French and Hexagonal French

Abstract Descriptions of regional pragmatic variation in French are lacking to date the focus has been on a limited range of speech acts, including apologies, requests, compliments and responses to compliments. The present paper, a systematic analysis of invitation refusals across regional varieties of French, is designed to add to the research on intralingual regional pragmatic variation in French. Using questionnaire data collected in France and Cameroon, this paper examines the strategies employed by French speakers in Cameroon and in France to decline an invitation to a friend’s birthday party, an invitation by a classmate to have a drink and an invitation to attend a talk given by a professor’s colleague. The findings reveal some parallels in both varieties of French with respect to the preference for face-saving refusal strategies (indirect refusal and adjuncts to refusals and internal modification devices). However, many differences emerged with respect to the choices of indirect refusals. Also, the Cameroonian participants tend to produce more complex utterances and to use more relational address forms than the French.