Substrate Grammar, Social Meaning, and Speaker Agency in Cameroon Anglophone Communities

This study examines the grammatical integration of substrate language structures into Cameroon English and explores the social meanings these features convey in Anglophone communities. Drawing on sociopragmatic and grammatical frameworks, we analyse how morphosyntactic patterns from indigenous Cameroonian languages have been systematically incorporated into local English varieties and how speakers deploy these features to index social identities, relationships, and contexts. Through qualitative analysis of naturalistic speech data collected from 45 participants across Anglophone communities in the Northwest, and Southwest Regions and an Anglophone-dense resident population in the Littoral, we identify four key grammatical domains: verb serialisation, aspectual marking, nominal plurality strategies, and prepositional usage, that systematically distinguish Cameroon English from standard metropolitan varieties. Our findings reveal that these grammatical choices carry significant social meaning, functioning as markers of authenticity, regional identity, and in-group solidarity, and that speakers strategically modulate their use to accomplish pragmatic goals across shifting interactional contexts. The study contributes to World’s English scholarship by extending indexicality theory to grammatical variation in postcolonial multilingual settings and by demonstrating how structural adaptation and social practice are inseparably linked.