Varieties of English in Cameroon audio-visual materials: Cameroon audio-lects

This paper identifies and describes five major varieties of Cameroon English (hereafter CamE) in Cameroon audio-visual materials. These five ‘audio-lects’ are Pidginized, Mainstream, Near-RP, Americanized and Frenchized CamE. The paper argues that these audio-lects mostly tie with real-life CamE, but differ from the latter phonostylistically. The utterances of 80 Cameroonian actors, actresses and musicians excerpted from 100 audio-visual materials constituted data for the paper. The audio-visual materials and artists were randomly selected to represent, as much as possible, CamE speakers from different socio-cultural spheres within Cameroon. The findings indicate that these audio-lects largely resemble real-life CamE varieties, which reflect the socio-ethnic, academic and professional diversity of CamE speakers.