Imaginaire linguistique anglophone en rapport avec le bilinguisme officiel au Cameroun

Abstract

Anglophone linguistic imaginary in relation to official bilingualism in Cameroon

The author of this article examines, from a sociolinguistic angle, the image that the English- speaking Cameroonian believes to be the one that the French-speaking Cameroonian has of him. To achieve this, we used a corpus made up of literary and political discourses. The common denominator of these two sources of the corpus is that they allow the profile of many glottopolitical interventions which are, according to Henri Boyer, 1997: 29), "the act of individuals (personalities more or less known in general), groups and/or associations of language activists […] they often have a strong claiming and polemical content, based on an identity ideology and a regionalist or nationalist political option”. They betray a linguistic imagination strongly marked by a feeling of glottophobia of which English-speaking Cameroonians claim to be victims.