Code-mixing: A Linguistic Form of Bilingualism in Anglophone Cameroon Literature

Abstract

Cameroon is known as an official bilingual nation as the country adopted English and French as its two official languages during the 1961 Foumban Conference. That conference laid the foundations of the Federal State of Cameroon with an English-speaking and a French-speaking part; one of the resolutions was the adoption of English and French as the two official languages of the country. This study attempts to ascertain the viability of code-mixing as a strategy that can mark the effectiveness of official bilingualism in Cameroon. This study was based on the framework of Muysken (2000). The data for this work was collected from John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo (2004), an Anglophone author in the field of creative writing, whose work showed the effective use of English and French that can give the reliability and validity to this study under investigation of official bilingualism in Anglophone Cameroon literature. The findings of the study reveal that code-mixing has progressive and positive effects in the field of creative writing, whereby French lexical insertion was used in order to promote official bilingualism in Cameroon since the country got its access to independence in 1960.