Contact of Languages in Cameroonian Literature: The Novels of Camille Nkoa Atenga as an Example

Abstract

As official languages, French and English are crowned with high degree of normativization and normalization that favor their imposition in administration, education, the media and all other public sectors. Logically, the authors adopted them as written languages as well. Nkoa Atenga is one of those Negro-Africans who make French their language of romantic writing. How does he faithfully portray the specific realities of endogenous socioculture that do not exist in the repertoire of standardized French? The present study attempts to demonstrate that multilingualism and much more language contact are unique features of Cameroonian novel writting, and of Camille Nkoa Atenga specifically. The study builds its framework on a descriptive and contrastive approach, and if necessary ethnostylistics.