Cameroonian Pidgin English, or Cameroonian Creole, is a language variety of Cameroon

Cameroon

Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon , is a country in west Central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west; Chad to the northeast; the Central African Republic to the east; and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo to the south. Cameroon's coastline lies on the...

. It is also known as Kamtok (from 'Cameroon-talk'). Five varieties are currently recognised:

• Grafi Kamtok, the variety used in the grassfields and often referred to as 'Grafi Talk'
• liturgical Kamtok. This variety has been used by the Catholic Church for three quarters of a century
• francophone Kamtok. This variety is now used mainly in towns such as Douala
  Douala
  Douala is the largest city in Cameroon and the capital of Cameroon's Littoral Province. Home to Cameroon's largest port and its major international airport, Douala International Airport, it is the commercial capital of the country...
  
   and Yaoundé
  Yaoundé
  -Transportation:Yaoundé Nsimalen International Airport is a major civilian hub, while nearby Yaoundé Airport is used by the military. Railway lines run west to the port city of Douala and north to N'Gaoundéré. Many bus companies operate from the city; particularly in the Nsam and Mvan neighborhoods...
  
   and by francophones talking to anglophones who do not speak French
• Limbe Kamtok. This variety is spoken mainly in the southwest coastal area around the port that used to be called Victoria and is now Limbe.
• Bororo Kamtok. This variety is spoken by the Bororo
  Bororo
  Bororo may refer to:* Bororo people, of Brazil** Bororo language, their language* Wodaabe, people of Western Africa...
  
   cattle traders, many of whom travel through Nigeria
  Nigeria
  Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...
  
   and Cameroon.

Cameroonian Pidgin English is an English-based creole language

Creole language

A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...

. About 5% of Cameroonians are native speakers of the language, while an estimated 50% of the population speak it in some form.

The terms "Cameroonian Pidgin", "Cameroonian Pidgin English", "Cameroonian Creole" and "Kamtok" are synonymous appellations of what Cameroonians call Cameroon Pidgin English. It is a variety of West African Pidgin Englishes spoken along the coast from Ghana to Cameroon. It is a vehicular language that has been in active use in the country for over 500 years. It came into being in the Slave Trade Years (1400–1800). It preceded English in Cameroon: the first Baptist missionaries who arrived Cameroon in 1845 and introduced formal education in English, had to learn Pidgin. A few decades later during the German annexation period (1884–1914), Pidgin resisted a German ban. It took flight when it became a makeshift language used in German plantations and undertakings by forced labourers who were drawn from the hinterland

Hinterland

The hinterland is the land or district behind a coast or the shoreline of a river. Specifically, by the doctrine of the hinterland, the word is applied to the inland region lying behind a port, claimed by the state that owns the coast. The area from which products are delivered to a port for...

 and who spoke different indigenous languages. With time, it invaded the market place and was adopted by Baptist missionaries as the language of their evangelical crusade. For many years, it has been used on school playgrounds and campuses and in political campaigns, and today, it is forcing its way into the spoken media scene. (For a comprehensive description of its linguistic features and its place in the language ecology of Cameroon, see amongst others, Kouega 2007 and 2008).

Vowels

Like most West African languages, Kamtok has seven vowel

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

s, with two mid vowels: open and closed (Schneider 1966:14-17). Schneider spells the mid vowels as closed ey and ow vs. open e and o but Todd spells them as closed e and o vs. open eh and oh.

	Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...	Central Central vowel A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel...	Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...
Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the...	i		u
Close-mid Close-mid vowel A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel...	e		o
Open-mid Open-mid vowel An open-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel...	ɛ		ɔ
Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue...		a

Consonants

The palatal approximate /j/ is written y, the palatal affricates /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/ are written ch and j, and the palatal and velar nasals /ɲ/ and /ŋ/ are written ny and ng (Schneider 1966:12-14). Some of these consonants, such as /r/ and /l/, are not distinguished by speakers who lack such distinctions in their local substrate languages (1966:225-229).

	Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...	Coronal Coronal consonant Coronal consonants are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Only the coronal consonants can be divided into apical , laminal , domed , or subapical , as well as a few rarer orientations, because only the front of the tongue has such...	Palatal	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Plosive	p b	t d	t͡ʃ d͡ʒ	k ɡ
Fricative	f	s	ʃ		h
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	m	n	ɲ	ŋ
Lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....		l
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...	w		j
Rhotic consonant Rhotic consonant In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet...		r

• Where symbols appear in pairs the one to the left represents a voiceless consonant.

Pronoun system

The basic pronoun system of Kamtok distinguishes three persons and two numbers. In most cases, the shape of the pronoun does not change to show grammatical function. Two exceptions involve the first person singular, where a serves as a subject clitic

Clitic

In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...

 on verb

Verb

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

s, as in mi, a mos go 'I must go', and ma is the possessive pronoun

Possessive pronoun

A possessive pronoun is a part of speech that substitutes for a noun phrase that begins with a possessive determiner . For example, in the sentence These glasses are mine, not yours, the words mine and yours are possessive pronouns and stand for my glasses and your glasses, respectively...

, as in ma beli 'my stomach'. The other major exception is -am in place of i or dem as an object suffix

Suffix

In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...

 on verbs, except when the referent is human, as in a go was-am 'I'll wash it.' (Schneider 1966:64-68). Acrolectal speakers, however, are more likely to use dei for dem in subject position and ohs for wi in object position (Todd, n.d.).

Person Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...	Singular Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....	Plural Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
1st Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...	mi, a, ma	wi
2nd Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...	yu	(w)una
3rd Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...	i, -am	dem, -am

Verbs

Verbs are not inflected to show grammatical tense

Grammatical tense

A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...

, aspect

Grammatical aspect

In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...

, modality

Linguistic modality

In linguistics, modality is what allows speakers to evaluate a proposition relative to a set of other propositions.In standard formal approaches to modality, an utterance expressing modality can always roughly be paraphrased to fit the following template:...

, or negation. Instead these notions are conveyed by a small set of preverbal auxiliaries (Schneider 1966:69-72, 95-104).

• no 'not'
• neba 'never'
• bin past tense
  Past tense
  The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...
  
  
• go future tense
  Future tense
  In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,...
  
  
• don perfective aspect
  Perfective aspect
  The perfective aspect , sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed as a simple whole, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. The perfective aspect is equivalent to the aspectual component of past perfective forms...
  
  
• di progressive aspect
• fit 'can, able to'
• lak 'must, like'
• mos 'must, ought to'
• wan 'want to'
• look 'look, watch'

Examples:

• Tri pipu go di kom. 'Three people will be coming.'
• Ma masa bin tutu wok. 'My boss worked very hard.'
• Dem neba cam? 'They haven't come yet?'
• Yu no fit bi ma klak. 'You cannot be my clerk.'
• Pipu go go simol-tam. 'The people will go soon.'
• Pasta bin di soso tok-tok. 'The pastor was continually talking.'
• Ah no wan look dat kyne ting. 'I don't want to watch that kind of thing.'
• If yu toch am, e go chuke yu. 'If you touch it, it will poke you.'
• Which man don tief ma books dem? 'Who has stolen my books?