Anarchism in a Postmodernist Approach to Cameroon PidgincreoleStandard Orthography: An Abortive Search for Relevance

Abstract

Cameroon Pidgincreole is the oldest contact language in Cameroon spanning through the various colonial periods. It is also one of the few languages where people write in without any formal training or instruction. This freedom has generated a lot of documentation, published and unpublished, in CPc to a wide readership, but with no two having exact orthography as it is in other languages where literacy programmes are developed and taught. This paper is of the opinion that this anarchy is a modernist approach where people want to identify themselves independently, ignoring a traditional collective movement towards a common goal. This paper makes use of various published and some unpublished documents in CPc to show this anarchy even among those who opt for the same orthographic system. Some of these documents include- the Pidgin English Bible, grammar books in Pidgin and Literary works. With the use of Chaos Theory, this paper holds that if this anarchy continuous, even in the next hundred years, CPc will not have a standard orthography. This paper calls for the creation of an Association of Cameroon Pidgincreole Scholars (ACPicS).