Gender and the use of Tags in Cameroon English Discourse

Titelangaben

Dashaco, Veronica A. ; Anchimbe, Eric A.:
Gender and the use of Tags in Cameroon English Discourse.
In: Anchimbe, Eric A. (Hrsg.): Structural and Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Indigenisation : On Multilingualism and Language Evolution. - Dordrecht : Springer , 2014 . - S. 145-166
ISBN 978-94-007-7881-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7881-8_8

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Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the types of tag questions commonly used by Cameroonian men and women in both formal and informal and single-sex and mixed-sex interactions in Cameroon English. A major question we seek to answer is: do the tags used by Cameroonian women suggest tentativeness, hesitancy, and powerlessness as implied by literature in western contexts? The analysis of the naturally-occurring data carried out here reveals on the contrary that the use of tags, especially by Cameroonian women, is conditioned by the respect of sociocultural norms of society and the desire to be polite, deferent, and acceptable. From a more general point of view, tag usage is highly context-dependent, i.e. in relation to the physical location, the discourse context (formal or informal), the participants involved (age, parent-child, gender), and the relationship between the participants (symmetrical or asymmetrical).

Although overall the statistics presented here show women as using more tags than men, the specific types of tags used are influenced by the contextual factors listed above. This chapter only opens up a field of sociolinguistic and pragmatic research that has still not been extensively explored within Cameroon English discourse. It is our wish that more in-depth studies be carried out that reveal inherent patterns of social interaction across gender and languages not only in Cameroon but also in other postcolonial communities.