A Spoken Corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English

A Spoken Corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE)

Melanie Green, working with Miriam Ayafor (University of Yaounde I) and Gabriel Ozon (University of Sheffield) have recently created and released the Spoken Corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English. The work was funded by the British Academy, and a Leverhulme Grant.

Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE) is a pidgin/creole language variety that has been heavily stigmatised and, to date, has not been extensively codified. Melanie and her colleagues carried out fieldwork to collect samples of private and public conversations and monologues for tagging and inclusion in their corpus. The way that the corpus is constructed allows CPE to be compared with other post-colonial varieties of English for research purposes.

The corpus contains 240,000 spoken words. The corpus is important in that it is linked with ongoing developments of a spelling system for CPE, and it will be useful for new research into CPE through the lenses of creolistics, typology, language contact, and other fields of theoretical and applied linguistics.

If anybody would like to explore the corpus and look at the variety in more detail, it can be accessed here.