Urbanising orality: A socio-artistic interpretation of Cameroonian Pidgin English proverbs

In this paper, the focus is that though proverbs are known to be elitist by nature,
the birth of urban spaces in Cameroon and the growth of Pidgin English have
generated a popular culture. One of the outcomes of popular culture is the
composition of proverbs in Pidgin English. The paper has, therefore, argued that
Cameroon Pidgin proverbs can contribute to the shaping and construction of
the Cameroonian worldview. This study is guided by the theoretical views of Hall
(2007) especially as he propounded that studying works from Cultural Studies
perspectives takes two angles – the aesthetic and the ideological angles. The
method of collecting data for this research was Naturally Occurring Data and
especially the tool known as Field Notes (Golato, 2017). Naturally Occurring
Data usually functions with experimenters that are not predicted in all
situations in which a given speech event may be produced (Golato, 2017). With
the help of the Field Notes research tool, the proverbs were collected on the bus
after an ensuing debate on the importance and relevance of pidgin English in
present-day Cameroon as the researcher traveled from Yaounde to Buea. The
research reveals that there is a huge corpus of pidgin proverbs that if carefully
analyzed and interpreted; they can serve, as a tool for enhancing the much needed Cameroonian national culture.

Key words:  Orality, Urban, Pidgin, Culture, Popular