The spoken corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English

This article reports on the construction of a 240,000-word pilot corpus of spoken Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE), a widely-used yet stigmatised and largely uncodified written pidgin/creole variety. The corpus consists of private and public dialogues and monologues, with mark-up and POS-tagging. Text categories and the proportions of monologue and dialogue are guided by those of the International Corpus of English project, which makes the corpus immediately comparable with existing corpora of post-colonial varieties of English. We discuss the extent to which this corpus can be regarded as an ICE component, and illustrate the relation between CPE and standardised Nigerian and Cameroonian varieties of English in Africa by means of case studies employing ICE-NIGERIA and the Corpus of Cameroon English.