Speaking at the Margins: Language, Identity, and Power at the Intersection of Gender, Race, and Class in Cameroon's Multilingual Landscape

Abstract

Cameroon's multilingual landscape, which encompasses French, English, Cameroonian Pidgin English (CPE), Camfranglais, and over 280 indigenous languages, has been extensively researched. However, the intersecting roles of gender, race, and class in structuring language inequality remain under-theorised. This paper addresses that gap through a theoretical-interpretive reanalysis of empirical data drawn from corpus, interactional sociolinguistic, and ethnographic studies. The analysis applies an integrated framework that brings Crenshaw's intersectionality into systematic dialogue with Bourdieu's theory of linguistic capital, Goffman's face theory, Silverstein's indexicality, and Robertson's glocalism. The analysis yields four principal findings. First, that Cameroon's linguistic markets are intersectionally structured such that mechanisms that reproduce class advantage simultaneously reproduce racialised and gendered hierarchies.  Second, that face is not a baseline resource which is equally available to all interactants, but is structurally pre-distributed along lines of class, gender, and racialised language ideology, such that CPE-dominant speakers enter institutional encounters with diminished interactional standing independently of their communicative competence. Third, a glocalism adequate to postcolonial multilingual realities must be explicitly power-sensitive, foregrounding the colonial and postcolonial mechanisms through which global language hierarchies are installed and sustained locally. Fourth, code-switching in Cameroon is political at every level of social organisation where each switch carries indexical meaning that negotiates personal identity, ethnic affiliation, and national political positioning. These occur in ways that are inseparable from the speaker's structural position. CPE also emerges from the analysis as both a stigmatised variety and an active counter-hegemonic resource. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for a multilingual education framework, revised language credentialing, gender-sensitive teacher training, and intersectionally informed institutional communication.