Language, Power, and Status: The Erosion of Age-Based Linguistic Hierarchies in Contemporary Discourse in Yaoundé, Cameroon

Abstract

This study investigates the erosion of age-based linguistic hierarchies in contemporary urban discourse in Yaoundé, Cameroon. It examines how the convergence of institutional professionalisation, credential-based authority, and the proliferation of digital communication platforms, principally WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram is reshaping the relationship between age, power, and language. Cameroon's sociolinguistic culture, like those of many sub-Saharan African societies, has historically accorded significant symbolic authority to elders, encoding deference linguistically through honorifics, address forms, speech acts, and age-marked registers. Drawing on a mixed-methods design, the study combines semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis of workplace and digital communication samples, and a Likert-scale perception survey administered to 20 purposively selected participants across professional, informal, and student communities in Yaoundé. The theoretical framework integrates Bourdieu's (1991) theory of linguistic capital, Fairclough's (1989, 2001) Critical Discourse Analysis, and Gumperz's (1982) Interactional Sociolinguistics. Findings document a discursively significant decline in deferential address forms, particularly in professional and digital domains, where institutional status increasingly displaces age as the primary determinant of linguistic power. Younger professionals in managerial roles issue unmitigated directives to older subordinates, while elders in digital spaces actively adopt youth-oriented informal registers to manage the stigma of technological irrelevance. The article argues that these shifts constitute not cultural decay but a structural renegotiation of the symbolic capital economy: gerontocratic authority is being displaced by technocratic and institutional capital as the dominant currency of linguistic power. The findings carry implications for interactional sociolinguistics, African language policy, and intergenerational communication in rapidly modernising urban African contexts.