“Je wanda!”: constructing Afro-diasporic identities through vernacular styles of Cameroonian French in digital media

This article analyzes the role of vernacular French-language practices in the construction of Afro-diasporic communities in the digital media realm. Defined as the linguistic style associated with a specific social group, the vernacular indexes locality and represents a form of authenticity, thus constituting a key resource in the identity construction of online diasporic communities. The article focuses on the ethnographic case study of Celia, a French-speaking female entrepreneur of Cameroonian origin who shares her time between Paris, France, and Yaoundé, Cameroon. I analyze how the “mediatized performance of the vernacular” (Coupland, “The Mediated Performance”), in both her webzine Wanda People and the videos of her YouTube channel of the same name, enables Celia to construct an Afropolitan woman persona, both African and cosmopolitan, which identifies with multiple Afro-diasporic communities at local, regional, and transnational levels. These “transfiliations” (Provencher), that inscribe the Cameroonian woman into a transatlantic Black space, are performed through the use of phonetic markers associated with a Cameroonian or pan-African accent, English, Pidgin-English, as well as the lexical and discursive forms characteristic of Cameroonian-spoken French and Francanglais or Camfranglais (Telep “Le camfranglais sur internet”), a hybrid style of French spoken by young people in Cameroon. Thus, I argue that Celia’s strategic use of different styles of Cameroonian French on social media contributes to the construction of a deterritorialized francophone pan-African community and to the performance of an Afropolitan Black female persona that indexes a counter-hegemonic model of cosmopolitan, elite Blackness.