A Lexico-Semantic Appraisal of Fraudsters’ Language in Bambili and Buea, Cameroon

Abstract: This paper seeks to study the lexico-semantic features of the language of fraudsters in Cameroon, with a focus on Bambili and Buea. This research emanated from the observation that fraudsters, in an attempt to hedge themselves from forces of law and order who pose a serious menace to them in Cameroon and to persuade and deceive their victims, have developed a deviant usage of lexical features understood only by them. The deviance from the Standard British English completely hinders or blurs intelligibility between fraudsters and any other Cameroonian, especially forces of law and order. The framework that was found appropriate for this study is the Register theory propounded by Halliday. The Register theory looks at deviance as an attempt to hinder intelligibility from those who are not part of a given circle, which in our study is the fraudulent circle. To effectively carry out this research, data was obtained through participant observation of fraudsters in Bambili and Buea, an audio recorder was used to record discussions of fraudsters; and later, the recorded items were transcribed and analyzed. Findings revealed that fraudsters in Cameroon use lexico-semantic features that are deviant from the Standard British English usage, thereby hindering or blurring intelligibility to hedge outsiders, especially forces of law and order who are a menace to them. The influence of Pidgin English, local parlance, and American English was evident in their choices of fraudsters, who are at times deceptive to win their victims to succumb to their fraud and productive in lexical expansion through coinages, buzz words, compounding, abbreviation, and Z Formation at trigger semantic expansion, shift, and extension.