Abstract :
Corruption is a social phenomenon which has eaten deep into the fabric of the Cameroonian society as the various annual reports of Transparency International (see the reports of 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2013) and National Commission for the Fight against Corruption (CONAC) indicate. The phenomenon has become so rife in this country that it has surfaced in the linguistic productions of Cameroonians, as the various linguistic tools used to this effect testify. Using a structural-functional framework, this paper aims at studying the various linguistic hallmarks which characterize the language of corruption in the spoken and written productions of Cameroonians. After analyzing the data, which were obtained from participant observation, interviews, online sources as well as printed materials, the findings reveal that the language of corruption is essentially metaphoric and euphemistic and is characterized by linguistic features such as semantic shifts, borrowing, affixation, idiomatic formation and stereotyped sentences. It is also found that the language of corruption in Cameroon draws its lexico-semantic constructions from English, Cameroon-Pidgin English, home languages and French, language from which the most sizeable proportion of them originate. This imbalanced proportion is attributed to the dominance of the French language in the Cameroonian administration system.
