In this chapter, I provide a historical and linguistic account of the ways in which French was introduced and spread to some parts of the African continent and then diversified along a basilect-to-acrolect continuum. I show the different communicative functions it plays in the new ecologies where it evolved. In environments where major African languages are used as vehicular languages, French enjoys limited communicative functions, mainly restricted to formal interactions such as in school, public administration, and government. Conversely, in ecologies where no indigenous lingua franca had emerged, it is used in daily interactions to communicate across ethnolinguistic groups. I then address the questions of why schooling hasn’t contributed to the spread of French in the post-colonial era despite the significant increase of the school population and why it has not speciated into different regional varieties drastically different from those of the former metropoles (viz., France and Belgium). Finally, I present contrastive examples of Camfranglais/Francanglais (Cameroun) and Nouchi (Côte d’Ivoire) and argue that the latter may be the only variety that has speciated into a new one very different from that of France.

This chapter discusses some grammatical features of 'African urban youth languages', focusing on Camfranglais in Cameroonian cities such as Yaoundé and Douala. While anti-languages have been characterised as parasitic styles of speaking that graft onto the grammar of another language, developing an ephemeral emblematic lexicon but little or no grammatical structures of their own, Camfranglais stands out in that its grammatical features cannot be entirely reduced to a (Standard) French matrix. Rather, it presents various phonological, morphological and syntactical properties mostly transferred from Cameroonian Pidgin English and its Bantoid substrate languages, most probably via a spectrum of varieties of Cameroonian French. However, as long as the distribution of these features along the continuum Camfranglais–Cameroonian Pidgin English–second-language varieties of French (and English) remains unclear, it cannot be decided whether Camfranglais has indeed developed a hybrid grammar peculiar to itself. On the functional level, Camfranglais retains some typical anti-language characteristics with a tendency to expand as a style of speaking that indexes positive values such as integration, solidarity, progressiveness and a cosmopolitan Cameroonian identity.