ABSTRACT
Lovers of privacy should never ask a social scientist to dinner. Anthropologists, psychologists, and linguists share a common occupational disease: they take mental notes and are deplorably prone to turn their hosts and fellow guests into case-story subjects. I have done it before, and am doing it again—with some limitations. What I mean is that I have limited the sample in this paper to rather close friends from Cameroon, leaving deliberately aside people from other countries. There are several reasons for this choice, the main one being that I think a homogeneous sample to be more significant, in so far as my sample from other countries is very dispersed in many respects (I had only three usable cases from Senegal, two from Togo- land, and one each from Congo-Brazzaville, Niger, Dahomey, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Guinee, and Chad). Moreover the people concerned all know I have been observing their language policy and have discussed it with me.
