ABSTRACT
When the Germans took over control of the country they found that Pidgin English had already become a lingua franca, particularly along the coast and in the south-western region that bordered Nigeria. The German administration established large plantations requiring thousands of labourers (see Tale 16), and as more and more Cameroon ians left their tribal groups, becoming absorbed into mixed linguis tic communities - communities which, moreover, included Togolese and Dahomeyans brought to Cameroon by the Germans - Pidgin English's value as a lingua franca became enhanced. For some time the Germans used Pidgin, and German troops were provided with a Pidgin Handbook, but gradually they attempted to impose German and to limit the use of vernacular languages to oral communication within their own speech boundaries. That some lingua franca was necessary is clear when one considers the linguistic diversity of the people. Kisob (1963, p.29) estimated that there are approximately one hundred mutually un intelligible languages in a sector of the country which then had a population of under one million. Rudin, describing German rule in Cameroon, pointed out that the people of the Bamenda Grassfields clung to Pidgin: 'In the grasslands of North Western Cameroons there were so many dialects that the various tribes spoke and still do speak Pidgin English, to make themselves understood by others in their periodic market days' (1938, p.358).
