E-morphology in Cameroon Social Media

The aim of this paper is to examine how Cameroonians form words in social media (SM) contexts. The study explores the kind of morphological processes they adopt and the extent to which these word formation processes occur in the platforms under study (e-mail, Facebook, and Yahoo Messenger). Analysis of 230 informal e-mails and chats revealed that Cameroonians espouse and alter some of the English word formation mechanisms to suit the context of SM. The following morphological processes were found in the data: accent stylizations, clipping, borrowing, neologisms, clitics, onomatopoeia, substitution, abbreviations, compounding, conversion/inflection, reduplication, hybrid, blending, slang, and smileys. Facebook tops the lead in terms of the number and frequency of occurrence of the word formation processes, as all are found in it with some reaching 100% frequency.