The pragmatics of requests in digital communication: A study of Francophone Cameroonian English speakers’ interactions

This study sets out to investigate request strategies used by some Cameroonian francophone speakers of English across major social media platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger to see how these strategies shape digital illocutionary behaviour. Drawing on a corpus of 230 authentic social media posts collected within 2020-2022, the work is grounded on Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) Speech Act Theory. Findings shows that Yes / No questions with 97 occurrences, Wh- questions with 76 occurrences, Enquiry about family or one’s health which stands at 56 occurrences and Tag questions used once by the users are the request strategies used on Cameroon social media interactions. This research is an important contribution to the pragmatics of online discourse. It has also increased awareness of Cameroon francophone English in online context.