The public discourse of the university: A contrastive sociopragmatic discourse analysis among Cameroon, France and Spain

Abstract

The informalization and conversationalization of public discourse in the latter part of the twentieth century is a complex phenomenon that has been well documented in English speaking societies. This article parts from Fairclough’s (1995) premises to analyse how this phenomenon is taking place in Romance languages with a similar technological development in comparison to the discourse practices of a country where the penetration of the Internet in the everyday life of its inhabitants is merely symbolic. The study thus compares the level of informalization of the public discourse in Cameroon, France and Spain by studying the welcoming letters of the principals of universities to their students published on the official websites of these higher institutions. We see the formality and informality of greetings, sign-offs and signatures of letters as well as the use of the second person pronoun as clear parameters that can confirm the tendency towards informalization in present public discourse. The results have shown that the discourse practices of these European university authorities are similar in their degree of informality, although there seems to be a stronger preference for informal styles in Spain. The results also confirm that the low penetration of the Internet must have a decisive influence on the fact that the discourse practices in Cameroonian universities follow a very traditional style with very formal salutations and farewells and a very formal use of signatures and pronouns, since most welcoming letters have not been written for the web, unlike the letters published on the French and Spanish websites. We understand the limitations of the study, which are clearly provoked by the poor access of Cameroonians to the Internet and have restricted our study to the official webpages of universities. However, we hope that this novel analysis of Cameroonian Computer-mediated Communication discourse (CMC) can serve as a point of departure for similar studies on CMC in technologically under-developed societies, but, above all, we wish this piece of research to enrich the field of linguistic studies in Romance languages.