Africa is home to over two thousand living languages, of which around 275 are spoken in Cameroon. This makes it the African country with the second largest number of languages after Nigeria (Eberhard *et al.* 2022). The so-called national languages of Cameroon are relegated to home usage only, and the country has retained the languages of its former colonial masters — French and English — as its official languages. Cameroon also follows a bijural legal system with common law and civil law legal systems, equally dating back to colonial times. Courts in such a multilingual and bijural environment, where legal professionals often communicate in the official languages and laypersons with no or limited knowledge of the official languages use the local languages, are an interesting case study for research related to language use in courtrooms. Nevertheless, this field is still largely unexplored despite the remarkable language dynamics that courtrooms in African countries offer. By analyzing the speech acts as well as the gestures that characterize the speech of court participants (legal professionals and lay litigants) in Cameroon's courtroom discourse, Dissake examines legal language-related problems that arise from a non-inclusive language policy and the use of exoglossic official languages in a highly multilingual court setting.

The book, which consists of six chapters, is based on qualitative research methods. Data were obtained through non-participant observation of court sessions covering thirty-seven court cases from 2016 to 2019. Discourse analysis was then conducted using approaches drawing on speech act theory and interactional sociolinguistics. The author also carried out semi-structured interviews with legal experts and one court interpreter.

The first chapter is an introduction that sets the context of language-related problems in the courts of Cameroon and informs readers about the structure of the book. The second chapter traces Cameroon's pre- and post-colonial history with a view to placing the current legal system and language policy in their historical context and to showing how colonial rule has shaped Cameroon's current language policy and legal system. Two judicial systems have existed side by side in Cameroon since 1900, when the German colonial administration introduced the Consular Jurisdiction Law for the Germans and the Colonial Law for the indigenous population.
However, the two exoglossic languages — French and English — and the two different legal systems of common law and civil law can be traced back to French and British colonial rule in Cameroon after the First World War. The third chapter gives a broad overview of forensic linguistics by reviewing the works of other scholars and also defines the scope of the book itself. The author claims that the book is a forensic linguistic study that touches on the areas of discourse analysis and pragmatics as well as translation and interpretation. This is then followed in chapter 4 by a discussion that forms the core of the book. This chapter contains a description and analysis of the discourse of court proceedings at the Courts of First Instance in four civil law districts and one common law district in Cameroon. The author attempts to document the communication difficulties that non-legal experts (plaintiffs, accused persons, and witnesses) face in Cameroonian courtrooms in violation of Austin's Felicity Conditions (conventionality and actuality conditions), and how the legal experts (judges, state counsels, and lawyers) rectify these violations through illocutionary acts. The fifth chapter presents the results of interviews conducted by the author during the research period, and aims at examining the attitude of the interviewees towards Cameroon's legal language-related problems. The sixth chapter concludes the book with a summary and proposes solutions to language problems that were identified earlier.

While a small number of contributions on language use in African courtrooms have been published (e.g. Ralarala *et al.* 2019 and 2022), the book under review is probably the only one based on the analysis of primary data collected in a multilingual courtroom using as many as five languages, namely French, English, Cameroonian Pidgin English, Fulfulde, and Ghomala' (Bamenjou). The research environment that the author has chosen for her study is therefore a true manifestation of an African multilingual courtroom. Although not explicitly mentioned, one can assume that the author's proficiency in English and French, as well as in a number of national languages of Cameroon, enabled her to cross the language barriers in her efforts to collect data unobtrusively and systematically in the form of field notes.

The discourse analysis conducted by the author highlights specific instances of language-related problems in Cameroonian courtrooms, categorized according to whether these are due to lay court participants having an inadequate command of the official court languages or from their unfamiliarity with legal jargon. Among the examples discussed in detail are cases of the legal authorities interrogating in the official languages and lay litigants answering in the national languages, a defense lawyer examining the plaintiff in Pidgin English because the latter could not speak English, a
Francophone defendant being compelled to defend himself in Pidgin English, and a clerk volunteering to interpret between judge and defendant, even though the law prohibits this.

The analysis reveals that failure of lay litigants to respond to questions in courtrooms, commonly regarded as a dilatory tactic, is often rather a manifestation of low language proficiency. The author also observes that lay litigants lie about their linguistic competence because they are ashamed to admit that they do not understand the official languages. Moreover, due to the lack of trained court interpreters in Cameroon, untrained (and sometimes non-sworn) interpreters are used at the discretion of the court. This further impedes communication for participants who speak essentially only Cameroonian national languages (including Cameroonian Pidgin English) or for participants whose knowledge of official languages is functionally inadequate.

The author draws on previous research showing that at least 40% of Cameroon's total population cannot speak French or English (p. 16). Combined with the above problems documented by the author, this means that 40% of Cameroon's total population have limited ability to make themselves heard and understood because of the use of the exoglossic official languages by legal professionals in the face of the national languages spoken by lay court participants. Furthermore, communication difficulties are exacerbated by other issues such as lay litigants not understanding legal jargon and inadequate legal training that does not prepare legal professionals for complex multilingual court settings.

Notwithstanding the documentary merit of this pioneering work, my critiques concern the data collecting method, the way the author manages the expectation of readers, potential gaps in the author's comparative analysis, the structure of the book and the political conclusions drawn. I will comment on each of these individually.

Concerning the method of data collection, it remains unclear why a study purporting to examine courtroom discourse does not make use of audio recordings and instead relies on notes taken by the author. If audio recordings were allowed (readers are not informed to the contrary), the study could have been based on more reliable and verifiable data sources. The criteria used to select the thirty-seven cases for the discourse analysis are also not mentioned.

It is also striking that the author delivers something different in her final analysis than what was signaled to the readers. Within the broad framework defining the scope of her study (chapter 3), the author claims that the book is a forensic linguistic study that touches on the areas of discourse analysis and pragmatics as well as translation and interpretation (p. 23ff.).
Based on the description that follows, one would expect to find answers to questions such as: To what extent does the complex multilingual setting in Cameroonian courtrooms lead to misinterpretations of the speakers' intended meaning of their actual language use? What are the particular challenges faced by legal translators in Cameroon who translate not only between French and English, but also between legal systems (from common law to civil law and vice versa)? However, the book does not address these issues, but instead investigates “linguistic infelicity, use of illocutionary acts, and judicial misconduct” (p. 56ff.). In simple terms, the final analysis of the book focuses on how laypersons and legal experts in Cameroonian courtrooms violate the court's code of conduct and how this relates to the complex language situation in Cameroon.

The author's efforts to bring many interesting works from the field of forensic linguistics to the attention of the reader in chapter 3 is to be applauded, but the comparative exercise that she sets out to undertake is not very successful. None of the scholarly works reviewed in chapter 3 is directly relevant to the analysis of Cameroon's courtroom discourse presented in chapter 4. It is not clear, for example, what the discussion on p. 33-37 regarding the linguistic analysis of police evidence from the work of Coulthard (2002) contributes to the analysis of the primary data collected by the author. The discussion of Tiersma (2002) (p. 39-42), whose goal is to show the ineffectiveness of warning labels on industrial products, seems distracting rather than enlightening for the study at hand. Similar criticisms can be made of the other works discussed in this chapter, with the exception of the study by Eades (2012), which the author briefly discusses in a section on “the evolution of FL [forensic linguistics] outside Europe and America”.

Instead, the author could have referred to other more relevant studies for a comparative perspective, especially to works on multilingual court environments similar to that of Cameroon. For instance Angermeyer (2008), who draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the New York City Small Claims Court, would have been relevant. Angermeyer analyzes a dataset of forty recorded arbitration hearings that include speakers of Spanish, Russian, Haitian Creole, and Polish, and identifies three linguistic situations which could possibly be compared to Cameroonian courtrooms: (1) litigants who are accompanied by an interpreter and are often interrupted by legal professionals and interpreters and discouraged from speaking English; (2) litigants who avoid the use of English and are often accused by the opposing party of pretending that they do not speak English; and (3) Spanish-speaking litigants who encounter a Spanish-speaking arbitrator and have no English interpreter readily available, which would result
in arbitrators spontaneously deciding to conduct hearings in Spanish (the non-official language).

The above linguistic situations can be compared to the receptive/pragmatic attitudes of Cameroon's legal professionals towards lay litigants. In her discourse analysis, Dissake encounters a case where a defense lawyer examines the plaintiff in Pidgin English to help her understand and respond to questions and another case where a clerk volunteers to translate between judge and defendant. The author even emphasizes this part of her analysis and establishes this speech act as a sixth type, called "receptive illocutionary act", to be added to the speech act typology developed by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969). Interestingly, this is in stark contrast to Angermeyer's observations in the first two linguistic situations before the New York City Small Claims Court, in which minority language speakers are discouraged from using the full range of their communicative abilities and their choice of language is used as a factor in assessing their credibility. On the contrary, Dissake's finding are consistent with the third of Angermeyer's situations in which interpreters are not available and arbitrators conduct hearings in the language of the disputants. The similarity with Cameroonian courtrooms would prompt one to further inquire whether the unavailability of court interpreters leads to a more receptive attitude on the part of legal experts toward the linguistic inadequacies of laypersons in the court.

Coming to the structure of the book, although the classical presentation style chosen by the author is laudable, it would have been preferable to merge the discourse analysis of the primary data in chapter 4 with the discussion of the existing literature in chapter 3, and the input from the interviews with the legal professionals and the interpreter in chapter 5. The chapters could then have been organized according to specific themes. One chapter could, for example, focus specifically on the description of problems related to inadequate command of the official court languages and another could turn its attention to those which manifest the ignorance of legal jargon among lay court participants. Yet another chapter could focus on the discussion of the illocutionary acts by legal experts in Cameroonian courtrooms to rectify the communication difficulties faced by lay court participants, including the speech act type that the author finds is unique in Cameroon's courtrooms ("receptive illocutionary act").

Finally, the author concludes, in light of her observations, that the use of English and French is the origin of the communication problem in courtrooms. She therefore suggests introducing national languages into the legal process — a suggestion that I believe should be weighed with great caution. The language choice of participants in courtrooms only constitutes a
problem if the participant is not fluent (or perceived to not be fluent) in the official languages. However, as the author herself notes in her discussion starting from p. 53, 100% of the court participants of Yaoundé and Douala districts use French in courtrooms, and national languages were only recorded in the semi-urban districts of Buea, Bafoussam, and Ngaoundéré. This data raises doubts as to whether a blanket introduction of national languages in courtrooms would solve, exacerbate or shift the language problem. It is known that most postcolonial countries have designated the languages of their former colonial masters as their official languages because they are considered politically neutral and are intended to serve as a lingua franca and a source of stability in ethnically diverse nations. The designation of French and English as official languages of Cameroon is no exception, and therefore the author's proposal to introduce the national languages in courtrooms has far-reaching consequences in terms of which language to choose (from among 275 possibilities), whether these languages should also be used in written law, and how to resolve difficulties in translating legal concepts in the different national languages. Instead, I would suggest that the receptive/pragmatic attitude of legal professionals is a promising alternative route towards reducing inequality in access to justice. This is a more compelling approach for courtrooms in developing countries like Cameroon which have no qualified court interpreters.

This critique is not meant to diminish the overall merit of this book. Any legal linguist who sets out to research the linguistic asymmetries between legal and lay participants in courtroom interaction in a multilingual African environment has to use this book as their starting point.

## References

- Angermeyer, Philipp Sebastian. 2008. Creating monolingualism in the multilingual courtroom. *Sociolinguistic Studies* 2(3). 385-404.

- Austin, J. L. 1962. *How to do things with words. The William James lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955*. Oxford: Clarendon.

- Coulthard, Malcolm. 2002. Whose voice is this? Invented and concealed dialogue in written records of verbal evidence produced by the police. In Janet Cotterill (ed.), *Language in the legal process*, 19-34. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

- Eades, Diana. 2012. The social consequences of language ideologies in courtroom cross-examination. *Language in Society* 41(4). 471-497.

- Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons & Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2022. *Ethno-lingue: Languages of the world*. 25th ed. Dallas, TX: SIL International.

- Ralarala, Monwabisi K., Russell H. Kaschula & Georgina Heydon (eds.). 2019. *New frontiers in forensic linguistics: Themes and perspectives in language and law in African and beyond*. Stellenbosch: Sun Press.
Ralarala, Monwabisi K., Russell H. Kaschula & Georgina Heydon (eds.). 2022. *Language and the law: Global perspectives in forensic linguistics from Africa and beyond*. Stellenbosch: Sun Press.

Searle, John R. 1969. *Speech acts. An essay in the philosophy of language*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tiersma, Peter M. 2002. The language and law of product warnings. In Janet Coterill (ed.), *Language in the legal process*, 54-71. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
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