Recent work in sociolinguistics criticizes labeling sets of linguistic practices as languages and varieties. A focal concept is translanguaging – while opening productive perspectives on linguistic behavior, this approach often claims that, linguistically speaking, there is no such thing as a language. In this chapter we argue that this ontological claim is too strong, and that bottom-up approach to activism that follows in its trail, is insufficient as a response to linguistically embedded social hierarchies and power inequalities. Linguistics has a checkered history; labeling of varieties and construction of language standards has served dubious ends. However, using Norway as a case in point and alluding to other cases of standardization and norm regulation, we argue that effective linguistic activism aimed at social justice sometimes requires the identification of varieties as linguistic objects. We reject a generalized language suspicion, because the anti-language approach to activism pushes out of theoretical reach a level of organization where social and political hierarchies are instituted and maintained – but where such hierarchies may also be challenged and altered. We conclude that socially engaged language scholars must struggle with the concrete contextual assessments that languages and varieties confront us with, and face the normative dilemmas that top-down political intervention on languages allegedly faces. Otherwise, important means of social justice are lost.

This chapter discusses some grammatical features of 'African urban youth languages', focusing on Camfranglais in Cameroonian cities such as Yaoundé and Douala. While anti-languages have been characterised as parasitic styles of speaking that graft onto the grammar of another language, developing an ephemeral emblematic lexicon but little or no grammatical structures of their own, Camfranglais stands out in that its grammatical features cannot be entirely reduced to a (Standard) French matrix. Rather, it presents various phonological, morphological and syntactical properties mostly transferred from Cameroonian Pidgin English and its Bantoid substrate languages, most probably via a spectrum of varieties of Cameroonian French. However, as long as the distribution of these features along the continuum Camfranglais–Cameroonian Pidgin English–second-language varieties of French (and English) remains unclear, it cannot be decided whether Camfranglais has indeed developed a hybrid grammar peculiar to itself. On the functional level, Camfranglais retains some typical anti-language characteristics with a tendency to expand as a style of speaking that indexes positive values such as integration, solidarity, progressiveness and a cosmopolitan Cameroonian identity.