This article analyzes the semiotic representations of gender through the language practices of Cameroonian youth observed in Tu Know Ma Life (You know my life), a YouTube series popular among the French Cameroonian diaspora that follows the daily life of nine young middle- and upper-class Cameroonian immigrants (five women and four men) living in Paris. This series is regarded by its audience as an authentic representation of Cameroonian identity, partly due to its remarkable use of Francanglais, a hybrid youth slang spoken in Cameroon. I analyze how the mediatized representation of Francanglais practices in the first season of the YouTube series contributes to the linguistic construction of gender differentiations. I argue that through the highly gendered use of Francanglais and French by women and men, the series reproduces hegemonic gender ideologies while reinforcing the ideological association between Francanglais and hegemonic heterosexual masculinity.

This article explores the relation between linguistic and nonlinguistic signs in enregisterment processes (Agha 2007) through the analysis of multimodal images of racial otherness in YouTube videos. It aims to show the role of images in indexing social meaning and performing hegemonic Whiteness among metropolitan Cameroonian-French elites living in Paris, through the use of a specific semiotic register indexing an “Afropolitan” persona – an elite, socially mobile and transnational type of Blackness. By focusing on the poiesis of “image-texts” (Nakassis 2019), this article will contribute to understanding the “total semiotic fact” of racial and social differentiation. It will also demonstrate that these images constitute a counter-discourse and are political acts that negotiate agency and contest power relations.