**1. Introduction**

Cameroon French has been the focus of many studies, and the research carried out so far has mainly explored phonetical, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and semantic features. In recent years, the scope of research on Cameroon French has been expanded considerably, with scholars also giving more attention to pragmatic and discursive aspects of this postcolonial variety of French. The topics examined so far include address terms [1], speech acts (e.g., compliments and compliment responses [2], greetings [3], invitations and expressions of sympathy [4]), politeness strategies [5], discourse markers [6], etc.

The present study focuses on the analysis of pragmatic and linguistic choices made by Cameroon French speakers when expressing gratitude in three different situations. The speech act of giving thanks has been studied in many different languages and mostly within the framework of speech act and politeness theories. While there is an abundant literature on thanks in languages such as English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, etc., there is a need to look at the impact of region on the realization of thanks in different regional varieties of the same language. With respect to French, the studies currently available mainly focus on the variety spoken in France. This paper is an attempt to extend the scope of research on thanks in French by examining the ways in which Cameroon French speakers express their gratitude in different situations. The study is based on data collected by means of a discourse completion task questionnaire that was administered to two groups of university students1 . This paper is structured as follows. After this introduction, the next section presents the theoretical framework of the study. Section 3 reports on the methodology employed. The findings of the study are presented and discussed in Section 4. Section 5 summarizes the main outcomes of the study and evokes some avenues for future research.
