Urban Youth Languages in Africa: Case Studies, Functions, Linguistic Strategies

Youth languages have developed in several of the major urban centres in Africa: Sheng in Nairobi (based on Swahili); Tsotsitaal and Iscamtho in Johannesburg (based on Afrikaans and Zulu); Ndoubil in Kinshasa (based on Lingala, later replaced by Lingala ya bayankee), and in Eastern Congo (based on Swahili); and Nouchi in Abidjan (based on Français populaire). The main function of these urban youth languages is to create and to mark group identity in opposition to the rest of society creating a distance from the older generations, from the rural and traditional way of life, and from the upper social classes. The term "anti-languages" introduced by Halliday (1978) for argots in general fits these urban youth sociolects very well.

Their origin often lies in a criminal argot, expanding to the language of the street gangs, to the male urban youth in general, and eventually developing into a general urban lect that is free from ethnic connotations. At this point a new language is born, a positive note against the all too common situations of language death. It is important to realise that urbanisation and globalisation is not always equivalent to English taking over, notwithstanding the role model of the American youth culture in the African urban youth languages.

It is our aim to first present the history, the sociolinguistic properties and the social functions of the youth languages of Abidjan, Jo'burg, Kinshasa and Nairobi, and to draw conclusions from what they have in common. Then we will look into their linguistic characteristics. Reflecting the multilingual contact setting in which they typically arise, they have a mixed appearance. Their morphosyntactical framework is mostly taken from one of the dominant languages of the city, their lexicon, however, is highly heterogeneous, drawn from very different source languages and subject to conscious manipulation and rapid change. This is because lexical innovation among the youths has a competitive, artistic, and provocative element. In contrast to other types of sociolects, we find urban youth languages to prefer strategies such as truncation, morphological hybridisation, hyperbole, dysphemism, and phonotactic operations such as metathesis; whereas strategies such as archaisms, paraphrase, and composition which play a prominent role in other types of sociolects, are nearly absent. This preference has something to do with a marked provocative disrespect on the side of the speakers who create themselves a new social and linguistic identity in opposition to established identities of the majority. Their disrespect is expressed in linguistic shape by three features: (1) phonotactic "violence" that distorts the linguistic icons of the majority by various strategies of metathesis or "mutilates" them by truncation; (2) morphological hybridisation, i.e. the conscious combination of lexemes and affixes that do not come from the same source; (3) dysphemism in the semantic and pragmatic domain, reflecting an aspiration for rudeness. The linguistic form is a direct reflection of psycho-social functions of the "urban youth" sociolect type.