9. Mock Chinese in Kinshasa: On Lingala speakers’ offensive language use and verbal hostility
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Nico Nassenstein
Abstract
With the arrival of numerous waves of Chinese workers in DR Congo from the early 2000s onwards, the presence of Mandarin and other Chinese languages has steadily increased in Kinshasa’s multilingual landscape. Most Chinese construction workers, small-scale entrepreneurs, and traders who have settled in remote villages, have since gradually acquired the basic fundamentals of regional Congolese languages, especially of languages of wider communication such as Lingala. The increasing presence of migrants of Chinese descent in urban and rural spaces throughout the country has heavily influenced popular culture, advertising and especially has had an impact on Kinshasa citizens’ metalinguistic exchange about Chinese immigrants’ alleged linguistic practices, contributing to the emergence of different forms of “mock language” in humorous narratives. The present paper aims to analyze Mock Chinese, a recurrent ethnophaulism and racial slur based on onomatopoeia, as well as Lingala speakers’ mimicry of “broken Lingala” as used by Chinese migrants. Both phenomena are discussed against a background of a more holistic approach to swearing that also includes a broader understanding of hostile language in metalinguistic discourse. This contribution looks at mock language as a racialized, satirical and hostile performance of Otherness in the margins, reflecting the appropriation and permeability of language, unequal power hierarchies and Lingala speakers’ language ideologies with regard to changing migration patterns from a linguistic anthropological perspective.
Abstract
With the arrival of numerous waves of Chinese workers in DR Congo from the early 2000s onwards, the presence of Mandarin and other Chinese languages has steadily increased in Kinshasa’s multilingual landscape. Most Chinese construction workers, small-scale entrepreneurs, and traders who have settled in remote villages, have since gradually acquired the basic fundamentals of regional Congolese languages, especially of languages of wider communication such as Lingala. The increasing presence of migrants of Chinese descent in urban and rural spaces throughout the country has heavily influenced popular culture, advertising and especially has had an impact on Kinshasa citizens’ metalinguistic exchange about Chinese immigrants’ alleged linguistic practices, contributing to the emergence of different forms of “mock language” in humorous narratives. The present paper aims to analyze Mock Chinese, a recurrent ethnophaulism and racial slur based on onomatopoeia, as well as Lingala speakers’ mimicry of “broken Lingala” as used by Chinese migrants. Both phenomena are discussed against a background of a more holistic approach to swearing that also includes a broader understanding of hostile language in metalinguistic discourse. This contribution looks at mock language as a racialized, satirical and hostile performance of Otherness in the margins, reflecting the appropriation and permeability of language, unequal power hierarchies and Lingala speakers’ language ideologies with regard to changing migration patterns from a linguistic anthropological perspective.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Foreword VII
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Part I: Othering and abjection as deep practice
- 1. “I will kill you today” – Reading “bad language” and swearing through Otherness, mimesis, abjection and camp 1
- 2. Ten issues facing taboo word scholars 37
- 3. “Damn your eyes!” (Not really): Imperative imprecatives, and curses as commands 53
- 4. “Oh, bald father!”: Kinship and swearing among Datooga of Tanzania 79
- 5. Aesthetics of the obscure: Swearing as horrible play 103
- 6. “I sh.t in your mouth”: Areal invectives in the Lower Volta Basin (West Africa) 121
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Part II: Cultural mobility as context of transgression
- 7. The linguistics of Jamaican swearing: Forms, background and adaptations 147
- 8. ‘Don’t say it in public’: Contestations and negotiations in northern Nigerian Muslim cyberspace 165
- 9. Mock Chinese in Kinshasa: On Lingala speakers’ offensive language use and verbal hostility 185
- 10. The name of the wild man: Colonial arbiru in East Timor 209
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Part III: Disruptive and trashy performance
- 11. Found and lost paradise: Bad language at a beach in Diani, Kenya 239
- 12. The sexy banana – artifacts of gendered language in tourism 259
- 13. English- and Spanish-speaking teenagers’ use of rude vocatives 281
- 14. “He shall not be buried in the West” – Cursing in Ancient Egypt 303
- Afterword 327
- Index 333
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Foreword VII
-
Part I: Othering and abjection as deep practice
- 1. “I will kill you today” – Reading “bad language” and swearing through Otherness, mimesis, abjection and camp 1
- 2. Ten issues facing taboo word scholars 37
- 3. “Damn your eyes!” (Not really): Imperative imprecatives, and curses as commands 53
- 4. “Oh, bald father!”: Kinship and swearing among Datooga of Tanzania 79
- 5. Aesthetics of the obscure: Swearing as horrible play 103
- 6. “I sh.t in your mouth”: Areal invectives in the Lower Volta Basin (West Africa) 121
-
Part II: Cultural mobility as context of transgression
- 7. The linguistics of Jamaican swearing: Forms, background and adaptations 147
- 8. ‘Don’t say it in public’: Contestations and negotiations in northern Nigerian Muslim cyberspace 165
- 9. Mock Chinese in Kinshasa: On Lingala speakers’ offensive language use and verbal hostility 185
- 10. The name of the wild man: Colonial arbiru in East Timor 209
-
Part III: Disruptive and trashy performance
- 11. Found and lost paradise: Bad language at a beach in Diani, Kenya 239
- 12. The sexy banana – artifacts of gendered language in tourism 259
- 13. English- and Spanish-speaking teenagers’ use of rude vocatives 281
- 14. “He shall not be buried in the West” – Cursing in Ancient Egypt 303
- Afterword 327
- Index 333
