Youth language in Africa: Introduction to the special issue

1 The articles in this issue

The articles included in this special collection represent a wide range of countries in Africa, with an emphasis on Anglophone contexts, including Ethiopia, the Gambia, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, and, as a Francophone context, DR Congo. In many ways this collection showcases the main threads of African youth language research as it has developed particularly in relation to the following three main themes:

1. The linguistic analysis of youth language – lexical, pragmatic and grammatical features of youth language, the relation between youth language and other registers and vernaculars, including implications for language variation.

2. The relationship between youth language and identity, including expressions of identity such as youth cultural practices (music, dress, hair styles etc.) and the indexicality of youth language in relation to urban, modern, streetwise and hybrid local-global identities, and on the reverse side of this, commodification and appropriation of youth forms by media and advertising.

3. Individual creativity and stylistic choice particularly in relation to metaphor, in the innovation of new terms in dialogue with popular culture, and in multimodal forms in virtual spaces.

The articles by Tomei and Hollington and Nassenstein and Bose represent two comparative papers looking at linguistic elements in comparable or related youth languages. Tomei and Hollington provide a global perspective on African youth practices as they reveal the impact of Jamaican language on youth languages in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Africa and the Gambia. They discuss the incorporation of lexical, grammatical and pragmatic elements from Jamaican by youth for individual creativity and stylistic choice. They demonstrate how this is associated with Reggae and Dancehall music and how linguistic elements in youth practice can be embedded in cultural practices such as music, dress and hair styles of users of Jamaican. Nassenstein and Bose meanwhile analyse morphological features of Kiswahili youth languages from Kenya, Tanzania and DR Congo, to provide an illustration of the commonalities and divergences of youth language in these different national contexts and their relation to regional varieties of Kiswahili. They suggest that parallel developments in remote settings could be triggered by use in the media, music and youth culture; while at the same time they could follow general patterns of linguistic simplification. These two comparative papers provide a linguistic understanding of youth language and some of the strategies employed by youth in differentiating their speech.

Some of the themes which arise in the contribution by Tomei and Hollington around individual creativity, stylistic choice, and linguistic elements embedded in cultural practices are picked up again in the contribution by Adjirakor who looks at English and its status in hip hop in Tanzania. Adjirakor demonstrates how English as a youth language is an indication of status and internationality, in the performances of hip hop in English amongst Tanzanian youth. She argues that English is perceived as cosmopolitan and urban, and that it embodies another type of Tanzanian identity, in juxtaposition with a nationalistic discourse which places Kiswahili as the authentic marker of national identity.

Oloruntoba-Oju in his contribution also focuses on identity in relation to indexicality in multimodal performances in Nigerian virtual space. In consonance with Adjirakor’s argument, he notes the indexicalisation of what he calls hybrid identities which combine foreign/ indigenous identities and languages. These are realized through multimodal means, and he considers the affordances of multimodality in virtual space, which he argues can facilitate an alter-ego, subversive identity. He also highlights communicative usages that appear distinctively African compared with the global north. Ndlovu stays in the virtual space in his analysis of the use of numericals in Zimbabwean Computer Mediated Communication. With an emphasis on metaphors, drawing on both social media data and interview verification, he considers numerical glyphs as phonemic metaphors, metaphorical numerical shapes, and cross-domain mappings of numerals in his analysis. He concludes that these are key strategies for relexicalization in contemporary youth language in Zimbabwe.

Hurst-Harosh and Kanana, continuing with the theme of relexicalization and metaphors, look at the innovation and circulation of terms, and how terms arise out of what they call ‘mini narratives’ within popular culture. Drawing on data from South Africa and Kenya, they show that generational peer groups and contemporary pop culture are central in the production of metaphors which are circulated and ultimately conventionalized in youth language forms. This language becomes indexical of the urban, modern, streetwise, youth(fulness) which is reified by a particular generation.

Mensah also focuses on metaphors, but specifically in relation to the construction of masculinity. Considering a particular community of practice in Nigeria, he explores slang and metaphors associated with alcohol consumption, the social and symbolic uses of alcohol, and shows how alcohol is a marker of masculinity within this community of practice. He highlights that drinking amongst the youth in his study is a rule-governed and culture-regulated social activity. He furthermore suggests that the discursive enactment of identity and the construction of authentic social selves through creative agency in language is mediated by shared ethnic, linguistic, social, and cultural attributes among in-group members.

Finally Nassenstein focuses on examples from Lingala youth language in DR Congo, and considers how such innovative terms as those described by Ndlovu as well as Hurst-Harosh and Kanana, can be commodified and used in media and advertising – and how youth language itself can be commodified and its indexicality appropriated for promotional purposes. Once terms are conventionalized and commodified, this then necessitates their replacement, leading to the innovation of fresh terms, an aspect of youth language that is often cited (although less often evidenced, see Hurst 2016, who argues that terms are often recycled and less often innovated). He points to a correlation between processes of appropriation or popularization of youth language and the pace of linguistic change.