Innovative use of Shona ideophones within an adolescent community of practice
-
Toni Cook
,
Clara McGilly
Abstract
This paper focuses on a nonnormative linguistic practice involving ideophones (nyaudzosingwi) among a Shona-speaking adolescent community of practice in urban Zimbabwe. Ideophones occupy a special position in Shona’s ethnolinguistic repertoire; they are culturally and linguistically salient, and highlighted in Shona classroom instruction. The perspective of Zimbabwe’s educational establishment is at odds with the on-the-ground situation, in which ideophones are exclusively the purview of older rural speakers. This dynamic puts young Shona speakers in a difficult situation: to succeed educationally, one is required to use ideophones, yet they are not a natural part of youth language. To balance these competing demands, young Shona speakers have developed a new use around ideophones that highlights the incongruity of balancing between being a “good Shona student” (fluency in “deep” Shona that eschews English influence) and a modern Shona subject (proficiency in English, upwardly socially mobile) by using them for unserious, comedic effect, where the humor deliberately derives from the idiosyncrasy of a young Shona speaker using ideophones. We also find a reduction in the morphosyntactic environments in which ideophones appear, in that they are always required to be introduced by a verbal element, and always the active form -ti, never the passive form -nzi.
Acknowledgments
A debt of gratitude is owed to our Karanga Shona consultant, Melissa Dzinoreva, for her patience and generosity in sharing her language with us. This paper grew out of a field methods class at Pomona College (LGCS 125) that was taught in spring 2022; we thank all the participants, and Julia Qian in particular, who helped with eliciting several of the constructions described here. Thanks too to the editors and two anonymous reviewers whose comments substantially improved the paper, and Pomona College for generously supporting this project. Any errors remain our own.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- New perspectives on morphosyntactic variation in African youth language practices
- Theoretical considerations on linguistic innovation through new combinations in African youth language practices, exemplified in Yanké and Langila (DR Congo)
- The use of the narrative final vowel -á by the Lingala-speaking youth of Kinshasa: from anterior to near/recent past
- On the development of tense-aspect markers in Lingala youth language: a microvariationist look at language change in the verb phrase
- Innovative use of Shona ideophones within an adolescent community of practice
- Encoding politeness in African urban youth languages: evidence from Southern Africa
- Noun classes, variation, and creativity in youth language practices in Zimbabwe and Tanzania
- Linguistic variation in urban vernaculars and rural and urban youth language in South Africa
- Verbal extensions in Sheng: an examination of variation in form and function
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- New perspectives on morphosyntactic variation in African youth language practices
- Theoretical considerations on linguistic innovation through new combinations in African youth language practices, exemplified in Yanké and Langila (DR Congo)
- The use of the narrative final vowel -á by the Lingala-speaking youth of Kinshasa: from anterior to near/recent past
- On the development of tense-aspect markers in Lingala youth language: a microvariationist look at language change in the verb phrase
- Innovative use of Shona ideophones within an adolescent community of practice
- Encoding politeness in African urban youth languages: evidence from Southern Africa
- Noun classes, variation, and creativity in youth language practices in Zimbabwe and Tanzania
- Linguistic variation in urban vernaculars and rural and urban youth language in South Africa
- Verbal extensions in Sheng: an examination of variation in form and function
