On the development of tense-aspect markers in Lingala youth language: a microvariationist look at language change in the verb phrase

1 Introduction: youth language in the Lingala-speaking areas in Central Africa

African youth language^[1] practices have increasingly come into the focus of linguists over the past 20 years, including the speech styles of young speakers of Lingala, a contact language widely spoken in Central Africa (with an estimated 45 million speakers; see Figure 1 for an overview). In recent years, the study of youth language has been approached from different directions, depending on the research focus and interest, mainly using sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological approaches. In contrast, this paper examines Lingala youth language with a structural interest in recent changes in the tense and aspect system, seen through the lens of microvariation.

Figure 1:

The approximate area where the Bantu language Lingala is spoken.

The Lingala variety that is used in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (and, while slightly different, in Brazzaville, the capital of neighboring Congo) is the most widespread dialect of the language, especially in popular culture, mass media, police and military forces, and also among diaspora speakers. It serves as the main “template” of comparison for specific morphological markers in this paper. However, it has not been fully standardized, despite Congolese linguists’ meetings in the 1970s. The notion of one “standard” and different “nonstandard” varieties as is common with other languages in the Bantu area therefore does not exactly apply to Lingala (see also Nassenstein and Shinagawa in press; and also footnote 6).

Lingala ya Bayankee or Yanké (hereafter abbreviated LyB/Y), literally “the Lingala of the Yankees”, is a variety of Lingala used by several thousand young people in Kinshasa (and also in Kisangani, where it is commonly known as Kindoubil; see Wilson 2015) and has a high degree of relexification and linguistic creativity (for available works, see Kunzmann 2022; Nassenstein 2014, 2020, 2022; van Pelt 2000). In recent years, since the publication of a much-cited survey article by Kießling and Mous (2004), it has come more into scholarly focus (see also Kunzmann 2024).

Langila, the second variety studied here,^[2] is a language game or play language based on LyB/Y, initiated by young dancers and choreographers, musicians, painters, university students, and others, and now used predominantly in digital communication via social media rather than in offline interactions. In some respects, Langila (itself a metathesis from Lingala) copies semantic manipulation strategies from LyB/Y.^[3] In other respects, Langila exhibits a high degree of unique phonological and lexical operations that have only been rudimentarily summarized in a single paper (Nassenstein 2015), but have been mentioned in several others (e.g., Sene Mongaba 2015).

In this short paper, I examine how LyB/Y differs from its base language, Kinshasa Lingala (KL), and from other Lingala youth languages such as Langila in terms of two temporal/aspectual categories, namely the near or immediate future and the progressive aspect. I also show how this can be analyzed using a microvariation approach to morphosyntactic change in youth languages (Marten et al. 2007; Shinagawa and Abe 2019; among others). Similarly, I am interested in how grammaticalization in the verb phrase can contrast or overlap with processes of general morphosyntactic change in the Bantu language Lingala. This article presents some tense-aspect markers that behave differently in two varieties of Lingala, namely LyB/Y and Langila (youth languages), helping us to understand within a microvariationist perspective how young speakers’ language use deviates from the common urban variety in Kinshasa. It not only contributes to the field of “youth language” studies in two ways – presenting fresh data on two understudied Lingala-based youth languages and conceptualizing “youth languages” as more than a collection of lexical items or manipulative morphological deviations – but also to the theoretical framework of “microvariation”, so far investigated by drawing on well-known language groups (such as Germanic and Romance languages).

Methodologically, data on LyB/Y were collected in Kinshasa in the DR Congo (a total corpus of several hours of recordings was produced) and include ethnographic fieldwork (between 2009 and 2012), qualitative interviews with street youth in Kinshasa (in March 2022), recorded dialogue, and social media data. Data on Langila include interviews with speakers (collected primarily in 2010) and a corpus of more than 17 h of video footage from YouTube and other online media. Sets of sentences and dialogues were also collected.

2 General morphosyntactic changes in Lingala ya Bayankee/Yanké

In addition to changes in the use and formation of tense-aspect markers and processes of grammaticalization, LyB/Y exhibits numerous morphosyntactic changes (beyond the often-cited “deliberate manipulations” in phonology, morphology, and semantics that range prominently among scholars), which will be listed here only briefly. One example is changes in the noun class system, where noun class 7a (marked with the prefix ki-) has taken over new functions and noun class 12 (marked with the diminutive prefix ka-) is productive in contrast to ordinary Lingala. In addition, French lexemes and definite articles are frequently borrowed or adopted as a whole, as in lifanto ‘child’ (French l’enfant), lemoro ‘mother, elderly woman’ (French la mère), and lapolis ‘police’ (French la police), affecting the noun class assignment and number marking of these nouns. There is a slight tendency towards analytic constructions in derivational processes in the verb phrase (as analyzed by Kunzmann 2022). There are also changes in the tense-aspect-mood system, such as the realization of certain affixes or emergent and grammaticalized markers, as studied in the present paper. For a brief overview of morphosyntactic changes in LyB/Y, see Nassenstein (2022).

3 Grammaticalization chains and grammatical transfer

Comparatively few contributions to date have examined morphosyntactic variation in African youth language practices beyond the general interest in linguistic “manipulations”; these notable exceptions in the growing literature on African youth and their language practices include Gunnink (2014) for South African tsotsitaal in Soweto, Nassenstein (2014) for LyB/Y from western Congo, Shinagawa (2019 and others) for Kenya’s Sheng, and Mulumbwa (2009) for Kindubile from southeastern Congo (to name just a few). The reader of this special issue may wonder why the study of youth languages spoken in Africa might benefit from adopting a microvariation framework that has often been applied previously to Germanic and Romance languages, and more recently to other Bantu languages, by examining specific parameters of morphosyntactic variation (e.g., in Southern Bantu languages by Lee et al. 2021). Barbiers (2008: 4) is in favor of examining syntactic microvariation and suggests that

more fine-grained data are necessary to investigate minor morphosyntactic differences between closely related language varieties, and the number of data and language varieties involved should be large enough to test hypothesized correlations in a reliable way. In the words of Kayne, large-scale microcomparative syntactic research comes closest to a language laboratory where one could do experiments with languages by altering minor properties of a language and observe which other properties change as a result of this.

In this context, documented youth varieties of well-described Bantu languages provide a solid basis for microvariationist analyses in nominal morphology, verbal morphology, and syntax. In particular, the relatively well-documented cross-varietal forms and structures in language groups such as Sabaki (with Swahili), Nguni (with isiZulu), and so on, therefore provide good “laboratory conditions” for these fine-grained inter-varietal studies in Barbiers’s sense. For the study of Lingala, the microvariationist perspective may mean examining the expression of certain grammatical features in closely related varieties that have only slightly divergent features. In the present case, this is illustrated by examining tense and aspect in two youth languages or registers. Specifically, this paper is concerned with the near or immediate future tense and the progressive aspect, which in KL both occur in the same pre-stem slot, unlike other tense-aspect categories, as Meeuwis (2020: 147) summarizes: “Most [tense-aspect-mood markers] are placed after the verbal root or base. Exceptions are the future marker -ko- and the contracted form of the present progressive -zô-, both prefixes placed after the SM [subject marker] and before the reflexive anaphora when it is used.” Both tense-aspect categories have given rise to new and different realizations in youth speech, which hypothetically can also be attributed to the pre-stem position in which both are marked.

Grammaticalization scenarios for both tense-aspect markers are common in Bantu languages (and beyond), as seen in numerous linguistic contexts. The specific case that occurs in LyB/Y, where two verbs kokende (used in all varieties) and kodyé (its creative manipulation in LyB/Y) that denote ‘to go’ are grammaticalized to a near or immediate future tense, does not occur in the urban variety KL. However, crosslinguistically, this is a common process in which “a form used for an action (‘to go’) is also used to denote a grammatical concept (future tense)” (Kuteva et al. 2019: 4). The same authors list the source “go to” and the target “future” (Kuteva et al. 2019: 468) as recurrent developments.

Already in common KL, the urban base language, the progressive is expressed with an auxiliary construction that was grammaticalized and contracted. The prefix zô- emerged as a contracted form of prefix ko- (infinitive) and -zalí (copula; for a more detailed analysis, see Meeuwis 2020: 50).^[4] Regarding the progressive aspect, which has a number of variants in LyB/Y and in Langila, it should be noted that in the two youth language practices, speakers modify and diversify these contraction processes, resulting in different, slightly divergent forms – with different semantics. Langila speakers, as will be shown below, build on and develop LyB/Y speakers’ modifications. That speakers of Lingala varieties use variants of a grammaticalized auxiliary construction is not surprising, for “progressives are expressed differently in Bantu … from ‘have/with being’; [or] visibly derived from locatives … [i.e., a] construction can be rendered as ‘to be in/at verb-ing’” (Nurse 2008: 139). In Lingala, it is the auxiliary of ‘to be’ which plays a central role. Kuteva et al. (2019: 130) give the grammaticalization path “copula, locative > (5) progressive: … Lingala -zala ‘be at’, copula > durative auxiliary” as a typical case – while the copula is indeed involved in Lingala, locatives are not. In the following, we discuss the two recent innovations in tense-aspect aspectual forms with concrete examples.

4 A glimpse at Langila: “same-same or different?”

It is promising to check whether the youth language Langila, which developed in response to and often structurally builds on the much older LyB/Y, exhibits similar examples of grammaticalization and grammatical transfer. While LyB/Y has numerous examples of contractions and truncated grammatical markers, Langila tends to replace lexical stems with partially homophonic nouns (names of people, places, products, etc.), often leaving the grammatical bound morphemes of a word unaffected. Based on elicitations (and construction of Langila sentences), attempts were made to express the near or immediate future with either koaleman ‘to go’ (equivalent and manipulated form of kokende) or kodieudonné (equivalent and manipulated form of kodyé). In examples (20) and (21) it becomes obvious that these verbs only mean ‘to go’ but never express a (grammaticalized) near or immediate future (see the forms marked with asterisk). Example (22) shows the pattern of future tense formation in Langila as invariant, always using of the prefixed tense marker ko- as in KL (neither of the two other forms would work here). The last line of the examples shows where some of the words originally derive from.

In terms of the progressive aspect, it will be interesting to see which variant Langila speakers use and whether they also use the prefix zô- or a shortened ô-, and also whether a periphrastic copula + (already) + connective + infinitive is used as in LyB/Y. Examples (23)–(25) show that Langila tends to use more analytic structures (analogous to those used in Missionary Lingala and other languages) with a variety of lexical substitutions replacing copula forms (KL naké → Langila nazarias, nazaire, nazaiko; all reminiscent of different names beginning with za-)^[12] and followed by an infinitive. Example (26) shows a (shorter) synthetic form aô followed by a verb stem, which seems to have been introduced by analogy with and based on the LyB/Y prefix ô-.

For the second type of construction recurring in LyB/Y (expressing a progressive perfect or iamitive aspect), there are no attested forms in Langila; see (27) for an ungrammatical elicited example rejected by speakers.

Why are there different variants of how the progressive aspect can be expressed in Langila, with numerous analytic or periphrastic constructions using the verbs -zaire, -zarias, or -zaiko plus infinitive, but also synthetic or contracted forms like aô, while LyB/Y (as has been shown) clearly favors synthetic progressive markers (unless a particular semantic reading is intended)? Or, put another way, acknowledging lexical creativity in Langila, why would speakers simply tend to use a form aô as in (26) instead of the more lexically innovative forms in (23)–(25), that is, -zaire, -zaiko, or -zarias?

The answer has to do with the segmentation of words by Langila speakers, which they then playfully substitute. They first define what is a functioning “syllable” that can be (partially) replaced by a similar-sounding name or suffix. The Lingala verb -zal ‘be’ can easily be replaced by -zaire, -zaiko, or -zarias, and even the contracted prefix zô- in KL can be replaced by -zaire and other creative lexemes because of its partial homophony due to syllable onset. However, this no longer works when Langila speakers encounter the contracted LyB/Y progressive form ô-. Speakers no longer consider sp+ô-a “substitutable” syllable for further creative operations because of its brevity, and thus retain aô for third person singular progressive and baô for third person plural progressive. Other combinations of subject prefix and progressive form are then formed analogously, as seen in (28a)–(28g), at times with ambiguous results (e.g., in second person singular ô bayern ‘you are drinking’ the subject prefix and tense-aspect marker merge, and progressive aspect is no longer unambiguous because of the omission of most other tense and aspect markers in Langila).

This shows that Langila speakers build on and modify some structures of the other youth language LyB/Y speakers, but that some features in Langila in verbal morphology have emerged independently of developments in LyB/L (following other motivations).

5 Concluding thoughts: microvariation and interdependencies of youth language

A closer look at specific structural phenomena in youth languages from the Bantu area can help to trace how certain bound morphemes or periphrastic structures are transferred, modified, or substituted in related youth language practices based on (or “modeled” on) the same language. This also means, as has been shown to some extent in this paper on LyB/Y and Langila, that a focus on similarities and differences in particular registers or varieties can help to identify dependencies and connections between youth languages (as also discussed to some extent by Kunzmann 2024). In cases where grammaticalized forms of an emergent immediate future tense show recent developments, or where young people’s choices from a range of variants expressing a progressive aspect show tendencies for two different construction types to dominate their language, sociolinguistic overview studies based on ethnographic research or focusing on deliberate manipulative strategies will not be very helpful in tracing such kinds of linguistic change.

In the case of the Congolese youth languages Langila and LyB/Y, the relationship is clear (and less complex than, say, between South African youth languages), and analysis has shown that language change in the verb phrase does not occur to the same extent or in the same way; however, a fine-grained analysis of specific morphosyntactic features has yet to be done.

New horizons in studies of microvariation in African youth languages could be a focus on variation between speakers and the innovation and diffusion of specific new forms, or comparison of “similar” youth languages in different geographical areas (e.g., Kinshasa, Kisangani, and Brazzaville for Lingala-speaking youth), as tentatively done for Swahili by Nassenstein and Bose (2020). In addition, a focus on microvariation in Lingala youth language could shed light on the impact of Lingala on Swahili-based youth language practices in eastern DR Congo (e.g., Yabacrâne and Kindubile). Finally, we can ask: what can microvariationist youth language studies in Lingala tell us about linguistic variation and change in other Bantu languages (of wider communication)?