Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change [1 ed.] 9781138596092, 9781032222080

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Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change

This volume provides a systematic comparative treatment of urban contact dialects in the Global North and South, examining the emergence and development of these dialects in major cities in sub-Saharan Africa and North-Western Europe. The book’s focus on contemporary urban settings sheds light on the new language practices and mixed ways of speaking resulting from large-scale migration and the intense contact that occurs between new and existing languages and dialects in these contexts. In comparing these new patterns of language variation and change between cities in both Africa and Europe, the volume affords us a unique opportunity to examine commonalities in linguistic phenomena as well as sociolinguistic differences in societally multilingual settings and settings dominated by a strong monolingual habitus. These comparisons are reinforced by a consistent chapter structure, with each chapter presenting the linguistic and social context of the region, information on available data (including corpora), sociolinguistic and structural findings, a discussion of the status of the urban contact dialect, and its stability over time. The discussion in the book is further enriched by short commentaries from four researchers contributing different theoretical and geographical perspectives. Taken as a whole, the book offers new insights into migration-based linguistic diversity and patterns of language variation and change, making this ideal reading for students and scholars in general linguistics and language structure, sociolinguistics, creole studies, diachronic linguistics, language acquisition, anthropological linguistics, language education and discourse analysis. Paul Kerswill is Emeritus Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of York, UK. His research focuses particularly on dialect and language contact resulting from migration. With Jenny Cheshire, Sue Fox and Eivind Torgersen, he has published “Contact, the Feature Pool and the Speech Community: The emergence of Multicultural London English” (Journal of Sociolinguistics). Heike Wiese is Professor of German in Multilingual Contexts and founder of the Centre “Language in Urban Diversity” at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Her 2012 monograph on Kiezdeutsch as a new German dialect received national and international media attention, and raised awareness of urban contact dialects as a legitimate part of the linguistic landscape.

Routledge Studies in Language Change Edited by Isabelle Buchstaller Leipzig University

Suzanne Evans Wagner Michigan State University

Panel Studies of Variation and Change Edited by Suzanne Evans Wagner and Isabelle Buchstaller Language Variation and Change in Social Networks A Bipartite Approach By Robin Dodsworth and Richard Benton Standardization as Sociolinguistic Change A Transversal Study of Three Traditional Dialect Areas Edited by Marie Maegaard, Malene Monka, Kristine Køhler Mortensen and Andreas Candefors Stæhr Language Variation and Language Change Across the Lifespan Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives from Panel Studies Edited by Karen V. Beaman and Isabelle Buchstaller Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change Insights from the Global North and South Edited by Paul Kerswill and Heike Wiese

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Language-Change/bookseries/RSLC

Urban Contact Dialects and Language Change Insights from the Global North and South Edited by Paul Kerswill and Heike Wiese

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Paul Kerswill and Heike Wiese; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Paul Kerswill and Heike Wiese to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-59609-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-22208-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-48795-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Pieter Muysken (1950–2021).

Contents

List of figuresx List of tablesxi List of contributorsxii Acknowledgementsxviii Introduction

1

PAUL KERSWILL AND HEIKE WIESE

PART A

Multilingual societal habitus9   1 Cameroon: Camfranglais

11

ROLAND KIESSLING

  2 Democratic Republic of the Congo: Lingala ya Bayankee/Yanké

28

NICO NASSENSTEIN

  3 Senegal: Urban Wolof then and now

47

FIONA MC LAUGHLIN

  4 South Africa: Tsotsitaal and urban vernacular forms of South African languages

66

ELLEN HURST-HAROSH

  5 Ghana: Ghanaian Student Pidgin English

86

DOROTHY POKUA AGYEPONG AND NANA ABA APPIAH AMFO

  6 Kenya: Sheng and Engsh MAARTEN MOUS AND SANDRA BARASA

105

viii  Contents   7 Finland: Old Helsinki slang

125

HEINI LEHTONEN AND HEIKKI PAUNONEN

Commentaries143   8 Baby steps in decolonising linguistics: Urban language research

145

MIRIAM MEYERHOFF

  9 Variation, complexity and the richness of urban contact dialects

158

JOSEPH SALMONS

PART B

Monolingual societal habitus165 10 Tanzania: Lugha ya Mitaani

167

UTA REUSTER-JAHN AND ROLAND KIESSLING

11 Denmark: Danish urban contact dialects

186

PIA QUIST

12 Norway: Contemporary urban speech styles

206

BENTE A. SVENDSEN

13 The Netherlands: Urban contact dialects

223

FRANS HINSKENS, KHALID MOURIGH AND PIETER MUYSKEN

14 Sweden: Suburban Swedish

246

JOHAN GROSS AND SALLY BOYD

15 France: Youth vernaculars in Paris and surroundings

264

FRANÇOISE GADET

16 United Kingdom: Multicultural London English

282

PAUL KERSWILL

17 Germany: Kiezdeutsch YAZGÜL ŞIMŞEK AND HEIKE WIESE

300

Contents ix

Commentaries323 18 Ethnolects, multiethnolects and urban contact dialects: Looking forward, looking back, looking around

325

DAVID BRITAIN

19 Migrants and urban contact sociolinguistics in Africa and Europe

337

RAJEND MESTHRIE

Index344

Figures

0.1  Advertisements in Dar es Salaam 1 180 10.2  Billboard in Dar es Salaam 181 13.1 The locations of the cities and towns discussed in this chapter 228 13.2 A receipt from an originally L2 Dutch speaking tailor, illustrating phonological reanalysis of the /ɑ-a/ contrast and variation in inflectional gender marking 233 17.1 Responses to 2017 Census question on “the language most frequently spoken at home”: number of all households with at least one person having a migration background301 17.2  Kiezdeutsch in public spaces 313

Tables

4.1 Languages of South African provinces 66 5.1 Stage at which respondent started speaking GSPE (Achimota Senior High School) 99 5.2 Stage at which respondent started speaking GSPE (University of Ghana) 99 5.3 Frequency with which speakers use GSPE in places other than schools (University of Ghana students) 100 6.1 Sheng’s imperfective suffix -ang110 6.2 Sheng’s diminutive ka- and tu-111 6.3 Changing Sheng vocabulary over time and within different neighbourhoods 114 7.1 Population of Helsinki and distribution of first languages from 1870 to 2018 126 11.1 List of studies of urban contact dialects in Denmark with indication of type(s) of data 189 11.2 Categorisation of participants according to amount of Funen intonation and staccato-like prosody combined, sorted according to quartile distribution 198 11.3 Value binaries associated with integrated and street 200 13.1 Population categories of the Netherlands in 2018 in official statistics 225 13.2 Speaker design in the Roots study 229 13.3 Main findings regarding the three sets of research questions for four linguistic variables in the Roots study 239 14.1 Most common countries of birth for foreign-born residents in Sweden and Gothenburg, 2017 247 16.1 Total and foreign-born population of the UK and London, 1951–2017 283 16.2 H-dropping (%) in Hackney and Havering from the Innovators project and in young speakers in Hackney/ Islington/Haringey from the MLE project288

Contributors

Dorothy Pokua Agyepong is a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics, University of Ghana. She holds a PhD from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research interests include semantics and pragmatics of African languages, syntax, gesture studies and the socio­ linguistics of urban youth (contact) languages. Her current research projects investigate the effect of age and culture on co-speech gestures in Asante-Twi oral narratives, and gestural variation in multilingual speakers of Educated Ghanaian Pidgin English. Her recent works have appeared in Nordic Journal of Linguistics (NJAS) and Journal of West African Languages (JWAL). Nana Aba Appiah Amfo is a former professor of linguistics at the University of Ghana. She holds a PhD from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include multilingualism, and language use in specific domains such as health, religion, politics and migration. Current research projects include documenting trends and transitions in sociolinguistic studies in post-colonial Africa, and investigating gestural variation in multilingual speakers of Educated Ghanaian Pidgin English. Her recent publications have appeared in Current Issues in Language Planning, Communication  & Medicine, Multilingual Margins, and International Journal of Language and Culture. In October 2021, she was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana. Sandra Barasa is a senior lecturer at Radboud University’s In’To Languages, in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD from Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), where she published a book on Language, Mobile Phones and Internet: A Study of SMS Texting, Email, IM and SNS Chats in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) in Kenya. Her research focus is in sociolinguistics, broadly including youth languages, multilingualism, language contact, language use in social media and in entertainment; all in relation to African languages. Her recent publications have appeared in Journal of Pidgins and Creole Languages and The Routledge Handbook of African Linguistics.

Contributors xiii Sally Boyd is Professor Emerita in general linguistics at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research has been mainly in the fields of sociolinguistics and bilingualism. Themes include language maintenance and shift, language attrition, attitudes to foreign accent, national language policy, language alternation in conversation, variation and change in language contact, as well as micro language policy in interaction. She has conducted sociolinguistically oriented research among bi- and multilingual children, young people and adults primarily in Sweden, but also in Australia and in other countries in the Nordic Region, particularly Finland. David Britain has been Professor of Modern English linguistics at the University of Bern since 2010. His research interests embrace language variation and change, varieties of English (especially in Southern England, the Southern Hemisphere and the Pacific), dialect contact and attrition, dialect ideologies, the use of new technologies in collecting dialect data as well as the dialectology-human geography interface, especially with respect to space/place, urban/rural and the role of mobilities. Françoise Gadet is Professor Emerita in sociolinguistics at the Université Paris Nanterre. Her pioneering research has focused on language use and syntactic variation of contemporary French. Research themes include methodology in sociolinguistics, registers and styles, language contact and Multicultural Paris French. Most influential monographs include Le Français ordinaire (1997), La variation sociale en français (2003/2007), Le Français populaire (1992), Le français en contact avec d’autres langues (with Ralph Ludwig, 2015) and Les Parlers jeunes dans l’Ile-de-France multiculturelle (2017). Johan Gross is a senior lecturer in Swedish as a second language at University West in Trollhättan, Sweden. He has primarily carried out sociophonetic studies focusing on language variation and change in Gothenburg and Stockholm, and in particular how language and dialect contact interact in multilingual neighbourhoods in the two cities. Other areas where he conducts research include language ideologies, and, from a sociolinguistic perspective, how language norms and ideologies affect people with dyslexia. Frans Hinskens is a senior research fellow at the Department of Variation Linguistics at Meertens Instituut, Amsterdam, and a professor of language variation and language contact at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. He is one of the founders and a member of the international scientific committee of the International Conference on Language Variation in Europe. He is the founder of the book series Studies in Language Variation (Benjamins), which he edits with Peter Auer and Paul Kerswill. His research interests include sound change and

xiv  Contributors ethnolectal variation, as well as the conceptual and methodological tensions between dialectology, sociolinguistics and contact linguistics on the one hand and formal theory on the other. Ellen Hurst-Harosh is Associate Professor in the Humanities Education Development Unit at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She holds a PhD in linguistics from UCT. Her research focuses on African youth language practices, including stylects and registers, as well as translanguaging pedagogies and the use of African languages in higher education. Recent publications include the monograph Tsotsitaal in South Africa: Style and Metaphor in Youth Language Practices (Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2020) and two edited collections African Youth Languages: New Media, Performing Arts and Sociolinguistic Development (with Fridah Kanana, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Sociolinguistics in African Contexts: Perspectives and Challenges (with Augustin Ebonguè, Springer, 2017). Paul Kerswill is Emeritus Professor of sociolinguistics at the University of York, UK. His research focuses particularly on dialect and language contact resulting from migration. He has researched the speech of rural migrants in the Norwegian city of Bergen, the English of young people in the New Town of Milton Keynes and the emergence of Multicultural London English. Over many years he has developed a parallel interest in sociolinguistic issues in West Africa, particularly in development contexts. With Salifu Mahama, he has published ‘Ethnicity, conflict and language choice: the case of northern Ghana’ in the Routledge Handbook of Language in Conflict. Roland Kießling is Professor of African linguistics at the University of Hamburg. He specialises in descriptive and historical (socio)linguistics with a focus on Bantoid languages of the Grassfields in Cameroon and Southern Cushitic and Southern Nilotic languages of Tanzania. Heini Lehtonen is a sociolinguist whose research interests include multi­ lingual interaction, language ideologies and language awareness, as well as multilingualism in education and teaching. She has carried out and participated in research projects focusing on interaction and linguistic variation in East Helsinki, especially in schools. Lehtonen is currently working as a senior lecturer of university pedagogy at the University of Helsinki. Fiona Mc Laughlin is Professor of linguistics and African languages at the University of Florida. She has published extensively on the sociolinguistics and morphophonology of the Atlantic languages, including Wolof, and she edited the 2008 volume The Languages of Urban Africa (Continuum). Her current research takes an interdisciplinary approach to urban language, and she is also interested in the

Contributors xv sociolinguistics of vernacular writing in the Sahel, the Sahara and the Maghrib. She is a former director of the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal, and has taught at universities in Senegal and Niger. Rajend Mesthrie is Emeritus Professor of linguistics at the University of Cape Town. He was head of the Linguistics Section (1998–2009), and currently holds an NRF research chair in Migration, Language, and Social Change. He was president of the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa (2002–9), a co-editor of English Today (2008–2012) and president of the International Congress of Linguists (2013–2018). Amongst his book publications are Language in South Africa (ed., 2002), World Englishes (with Rakesh Bhatt 2008), A Dictionary of South African Indian English (2010) and A Handbook of Sociolinguistics (ed., 2011). Miriam Meyerhoff is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the linguistic and social dimensions of language variation, especially in contexts of language or dialect contact. She works mainly in Vanuatu, but also Bequia (St Vincent & the Grenadines), Auckland (New Zealand) and Edinburgh and London (UK). Khalid Mourigh obtained his PhD on the grammar of Ghomara Berber at the University of Leiden in 2015. From 2014 until 2017, he conducted research on the phonetics of Moroccan Dutch in Gouda. He is a nonfiction writer, translates from Berber into Dutch and lectures about straattaal in secondary schools in the Netherlands. Maarten Mous is Professor of African linguistics at Leiden University. His research is clustered around four themes: Cushitic languages, language and identity, diathesis and derivation, and Bantu languages. He worked on the Cushitic languages Iraqw, Alagwa and Konso, and his current project is on the linguistic history of East Africa. The Bantu languages that he has published on are Tunen (Cameroon), Mbugu, Pare and Mbugwe (all Tanzania). His research on language and identity derives from his interest in the mixed language Ma’a/ Mbugu and continued with a typological study of African urban youth languages. Pieter Muysken was Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. His research focused on the ways that human languages interact, and the contact-induced language change that results from this interaction. Muysken developed different formal models of language to study these processes of contact. He carried out fieldwork in the Andes and the Caribbean, as well as with bilingual groups in the Netherlands.​He died in April 2021.

xvi  Contributors Nico Nassenstein is Junior Professor of African languages and linguistics at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, JGU Mainz. Before obtaining a PhD from the University of Cologne, he studied youth language practices in DR  Congo. He currently works in the fields of sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics/linguistic anthropology and pragmatics, with a focus on Bantu languages from East and Central Africa. He is series editor of the book series “Anthropological Linguistics” (Mouton de Gruyter) and editor of the journal The Mouth. Two of his most recent books include Swearing and Cursing (co-edited with Anne Storch, Mouton de Gruyter, 2020) and Metasex (co-authored with Anne Storch, John Benjamins, 2020). Heikki Paunonen is an emeritus professor of Finnish language at Tampere University and holds the title of docent at the University of Helsinki. His research on sociolinguistic variation of spoken language in Helsinki is groundbreaking for the field in Finland. He has gathered, documented and researched Helsinki slang, both the old Helsinki slang and newer slang, since the 1970s. He continues to organise events for the collection of slang words in schools. Pia Quist is Professor of sociolinguistics and dialectology at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics. Quist is interested in language in the broad sense from structure to discourse, including sociolinguistics, multilingualism, dialects, language and gender, youth language, language and place and mobility. Since 1998, she has published more than 70 research articles and monographs on multiethnolects, stylistic practice, variation and social meaning, and language and place. She is an experienced PI and work package leader, e.g. of projects on language and place, language and social mobility and, in collaboration with Museum Copenhagen, “The Sound of Copenhagen”. Uta Reuster-Jahn is a lecturer in Swahili at the Asien-Afrika-Institut of Hamburg University. She holds a PhD from Johannes-GutenbergUniversity, Mainz (Germany). She has co-authored, with Roland Kießling, Lugha ya Mitaani in Tanzania – The Poetics and Sociology of a Young Urban Style of Speaking (2006) and co-edited, among others, Bongo Media Worlds. Producing and Consuming Popular Culture in Dar es Salaam (2014). Her research interests are on Tanzanian Swahili literature, youth language practices in Tanzania, Bongo Flava music and story-telling. Joseph Salmons is the Lester W.J. “Smoky” Seifert Professor of Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. With Jim Leary, he co-founded the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures and edited Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics from 2002 until 2019. He is the author of A History of German:

Contributors xvii What the Past Reveals about Today’s Language (Oxford, second edition 2018) and Sound Change (2021, Edinburgh University Press). His research focuses on language change and linguistic theory, especially sound systems. Yazgül Şimşek has studied German language, Turkish and phonetics at the University of Hamburg. She completed her doctorate in 2009 at the University of Potsdam, with her thesis analysing the role of prosody in natural interactions among Turkish-German bilingual adolescents in the city of Berlin. Working at the German Department of the University of Potsdam between 2004 and 2014, her main research was on the acquisition of orthography and written language in contexts of migration and multilingualism. Currently she is a lecturer in the German Department of the University of Münster and is continuing research and teaching on the acquisition and use of German as a second language. Bente A. Svendsen is Professor of SLA and Scandinavian linguistics at the University of Oslo, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway. She initiated and co-developed the Centre for Multilingualism in Society Across the Lifespan, a Centre of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Norway. Svendsen investigates multilingualism across the lifespan. In the award-winning article “The dynamics of citizen sociolinguistics”, she has furthered Citizen Science in sociolinguistics. Svendsen engages in public outreach activities in a variety of channels, e.g. a language exhibition, a language lounge, radio and TV programs, films and podcasts as well as in national, regional and local newspapers and magazines. Heike Wiese is Professor of German in Multilingual Contexts and founder of the Centre “Language in Urban Diversity” at HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin. She is interested in the dynamics of multilingual settings, with foci on grammatical-pragmatic interfaces and linguistic architecture, and on monolingual ideologies, linguistic discrimination and empowerment. Her 2012 monograph on Kiezdeutsch as a new German dialect received national and international media attention, and raised awareness of urban contact dialects as a legitimate part of the linguistic landscape. Further research areas include heritage speakers’ repertoires, urban markets as metrolingual sites and Namibian German. In outreach activities, she cooperates with communities, kindergartens and schools, educational policy makers and museums.

Acknowledgements

First, we would like to thank the series editors for their prompt and constructive input at every stage, and indeed for suggesting the topic in the first place. Our clear-sighted student assistant, Kathleen Sinclair, kept us on the straight and narrow; we owe her a great debt of gratitude. Towards the end of the project, Gerard Hearne was able to apply his long experience as an editor in efficiently getting the volume ready for publication; he, too, deserves special thanks.

Funding Research for this volume was supported through funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), projects Z (WI 2155/10), P6 (WI 2155/11) and Pd (WI 2155/12) of the Research Unit “Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations”; and project A01 of the Collaborative Research Cluster “Limits of Variability in Language” (CRC 1287; project 317633480).

Introduction Paul Kerswill and Heike Wiese

1  Urban contact dialects Urban settings have always been a hotbed of language variation and change. The great diversity of people and backgrounds we find in cities makes such settings particularly linguistically dynamic. In the melting pot of cities, speakers can draw on a wealth of different languages, dialects and styles that support new linguistic practices, the emergence of new codes (styles, varieties, particularly among young people) and a generally faster pace of language development and change (see, for example, Mackey 2005; Vanderkerckhove 2010 for overviews). This is particularly evident in countries where societal multilingualism is the norm, as is the case of most (but by no means all) of Africa south of the Sahara; here, multilingual practices, including language mixing and code-switching, are a normal part of everyday interactions. The new styles and varieties which emerge in the dynamic linguistic contexts that characterise these countries exist alongside the typically extensive code-switching that is also characteristic of these societies. They also often have a long history of a century or more (see Beck 2010 for an overview and Mc Laughlin 2009 on urban Wolof). In contrast, in the ‘Global North’, especially Europe, most societies are still dominated by a strong monolingual habitus (Gogolin 1994, 2002; see later in this Introduction) that takes monolingualism as the norm and regards multilingual practices as deviant. This is, of course, in contrast to the linguistic reality; in particular, urban speech communities are increasingly multilingual and foster new and creative ways of speaking. In this volume, we take a unified view of urban contact dialects in such settings, which we define as: [U]rban vernaculars that emerged in contexts of migration-based linguistic diversity among locally born young people, marking their speakers as belonging to a multiethnic peer group. (Wiese forthcoming) DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-1

2  Paul Kerswill and Heike Wiese This definition is broad enough to capture phenomena from both global regions, and at the same time restrictive enough to distinguish the kind of language use we are interested in from, for instance, learner languages, pidgins and creoles. By using the term ‘dialect’, we aim to avoid a simple opposition between ‘style’ and ‘variety’ and, following traditional usages of this term, to bring together research on sociolinguistic aspects of language use and communicative practices (the style perspective) with that on grammatical and phonological aspects of the linguistic system and language change (the variety perspective). Among other things, this should lead to new insights into register differentiation, as well as shedding light on subtle grammatical and phonological patterns that characterise such urban contact dialects in addition to lexical ones. In Africa, urban contact dialects often take the form of mixed varieties, characterised by lexis from multiple source languages and a morphosyntactic base founded on an urban, nonstandard version of one of the more widely spoken languages. The morphosyntax may, nevertheless, take elements from other languages as well as containing what appear to be deliberate manipulations (such as verlan, or syllable reversal). Mixing may be so extreme that mutual intelligibility with the ‘matrix’ language (Myers-Scotton 2002) on which the variety is based is lost. When describing urban contact dialects in Europe, many researchers have adopted the term multiethnolect. This term was originally coined by Clyne (2000: 87) to refer to a new variety of the majority language which is used by several minority ethnic groups to express their minority status and/or as a reaction to that status to upgrade it. In some cases  .  .  . members of the dominant (ethnic) group, especially young people, share it with the ethnic minorities. . . . It is the expression of a new kind of group identity. Clyne here emphasises the identity-marking function of these varieties, especially for the youth. Clyne was writing about Australia, and the European situation is similar, with the difference that the urban contact varieties that have emerged in Europe are mainly found in neighbourhoods where many speakers have migration-based family ties to the ‘Global South’ – typically ex-colonies of the UK, France and the Netherlands – as well as to poorer countries bordering on or lying within Europe, especially Turkey and the former Yugoslavia. Both the African and European varieties are used in multilingual communities in the ethnically and linguistically diverse context of urban neighbourhoods. European multiethnolects are typically closely aligned with a nonstandard variety of the majority language with which they share their grammatical, phonological and lexical base. Even though there are grammatical and phonetic innovations, some of which are cases of transfer from speakers’ first or heritage languages, these contact varieties generally

Introduction 3 retain mutual intelligibility with the majority language. As Wiese (forthcoming) argues, this difference from most African cases might be related to the prevailing monolingual societal habitus in Europe. Habitus can be defined as: “[a] set of acquired dispositions of thought, behaviour, and taste, which is said by Pierre Bourdieu (1977) to constitute the link between social structures and social practice” (Scott 2015). In countries with a monolingual habitus, there is a widespread disposition to act as if monolingualism was the normal state for a society, and as if the default was for everyone to be monolingual in a specific, national (or regional) language. The monolingual habitus engenders strong, dominant majority languages, and thus leaves less space for the emergence of mixed varieties. We should not, however, assume that the pervasive differences between European and African urban contact dialects are somehow universal – as studies reported in this volume make clear. Instead, we take this difference at the level of linguistic systems to reflect the sociolinguistic distinction between societal multilingualism and a societal monolingual habitus. In both the Global North and Global South, the linguistic creativity described earlier involves new patterns of language variation and change, drawing on existing, language-internal tendencies as well as the special linguistic dynamics of language contact settings. And in both the North and the South, part of the dynamics is also the degree of conscious identity work engaged in by the (usually young) speakers. The emerging or resulting varieties may thus encode an oppositional, ‘resistance identity’ (Castells 1997), or they may form part of a positive in-group identity. An outward manifestation of this is that many of these urban contact varieties are enregistered (Silverstein 2003; Johnstone et al. 2006). Thus, they may be given a name and become subject to media comment (Kießling and Mous 2004; Kerswill 2014; Wiese 2013, 2015; Cornips et al. 2015) as well as being used in music (Drummond 2016) and in social media (Deumert 2018), often self-consciously evoking identities and lifestyles and involving a certain amount of metacommentary (Kerswill 2013).

2  Comparative approaches to urban contact dialects Since the 1980s, there has been a strong research interest in these new ways of speaking, generating a wealth of studies with a particular focus on dynamic groups of young, adolescent speakers in the two general locales we have already mentioned: (Sub-Saharan) Africa and (NorthWest) Europe (e.g. Kotsinas 1988; Kembo-Sure 1992). The present volume aims to link up these lines of research, bringing together studies on the Global South and North. Previous comparative work includes Kießling and Mous (2004) and Dorleijn et al. (2015); Wiese (forthcoming) provides an integrative perspective. Indeed, even though there exist good descriptions of a number of contact dialects, there has not yet been a large-scale systematic comparison between those in the South and those

4  Paul Kerswill and Heike Wiese in the North, nor indeed within each region. All contributors to this volume have been asked to set out their descriptions in such a way that direct comparisons can be made, and to make some themselves.

3 The structure of the volume: multilingual versus monolingual orientations The book compares 15 case studies of urban contact dialects. As alluded to earlier, in line with our integrative perspective on urban contact dialects in the Global North and South, chapters are organised into the two parts of this book not by region, but by a multilingual versus a monolingual societal habitus. Part A brings together examples of the first kind of setting, with chapters on urban contact dialects in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Senegal, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya and Finland. Part B assembles examples of the second kind of setting, with chapters covering urban contact dialects in Tanzania, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, the UK and Germany. As this list makes clear, there is a large overlap with the regional dichotomy, due to the fact that the first is prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa and the second in North-Western Europe. However, as the examples of Finland and Tanzania show, there is no one-to-one correspondence. So, while there is a strong regional bias in each of the two parts, their organisational guiding principle transcends the distinction of Global South versus North. As mentioned earlier, the difference in societal macro-context can have an impact on the form of the urban contact dialect, and this can be seen by comparing the examples in the two parts. The urban contact dialects described in Part A emerged in societal contexts where multilingual practices are recognised as normal, and the mixing and integration of elements from diverse linguistic resources is common in daily life. In these settings, urban contact dialects can constitute new mixed codes. Such codes often include massive lexical transfer from a range of languages, as described for borrowing from Cameroonian Pidgin English and various Cameroonian languages into the local variety of French, producing Camfranglais (Chapter 1); relexification of the Bantu language Lingala in the Democratic Republic of Congo, giving rise to Lingala ya Bayankee (Chapter 2); borrowing from French across lexical categories into urban Wolof in Senegal (Chapter  3); borrowing from Kenyan languages and English into Swahili to produce Sheng, and borrowing from Swahili and other Kenyan languages into Kenyan English, producing Engsh in Kenya (Chapter 6); and the integration of Finnish, Swedish and Russian lexis in Old Helsinki Slang (Chapter 7). Lexical borrowing is found in South African Tsotsitaal, too, but here there is a set of lexical items which occur across varieties of Tsotsitaal, regardless of the syntactic frame, which may be that of Zulu, Xhosa or other languages (Chapter 4). By contrast, Ghanaian Student Pidgin English, which uniquely in our sample is an

Introduction 5 adaptation of an existing pidgin, varies lexically by geographical location and the language background of the speakers, who may incorporate words from languages such as Ga or Akan (Chapter 5). In addition, we see a fair amount of grammatical transfer and some syntactic restructuring (sometimes as a result of lexical borrowing), and this is found in all the cases described in Part A. It seems particularly true of Sheng in relation to its Swahili base. In contrast, the cases in Part B are from countries with a strong monolingual societal habitus. In such settings, the development of urban contact dialects is more restricted, since such multilingual practices as language mixing and integration are somewhat held back by societal norms, and there is a dominant majority language exerting a strong influence on language use even in informal everyday encounters. As a result, we find urban contact dialects that can be described as varieties of this majority language, and innovations are more restricted, mostly drawing on internal variation and change tendencies, while lexical borrowing is less extensive than in mixed codes. We find this in Lugha ya Mitaani in Tanzania (Chapter 10), which is grammatically close to Standard Swahili, and in modern urban contact dialects in Scandinavia, as described for Denmark (Chapter 11), Norway (Chapter 12) and Sweden (Chapter 14); this is also true for the Netherlands (Chapter 13), France (Chapter 15), the UK (Chapter 16) and Germany (Chapter 17). The examples described in Part B point to lexical borrowing from a range of heritage languages, and also to some grammatical innovations, so there is some similarity to the Part A cases, but such innovations are much more restricted under conditions of a monolingual habitus, and we find a stronger alignment with the majority language, making urban contact dialects part of the general spectrum of internal variation. Unlike the case for some of the varieties covered in Part A, there are generally few problems of mutual intelligibility beyond the use of some lexis (often age and group-related). The locations for the 15 studies have been chosen because previous literature shows they differ considerably even if they fall within the same category. In order to be able to contrast the different varieties in as systematic a way as possible, as already noted, we asked the chapter authors to follow a single template which laid down the number of sections and their headings. This makes it possible to make direct comparisons not only between the linguistic ecologies of each location (number of languages and speakers, their social and institutional roles etc.), but also with respect to the relevance and effect of different political and demographic factors in each society. It also makes it possible to directly compare linguistic innovations and changes across contact dialects. Detailed accounts of the sociolinguistics of each community provide information about ideologies surrounding the varieties, as well as about their users (especially in relation to gender and age), what social categories and characteristics they index, and the contexts in which they are used.

6  Paul Kerswill and Heike Wiese Each chapter is structured in such a way that comparisons across a large number of factors will be possible, while providing a discussion of theoretical issues arising from the particular studies that are reviewed. To date, many discussions of urban youth language focus on the use of new codes for identity construction in the immediate context of the conversations in which they occur, and as a consequence explore the alternation and mixing of elements from different languages in conversation. In a complementary approach to this, this volume focuses on linguistic descriptions of urban contact dialects, taking structural consequences of language contact into account, and integrating these with accounts of the (socio)linguistic conditions in which they emerged. As a consequence of this approach, we can talk more precisely about how these new urban dialects contribute to our picture of language variation and change. In addition, each author presents some of their original research. Many authors focus on the transition from ‘style’ to ‘variety’ or ‘vernacular’. This has the benefit of giving a clear picture of the first phase of these language varieties, providing a crucial comparative perspective. In addition, four commentary chapters by leading researchers with specialisations in each region provide a synthesis, while also bringing out new perspectives enabled by the comparisons. Two of the commentators are sociolinguists with a specialisation in language contact (Rajend Mesthrie and Joseph Salmons), while the other two come from a (more) quantitative variationist research tradition (David Britain and Miriam Meyerhoff). Between them they can be said to represent the orientations of the two parts of this volume. Each main chapter has the following sections: 1. Linguistic and social context • including social and demographic changes leading to the emergence of the community in which the contact variety is used 2. Empirical data •

including available corpora and how to access them

3. Structural findings • including changes (especially how the contact dialect takes up ongoing changes and/or linguistic features from other informal contexts) • matrix language 4. Sociolinguistic findings • including a discussion of the status of the urban contact dialect, i.e. the extent to which it might be based on stylised use of language, or whether it represents a register-specific choice for

Introduction 7

• •

informal situations, corresponding in some respects to a ‘vernacular’ in Labov’s sense (Labov 1972) users (social categories) indexicality and attitudes

For the discussion of both sociolinguistic and structural aspects, a shared focus is on quantitative findings. Some of the studies have recourse to a large, systematic sample of speakers, with linguistic features quantified and subjected to statistical analysis. All chapters provide succinct descriptions of variation in morphosyntax, phonology and lexis. Taken together, we hope this book will contribute to a more integrated conceptualisation of urban contact dialects, bringing together research on these interesting new ways of speaking from the Global South and North in a cohesive and fruitful way.

References Beck, Rose Marie (2010). Urban languages in Africa. Africa Spectrum 45: 11–41. DOI: 10.1177/000203971004500302. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511812507. Clyne, Michael (2000). Lingua franca and ethnolects in Europe and beyond. Sociolinguistica 14: 83–9. DOI: 10.1515/9783110245196.83. Cornips, Leonie, Jürgen Jaspers and Vincent de Rooij (2015). The politics of labelling youth vernaculars in the Netherlands and Belgium. In: Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century. Linguistic Practices across Urban Spaces. Jacomine Nortier and Bente A. Svendsen (eds.), 45–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/cbo9781139061896.004. Deumert, Ana (2018). Tsotsitaal online – the creativity of tradition. In: Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Cecilia Cutler and Unn Røyneland (eds.), 109–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781316135570.007. Dorleijn, Margreet, Maarten Mous and Jacomine Nortier (2015). Urban youth styles in Kenya and the Netherlands. In: Language, Youth, and Identity in the 21st Century. Jacomine Nortier and Bente A. Svendsen (eds.), 271–89. Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1017/cbo9781139061896.019. Gogolin, Ingrid (1994). Der monolinguale Habitus der multilingualen Schule. Münster: Waxmann. Gogolin, Ingrid (2002). Linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe: A challenge for educational research and practice. European Education and Research Journal 1(1): 123–38. DOI: 10.2304/eerj.2002.1.1.3. Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus and Andrew Danielson (2006). Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of “Pittsburghese”. Journal of English Linguistics 34: 77–104. DOI: 10.1177/0075424206290692. Kembo-Sure, Edward (1992). The coming of Sheng. English Today: 26–8. Kerswill, Paul (2013). Identity, ethnicity and place: The construction of youth language in London. In: Space in Language and Linguistics: Geographical,

8  Paul Kerswill and Heike Wiese Interactional, and Cognitive Perspectives.  Peter Auer, Martin Hilpert, Anja Stukenbrock and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (eds.), 128–64. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110312027. Kerswill, Paul (2014). The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: The discoursal embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In: The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.). 428–55. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110346831.427. Kießling, Roland and Maarten Mous (2004). Urban youth languages in Africa. Anthropological Linguistics 46: 303–41. Kotsinas, Ulla-Britt (1988). Immigrant children’s Swedish – a new variety? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 9(1–2): 129–40. DOI: 10.1080/01434632.1988.9994324. Labov, William (1972). Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in society 1: 97–120. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404500006576. Mackey, William F. (2005). Multilingual cities. In: Sociolinguistics. An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society. Volume 2/1 Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier and Peter Trudgill (eds.), 1304– 12 Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Mc Laughlin, Fiona (2009). Senegal’s early cities and the making of an urban language. In: The Languages of Urban Africa. Fiona Mc Laughlin (ed.), 71–85. London: Continuum. Scott, John (2015). A Dictionary of Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press (published online). DOI: 10.1093/acref/9780199683581.001.0001. Silverstein, Michael (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23: 193–229. DOI: 10.1016/ s0271-5309(03)00013-2. Vanderkerckhove, Reinhild (2010). Urban and rural language. In: Language and Space: Theories and Methods. Peter Auer and Jürgen Erich Schmidt (eds.), 315–32. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Wiese, Heike (2013). What can new urban dialects tell us about internal language dynamics? The power of language diversity. Linguistische Berichte 19: 208–45. Wiese, Heike (2015). ‘This migrant’s babble is not a German dialect!’ – The interaction of standard language ideology and ‘us’/‘them’ dichotomies in the public discourse on a multiethnolect. Language in Society 44: 341–68. DOI: 10.1017/ s0047404515000226. Wiese, Heike (forthcoming). Urban contact dialects. In: Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact. Salikoko Mufwene and Anna María Escobar (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part A

Multilingual societal habitus

1 Cameroon Camfranglais Roland Kießling

1  Linguistic and social context Camfranglais (CFA)1 has developed since the 1980s among the urban youth of Cameroon, especially in the cities of Douala and Yaoundé, as a hybrid language practice and an icon of urban adolescence. It owes its popularity to its potential to transcend boundaries imposed by social class, ethnicity and elitist norms of speaking enshrined in the overall exoglossic language policy that gives official status to the ex-colonial languages, French and English. The central African state of Cameroon is characterised by an enormous degree of internal linguistic diversity, with two elitist ex-colonial languages having official status, and various regional vehicular languages superimposed on a total of more than 250 national languages.2 Cameroon’s sociolinguistic profile is typical of many African states that have an exoglossic language policy (Reh and Heine 1982). None of the home, i.e. national, languages dominates at a national level. Because of its particular colonial history, the country is divided into a larger francophone and a smaller anglophone part, a situation enshrined in the constitution, which imposes a bilingual exoglossic policy, with French and English as official languages. However, this official bilingualism is an ideal that is contradicted by the reality, which seems to present the image of a regionally complementary official monolingualism with a strong bias towards French (Echu 1999a, 1999b; Kouega 1999; Kouega 2007: 70; Rosendal 2008). Beside these two elite official languages, there are some autochthonous languages that dominate in certain regions and tend to be used as vehicular languages, e.g. Cameroonian Pidgin English, Duala, Beti (Ewondo, Bulu, Fang), Basaa, Fulfulde, Mungaka, “Bamileke” (Ghomala’, Yemba, Medumba, Fe‘fe’, Ngiemboon), Kanuri, Hausa and Arabic. While work towards the standardisation of some languages has been carried out by NGOs such as SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) and NACALCO (National Association of Cameroonian Language Committees) (Breton and Fohtung 1991: 19; Anchimbe 2006), none of these languages enjoys support from the state, nor are they being developed for DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-3

12  Roland Kießling official domains of use, e.g. in education. Active governmental status and corpus planning are absent. Due to the rural exodus and migration to urban centres, cities such as Douala and Yaoundé have become ethno-linguistic melting pots with a high degree of multilingualism (Chia 1992: 50; Franqueville 1984) characterised by a largely complementary usage of three categories of languages: (a) non-African official languages, i.e. French and to a lesser extent English, used in formal and official domains such as education, administration, judiciary and health; (b) African vehicular languages (Cameroonian Pidgin English, Beti and Fulfulde) used in non-official public domains (petty trading, cook shops and bars) to some extent; and (c) other African national languages that are restricted to certain city quarters and used predominantly for communitarian3 functions (Brehmer et  al. 2013: 213–18). Urban residents tend to be trilingual with repertoires that include at least one representative of each category. This constellation is marked by a vacuum caused by the absence of a medium of communication that unites instrumental and communitarian functions for the urban majority, i.e. which could serve as an interethnic medium of communication in all practical aspects of urban life and as an icon of identification at the same time. At one end of the scale, none of the African national languages qualify as languages of wider communication in the multilingual big cities, since, apart from their restricted distribution, they are felt to be much too ethnically loaded and too strongly associated with connotations of traditional ways of life in rural backwaters. At the other end of the scale, neither of the official languages, French or English, qualifies as a linguistic icon of identification. Due to their restricted accessibility resulting from insufficient dissemination (Rosendal 2008), they have become elitist languages of vertical communication signalling social distance (Heine 1977) and instruments of exclusion. Many people aspire to them, but feel they fail to satisfy the norms. So, neither French nor English offers any potential as an icon of identification. Only Cameroonian Pidgin English could be an option due to its widespread use as a lingua franca and its potential for transcending ethnicity, but it is also disqualified due to its negative associations with notions such as lack of education, illiteracy and backwardness and its exclusion from most official domains. This leaves Cameroon with a communicative vacuum in the big cities and pressure to linguistically transcend ethnic and superimposed colonial boundaries under conditions of a language policy of alienation which installs largely inaccessible ex-colonial languages as official media and which has only recently begun to change through the admission of national languages as media of instruction in government schools (Rosendal 2008). Practices of multilingual communication, such as code-switching as an unmarked choice, massive lexical borrowing and transfer of syntactic structures, and semantic and pragmatic features from Cameroonian

Cameroon 13 Pidgin English and various Cameroonian Bantu and Bantoid languages into Cameroonian French, have contributed to fill this vacuum. All of these practices have crystallised in the emergence of a new urban code, Camfranglais (de Féral 1997; Kießling 2005; Stein-Kanjora 2008, 2015), which is very popular due to its potential to index an alternative progressive and youthful urban identity in opposition to the older generation(s), rural populations and Cameroonian elites, who have subscribed to the norms of ‘la francophonie’. Moreover, it also indexes a specific Cameroonian identity, as confirmed by Tchokothe’s (2015) observation that CFA is widely used among Cameroonians in the (German) diaspora as an exclusive Cameroonian identity marker. Following the general introduction to the linguistic situation in Cameroon in this section, Section 2 briefly summarises all major existing studies and available corpora of CFA. Section 3 presents the salient lexical and grammatical features of CFA, which characterise it as an urban contact language based on a French matrix with admixtures from Pidgin English and various Cameroonian source languages, deliberately distorted to various degrees. Section 4 discusses the historical emergence and the sociolinguistic profile of CFA, with particular reference to its incipient transition from an adolescent jargon to an emergent urban vehicular code which serves the pressing communicative needs of the multilingual urban population of Cameroon’s cities.

2  Empirical data The main sources on CFA are monographic treatments such as Kouega (2013) and Kamdem (2015) and online resources such as Annexe: Camfranglais (2019), supplemented by data from articles such as de Féral (1997, 2005, 2006, 2010), Telep (2014), Tiayon Lekobou (1985), SteinKanjora (2008, 2015), Tiewa Ngninzégha (2008), Kouega (2003a, 2003b), Kießling (2005, 2014, 2021) and various contributions in Ntsobé, Biloa and Echu (2008). These contributions include exemplifications of lexical items and expressions which are contextualised to varying degrees. There is at least one group on Facebook, “Ici on topo le Camfranglais! le speech des vrais man du Mboa”, which provides a forum for metalinguistic discourses on Camfranglais. Few of the sources are explicit about their methodology. De Féral’s work generally draws on the observation of spontaneous discourse, as do other contributions with a sociolinguistic focus (Telep 2014; Stein-Kanjora 2008, 2015). The others tend to focus on etymological and lexicological issues and build on a mix of introspection, the collection of data from oral discourse overheard in the street or on radio programmes, from written discourse in chat rooms, Facebook groups and other electronic platforms, and from artistically manipulated language, e.g. in the lyrics of songs in various genres. Kamdem (2015) explicitly uses a combination of lexicographic

14  Roland Kießling and ethnolinguistic methods. His monograph is based on recordings of naturally occurring conversations from a sample of four major towns of Southern Cameroon, i.e. Bafoussam, Nkongsamba, Douala and Yaoundé, with a total of 24 participants from various social groups. Kouega’s data are drawn from short conversations in informal settings, exclusively students at the University of Yaoundé I (2013: 115–17). He conducted two rounds of data collection in 2000 and in 2010 to document lexical replacement in CFA. While CFA discourse corpora do exist, none of these seems to be publicly accessible.

3  Structural findings CFA is characterised by a highly hybrid lexicon embedded in a morphosyntactic frame which mainly builds on Cameroonian French and includes various features imported from Cameroonian Pidgin English, some of which ultimately derive from Bantoid structures, as demonstrated next.4 Lexical elaboration predominantly affects those semantic domains which form the focus of juvenile interests, i.e. social relations, communication (especially terms of address and greetings), the human body and appearance, economy (especially money), sex, drugs and alcohol, food, locomotion and vehicles, evaluations of other people, violence and conflict, crime and police. At the structural level, the CFA lexicon incorporates items derived from Cameroonian French, Cameroonian Pidgin English (CPE) and Cameroonian home languages, such as Duala and Ewondo, through a range of strategies which feature prominently in the creation of urban youth languages in Africa in general (Kießling and Mous 2004). These strategies include phonological distortions, such as truncation and metathesis, morphological hybridisation and parasitic affixation, and semanticopragmatic manipulations, such as dysphemism, which operates via metaphor, metonymy, onomastic synecdoche and hyperbole (Kießling 2014). I exemplify these next. At the phonological level, truncation derives kat [kat] ‘quarter’ from French quartier, (m)bùt [(m)bùt] ‘fool, foolish’ from Ewondo (m)bùtúkù ‘stranger’ and lage [lɛ̀dʒ] ‘village’ from English village. Metathesis accounts for CFA items such as tcham [tʃam] ‘fight’, derived from English match. At the morphological level, hybridisation is often achieved by combining lexemes and affixes from different source languages, e.g. French verbal stems such as donner ‘give’ and lancer ‘hurl’ are combined with non-French affixes, e.g. the English suffix -ing (gerund), to form CFA items such as lanc-ing [lãŋs-iŋ] ‘hurling’. Or non-French lexical items such as English white and Duala Mbeng ‘France’ are combined with French suffixes such as -is-er (causative-infinitive) and -iste (noun of agent) to derive CFA items such as whit-is-er [wait-iz-e] ‘to talk like a

Cameroon 15 white person’ and Mbeng-uiste [mbɛŋg-ist] ‘someone who goes regularly to France’, respectively. Dummy affixation by parasitic suffixes -o and -sh is often combined with truncation, e.g. in pa-cho [pa-tʃo] ‘father’ from French papa and ba -sh [ba-ʃ] ‘basketball’ from English. Dysphemism, achieved by metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole and onomastic synecdoche, satirises unfavourable aspects of target concepts, as in torpiller ‘have sex’ (< French torpiller ‘torpedo’). Bakassi, the name of a disputed peninsula on the border of Cameroon and Nigeria and the object of armed conflicts between the two countries, has become a general term for any ‘dangerous place’, and opep ‘illegal taxi’ derives from the acronym of ‘organisation des pays exportateurs de poussière’ (‘organisation of dust-exporting countries’) (Echu 1999c: 125), a satirical allusion to the fact that these taxis are frequently found in rural areas where they collect a lot of dust on rough roads. Even though most existing studies agree that the emblematic lexicon of CFA is inserted into a French matrix (Biloa 1999; de Féral 1997, 2005, 2006, 2010; Kouega 2003b; Schröder 2007; Vakunta 2007; Hecker 2009; Nchare 2009), it is quite clear that CFA grammar cannot be reduced to simplified French, since it displays a number of grammatical features which are more likely to derive from Cameroonian Pidgin English, i.e. lexically distinctive tone contrasts, homorganic nasal prefixes used in word formation, the noun of agent formative -man, total reduplication, serial verb constructions, the immediate postverbal placement of interrogative pronouns and possibly a variety of other features for which the evidence is inconclusive so far (Biloa 2003; Chia 1990; Chia and Gerbault 1991; Kießling 2021). A distinctive contrast of high vs low tone distinguishes minimal pairs, such as yáŋ ‘nice, good, elegant, smart’ vs yàŋ ‘buy’, kík ‘kick’ vs kìk ‘steal’ and gó ‘girl, woman’ vs gò ‘go’, reported by Tiayon Lekobou (1985: 159), Chia (1990: 116), Biloa (2003: 254), Kouega (2003b: 513) and Stein-Kanjora (2015: 56–8), respectively. A homorganic nasal prefix is used in CFA word formation to lend a Bantoid flavour to nouns, adjectives or verbs originally taken from French or English (Chia and Gerbault 1991; Biloa 2003: 260; Biloa 2008a: 67), e.g. nga [ŋ-gà] ‘woman, girlfriend’ from English girl, and mbèrè [m-bɛ́rɛ́] ‘policeman, soldier’ from French béret ‘beret’. The CFA formative -man derives agent nouns, such as lob-man ‘drug addict’, jong-man ‘drunkard’, kik-man ‘thief’, fey-man [fé-màn] ‘crook, cheat, rogue, swindler, deceiver’ from lob ‘smoke marijuana’, jong ‘drink alcohol’ (Kamdem 2015), kìk ‘steal’ (Tiayon Lekobou 1985: 110) and French fait ‘done’ (Kouega 2003b), respectively. Total reduplication or repetition of adjectives, adverbs and prepositions is used for intensification in CFA (Tiayon Lekobou 1985: 63), e.g. penya-penya ‘brand new’ from penya ‘new’ (Biloa 1999: 153; Kouega 2013: 65), nayo-nayo ‘very slowly’ from nayo ‘slowly’ (Biloa 2003: 270;

16  Roland Kießling Kouega 2013: 65) and depuis-depuis ‘a long time ago’ from French depuis ‘since’ (Biloa 2008b: 126). Serialisation with deictic motion verbs ‘go’ and ‘come’ is frequently used in CFA to express precursory co-events, exemplified in (1a–b), in which the precursive motion may develop to highlight inchoative or inceptive and purposive notions rather than purely spatial ones, as in (1a). (1) CFA serialisation with precursive deictic motion verbs5 (a) on go là-bas do what IS go there do what “What are we going to do there?” (Biloa 2008b: 113) (b) C’est sûr que le djo il est go nye it.is certain that DET.M guy he be.3sg go see le répé du ledge avec lui DET.M elder of village with him “The guy certainly went to see the wise man of the village with him”. (Stein-Kanjora 2015: 60) The crucial property which makes these constructions qualify as verbal serialisation is the complete absence of any morpheme which explicitly marks the second verbs as either coordinate or subordinate to the preceding verb ‘go’. Wh- questions in CFA are overwhelmingly formed by placing the interrogative pronoun in immediate postverbal position without inversion of the subject and the verb (Stein-Kanjora 2015: 59–60; Biloa 2008b: 113, 128; Kamdem 2013: 16), as can be seen in (2a–b), deviating maximally from the Standard French model which is characterised by inversion of subject and verb plus fronting of the interrogative pronoun. (2) Immediate postverbal position of interrogative pronouns in CFA (a) mola je go où avec une djim-djim mater brother 1sg go where with one fat-fat woman “Brother, what shall I do with such a fat woman?” (Biloa 2008b: 124) (b) tu vas do quoi maintenant 2sg go.2sg do what now “What will you do now?” (Kouega 2013: 86, 88) While this type of syntactic structure in Wh- questions is characteristic of informal French across the world, its occurrence in CFA is supported by exact parallels in many Cameroonian Bantoid and Bantu languages in which the immediate postverbal position acts as the structural focus

Cameroon 17 position for nominal constituents, i.e. for interrogative pronouns. While Bantoid syntactic structures seem to be the ultimate source of the CFA syntax of Wh- questions, as suggested by Biloa (2008b: 113), it seems reasonable to assume that the direct model for the CFA calque must have been provided by the demographically much more widespread CPE which follows the same syntactic model (de Féral 1989: 140). So the chain of calquing is most probably from Bantoid languages to CPE, to Cameroonian French (Biloa 2012: 131–2) and from there to CFA. Some of these non-Standard French features of CFA pertain to the lexical component, in that derivational markers seem to acquire independent productivity entailed by the recurrent integration of lexical items from Cameroonian Pidgin English. However, others, such as serial verb constructions and the position of question words, clearly relate to syntax. For more details on the CPE-sourced morphosyntactic properties of CFA, see Kießling (2021). There are basically two interpretations of the hybrid nature of the grammatical frame of CFA. Either CFA is on its way to developing a hybrid grammar of its own by blending a Cameroonian French matrix with CPE parameters, or else there is a grammatical split, i.e. the emblematic lexicon which constitutes CFA could be integrated into a morphosyntactic matrix sourced by either of the donor languages, Cameroonian French or CPE (Schröder 2007, as cited in Tiewa Ngninzégha 2008: 56), as suggested by frequent reference to “diglossia” of a French-based and a CPE-based variety of CFA (Chia 1990: 123, as cited in Biloa 2003: 274f.) illustrated in examples 3–4. (3) Camfranglais as relexified Cameroon Pidgin English A fi blou yu. 1sg can beat 2sg “I can beat you up”. (Schröder 2003: 76) (4) Camfranglais as relexified French On l’a blou. IS O3sg:PF beat “He has been beaten up”. (Schröder 2003: 76) The same phenomenon has been described by Tiayon Lekobou (1985: 62) as a contrast of “Camspeak via French syntax” vs “Camspeak via Pidgin English syntax”, and by de Féral (1989: 20f., 165ff.) as an opposition of “français makro” vs “pidgin makro”. While the ultimate answer to this question (matrix shift vs emergence of a hybrid grammatical frame) can only be achieved by systematic discourse-based research on variations of CFA across cities such as Douala, Yaoundé and Bamenda, it seems very likely that there is a continuum of CFA varieties between the

18  Roland Kießling poles of a francophone and an anglophone orientation. It remains to be explored to what extent the CFA variety with a CPE grammatical frame might be identified with the variety called Mboko (Talk) reported in the anglophone region of Cameroon, especially in and around Bamenda (Kamdem 2015). With respect to Cameroonian linguistic ecology, CFA seems to straddle the border between a basilectal Cameroonian French, a francophone CPE variety and an anglophone CPE variety. Since all three varieties occupy social spaces outside the normative reach of standardised languages, there seem to be high rates of diffusion of both lexical items and grammatical structures, the francophone CPE variety probably representing the crucial gateway for the integration of CPE grammatical structures into Cameroonian French grammar.

4  Sociolinguistic profile and development From a socio-ecological perspective, Camfranglais seems to be growing to fill the communicative gap between the elite official languages, French and English, on the one side, and the Cameroonian home languages on the other. Opinions on its ultimate origins diverge. They range from criminal argot in Douala (Tiayon Lekobou 1985: 50) to student jargon at the University of Yaoundé (Lobé Ewane 1989: 33; cf. chapter on Ghanaian Student Pidgin English, this volume) which has developed since the 1970s, when the official bilingualism policy of Cameroon was intensified and francophone pupils became increasingly exposed to English, and anglophone pupils to French (Hecker 2009: 69). De Féral (1989: 20), who described CFA with the name “français makro” (< French maquereau ‘pimp’), actually distinguishes two varieties: “makro étroit” spoken primarily by thieves as a medium of secret communication, and “makro large” which is more widespread and spoken mainly by young townsfolk such as pupils, students and taxi-drivers for the purpose of symbolising an urban identity. This actually points to the layered nature of CFA seen today which embraces a spectrum of speaking practices ranging between the poles of underworld secrecy and cosmopolitan openness, comparable to the creole continuum and ranging from an “acrolectal” variety close to Cameroonian colloquial French via intermediate varieties which are used in the daily communication of youths to a “basilectal” form which is lexically more elaborate and esoteric and used by certain groups such as prostitutes and criminals as an argot (Stein-Kanjora 2015: 55).6 The dynamism of the entire spectrum of CFA resides in vibrant lexical elaboration and innovation7 (Tiayon Lekobou 1985; Chia 1990; Chia and Gerbault 1991; Essono 1998, 1997; Biloa 1999; Kießling 2005; Echu 2008b; Kouega 2013), achieved by jocular manipulation of items drawn from virtually all available sources (i.e. French, English, CPE and Cameroonian languages such as Duala, Ewondo, Basaa and BamilekeGhomala’). It is driven by motivations such as contest and display

Cameroon 19 (Stein-Kanjora 2015: 119–20; Echu 2008a: 48–9) and results in overlexicalisation in domains of adolescent preoccupations and experimentation, such as social relationships, love and sexuality, drugs, criminality, school, intergenerational conflicts, judgements of acceptance or rejection, people’s physical appearance and feelings, and ways of addressing people and referring to them (Kamdem 2015: 33–47; Kouega 2013; Echu 2008a: 54–61). While this characterisation comes close to the profile of an antilanguage in the sense of Halliday (1978), i.e. “the language of an antisociety, which constructs by means of language an alternate reality set in opposition to some established norm” (Eble 2004: 266), three reservations must be made against such a categorisation (Kießling 2021). First, CFA stands out from prototypical anti-languages in that its grammar is not grafted onto a single widespread vehicular language, such as Cameroonian French, but rather incorporates features from Cameroonian Pidgin English (CPE), most of which ultimately derive from Cameroonian Bantoid substrate languages. Second, metaphor is only one strategy used in forming the CFA lexicon, along with others such as borrowing, truncation, morphological hybridisation, synecdoche and dysphemism (Kießling 2005, 2014; Stein-Kanjora 2015; Kouega 2003b, 2013). Third, overlexicalisation, i.e. a proliferation of synonyms, in CFA is not restricted to those areas which set its predominantly adolescent users most sharply apart from established society, but rather abounds in domains which are taboo in the official languages, as is the case, for example, with the slang of college students worldwide.8 Furthermore, it also includes areas of common interest, i.e. economy, money, fashion, leisure activities, food and drink, sports, vehicles, diseases, future prospects and career opportunities, national and international news (Echu 2008a: 54–61; Stein-Kanjora 2015; Kouega 2013: 47–9; Kamdem 2015: 33–47). So CFA would seem to qualify as “secondary slang” which “functions for purposes of a breezy, trendy, or avant-garde style or attitude more than for identification with an easily delineated group” (Eble 2004: 263). But even here, CFA does not neatly fit, since it owes its breeziness or trendiness not only to an attitude of undermining authoritarianism and “sharing vicariously in the daring while remaining apart from what is unsafe or objectionable about the way of life in the subculture” (ibid.). Its charm also resides in its function of bridging ethno-linguistic gaps and serving as a test-field for forging elitist and esoteric ex-colonial languages (French and English) into a medium a Cameroonian person can identify with. Changing attitudes towards Camfranglais reflect its development into a new medium of identification. On the one hand, positive in-group attitudes towards Camfranglais contrast sharply with negative outgroup attitudes, i.e. an internal covert prestige of urban progressiveness contrasts with an external stigma of cultural degradation. Thus, Camfranglais is regarded as ‘vachement cool’ (Stein-Kanjora 2008) among

20  Roland Kießling youths, while youths who do not use it in their peer groups run the risk of being regarded as ‘réglo', i.e. boring nerds: “dans la jeunesse il faut parler ça pour se sentir dans la groupe, sinon on se sent un peu trop réglo, ça dit qu’on ne parle que du bon français, on est académicien”9 (Hecker 2009: 52–3). On the other hand, Camfranglais still tends to be discussed within the prescriptive paradigm of falling standards and cultural degradation, being seen as a major obstacle which prevents pupils from learning proper French and sometimes even perceived as “vandalisme linguistique” (Lobé Ewane 1989: 34). This is expressed in a cartoon cited in Stein-Kanjora (2008: 133), where a pupil addresses his teacher in Camfranglais: Monsieur, il y a un djo qui vous ask là-bas. . . “Sir, there is someone who asks for you over there . . .”, the teacher bursting out in indignation: “And I still teach him the language of Molière!” Since the late 1980s, CFA has gained considerable popularity through the work of popular musicians, such as Lapiro de Mbanga and Koppo, who use(d) CFA in their songs in Makossa and Bikutsi or Hiphop styles, respectively, to disseminate critical messages and comments on Cameroonian socio-economic realities. This shows that CFA had, already at this stage, gone beyond primarily addressing and reflecting adolescent needs in a quest for identity by linguistically distancing the older generation(s). Rather, it had come to address more important general needs, especially to downplay and transcend ethnic and linguistic distinctions, to overcome linguistic alienation and exclusion and to undercut formality by a jocular subversion of linguistic normativity. In contrast to European settings of ‘resistant' youth culture, in Cameroon, just as in many other African settings, generational conflict seems no longer to be the predominant driving force in the creation of Camfranglais; rather, it is a feeling of socioeconomic deprivation and being excluded from access to the commodities of the modern world by corrupt elites. This becomes obvious in the association of Camfranglais as a medium of artistic expression with rebels such as Lapiro de Mbanga, a song-writer and performer who was very popular in the late 1980s because he dared to articulate satirical criticism of corrupt politicians (Vakunta 2014a), e.g. in his banned song “Constitution constipée” for which he was sent to prison in 2008. The song is an ironic criticism of Paul Biya, the president of Cameroon, referred to by CFA items such as Big Katika ‘Big-Cashier’, pacho ‘father’ and Répé Ndoss ‘Father Boss’ in the refrain (3), who does not seem to care about pressing problems of the country, but is instead occupied with changing the country’s constitution in order to make himself president for life. (5) Camfranglais in critical lyrics: Lapiro de Mbanga’s “Constitution constipée”10 CF: Libérez Big Katika, libérez Répé Ndoss, Le pater est fatigué oooo, foutez-lui la paix

Cameroon 21 Libérez Big Katika, libérez Répé Ndoss Le pacho est daya ooo, foutez-lui la paix Set Big-Cashier free, set free Father Boss The father is old, leave him in peace Set Big-Cashier free, set free Father Boss The father is dying, leave him in peace There is also a growing awareness of the merits of Camfranglais regarding education and instruction. Thus, Camfranglais vocabulary is increasingly used in the media (Hecker 2009: 21–2), e.g. in special columns of newspapers and youth magazines such as “100% Jeunes” (6), where it comes to serve a special function to address touchy topics pertaining to body hygiene, health and sexuality which would be felt too awkward or unacceptable to be transmitted bluntly in the official languages, French or English. (6) Column “Entre meufs” in “100% Jeunes” 44, page 8 (Hecker 2009: 23)

Il serait bénéfique pour les ‘go’ de palper leurs ‘lolos’ et de savoir interpréter des signes qui, en cas de négligence, aboutiraient à en cancer.



“It helps a lot, if the girls touch their breasts and know how to recognise the symptoms which could indicate cancer”.

Well beyond juvenile user groups and adolescent audiences, CFA has started to be effectively exploited for literary purposes, e.g. in novels such as Mercédès Fouda’s Je parle camerounais (Fouda 2001), Patrice Nganang’s Temps de chien (Nganang 2001), Gabriel Kuitche Fonkou’s Moi taximan (Fonkou 2002) and Peter Wuteh Vakunta’s Requiem pour ongola en camfranglais: une poétique camerounaise (Vakunta 2015) – a production which is accompanied by literary analysis and criticism from the perspective of translation theory (Vakunta 2007, 2016) and discourse on a new literary canon based on the indigenisation of language in the African francophone novel (Vakunta 2011, 2014b). All of this indicates that there is a growing awareness of Camfranglais for its potential to mark urbanity, transcend ethnic identity and transcend the discourse paradigm of falling standards, reaching well beyond the adolescent user group. Today, CFA seems to present a continuum of speaking practices, ranging from esoteric argot, through intermediate stages of a juvenile jargon, to a hybrid urban vernacular. This continuum reflects diachronic development. The common denominator linking CFA varieties is their use for ‘horizontal communication’, i.e. communication among equals in a peer group for transmitting messages of internal solidarity. They owe their attractiveness to the fact that CFA is perceived as a vacuum in which

22  Roland Kießling linguistic norms can easily be manipulated, free from sanctions. This is corroborated by frequent comments by speakers that one of their principal motivations for using CFA is that they feel released from the pressure to constantly observe the norms of the not fully mastered European standard languages, French and, to a lesser extent, English. Therefore, even if Camfranglais might have started as an argot or antilanguage restricted to criminals and outlaws and predominantly used for purposes of secrecy, i.e. a metasign of resistance which serves to create identity by asserting difference from a dominant group (Hodge and Kress 1997: 53), it does so no longer. It has, rather, expanded to youth in general with a tendency to expand even further, due to increasing exploitation in the media and by popular artists. In this it seems to represent the process and the result of two converging developments: the creative appropriation of an imported foreign language, French (Naguschewski and Trabant 1997), which is felt to remain an alien instrument of exclusion employed by elites to exclude the majority from participation, and the destigmatisation of CPE. This is why CFA is on its way to becoming adopted by other social groups, spreading outside urban youth, forming new norms and setting its own standards in the linguistic “configuration of an urban identity” (Mc Laughlin 2001), slowly growing into an icon of an emerging new “project identity” (Castells 1997), a symbol of progressiveness and modern urban life in Cameroon.

Notes 1 The very name Camfranglais – a blend of Cameroon, Français and Anglais – reflects its hybrid nature. While the name itself seems to be alternating with Francamglais, Francanglais or Frananglais, among both speakers and in the popular press, I will adhere to the term Camfranglais (CFA) in this contribution for the sake of clarity. The fact of terminological fluidity in itself also seems to be used as an index of its hybridity. 2  Figures range from 248 (Boum Ndongo-Semengue and Sadembouo 1999) up to 279 (Breton and Fohtung 1991) and 283 (Eberhard, Simons and Fennig 2021). 3  The term is used in the sense of Ehlich (2007), who recognises three basic functions of language: the gnoseological function which highlights language as a tool for creating knowledge, the teleological function which highlights language as an instrument for performing tasks and achieving goals in practice, and the communitarian function which highlights language as an instrument to create feelings of belonging, solidarity and togetherness. 4  At present, it is not possible to pinpoint precisely the demarcation line between Camfranglais and Cameroonian French in terms of grammatical structures. They both deviate from Standard French. Camfranglais deviates by a set of grammatical features which are attributable to substratal Bantoid influence via Kamtok, as detailed later in this chapter. However, the extent to which these features also radiate into Cameroonian French needs to be explored in a much more detailed study – which actually requires a dedicated description of Cameroonian French in delimitation from Standard French on the one side, and delimitation to other West African varieties of (popular) French on the other. 5  Abbreviations: DET determiner, IS impersonal subject, M masculine.

Cameroon 23 6  This is also why most of the labels which have been proposed for a proper sociolinguistic categorization of CFA in the current debate, i.e. pidgin/creole (Echu & Grundstrom 1999: xix), dialect of French (Mbah Onana 1997) or argot (de Féral 1994), fit somehow, but to a limited extent only. For extensive discussion on the terminological categorization of CFA see Tiewa Ngninzégha (2008: 12–26), Hecker (2009: 34–42), Kouega (2013: 17–22). 7  A comparison of Tiayon Lekobou (1985) and Kouega (2013) reveals an impressive rate of lexical replacement which would merit an investigation in its own right. 8  Thus, Kamdem (2015) and Kouega (2013) list more than 20 different terms for the meaning ‘to engage in sex’. 9  “Among the youth, one has to speak like this to feel as part of the group; if not, you feel too prim, i.e. if you only speak neat French, you are an academic”. 10 For the full lyrics see: www.dibussi.com/2008/05/lapiro-de-mbang.html. For the full video see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUPJxutbTc

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26  Roland Kießling Kouega, Jean-Paul (2008). A Dictionary of Cameroon Pidgin English Usage: Pronunciation, Grammar and Vocabulary. München: LINCOM Europa. DOI: 10.1075/jpcl.24.2.11sam Kouega, Jean-Paul (2013). Camfranglais: A Glossary of Common Words, Phrases and Usages. Lincom: München. Lobé Ewane, Michel (1989). Cameroun: le camfranglais. Diagonales 10: 33–4. Mbah-Onana, Marie (1997). Le camfranglais, dialecte moderne du Cameroun, genèse et manifestations. In: Ecritures VII: Le regard de l’autre. AfriqueEurope au XXe siècle, 29–37. Yaoundé: Editions CLE. Mc Laughlin, Fiona (2001). Dakar Wolof and the configuration of an urban identity. Journal of African Cultural Studies 14(2): 153–72. Naguschewski, Dirk and Jürgen Trabant (1997). Was heißt hier “fremd”? Studien zu Sprache und Fremdheit. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Nchare, Abdoulaye Laziz (2009). The Morphosyntax of Camfranglais and the Matrix Language Frame Hypothesis. New York: MS. Nganang, Patrice (2001). Temps de chien. Paris: Le serpent à plumes. DOI: 10.7202/1041894ar. Ntsobé, André-Marie, Edmund Biloa and George Echu (eds.) (2008). Le camfranglais: quelle parlure? Étude linguistique et sociolinguistique. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Reh, Mechthild and Bernd Heine (1982). Sprachpolitik in Afrika. Hamburg: Helmut Buske. Rosendal, Tove (2008). Multilingual Cameroon: Policy, Practice, Problems and Solutions. Gothenburg Africana Informal Series No. 7. Schröder, Anne (2003). Status, Functions, and Prospects of Pidgin English: An Empirical Approach to Language Dynamics in Cameroon. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. DOI: 10.1075/eww.30.1.11ate. Schröder, Anne (2007). Camfranglais: A  language with several (sur)faces and important sociolinguistic functions. In: Global Fragments. (Dis)Orientation in the New World Order. Anke Bartels and Dirk Wiemann (eds.), 281–98. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. DOI: 10.1163/9789401204224_020. Stein-Kanjora, Gardy (2008). “Parler comme ça, c’est vachement cool!” Or how dynamic language loyalty can overcome “resistance from above”. Sociologus 58(2): 117–41. DOI: 10.3790/soc.58.2.117. Stein-Kanjora, Gardy (2015). The Power to Exclude? – – A Sociolinguistic Study of Gender-Based Differences in Exposure to and Usage of Camfranglais in Cameroon. PhD, Hamburg. Tchokothe, Rémi Armand (2015). Camfranglais at the challenge Camerounais. Paper presented at WOCAL 8, Kyoto. Telep, Suzie (2014). Le camfranglais sur Internet: pratiques et représentations. Le Français en Afrique 28: 27–145. (Réseau des Observatoires du Français Contemporain en Afrique – Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis) www.unice.fr/bcl/ ofcaf/28/28.html. . Tiayon Lekobou, C. (1985). Camspeak: A Speech Reality in Cameroon. Université de Yaoundé: Mémoire de maîtrise. Tiewa Ngninzégha, Kathrin (2008). Stadtsprachen im südlichen Kamerun. Eine linguistische und soziolinguistische Darstellung der Varietäten Cameroonian Pidgin English und Camfranglais. Unpublished MA thesis, Mainz.

Cameroon 27 Vakunta, Peter Wuteh (2007). On Translating Camfranglais and other Camerounismes. Translation Review 73: 31–7. DOI: 10.1080/07374836.2007.10523953. Vakunta, Peter Wuteh (2011). Indigenization of Language in the African Francophone Novel: A  New Literary Canon. New York: Peter Lang. DOI: 10.7202/1018672ar. Vakunta, Peter Wuteh (2014a). The Life and Times of a Cameroonian icon: Tribute to Lapiro De Mbanga Ngata Man. Mankon, Bamenda: Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group (RPCIG). Vakunta, Peter Wuteh (2014b). Camfranglais: The Making of a New Language in Cameroonian Literature. Mankon, Bamenda: Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group (RPCIG). Vakunta, Peter Wuteh (2015). Requiem pour ongola en camfranglais: une poétique camerounaise. Mankon, Bamenda: Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group (RPCIG). Vakunta, Peter Wuteh (2016). Critical perspectives on the theory and practice of translating Camfranglais literature. Mankon, Bamenda: Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group (RPCIG).

2 Democratic Republic of the Congo Lingala ya Bayankee/Yanké Nico Nassenstein

1 Linguistic and sociohistorical context: on the emergence of youth registers in Kinshasa The analysis of spoken youth language practices used by mostly urban speakers in African cities has been the subject of a growing number of studies in recent years. While the emergence of these fluid practices dates back to the end of the colonial era on the African continent (i.e. from the 1950s to the 1970s), they have sparked academic interest mostly since the millennium. This has led to numerous seminal papers (the most influential one being Kießling and Mous 2004), edited volumes (Nassenstein and Hollington 2015; Mensah 2016; Hurst-Harosh and Kanana 2018) and in-depth studies of specific youth registers (Hurst 2008, for Tsotsitaal/RSA; Ferrari 2009; Rudd 2008, among others, for Sheng/Kenya; Reuster-Jahn and Kießling 2006, for Lugha ya Mitaani/Tanzania) being published over the last two decades. Adolescents in urban Kinshasa, with 8–12 million inhabitants being the most populated city in Central Africa and the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (henceforth DR  Congo), employ a specific register of the Bantu language Lingala, which is characterised by phonological, morphological and semantic deviations from the common variety. Lingala is spoken by at least 25 million people in DR Congo, northern parts of the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), northern Angolan provinces, along the borders of the Central African Republic and South Sudan up to the northwestern tip of Uganda.1 Typologically, Lingala is (mostly) agglutinating with simplified concordance patterns (due to its emergence in a contact situation) but with a complex tense-aspect system (Nurse 2008; Meeuwis 2010). The present overview2 summarises the salient sociolinguistic and structural peculiarities of Lingala ya Bayankee, literally ‘Lingala of the Yankees’ or, in its shortened version, simply Yanké (hereinafter LyB/Y), a contemporary register employed by most of the (estimated) 20,000–25,000 street children, as well as by other adolescents and young adults in Kinshasa, and increasingly also in other urban centres of the country. In the description and documentation of African DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-4

Democratic Republic of the Congo 29 languages, prior to and during colonialism, missionaries and colonial agents alike reified and artefactualised fluid practices and turned them into “languages” that were classified and often also modified (see Irvine 2008; Blommaert 2008). The much criticised practice of linguistic artefactualisation (Lüpke and Storch 2013) later also occurred in regard to fluid contemporary practices and UCD, giving rise to labels such as “Lingala ya Bayankee”, wherein speakers described themselves as Yankees with reference to American popular culture, and then became entirely subsumed under and labelled by this name by non-initiated speakers/ outsiders. However, not all LyB/Y speakers identify with the term yankee but prefer other (competing) labels, such as yaya ‘elder sibling’ or yakuza (derived from Japanese), or describe the UCD as kinoiserie (‘Kinshasaish game’), while a few speakers still use the term hindubill.3 There is no clear consensus among speakers concerning the name for the language; see Nassenstein (2014), and also Wilson’s (2012) study. The sociopolitical conditions for the emergence of youth languages can often be traced back to colonial times, as for instance suggested by Glaser (2000) for the history of Tsotsitaal in Sophiatown in the 1930s–’40s, or by Gondola (2016) for the linguistic predecessor of today’s LyB/Y in Kinshasa. Youth language is therefore actually entangled in far-reaching sociohistorical events and is only partially a reflection of recent trends. Léopoldville – the colonial designation for today’s Kinshasa – was founded in 1881, situated on the grounds of some fishing villages mostly inhabited by Humbu and Teke people (de Boeck 2020). The colonial capital was then shifted from the port town of Boma, in 1926, farther upcountry to Léopoldville. The large numbers of ethnic Kiteke and Kikongo speakers (e.g. of the Kintandu variety) in early Léopoldville subsequently shifted to speaking what is nowadays called Lingala, a contact language that had emerged farther up the river in the interior of the country, and was modified and promoted by missionaries and then used in the colonial administration from the turn of the century onwards; Scheut missionaries strongly favoured the use of Lingala in Leopoldville, established there since 1885 as described above – albeit in a prescriptive, corpus-planned variety they had been coining because of what they perceived as the pidgin’s “too rudimentary” structures and lexicon. . . . In their corpus-planning efforts, they also judged the overlap of the term “Bangala” for denoting both a population and a language too confusing, and propagated the glossonym “Lingala” instead, which gradually found general acceptance. (Luyckfasseel and Meeuwis 2018: 89) Instrumentalised by the Belgian colonial administration, Lingala was turned into the language of the colonial army Force Publique (Samarin 1990: 72) and became the main medium of communication in

30  Nico Nassenstein Léopoldville (for a more detailed analysis of the origins of Lingala and its colonial implications, see Mufwene 1989; Samarin 1986, 1990; Meeuwis 2006, 2009). At the same time serving as the language of fashion, and especially as the language used in the fast spreading Congolese rumba from the 1940s onwards, it was the most widespread national language before independence.

2  Empirical data 2.1  Fieldwork on Lingala youth language The main fieldwork on Lingala youth language was carried out by the present author in Kinshasa from the end of July to the end of September 2009, with a second shorter stay in March and April 2010. The data collected and recorded during these research periods include a (short) dictionary with around 700 entries4 and sample sentences, several hundred elicited sentences collected during the course of the fieldwork, around 20 free texts and dialogues that were transcribed thereafter, as well as ethnographic notes based on the researcher’s participation in group activities with LyB/Y speakers in their daily social interactions. Most of the speakers who contributed to the corpus of LyB/Y were male and between 10 and 20 years old, and were either still living in the streets or had just left them. Subsequently, more data on LyB/Y were obtained through qualitative interviews on language ideologies, attitudes and media use with speakers between 2015 and 2018, some of whom were living in the European diaspora or in East Africa. As a kind of digital ethnography, more data were extracted during the same period from social media, music and video clips. These data are not organised in a corpus and are therefore not freely accessible. Apart from the raw data collected by Van Pelt (which are not accessible) and the author’s data from 2009–10, no other corpus exists (to the best of the author’s knowledge). 2.2  Existing studies Early studies include Sesep’s accounts (1979, 1990), which were compiled years after the so-called Bills movement  – a cowboy and “Wild West” movement of often brutal Congolese youths who watched Western movies and dressed like actors in those movies – had ended; the data presented in his study may reflect linguistic practices from the late 1950s through to the 1980s, rather than only until the late 1960s. This also explains the high number of lexemes that today’s speakers of LyB/Y would still categorise as being in use, or at least as being understood.5 Gondola’s (2016) study of the Bills and their youth culture, performed masculinity and “Western”/Wild West cult also includes references to language but provides no linguistic description – the data presented, however, are

Democratic Republic of the Congo 31 consistent with the present author’s interviews with former “cowboys” in their 60s and 70s in Kinshasa in 2009.6 In contrast with most studies that focus on this language practice in Kinshasa, Ossette (1991) provides a short description of the “argot Lingala” used in the Republic of the Congo and specifically in its capital Brazzaville (the only study, to the best of the author’s knowledge). LyB/Y was first studied by Van Pelt (2000) in a concise overview study, which mainly focuses on processes of linguistic change and deviating lexicon in Lingala. The study is based on data collected in a refugee camp in the Netherlands in the late 1990s. This study, initially an MA thesis, also dealt with lexical and semantic peculiarities and was brought to the attention of a broader audience due to some examples cited in an influential seminal paper by Roland Kießling and Maarten Mous (2004), which undoubtedly paved the way for today’s youth language studies in the field of African Linguistics. Kießling and Mous (2004) list “Lingala ya Bayankee” alongside better researched language practices such as Sheng, Camfranglais and Nouchi, and observe that “it seems to be on its way to becoming an urban language of wider communication that is no longer restricted to youths”; this has been confirmed in later studies. In addition, the anthropologist Filip de Boeck (2004) also lists numerous examples of LyB/Y, especially witchcraft and street-related terminology in his study of the occult and the phenomenon of witch children. This phenomenon mostly emerged in the 1980s when the community of practice had changed from Bills (1950–’60s) to teenagers and young adults, mostly interested in music and building close ties between youth groups from Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to communities of marginalised street children who had been expelled from their homes (labelled as bashegué, baphaseur etc.).7 Nassenstein’s (2014) monograph, an overview study which considers both sociolinguistic and structural features of LyB/Y (labelled as Yanké in its shortened form), focuses on language use among communities of street children in Kinshasa. Several other journal articles (Nassenstein and Hollington 2015; Hollington and Nassenstein 2018a, 2018b) have provided insights into LyB/Y with regard to processes of borrowing and translanguaging from global hip-hop repertoires, and to language use in social media and reflected in broader processes of “social spread”, i.e. an increasing popularisation of the UCD among well-off adolescents and students. These concise papers particularly address its changing status and use between 2000 (Van Pelt’s study) and the period between 2009 (when the first data were collected) and 2015–16. In contrast to the work devoted to the urban language of Kinshasa, Wilson (2012, 2015) has worked on the Yankees from Kisangani, roughly 1,700 km upriver from Kinshasa. Her extensive study analyses the use of Kindoubil (the youth language label used there) and of a creative ludling based on it: this consists of a language game that functions on the basis of syllable reversal, Kindoubil ya kozongela. The use of Lingala in contrast

32  Nico Nassenstein to many speakers’ knowledge of Swahili, and the indexicalities of both languages in a multilingual urban setting, is the focus of this predominantly ethnographic study. Apart from LyB/Y and Kindoubil, there are other sociolects of Lingala that are also associated with youth culture: Langila (Nassenstein 2015), for instance, constitutes a creative language practice that is partly based on LyB/Y and substitutes syllables with similar-sounding anthroponyms, toponyms or brand names. Initially categorised as a youth language, it has spread across social platforms such as WhatsApp, YouTube and Twitter, and is nowadays used by Congolese all around the world, especially in mobile communication.

3  Structural findings LyB/Y reveals a number of structural features that diverge from Kinshasa Lingala (and, even more, from other Lingala regiolects). Processes of linguistic change that occur in the youth variety of Lingala are often not fully conscious developments, in contrast with, for instance, youths’ linguistic manipulations, but are rather processes of contact-induced change, as also occurs in varieties that are not youth registers. In terms of lexical borrowings, LyB/Y speakers enrich their repertoire by integrating lexemes from various languages, primarily from the (only) official language, French, from adjacent Kikóngo-Kituba, from Cilubà in the central provinces, and to some extent from Kiswahili, spoken in the eastern parts of the country. While all of these constitute languages that are widespread lingua francas in the Congo basin, a major impact – especially since 2008 – has come from English. While Lingala contains lexemes of English origin, the ones employed in LyB/Y are recent innovations that accompanied the increasing emergence and popularisation of American hip hop, R‘n’B and Nigerian music in Kinshasa. Older innovations in common Lingala also include lexemes from Portuguese, and a handful of terms from Flemish. Due to the limited extent of this overview chapter, the present focus will be more on phonological properties and salient grammatical innovations, as well as on some examples of pragmatic change.8 3.1 Phonology Phonologically, LyB/Y deviates from Kinshasa Lingala in both segmental and suprasegmental features. There are specific phonemes that are recurrent (and perceived as emblematic) among adolescents that are not found in the speech of older speakers (or of those who do not belong to the communities of practice studied). Prothesis is among the most common phonological manipulations. Speakers of the UCD tend to employ the alveopalatal affricate [ʧ] in

Democratic Republic of the Congo 33 word-initial position, especially in coined or borrowed terms. Coined terms with this phoneme include frequently used lexemes such as tshor [ʧɔʀ] ‘(child) witch’, tshél [ʧɛl] ‘sex worker’, tshweke [ʧᵂeke] ‘money’ and tshómbo [ʧombo] ‘mobile phone’. Borrowed lexemes are, for instance, tshík [ʧik] ‘school’ clipped from Cilubà slang tshikul, which was originally borrowed from English school, as well as tshupa/chupa [ʧupa] ‘bottle’ and tshakayi [ʧakaji] ‘tea; breakfast’ from Kiswahili chupa and chai. According to speakers, the word-initial position of the affricate alters the sound of words, and is perceived as an emblematic feature when speakers integrate new terms into LyB/Y (also brand names such as Versace, which becomes [ʧaʧe]). The absence of this phoneme in Kinshasa Lingala may have contributed to its perceived attractiveness in the UCD. Speakers also suggested that the sound might be associated with the Cilubà [ʧiluba] language, the language spoken by numerous street children’s parents (who expelled them from their homes); however, this hypothesis could not be substantiated. The word-initial phoneme [ʃ] is not listed for Kinshasa Lingala by Meeuwis (2010: 30) but occurs frequently in borrowed lexemes from other languages into LyB/Y, such as shida ‘problem’ from Kiswahili, -choqué ‘to beg for money’ from French, shéta ‘(child) witch’ from Arabic aš-Šait ̣ān ‘devil’, shisho ‘Chinese pirate clothes’ as a sort of mock Chinese, or in coined terms such as shúshu ‘complicated’. Another form of prothesis that deserves attention is the “Bantuisation” of French words or of other already existing LyB/Y words that contain no word-initial nasal. This is a common process in other African youth language practices, as also observed by Kießling and Mous (2004) for Nouchi, for instance. These cases of “prefixation of homorganic nasals to English or French words . . . give them a Bantu flavor” (ibid.: 321). Frequent words in LyB/Y include nkópo ‘alcohol; glass of beer’ instead of kópo (initially from Portuguese copa), and ntsinga ‘gold chain’ instead of singa ‘chain, cable’. Also, common terms such as shimboki ‘cigarette’ in Lyb/Y underwent phonological change; a plosive is inserted into the borrowing smoke (this and the aforementioned tshakayi ‘tea’ are examples of epenthesis). Metathesis constitutes another widespread phonological process deliberately employed by youths. Terms such as French savon ‘soap’, chambre ‘room’, and laver ‘to wash’ are realised as vosa, mbresha (or shambar) and -vela by youths (cf. French verlan). This is also a widespread practice in other youth language practices beyond Kinshasa. Another process of phonotactic manipulation is clipping, shortening French words such as l’argent ‘money’ to lar and préparer ‘to cook’ to -paré (example 5). Nowadays, a clipped form of shimbok(i) (see earlier), bok(i), is used in order to denote ‘alcohol’ (as both cigarettes and alcohol are consumed through “drinking” in Lingala). Various acronyms, onomatopoiea and deliberately changed vowels also occur in LyB/Y.

34  Nico Nassenstein Moreover, young speakers tend to change the syllable structure of their language. While Lingala follows an (N)CV syllable structure with few exceptions (in words having entered the language as lexical borrowings), LyB/Y reveals a syllabic structure with closed syllables, especially in clause-final position. This is achieved by adding a phoneme /d/ or, depending upon the speaker, [t] or [d̪ ]. Sometimes, this can also be realised as [ʦ]; all of these can be understood as free variants (see examples 1a–b). This phonological change may be explained as a feature borrowed from Cilubà, where a word-final /s/ either expresses a speaker’s impatience or emphasis (Kabuta and Schiffer 2009: 116) (see example 2). Another more recent and very popular LyB/Y term across social media, initially introduced by musician Fally Ipupa, is tokooos. It represents a clipped form of the adjective/adverb kitóko ‘beautiful’, also containing a word-final /s/, which can be related to the LyB/Y examples. As already indicated, Cilubà is the language spoken in many of the adolescents’ homes,9 who later became street children. (1a) Mister, o-món-í? NP1a.buddy SM2SG-see-PRS1 ‘Buddy, you see now?’

[mista omóníd̪ ]

(1b) Petit-yó, lobá! [pitᴶó lobáʦ] you.small.one speak ‘Spit it out, small one (term of address)!’ (Cilubà) (adapted from Kabuta and Schiffer 2009: 116) (2) Vwâku-s! come.PF-PF10 ‘So, come!/Come, won’t you?’ There are also prosodic features in LyB/Y that are indexical of individual style, and thus of social standing. Young people’s speech reveals specific differences from the intonational patterns found in Kinshasa Lingala, especially with regard to pitch contour, which is considerably lower than in other people’s way of speaking Lingala, with smaller intervals between high tones and low tones. The lowered pitch, slurred speech and comparably high volume (approximately 5–10 db louder than other speakers) with which LyB/Y is usually spoken marks it intonationally as distinctive. 3.2  Nominal morphology Lingala has noun classes, which means that nouns can be sorted into specific pairs with singular and plural classes, whereby one singular prefix usually corresponds to one plural prefix (such as NCP1 mo-to ‘person’

Democratic Republic of the Congo 35 and NCP2 ba-to ‘people’; NCP5 li-kámbo ‘problem’ and NCP6 makámbo ‘problems’), apart from classes that are made up of nouns that are singularia tantum or pluralia tantum. The noun class (henceforth NC) system of Kinshasa Lingala has no class pair 12/13, which is used in other Bantu languages in order to express diminutive or pejorative readings (see, for instance, Katamba 2003). LyB/Y nouns that carry the prefix/clitic ka- and are thus grouped in NC12, include for instance ka-moké ‘somebody of short size, young person’, kamusenzi ‘bad-mannered person’, ka-zobazóba ‘idiot’, and many more. In the Lingala spoken in Kinshasa, the only words containing NCP12 class marking were formerly borrowed in their entirety from languages such as Congo Swahili where a NCP12 is actively used (e.g. kadogo ‘child soldier; somebody of short size; young kid’), while LyB/Y speakers make active use of this evaluative morpheme in order to express a diminutive or pejorative perspective. Plural-marking in NC13, however, does not occur in LyB/Y. (3) ba-boté ka-zobazóba

(w)âná

SM2-beat NP12-idiot DEM2 ‘they hit that idiot’ Apart from the productive use of NC12, users of LyB/Y tend to shift concepts to NC7a (ki-) or use ki- in prefix doubling more often than users of the common Lingala of Kinshasa. While the regular prefix of NC7 is e-, ki- is usually only used for “all names of languages except Lingála [ . . . and] [u]sed as a supplementary prefix in prefix stacking. . ., ki- also appears as a marker of nouns indicating behaviour types, manners, ways, etc.” (Meeuwis 2010: 42, emphasis in original). Moreover, there seems to be a semantic change from marking behaviour/attitude types to denoting human beings who embody these behaviours. These include kibuki ‘obese person’, kizengi ‘mentally disabled person’, kipelepéle ‘bad-tempered person’ and kidiamfuka ‘somebody who does not pay his/her debts’. Non-human referents include kindinga ‘foreign language’ (a modification of Kikongo-Kituba ndinga) and kibwakala ‘flip-flop’. (4) ki-bwakála

ó

e-zá

kitóko

té

NP7a-flip.flop DEM1 SMINANIM-be beautiful NEG ‘this flip-flop does not look good’ Apart from these changes in the noun class system of LyB/Y, speakers deliberately employ morphological manipulations, such as the affixation of French derivational morphemes (see also Kießling and Mous 2004: 318) for similar processes in other contexts. These are the frequently used French suffixes -eur and -ard as agentive nominalisers, the English -man

36  Nico Nassenstein with the same function, as well as several others that occur less frequently (see Nassenstein 2014: 64–5). The only inflectional morpheme used by speakers is the English suffix -ing, which is used in order to create nouns such as palesting ‘house’ from French palais ‘palace’. Another common feature of the noun morphology of LyB/Y is the fact that nouns, especially when denoting human referents, are often borrowed together with their definite article, as in lifanto ‘child’ from French l’enfant or lemoro ‘woman, mother’ from French la mère (see example 5). (5) Lemoro

a-paré

níni?

mother SM1-cook ITRG ‘What has mother cooked?’ 3.3  Verbal morphology The verb phrase also reveals several deviations from Kinshasa Lingala, especially in terms of tense-aspect marking. LyB/Y speakers employ a prefix -ké-, which expresses the near/immediate future and is derived from the verb kokende ‘to go’. The verb -kend- uses an irregular present (PRS1) -keí, which is often shortened to -ké (Meeuwis 2010: 128). However, in Kinshasa Lingala, this does not commonly express the future tense but maintains a connotation of ‘going somewhere’; neither is it followed by the verb root but instead by an infinitive (see 6a–6b). While grammaticalised forms across Bantu languages make regular use of the verb ‘to go’ when expressing the near future (Heine and Kuteva 2002: 161, Nurse 2008: 87), the Lingala spoken in Kinshasa by older or non-initiated speakers expresses the future tense regularly with a prefix -ko- always followed by a high tone on the first syllable of the verb root. This future tense also exists in LyB/Y but refers to planned events that will take place later on. Two examples illustrate the grammaticalised near future in LyB/Y. While example 7a has two readings, that of a subjunctive 1st plural (‘let’s go!’) and a near future, example 7b only allows a reading of the near future. Semantically, this comes close to the proximative aspect (Heine 1994), describing events that are about to take place, in Lingala formed with the verb -ling- ‘want’. (Kinshasa Lingala) (6a) ba-ké zándo SM2-go NP9.market ‘they are going/have just gone to the market’ (6b) ba-ké ko-lúka leki na bangó SM2-go INF-search NP1a.young.sibling POSS 3PL ‘they are going/have just gone to look for their younger sibling’ ‘they will shortly go to look for their younger sibling’ (?)

Democratic Republic of the Congo 37 (LyB/Y) (7a) to-ké-bámb-a ba-momie SM1PL-NEAR.FUT-lay-FV NP2-girl

ya    Kimbangu CON    K.

‘let’s go and lay (the) girls from Kimbangu’/ ‘we will shortly lay (the) girls from Kimbangu’ (7b) mo-to   na

nga

NP1-person   POSS 1SG

a-ké-také penge SM1-NEAR.FUT-steal NP9.money

‘my friend is about to/will shortly steal some money’ A second change in the verbal system of LyB/Y concerns epenthetic consonant loss in prefixes expressing the future tense -ko- → -o- and progressive aspect -zó- → -ó- (a phonological feature but with effects on the TAM system). As these two tense-aspect markers are the only ones that are prefixed to the root in Lingala, the compression of both forms leads to a single vowel differing only in prosody (future vs present progressive), which could be described as “sporadic sound change” (Dimmendaal 2011: 54) or as sound change with a specific morphological condition, due to rapid speech habits and a specific “key” or speech style when speaking LyB/Y, often characterised as “slurred speech” that is recurrent as a stylistic feature of youth registers (see also Fagyal 2010). (8a) père

na

bínó a-ó-vivre

NP1a.father POSS 2PL

vie móko ya kimobol ya tetí

SM1-PRG-live life QUANT CON unemployed.person

‘your father lives like an unemployed person (i.e. in misery)’ (8b) na-o-nyát-a

yó

vrai

SM1SG-FUT-kick-FV OM2SG real

bolít! punch

‘I am really going to punch you!’ 3.4  Semantics and pragmatics In terms of semantics, Lingala-speaking youth employ a large number of strategies of figurative speech. Metaphors are frequently used, such as mbwá ‘broken’ (lit. ‘dog’), -bayé ‘to drink, smoke’ (French bailler ‘yawn’) and pinareserve ‘extramarital affair’ (French pneu de réserve ‘spare tire’); metonymies of brand names like rái ‘sunglasses’ (Ray Ban) and gillette ‘razor blade’; onomastic synecdoches such as djo ‘guy, man’ (Joe), PPRD ‘okay, fine’ (Ling. pépélé, PPRD being a political party); and complex

38  Nico Nassenstein semantic extensions, such as nyabu ‘female; vagina’ derived from Luganda nnyabo ‘woman’ (as a term of address), introduced to Kinshasa by Ugandan soldiers in the late 1990s reportedly calling out for sex workers. Other techniques are euphemisms (jeu/jé ‘trick; false game’ from French jeu ‘game’), dysphemisms (ghetto for ‘house’), hyperboles and various folk etymologies. Semantic manipulations are recurrent in African youth language practices (see Kießling and Mous 2004 for more examples). At the pragmatic level, the emergence of a specific quotative óo (example 9) should be mentioned for direct speech constructions; this is a widespread phenomenon across African languages (Güldemann 2008). Most adolescents use a marker óo when citing direct speech; it is more commonly used than the Lingala complementiser te (Meeuwis 2013) or the borrowed que, both of which denote reported speech. The quotative óo (most probably derived from the exclamation oh) was not attested for Kinshasa Lingala. (9) a-lob-í

óo

lóbí

na-bay-ákí

trois

chupa

SM1-say-PRS1 QUOT yesterday SM1SG-drink-PST1 NUM NP9.beer ‘and (s)he said “yesterday I drank three beers” ’

4 A sociolinguistic glance at enregisterment, communities of practice, stylisation and spread While structural analyses of youths’ deviating speech explain the exact linguistic output of a changing or modified morphosyntax, it is specifically sociolinguistic factors that explain the dynamics of group membership, the organisational principles of communities of practice (CoP) and the social context of adolescents’ language use and ‘languaging’ processes. While first accounts of children’s deviations and deliberate language change in the use of Lingala date back to the late 1940s (ComhaireSylvain 1949a, 1949b), it was toward the end of the 1950s that young Congolese formed a variety of Lingala that was unintelligible to most outsiders, it had a broad range of lexical but also morphophonological and semantic manipulations. This linguistic practice was analysed only decades later, labelled “Indoubill” (sometimes also spelt Indubill or Hindubil) and was described by Sesep (1979, 1990), and also later by Edema (2006). The emergence of Indoubill in the politically restless days of the independence movement was probably rooted in a state of political anarchy, it was linked to images of violence predominantly found in Wild West movies of that time. Gondola (2009: n. p.) has worked extensively on the so-called Bill movement and described the Bills as “tropical cowboys”; as street boys who “reappropriated the aesthetic of cowboy movies’ violence to frame their critique of the colonial system, while creating the elements of a new masculinity that clashed with not only colonial but also ‘traditional’ norms”. The gangs’ apparent copying of the colonial system’s brutality was widely known

Democratic Republic of the Congo 39 beyond the boundaries of the capital. While Indoubill reveals specific differences from today’s UCD, the current youth language still shares/ retains much of its lexicon. The changes in youth culture and adolescents’ communities of practice can be seen as a cyclical development in Kinshasa, despite the fact that their orientations, standards, values and matters of prestige have changed. The youngsters following the early Bills (from the late 1960s to the early 1980s) were mostly organised in musical groups (inspired by the new musical style ebuka) and established close connections between the two bordering capitals of Kinshasa and Brazzaville, only separated by the Congo River (see Nassenstein and Hollington 2016: 189). From 1983 onwards, new communities of practice were shaped by increasing numbers of street children, expelled by their families (see above). Children accused of witchcraft, mostly operating in acephalous gangs, still represent the largest number of LyB/Y users today. After the millennium, there were also criminal kolúna gangs (lit. ‘to demolish/devastate’), that were formed in the popular neighbourhoods of Yolo, Matongé, Barumbu, Matete and others, and operated strictly hierarchically in écuries (‘stables’). These groups began to use LyB/Y and appropriated it as a language of violence and instrumentalised intimidation, as had already been the case with the early Bills in the 1950s–60s. This also happened due to the fact that numerous street children (bashegé) joined the kolúna gangs when they reached adulthood. In 2010, the authorities reacted and, in a widely criticised act of brutality, arrested and expelled hundreds of arbitrarily chosen perpetrators into the interior of the country or executed them, which stopped the phenomène ya kolúna. In more recent times, the register was widespread beyond the former boundaries of its CoP; however, most users of LyB/Y who are not fully initiated seldom know the “core Lyb/Y”, with its high numbers of synonyms in specific semantic fields. Most speakers of LyB/Y are less than 30 years old and can be considered as communities of practice formed either by the aforementioned street children, gangs, football teams, groups of local musicians and, increasingly, also students and children from better-off families – which can be seen as a rather recent phenomenon due to the spread of the language in music and through social media (occurring only after 2010). However, there are gradual nuances in terms of the ephemerality of linguistic innovations from one community of practice to another: while school children and students make use of a register that is already diffused across broader layers of society, street children and gang members are at the core of innovation and relexification processes; or, in Labov’s (2001) terms, they include highly innovative ‘saccadic leaders’ (leaders of linguistic change in groups of speakers or communities of practice) in their groups. However, groups and communities of speakers deviate in regard to their composition, their structure (acephalous groups of shége vs strict

40  Nico Nassenstein hierarchical groups of gangsters vs non-organised students on the periphery of LyB/Y-speaking networks), and also with regard to their actual knowledge of LyB/Y and their inherent innovational potential in processes of linguistic change. These can thus, building on several colleagues’ work, be described as core networks vs loose peripheral networks, or ‘deep’ LyB/Y vs ‘LyB/Y for the general public’ (by analogy with Namyalo (2015) for Luyaaye in Uganda). When interviewing self-proclaimed speakers of the UCD, the results vary not only according to speakers’ choice of lexicon – which depends upon their neighbourhood, their pragmatic strategies, their daily interlocutors and the speech act in question, but also in terms of their integration within (or alongside) a community of practice, i.e. their position and ties within a social network of speakers (cf. Milroy 2004, among others). So why does the use of LyB/Y (still) evoke associations of a specific role, a speaker’s intended positionality and also associations with specific lower strata, despite its steady diffusion and spread? This can be explained with reference to ‘indexicality’, and the indexical value of using LyB/Y as one marked register among other Lingala registers; with reference to Agha (2005, among other publications), the use of LyB/Y can thus be understood as a form of enregisterment, “a social regularity of recognition whereby linguistic (and accompanying nonlinguistic) signs come to be recognized as indexing pragmatic features of interpersonal role (persona) and relationship” (p.  57). Without the underlying indexed images and their function in contributing to the widespread recognition of a “social indexical”, the forms and structures of LyB/Y, discussed in Sections 3.1–3.4, are devoid of meaning (for a more detailed discussion, see Nassenstein 2014). The social function of LyB/Y, serving as an indexical marker for specific (language) ideologies embodied by speakers (i.e. the whys and wherefores of their language use), causes – and is nourished by – the negative language attitudes of non-speakers and non-users, who reject this linguistic practice. This adds to explanations of why, in youth language research, the idea of “covert prestige” is recurrent in the literature. Apart from mere linguistic performance, this enregisterment also circles around the semiotic value of gestures/facial expressions, clothes, hairstyles, dance moves, drinking and smoking, ways of walking and behaving  – in general, an overall stylisation of social practices (Eckert 2000), marking a “stylect” (Hurst 2008); and it is therefore an often-cited example in third-wave variation studies (Eckert 2012). Acknowledging LyB/Y, therefore, not as a demarcated “language” that fully deviates in grammar from another (opposed) language, nor as an “antilanguage” in Halliday’s (1976) sense, contributes to our understanding of it as a social register, which can be used by the same speakers who use common Kinshasa Lingala in other contexts, for example. Speakers who use Kinshasa Lingala in daily life situations when interacting with teachers, priests, parents, shopkeepers and non-initiated speakers (in general) may

Democratic Republic of the Congo 41 choose LyB/Y when interacting with peers, police, thieves, musicians and, for reasons of social distinction, also with representatives of the groups first mentioned. Understanding LyB/Y as a (languaging) process, in which speakers’ diverse linguistic resources are reflected, rather than as a solid linguistic artefact, also allows us to acknowledge the apparent similarities between the youth language from Kinshasa and UCD from other parts of the country, such as Yabacrâne and Indoubill (Goma/Bukavu, eastern DR Congo) and Kindubile (Lubumbashi, southeastern DR Congo), despite their Kiswahili base. The trans/polylanguaging processes (cf. Pennycook 2016) in these settings are similar to speakers’ practices in Kinshasa (as also described in detail in various other chapters of this volume), their “metrolingual” use of urban language(s), as well, while the linguistic basis is Lingala in one setting but Kiswahili or Cilubà in another. The common cross-regional spread of LyB/Y terms and innovations to other urban centres in the DR Congo forms part of these languaging processes, facilitated through social media use, music and advertising. Further studies are needed in order to analyse LyB/Y in more depth with regard to current sociolinguistic theories and debates (e.g. languaging processes; indexicality and stance; enregisterment; embodiment; mediatisation; inequality etc.). A  discussion of LyB/Y in analogy with youth registers, fluid urban practices and multiethnolects outside of the African context, as set out in the present volume with insights from the Global North and South, will allow for a more holistic and theoretically more fine-grained analysis of adolescents’ linguistic choices.

Abbreviations CON connective DEM demonstrative DR Congo Democratic Republic of the Congo FUT future tense FV final vowel INF infinitive ITRG interrogative LyB/Y Lingala ya Bayankee/Yanké NEAR.FUT near/immediate future NEG negation NP1 nominal prefix of class 1 NUM numeral OM1SG object marker of the 1st person singular PF post-final PL plural POSS possessive PRG progressive aspect PRS1 present tense 1

42  Nico Nassenstein PST1 past tense 1 QUANT quantifier QUOT quotative SG singular SM1 subject marker of noun class 1

Notes 1 The Ethnologue (Simons and Fennig 2018) suggests a considerably smaller number of speakers, which seems an underestimate considering its use in the metropolises of Kinshasa, Brazzaville and beyond. Meeuwis (2013) assumes 25 million speakers altogether, or even as many as 30–40 million (p.c.). 2  I am very grateful to all of the research assistants who have allowed me to study their language and youth culture over the years. Notably, Carter Omende is thanked for his overall assistance between 2009 and 2018. I am grateful to my colleagues Andrea Hollington, Anne Storch and Ellen Hurst for our collaborative work on African youth languages. I am indebted to the editors of this volume and anonymous reviewers for all comments and ideas. Mary Chambers is thanked for helping to improve my English. 3  Rampton (2015: 40) sees a danger in fixed names being attributed to “contemporary urban vernaculars”. 4  This word list can currently be downloaded from [www.academia. edu/27274934/Yanké_ – _English_dictionary] (Accessed 10 June 2019). 5  For a sociolinguistic historical overview from Indoubill to LyB/Y, see Nassenstein (2018). 6  Gondola (2009, footnote 48, n.p.) also mentions a book chapter by La Fontaine (1969) that deals with Indoubill, which was not available to the author. Gondola himself describes the early youth language in Kinshasa as “a Lingala-based pidgin” and also states that its users borrowed heavily from Kikongo and French. While the latter is unmistakably true, there are no indications, based on Sesep (1990), that Indoubill fulfilled the criteria of a pidgin. 7  This happens mainly due to beliefs around kindoki (‘witchcraft’) that were popularised in Kinshasa due to the establishment of Nigerian and American pentecostal churches in the early 1980s. Families abandoned their children in large numbers because preachers would blame them for bad luck, socioeconomic failure etc. 8  No exhaustive discussion is provided in the following; instead, a selection of specific features that deviate from Kinshasa Lingala is provided. For a more detailed analysis, see Nassenstein (2014). 9  Based on early interviews carried out in 2004–5, out of a sample of 50 street children more than 25 described themselves as ethnic Luba. 10  Kabuta and Schiffer (2009) classify both -ákú- (with the meaning dan ‘then’) and also the morpheme -s as post-final (PF).

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Democratic Republic of the Congo 45 Namyalo, Saudah (2015). Linguistic strategies in Luyaaye: Word-play and conscious language manipulation. In: Youth Language Practices in Africa and Beyond. Nico Nassenstein and Andrea Hollington (eds.), 313–44. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9781614518525-017. Nassenstein, Nico (2014). A Grammatical Study of the Youth Language Yanké. Munich: LINCOM. Nassenstein, Nico (2015). The emergence of Langila in Kinshasa (DR Congo). In: Youth Language Practices in Africa and Beyond. Nico Nassenstein and Andrea Hollington (eds.), 81–98. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/ 9781614518525-006. Nassenstein, Nico (2018). Historical sociolinguistics and the study of youth language: Aging cowboys and the problem of tracing language change. Paper presented at the colloquium Altern in der Welt, 27 November 2018, University of Cologne. Nassenstein, Nico and Andrea Hollington (eds.) (2015). Youth Language Practices in Africa and Beyond. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Nassenstein, Nico and Andrea Hollington (2016). Global repertoires and urban fluidity: Youth languages in Africa. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 242: 171–93. DOI: 10.1515/ijsl-2016-0037. Nurse, Derek (2008). Tense and Aspect in Bantu. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ossette, Eugene-Andre (1991). Caractères sociologiques de l’Argot Lingala. In Des langues et des villes. Gouaini, Elhousseine and Ndiasse Thiam (eds.), 475– 81. Paris: ACCT and Didier Erudition. Pennycook, Alastair (2016). Mobile times, mobile terms: The trans-poly-supermetro movement. In: Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Nikolas Coupland (ed.), 201–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/ cbo9781107449787.010. Rampton, Ben (2015). Contemporary urban vernaculars. In: Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century: Linguistic Practices across Urban Spaces. Jacomine Nortier and Bente A. Svendsen (eds.), 25–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reuster-Jahn, Uta and Roland Kießling (2006). Lugha ya Mitaani in Tanzania. The poetics and sociology of a young urban style of speaking with a dictionary comprising 1100 words and phrases. Swahili Forum 13: 1–200. Rudd, Philip W. (2008). Sheng: The Mixed Language of Nairobi. PhD dissertation, Ball State University, Muncie. Samarin, William J. (1986). Protestant missions and the history of Lingala. Journal of Religion in Africa 16(2): 138–63. DOI: 10.1163/157006686x00100. Samarin, William J. (1990). The origins of Kituba and Lingala. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 12: 47–77. DOI: 10.1515/jall.1991.12.1.47. Sesep, N’Sial Bal-Nsien (1979). Recherche sur le métissage linguistique. Cas du français, du lingála et de l’indoubill au Zaïre. PhD dissertation, Université Nationale du Zaïre/Campus de Lubumbashi. Sesep, N’Sial Bal-Nsien (1990). Langage, normes et repertoire en milieu urbain africain: L’indoubill. Québec: Centre International de Recherche en Aménagement Linguistique. Simons, Gary F. and Charles D. Fennig (eds.) (2018). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (21st edition). Dallas: SIL International.

46  Nico Nassenstein Van Pelt, Frank (2000). Lingala ya Bayankee: een beschrijving van het Lingala Argot. MA thesis, Leiden University. Wilson, Catherina (2012). The Congolese Yankee. MA thesis, Leiden University. Wilson, Catherina (2015). Kindoubil: urban youth languages in Kisangani. In: Youth Language Practices in Africa and Beyond. Nico Nassenstein and Andrea Hollington (eds.), 293–311. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

3 Senegal Urban Wolof then and now Fiona Mc Laughlin

1  Linguistic and social context Wolof, an Atlantic (Niger-Congo) language, has served as a lingua franca in multilingual Senegal since the precolonial period. As urbanisation has increased, Wolof has steadily gained speakers, both L1 and L2-x, to become the dominant urban language. Linguists and others have pointed to an urban contact variety of the language, variously identified by researchers as Dakar Wolof (Stewart 1966; Mc Laughlin 2001) or Urban Wolof (Swigart 1994), that exhibits extensive lexical borrowing from French, yet there are relatively few speakers of Wolof who do not incorporate at least some French borrowings into their speech. Whether or not this constitutes a variety of Wolof, it is nonetheless incontrovertible both that a French-influenced way of speaking Wolof originated in multilingual urban contexts, and that it holds a strong association with the capital city of Dakar in the popular imagination. 1.1  The dominance of Wolof in a multilingual country Senegal is characterised by societal and individual multilingualism. More than 30 indigenous languages are spoken in the country, yet what is somewhat unusual is that a single African language, Wolof, serves as a national lingua franca. The country became independent from France in 1960, and French remains the sole official language. A  little more than 40% of the Senegalese population, which currently numbers close to 17  million, is ethnically Wolof, yet at least 90% of the population speaks Wolof as a first or other language. This figure rises in urban areas, and particularly in Dakar, a city of 2.5 million people (Cissé 2005). So dominant is Wolof that it is often referred to informally as the “national language”, and it is strongly associated with a Senegalese identity by Senegalese themselves, at home and abroad, as well as by other Africans. No special or otherwise formal status has been accorded it, above and beyond that of any other African language spoken in the country. This neglect of Wolof and lack of promotion by the Senegalese state may in DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-5

48  Fiona Mc Laughlin fact have allowed it to flourish and spread. As it is not officially recognised, there is no real means of opposing creeping Wolofisation, thus no impediment to the successful spread of the language (Cruise O’Brien 1998; Mc Laughlin 2008b, 2018), which has been steadily gaining speakers for more than 150 years, facilitated in large part by urbanisation. 1.2  French, the official language French, the former colonial language, is the official language of Senegal, and it is thus (nominally) the language of administration and education, yet according to estimates by Beck et al. (2018) only 26% of the population can be considered French-speaking. What exactly it means to be counted as a French speaker is undefined, but clearly, French plays a much more restricted role in the language world of Senegal than does Wolof. This is somewhat surprising, given that Senegal was home to two successive capitals of the vast colonial territory of French West Africa, and French was promoted on a practical and ideological level by Léopold Senghor, the country’s first president and member of the French Academy. Although other factors such as weaknesses in the educational infrastructure can be added to the equation, the restricted role of French can be largely attributed to widespread familiarity with Wolof as a lingua franca. Even in contexts such as state-run schools where instruction is in French, teachers resort to Wolof to keep order in the classroom, especially in primary schools where pupils often enter with no knowledge of French. Wolof serves as a lingua franca among schoolchildren with different L1s, and is thus established as the language of the school corridors and playground, so that children from non-Wolof backgrounds learn the language in this way. This example complicates and even calls into question the attribution of Senegalese languages to specific sociolinguistic domains (e.g. Wolof at home, French at school) usually associated with diglossia, and specifically Fishman’s (1967) notion of diglossia that identifies H and L varieties by their function, rather than requiring any linguistic relatedness between the two varieties. 1.3  Urban Wolof The salient role French plays in the Senegalese linguistic repertoire lies largely in the way it has crept in through the back door, so to speak, by contributing a substantial number of loanwords to Wolof.1 Over its history, Wolof has incorporated loanwords from different languages, including most significantly, Arabic, Portuguese, Zenaga Berber, Bambara, Pulaar and English, but it is the proliferation of French borrowings and code-mixing between Wolof and French that distinguishes urban ways of speaking. The grammar of Wolof has remained largely intact as the result of contact, but changes in the lexicon have led to some

Senegal 49 concomitant morphological and syntactic adjustments that facilitate the integration of borrowings. An urban way of speaking first emerged in the colonial city of SaintLouis du Sénégal, founded in the mid-17th century, but today it is associated in the popular imagination with the capital, Dakar, founded in 1857. Thanks to the nature of their populations and their status as contact zones (Pratt 1991), their immanent potential for self-transformation, and their association with modernity, these two cities became the incubators of this new and prestigious way of speaking, characterised by borrowing from French, that was gradually appropriated by others to the extent that borrowing is now a salient characteristic of Wolof as spoken in Senegal.2 The origins of urban Wolof can, of course, be traced to French contact and colonisation, but the French were not the agents of change because they rarely spoke Wolof. The original agents of change were urban speakers of Wolof. Contemporary studies (Seck 2016; Vold Lexander 2011) show that in addition to an unmarked form of urban Wolof that borrows liberally from French, there are youthful ways of speaking urban Wolof that make greater use of English borrowings, verlan (the transposition of syllables within a word), and many other creative linguistic processes. These ways of speaking index a “cool” and cosmopolitan youthful identity, but are considered disrespectful and inappropriate for use with older people (Seck 2016). 1.4  The role of English Over the course of its history, Wolof has incorporated a number of borrowings from English that derive from various sources. Saint-Louis was occupied by the British from 1758–79 and from 1809–14, and it is possible that some older borrowings such as forok ‘frock, tunic’ and fiftin ‘small coin’ > fifteen, now considered archaic, or cuu ‘stew’ entered Wolof then. The Gambia, a small country surrounded by Senegal on three sides, was a British colony, and English is currently the official language, so a number of English words have entered Senegalese Wolof in that way. In more recent times, popular culture, first in the form of reggae and then hip-hop, has served as a source for English borrowings, especially by youthful speakers, a phenomenon that has continued with the increasing importance and appeal of English as a global language. Senegalese youth are keen to learn English because of its cachet and also because it carries none of the colonial associations of French, and a number of private English-language primary and secondary schools have become popular choices for children from middle-class families. A  final important factor that elevates the status of English in Senegal is the large number of Senegalese emigrants in the United States. Many of these emigrants return home for family reasons or religious holidays, often bringing their

50  Fiona Mc Laughlin English-dominant children with them, and they play an important role in the youthful Senegalese imagination.

2  Empirical data 2.1  Spoken corpora Wolof is a relatively well-documented language with grammatical descriptions, wordlists and dictionaries dating from before the 18th century (Irvine 1978) up to the present. Spoken corpora of contemporary urban Wolof, however, are not well represented. Beyond the recordings that individual researchers have made, most of which are not accessible to others, there is a small open access “Wolof Corpus and functional database on predication of the Cortypo project” compiled by Stéphane Robert at CNRSLLACAN, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01678100; and the Wolof/ French corpus archived at the Sociolinguistics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa, under the direction of Shana Poplack, which includes audio recordings, transcriptions and concordances of speech by Wolofspeaking students in Canada: www.sociolinguistics.uottawa.ca/holdings/ languagepairs.html. This website is not, however, open access. A database compiled by Mc Laughlin in 2005 contains approximately four and a half hours of recordings of naturally occurring speech in Dakar. Most of the recordings were done in a small institutional context and the ten interlocutors included people of all ranks, from cleaner to associate director. Three are females and seven males, and their ages range from late 20s to late 60s. These data were supplemented with sociolinguistic interviews the researcher conducted in Wolof with the participants. This database awaits transcription and archiving. In addition to these audio sources, there are a number of studies containing original data that address urban Wolof, cited in §2.4. For any researcher interested in collecting urban Wolof data, it is robustly represented in multiple platforms on the internet, including Senegalese and diaspora news sites and social media. 2.2  Written corpora Nineteenth century data on urban Wolof come from a source published in 1864 in Saint-Louis by Louis Descemet, a bilingual member of the métis or mixed-race elite (Jones 2013). Descemet’s contribution is of special interest because it is neither a lexicon nor a grammar but rather a phrase book, entitled Recueil d’environ 1,200 phrases françaises usuelles avec leur traduction en regard en ouolof de Saint-Louis, that provides an unparalleled collection of everyday 19th century French phrases with their translation into the Wolof of Saint-Louis, as well as a glimpse into the life of an elite tranche of Saint-Louisien society of the time. Historical data, as Milroy (1992: 45) points out, provide only one part of the

Senegal 51 picture, because they have been accidentally preserved, yet there are some compelling reasons why Descemet’s 1864 phrase book might actually be a fairly good source of data. Deploring an educational system in which Wolof-speaking children were taught to recite lessons in French without knowing the meaning of what they were saying, Descemet intended his book to be used in Senegalese schools. The representation of Wolof in the translations is described by Descemet as being the “simplest” possible. He claims that it did not need to be exact because it was simply a mnemonic device for indicating to the student the meaning of the French phrase it was intended to translate. These Wolof data, as I have argued elsewhere (Mc Laughlin 2008a: 717), are more valuable to the sociolinguist than a dictionary or grammar because, according to Descemet’s description, they are free from any prescriptive norms and thus represent the closest equivalent to the spoken language of the day. Contemporary written data are found in Jean-Léopold Diouf’s (2003) Dictionnaire wolof-français et français wolof. For each entry in the Wolof-French section of the dictionary, Diouf, a native speaker of Wolof, also provides a naturalistic phrase in which the Wolof word is used, and of course the noun class is provided for each noun. Clearly, it is impossible to find completely parallel databases for the two different periods, but these sources arguably constitute a good compromise. Whereas Descemet’s 19th century phrases, as described earlier, are in a sense incidental to the French phrases, and therefore of a more casual and natural aspect than the French since they are not subject to a robust regime of literacy, any prescriptiveness that may have found its way into Diouf’s dictionary should be offset by the oral data. 2.3 Evaluating the comparability of 19th and 21st century sources Descemet’s phrase book depicts very self-consciously the Wolof of SaintLouis, an island city founded by the French in 1654, making it the oldest French settlement in Africa. In the middle of the 19th century, Saint-Louis numbered approximately 15,000 inhabitants, of whom approximately 7,000 were recently freed Africans of diverse origins. Around 6,000 were local Africans, most of whom were Wolof and Muslim; approximately 1,000 made up the métis population of the city, and counted Descemet among their ranks; and the remaining 1,000 inhabitants were French administrative and military personnel (approximately 800), and French merchants and their dependants (200) (Robinson 2000: 31). Midnineteenth century Saint-Louis was thus a contact zone, where people with diverse languages and backgrounds mingled in everyday life. Descemet’s insistence on the Wolof of Saint-Louis indicates that he understood it as a distinct way of speaking, different from other dialects of Wolof in its use of French borrowings.

52  Fiona Mc Laughlin Contemporary spoken data were collected in Dakar, located 300 kilometres south of Saint-Louis. Many of the interlocutors were originally from other places in Senegal, a situation not atypical of Dakar’s population as a whole which, since the founding of the city in 1857, has always attracted large numbers of newcomers born elsewhere. In the preface to his dictionary, Diouf states that he gathered his corpus in the Wolofspeaking heartlands of the country, as well as Dakar, and that it included vocabulary related to cultural practices, health, religion and agriculture. The two urban locales, I would argue, do not make for a disparate database for two important reasons. First, the dominant urban setting in 19th century Senegal was Saint-Louis, and at the time of publication of Descemet’s phrase book, the city of Dakar was less than a decade old. After the rise of Dakar, Saint-Louis faced a steep decline in terms of economic and administrative activity and its population growth slowed substantially. Starting in 1990, the city gained a new vitality with the opening of a university located 12 kilometres from the city centre, but nothing on the scale of Dakar, which has been the dominant urban setting in Senegal since the beginning of the 20th century. So although the data come from two locales separated not only in time but also in space, each locale represents the urban capital and cultural and economic centre of its time. Moreover, the practice of incorporating French borrowings into Wolof, which likely had its origins in Saint-Louis, is currently characteristic of Wolof as a whole, regardless of where it is spoken. We are not, then, dealing with forms of Wolof that have different histories; rather, the history of Wolof since contact with French has been shaped sequentially in these different urban environments. Two caveats do, nonetheless, remain. The main limitation of the comparison is that Descemet’s phrase book is, as its title suggests, a list of phrases rather than longer stretches of discourse, although a number of them are somewhat dialogic in nature. This makes it somewhat difficult to evaluate changes in the texture of urban Wolof as an everyday practice. Second, Diouf’s dictionary tends towards a more conservative use of noun classes than does the contemporary spoken corpus, as perhaps befits a dictionary. 2.4  Studies of urban Wolof A number of studies of urban Wolof have approached the topic from different perspectives. Cruise O’Brien’s insightful work (1998) focuses on the politics and sociology of urban Wolof and Wolofisation, while Thiam’s articles (1990, 1992, 1994) were some of the first to describe Dakar Wolof and consider its implications for an urban identity, a theme also taken up in studies by Swigart (1992a, 1994), Dreyfus and Juillard (2004), Ngom (2004), Versluys (2008, 2010) and Mc Laughlin (2001, 2018). Many of these studies explore codeswitching and code-mixing in urban Wolof from a sociolinguistic point of view, while Meechan

Senegal 53 and Poplack (1995), Schindler et al. (2008) and Legendre and Schindler (2010) approach urban Wolof-French codeswitching from a more formal perspective. Swigart (1992b) and Mc Laughlin (2018) address the question of language and gender in urban Wolof. Seck (2016) addresses the issue of youth language in Senegal, as does Vold Lexander (2011), whose work focuses primarily on digital media, especially mobile phone text-messaging, and Mc Laughlin (2014) analyses digital writing and language ideology on a Senegalese news website, Seneweb. Additional work on the sociolinguistics of writing in urban Senegal has been published by Calvet (1994), Dumont (1998), Cissé (2006), Diallo (2015), Shiohata (2012), Mc Laughlin (2001) and Bao Diop and Lüpke (2014). Historical work on urban Wolof in Saint-Louis includes Mc Laughlin (2008a, 2009), and Bao Diop (2019) distinguishes between an “old urban Wolof” and a “contemporary urban Wolof”, casting the latter, somewhat prescriptively, as a deviation from authentic speech. Finally, linguistic anthropologist Judith Irvine’s extensive work (e.g. 1974, 1978, 1980, 1993) and, more recently, Christian Meyer’s (2018) work on rural Wolof serve as a counterpoint to studies of urban language because they remind us of what is and is not unique to urban ways of speaking.

3  Structural findings A comparison of 19th and 21st century urban Wolof data reveals the following continuities and changes: • Nominal borrowing from French is ongoing, and the use of a single default noun class to which such borrowings are assigned has expanded • Verbal borrowing from French has greatly expanded, and French stems are now integrated into Wolof morphology and commonly combined with Wolof derivational and inflectional morphemes • Borrowing is not limited to nouns and verbs: words from other lexical categories, as well as prepositional phrases, are now borrowed into Wolof as verbs • Phonologically, borrowings from French are now less integrated into Wolof than they were in the 19th century • Some minor structural changes have occurred in urban Wolof as a consequence of borrowing The expansion of a default class has been noted in the literature on Wolof since the 19th century. Rambaud (1898: 15) writes of the Wolof of Saint-Louis that most nouns designating objects imported by Europeans are assigned to the default class, while Irvine’s (1978) study, conducted in rural Senegal, shows that the expansion of the b-class is also

54  Fiona Mc Laughlin linked to the notion of “appropriate error” among high-ranking Wolof men. They eschew using the “correct” class because eloquent speech is the domain of low-status verbal artists from whom they wish to distinguish themselves. 3.1  Nominal borrowing and noun-class assignment Nouns constitute a lexical category that ranks highest in the hierarchy of borrowability, followed by adjectives and verbs (Winford 2003: 51). Of the 175 French loanwords that appear in Descemet (1864), 163 or approximately 93% are nouns, while only 12 or approximately 6% are verbs. Of the 9,979 entries in Diouf’s (2003) dictionary, 458 or 4.6% are French borrowings. Of these, 338 or approximately 73% are nouns, while 120 or approximately 26% are verbs. These figures reveal a more robust tendency to borrow verbs in contemporary urban Wolof than in 19th century urban Wolof, but in both cases nouns are the most frequently borrowed items. Most of the nominal borrowings in Descemet’s corpus are borrowings of necessity, used to refer to objects and concepts introduced though contact with French, hence the high percentage of nouns. In order to be integrated into the grammar of Wolof, nominal borrowings must be assigned to a noun class, the functional equivalent of Indo-European gender. Different strategies, detailed in Mc Laughlin (1997), have been used over time in assigning a borrowed noun to a noun class, but the discussion here is limited to more recent strategies. Descemet’s phrase book provides evidence of two strategies at work: 1) a remnant alliterative strategy in which the initial consonant of the borrowed noun determines the noun class to which it is assigned; and 2) the robust use of the default b-class. The alliterative strategy is no longer productive in contemporary urban Wolof, except in an occasional case of hypercorrection or lexicalisation, and it was already waning in 1864. The use of the default class, however, has become generalised for loanwords, often extending to native Wolof words as well. Changes and simplification within a noun-class system due to language contact have been attested for other urban Niger-Congo languages such as Lingala (Bokamba 2009). Examples of the alliterative strategy for assigning a loanword to a noun class in Descemet’s phrase book amount to only three examples, and the default strategy is used for the remaining 27 instances of French borrowings where the noun class is transparent. Default strategies of gender or noun-class assignment are quite common across the world’s languages. In Wolof, the default class is the b-class, so called because the consonant [b] surfaces as the class marker. The tendency towards the use of the b-class is robust throughout the sources used in this study. Contemporary examples of borrowed nouns that surface in the b-class include the following,

Senegal 55 all of which occur in a stretch of discourse of less than two minutes in duration: (1) problem ka afeer estres solidarite restoraa iniwersite ekol rasambalmaa fami mesaas

‘the problem’ ‘case’ ‘matter’ ‘stress’ ‘solidarity’ ‘restaurant’ ‘university’ ‘school’ ‘meeting’ ‘family’ ‘message’

> Fr. problème > Fr. cas > Fr. affaire > Fr. stress > Fr. solidarité > Fr. restaurant > Fr. université > Fr. école > Fr. rassemblement > Fr. famille > Fr. message

Interestingly, in urban Wolof, the b-class is often extended to include Wolof nouns that for many speakers belong to a different class, resulting in much inter- and intra-speaker variation. Examples are given in (2): (2) jigéen ji~bi jàkka ji~bi kër gi~bi ndox mi~bi picc mi~bi cin li~bi

‘the woman’ ‘the mosque’ ‘the house’ ‘the water’ ‘the bird’ ‘the cooking pot’

What we can tentatively conclude is that by the mid-19th century, the default strategy of class assignment was well established, and the b-class has continued to expand into the 20th and 21st centuries and been extended from borrowings to native Wolof words. 3.2  Verbal borrowing and morphological integration This section addresses loanwords and phrases that are borrowed into Wolof as verbs, rather than simply French verbs borrowed into Wolof. Wolof’s verbal structure is quite different from that of French, in that the grammar includes a system of more than 30 inflectional and derivational verbal extensions in the form of suffixes. These extensions may indicate grammatical relations between words or they may extend the meaning of a verb. They include categories such as causative, applicative, negative, imperative, iterative or directional deixis. None of the 12 borrowed verbs that are attested in Descemet’s phrase book take verbal extensions other than the negative, suggesting that their morphological integration is not very far advanced. This may

56  Fiona Mc Laughlin simply be a function of the nature of the data which consist of relatively short phrases separate from any discursive context, but a comparison with both native Wolof verbs in Descemet’s corpus and with contemporary borrowed verbs in the Dakar corpus seems to confirm a weak morphological integration of borrowed verbs in 19th century urban Wolof. Native Wolof verbs that occur in Descemet’s phrase book tend to show a more complex use of verbal extensions, as shown in (3), where both the causative and the imperative (which are homophonous) are combined: (3) Diar-al-al

assette-bi

file

V:pass.CAUSATIVE.2SG.IMPERATIVE N:plate-DET LOCATIVE ‘Pass the plate over here’ The contemporary example in (4) illustrates the combination of three verbal extensions with a borrowed French verb: (4) Rembourser-wat-ag-u-ma

ko

V:pay back.ITERATIVE.ACCOMPLATIVE.NEG.1SG ‘I have not yet paid him/her back’

3SG.OBJECT

Here, the French borrowing, rembourser ‘to reimburse, pay back’ combines with the iterative /-at-/, the marker of accomplishment /-ag-/, and the negative /-u-/. Examples such as this, of which there are many in the Dakar corpus, suggest a deeper morphological integration of borrowed French verbs in contemporary urban Wolof grammar. Borrowed adjectives from French also become Wolof verbs. The French adjective is described as an orphan category by Meechan and Poplack, who examine adjectivisation strategies in French-Wolof bilingual discourse (1995). There is no lexical category of adjective in Wolof, and words that are semantically adjectival are encoded as verbs, such as njool ‘to be tall’, ñuul ‘to be black’ etc. (Mc Laughlin 2004). A French adjective such as bleu ‘blue’ thus becomes the Wolof verb bulo ‘to be blue’. Data from contemporary spoken Wolof also show a number of borrowed French words from additional categories becoming verbs in Wolof: (5) Oto

bi

dafa

salte

>Fr. saleté ‘dirt’ (N)

N:car DET.CLb 3SG V:be.dirty ‘The car is dirty’ (6) Parkër-ag-u-ma

ko >Fr. par coeur ‘by heart’ (PP)

V:memorise-ACCOMPLATIVE-NEG-1SG 3SG.OBJ ‘I haven’t yet memorised it’

Senegal 57 (7) Ariyeer-al! >Fr. arrière ‘back’ (N) V:back up-IMPERATIVE ‘Back up/reverse!’ As these examples illustrate, nouns and even prepositional phrases borrowed from French take their place beside adjectives in their incorporation into Wolof as verbs in contemporary urban Wolof. Finally, other kinds of reanalysis can occur in the contemporary borrowing process, as in the case of the French expression est-ce que ‘is it that’ which is used to introduce a yes-no question and typically appears phrase-initially. Reanalysed as an interrogative particle in Wolof, it may surface in phrase-final position, as in the following example: (8) Xiif

nga

eskë? >Fr. est-ce que ‘is it that’

V:hungry 2SG.PERFECTIVE INTER ‘Are you hungry?’ Whether this construction transfers into Senegalese French is a matter for future research. 3.3  Borrowing and phonological integration There was no standard way of writing Wolof in 1864, so the urban Wolof expressions in Descemet’s phrase book are written in French orthography, with some added conventions (explained in his introduction) to capture phonemes that are alien to French, such as [x], rendered as . The phrases are not difficult to read, and they reflect French borrowings that are quite nativised and integrated into Wolof phonology. Wolof does not have the fricative [v], which Descemet renders as the sound [w], nor the fricatives [z], [ʃ] or [ʒ], all of which are rendered as [s] (e.g. cassot for Fr. cachot ‘jail’, socolat for Fr. chocolat ‘chocolate’). French nasal vowels appear in Descemet’s borrowings as a vowel plus the velar nasal stop, [ŋ], (e.g. sambong for Fr. jambon ‘ham’, salang for Fr. chaland ‘boat’). The CV(V)(C)(C) syllable structure of Wolof is often maintained in the French borrowings through processes of epenthesis or CV metathesis to break up initial consonant clusters (e.g. tirbinal >Fr. tribunal ‘court’). The highly marked high front rounded vowel [y] in French is unrounded in Wolof pronunciation, as the same word illustrates. In the contemporary corpus there is variation in the way in which speakers pronounce French loanwords. This may also have been true in 19th century Saint-Louis, but we have no way of knowing. In contemporary urban Wolof, French fricatives are often maintained in borrowings, and French consonant clusters may or may not be split by epenthesis. Certain borrowings seem to have been lexicalised with their Wolof

58  Fiona Mc Laughlin pronunciation, such as torop ‘a lot’ >Fr. trop ‘too much’ or (ba) pare ‘already’ >Fr. prêt ‘ready’, and are rarely pronounced otherwise when speakers are speaking urban Wolof (as opposed to French). To date, no extensive study of variation in the pronunciation of French borrowings in contemporary urban Wolof has been carried out, but some factors that potentially affect variation include the speaker’s knowledge of French and proximity to Dakar (Mc Laughlin 2018). Hypercorrection of [s] to [ʃ] or [ʒ] (e.g. franʃais ‘French’) is not uncommon among less educated speakers in the 2005 Dakar corpus, suggesting a threshold of awareness that recognises and values French phonemes that are not native to Wolof. To summarise, French borrowings in 21st century urban Wolof are less integrated into Wolof phonology than were their 19th century counterparts. This is likely due to ongoing contact, education and increasing familiarity with French among the population at large. 3.4  Structural change The grammar of Wolof remains essentially intact in its urban form, although there are some hints of minor structural changes in the 2005 corpus. Most robust among these is the doubling of the complementiser in constructions such as the following, where the French complementiser que occurs side by side with the Wolof complementiser ne/ni. (9) Dangay

sentir que ni ñungi perdre waxin

bi

2SG.IMPERFECTIVE V:feel COMP COMP 1PL V:lose N:way of speaking DET.CLb

‘You feel that we’re losing a way of speaking’ Other tendencies such as the substitution of French adverbs for Wolof verbal extensions have not been studied systematically enough to draw any conclusions.

4  Sociolinguistic findings Urban Wolof, namely Wolof that systematically incorporates French borrowings, is the unmarked way of speaking in contemporary Dakar just as it appears to have been in mid-19th century Saint-Louis. Scholars such as Thiam (1990) and Swigart (1992a) have stated as much for the contemporary period, and the 2005 Dakar database confirms this. The fact that Descemet’s phrase book appears in published written form – a more formal medium than spoken language – supports the idea that it was an unmarked way of speaking in Saint-Louis at the time. A closer examination of what exactly is borrowed in both cases leads us to discern an important trend in the sociolinguistic evolution of urban Wolof.

Senegal 59 4.1 Necessity and prestige: different motivations for borrowing The impulse to borrow words from another language derives from two factors: necessity and prestige. The first of these is what motivates borrowing in Descemet’s phrase book. The borrowings come from domains of life that have to do with administration, schooling, trade and business, military, travel and cuisine, all central areas in which the French were involved and for which they introduced new terms. Tellingly, there are almost no instances of variation between a native Wolof word and a French borrowing, something with which the 21st century corpus is replete. What this tells us is that the vast majority of borrowed lexical items in the 19th century phrase book were borrowed out of necessity as new items or concepts for which Wolof had no words. While necessity presents a fairly straightforward motivation for borrowing, prestige opens up an almost infinite set of possibilities, and it is here that speakers have choices and where variation in their choice of lexical items or in their pronunciation can take on sociolinguistic meaning. As Thiam’s (1994) preliminary study shows, better knowledge of French results in more French loanwords in speakers’ Wolof. Measured along these lines, the 2005 Dakar corpus looks very different from the 19th century corpus. In many instances words are repeated, once as a borrowing and once as a Wolof word, with no set order in which this occurs (e.g. corne >Fr. followed by béjjén Wol. ‘horn’; dégg Wol. followed by comprendre >Fr. ‘understand’). While these examples may have no subtler sociolinguistic meaning than the performance of an urban identity, other examples can be correlated with salient characteristics of the speaker. For example, in one individual’s speech, we find the use of both jigéen (Wolof) and femme (>French) for ‘woman’. Many contemporary borrowings have equivalents in Wolof, and only more recent borrowings, especially those related to global capitalism (brand names) and technology, can be said to have been borrowed out of necessity. This change in the motivation of borrowing suggests that the urban way of speaking Wolof in 19th century Saint-Louis came to index the urbanity and modernity associated with the city, a trend that was amplified as urban Wolof became associated with Dakar in the 20th and 21st centuries. 4.2  New sources of prestige borrowing among youth As Seck (2016) has pointed out in one of the few linguistic studies on Senegalese youth, in addition to borrowings from French, young people increasingly use English in their Wolof, something that distinguishes them from older generations. Young men, in particular, use English borrowings in talking about women, evidenced in words such as gel ‘girl, girlfriend’, wo ‘woman’, sista ‘sister, friend’ or nays ‘attractive’ > nice.

60  Fiona Mc Laughlin Other commonly occurring English loanwords include job ‘to work’, call ‘to phone’, school, money, town and words that have an association with delinquency such as gun, fight and kill (Seck 2016: 198). These latter, while currently associated with American culture, were earlier associated with the Gambian English of delinquents. Also indexical of youth Wolof is the systematic use of the Pulaar word for ‘house’, galle, which is frequently substituted for the Wolof word kër. The prestige that English holds among youth is due to the many factors mentioned in §1.4. In Vold Lexander’s study of text-messaging among Senegalese youth, she shows that they often use a number of English words or expressions, or expressions inspired by English, mixed with French, Wolof or Pulaar, as in the following examples (2011: 439): (10) je te 1SG 2SG.OBJ ‘I miss you a lot’

fais 1 big

name

V:do 1 ADJ:big V:miss

(11) namess you V:miss 2SG.OBJ ‘I miss you’ In (10), the writer uses the French verb faire ‘to do’ as a support for an invented noun derived from the Wolof verb namm ‘to miss’ which is qualified by the English adjective big. In (11), the writer uses namm as a verb in conjunction with the English pronoun, you, and adds some extraneous morphology (ss) to the end of the verb in order to index English. Creative lexical substitution using Wolof and French words is also typical of youth speech, as documented in the following example from Seck (2016: 225), where Chine, the French word for China which is the source of the kind of tea favoured by the Senegalese, is substituted for the older Arabic loanword for tea, àttaaya, which can also be used as a verb. (12) Diaral gnou chine V:pass-IMPERATIVE 1PL ‘Pass by and we’ll make tea’

V:make tea

These examples of creative speech among youth merit further study, both for their forms and their sociolinguistic meaning, especially because Senegal, like most of Africa, has a disproportionately young population. 4.3  The social meaning of variation No detailed study has yet been carried out on the ways in which features of urban Wolof can be correlated with social factors, but in a recent

Senegal 61 article (Mc Laughlin 2018) I  report on some aspects that merit more research, drawn from the same corpus of contemporary spoken urban Wolof. The first of these involves variation between [r] and [ʁ]. Apical [r] is the unmarked variant, associated with both Wolof and Senegalese French. The uvular metropolitan [ʁ] is sometimes used by individuals who are either insecure or prescriptive about their French, but it is used primarily as a marker of sophistication by upwardly mobile Senegalese women who use it in their French, in their pronunciation of French borrowings in Wolof, and even sometimes in their Wolof. The use of [ʁ] is almost absent from Senegalese men’s French and does not occur in their pronunciation of French borrowings in Wolof. The variable is thus a marker of both gender and class among Senegalese, and especially Dakar, women. Bao Diop (2019) points out some additional characteristics associated with the same demographic, thus there is potential for a number of variationist studies on urban Wolof in future research. 4.4  Attitudes towards urban Wolof For Descemet, urban Wolof signified a way of speaking unique to the cosmopolitan city of Saint-Louis, attitudes towards which were undoubtedly as mixed in 1864 as they are today, and for many of the same reasons. Contemporary speakers often hold simultaneously negative and positive attitudes towards urban Wolof, and it is a topic of considerable metalinguistic discourse. It would perhaps be too facile to attribute positive attitudes to urban Wolof simply to the modernity and potential for self-transformation of the city, although this is an important part of the picture. The fact that urban Wolof is an old way of speaking, and one that has its origins in the Wolof of Saint-Louis, a place of refinement, culture and elegance in the Senegalese popular imagination, is also an important factor in attitudes towards this way of speaking. It is not a youth language, although there are of course youthful ways of speaking urban Wolof. The fact that urban Wolof has no name, it is – as one person in the 2005 Dakar corpus put it – suñu olof ‘our Wolof’, means that it is the unmarked way of speaking, the language of a city and, increasingly, a nation (Cruise O’Brien 1998). Negative attitudes towards urban Wolof rarely result in changes in linguistic behaviour,3 yet they abound in metalinguistic discourse. Arguments take the form of critiques of hybridity and the loss of a purer version of Wolof (referred to, paradoxically, as olof piir >Fr. pur ‘pure’). These linguistic arguments are correlates of other discourses of dissatisfaction with the challenges of urban life and a wistful nostalgia for an imagined past, all of which view the city as a place where people lose their identity and become in some way inauthentic. These are powerful tropes, but they can be held simultaneously with positive attitudes

62  Fiona Mc Laughlin towards urban Wolof, indexing the ambivalent relationship with the city and urban life of speakers. As will be clear from this section, an urban way of speaking is more than a grammar, and comprises language at the discourse level as well, and in the case of urban Wolof, as well as many other urban situations, discourse is also characterised by what has traditionally been called codeswitching and is now often referred to as translanguaging (García 2009). The following excerpt is from a professional man in his early 40s, taken from the 2005 Dakar corpus. French origin items and their translated equivalents are italicised. Le monde, boo xoole, ça se modernise quoi, dangay gëna perdre. Bon, am na ñoo xam ne ils tiennent à leurs racines, waaye nak, au fur et à mesure ñu dem, générations yu bés di ñëw, dangay sentir que ni ñungi perdre waxin bi, ñungi perdre mots yi seen sens ak y. . . et cetera, ak yooyu yépp, du fait que dañuy jél toujours di mélanger. Et ci loolu yépp français bi moo dominer. The world, when you look at it, it’s modernising and you lose more and more. OK, there are some who are attached to their roots, but as we go on and new generations come you get the feeling that that (sic) we’re losing a way of speaking, we’re losing words, their meaning and. . . et cetera, and all of that because we always take and mix. And in all of that it’s French that dominates. This excerpt provides a glimpse of the texture of urban Wolof, which seems to encompass much more than what the term variety can capture.

Notes 1  This is true of other Senegalese languages as well, although in many cases these are secondhand borrowings that have entered those languages indirectly via Wolof. 2  (Urban) Wolof is also spoken in The Gambia, where English is the official language, especially in the capital, Banjul, and also in officially Arabophone Mauritania, primarily in the capital, Nouakchott, and around the western part of the Senegalese border. 3  For an interesting counterexample based on religious identity see Mc Laughlin (2018).

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4 South Africa Tsotsitaal and urban vernacular forms of South African languages Ellen Hurst-Harosh 1  Linguistic and social context South Africa has 11 official languages: Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, Sepedi/Sesotho sa Leboa, Sesotho, Siswati, Xitsonga, Setswana, Tshivenda, isiXhosa and isiZulu, with a number of other additional languages of importance such as sign language and the languages of neighbouring countries. South Africa is made up of nine provinces (see Table 4.1). Different provinces have different linguistic ecologies, due to socio-historical and political factors (see Table 4.1 for the dominant languages of each province). The main focus of this chapter is on urban varieties based on isiXhosa, since that is this author’s research background, having focused on Western Cape and, to an extent, Eastern Cape varieties of Tsotsitaal. The literature has in general focused predominantly on Tsotsitaal from Gauteng province. The chapter therefore contrasts a relatively monolingual context with more multilingual examples from Gauteng. The main provinces discussed in this chapter are the Western Cape and Gauteng. While Afrikaans, spoken by the population group designated Coloured under apartheid classifications, is the most spoken language in Table 4.1  Languages of South African provinces Province

Most spoken language

Largest city

Eastern Cape Free State Gauteng KwaZulu-Natal Limpopo

isiXhosa Sesotho isiZulu isiZulu Sepedi/Sesotho sa Leboa Siswati Setswana Afrikaans Afrikaans

Port Elizabeth 168,966 km2  Bloemfontein 129,825 km2  Johannesburg 18,178 km2  Durban 94,361 km2  Polokwane 125,754 km2 

Mpumalanga North West Northern Cape Western Cape 

DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-6

Mbombela Klerksdorp Kimberley Cape Town

Area

76,495 km2  104,882 km2  372,889 km2  129,462 km2 

Population 6,562,053 2,745,590 12,272,263 10,267,300 5,404,868 4,039,939 3,509,953 1,145,861 5,822,73

South Africa 67 the Western Cape, isiXhosa is spoken by the majority of Black1 people in the townships2 surrounding its capital, Cape Town. The two Cape Town townships where the author’s data were gathered, Gugulethu and Khayelitsha, are predominantly isiXhosa-speaking as a result of postapartheid in-migration from the Eastern Cape (88.56% and 90.54%, respectively, in the 2011 census, Statistics South Africa 2012). Gauteng province is the location of Johannesburg, South Africa’s biggest city, and the most linguistically mixed, with isiZulu as the largest African language, followed by Sesotho. The collection of townships called Soweto on the outskirts of Johannesburg was originally populated by the South African Black workforce of Johannesburg and their families, including those relocated from older townships such as Sophiatown (see Section 4). In the 2011 census the first language statistics reflect a multilingual situation, with 37.1% isiZulu, 15.5% Sesotho, 12.9% Setswana, 8.9% Tsonga and 25.7% listed as Other (including other African languages) (Statistics South Africa 2012). It should be noted that even in contexts where one African language is strongly dominant, South Africans are still heavily influenced by English, which is one of the official languages and the main language of education, government and the media in South Africa. Afrikaans still has an influence as a legacy of its role as the language of apartheid, as well as being the majority language of the Coloured population. Thus, South Africans are typically multilingual, with widespread English-Afrikaans bilingualism, as well as societal multilingualism (a characteristic of most of Africa). African language speakers may be able to speak both English and Afrikaans, and a number of related (and to an extent mutually intelligible) African languages, such as the Nguni cluster of isiXhosa, isiZulu and Seswati, including their own home language or mother tongue. In addition to the national languages, there are a number of urban varieties or “urban contact dialects” present, particularly in urban centres. These include, on the one hand, the youth language register commonly referred to as Tsotsitaal by linguists and speakers/community members, and on the other, urban vernacular forms of South African languages. The urban vernacular here refers to the urban form of an African language (e.g. urban isiXhosa, urban isiZulu) or, in some cases, a code-mixture such as between Setswana – Sesotho in the township of Botshabelo in the Free State province (described by Finlayson and Slabbert 1997) or isiZulu-Sesotho in Soweto (Aycard 2014; Gunnink 2012). The urban varieties of African languages in South Africa’s urban centres are differentiated from the standard forms taught in schools by factors such as increased switching and borrowing, contractions, clipping etc. For example, urban isiXhosa in Deumert’s (2013: 63) research is marked by a heavy influence from English, including borrowings, particularly in regard to logical connectors. These features will be illustrated in the sections that follow.3

68  Ellen Hurst-Harosh Mesthrie and Hurst (2013) argue that the term Tsotsitaal is used to refer to a register which can have any of the South African languages as its base language (where “base” refers to the language which provides the morpho-syntactic frame, as well as some common/unmarked lexical items). The syntactic base of a Tsotsitaal is “always a partially restructured urban one, often having the most deviant syntax on this continuum that young speakers can come up with” (Mesthrie and Hurst 2013: 125–6). Thus, in Cape Town, the Tsotsitaal register is embedded in the urban isiXhosa morpho-syntactic frame, while in Durban, Tsotsitaal lexis is embedded in an urban isiZulu variety. Hurst and Mesthrie (2013) argue that Tsotsitaal features a combination of a national lexicon of longstanding Tsotsitaal terms as well as terms innovated locally within peer groups (see Hurst and Mesthrie 2013: 9 for examples of the most common terms nationally). These lexical resources index a streetwise, urban identity, and they are accompanied by other nonverbal resources such as clothing styles, musical preferences, lifestyle choices and gestures (Brookes 2004; Hurst-Harosh 2020). Hurst and Mesthrie (2013) propose the term “stylect” to refer to the phenomenon.

2  Empirical data Existing corpora on Tsotsitaal include my own data which come from three main research projects: the first is Sociolinguistics Profiles and Policy Implications of Rural-Urban Migration to Cape Town, which was led by Ana Deumert, with data gathered between 2005 and 2007 in the Cape Town townships of Gugulethu and Khayelitsha. Methods involved random sampling and concentrated mainly on perception data, as well as questionnaires and elicited sentences in Tsotsitaal. The second project, South African Informal Language Varieties: the National Picture, ran from 2010 to 2013, with data being gathered from four major urban centres: Johannesburg, Cape Town, East London and Durban. The project focused exclusively on generating naturalistic data, and it utilised video-camera recordings in order to capture gestures and other facets of the Tsotsitaal style. A third project, Urban Youth Language in Africa: a Comparative Approach, ran from 2013 to 2016. The main fieldwork sites represented in the data are as follows: • • • • •

Mdantsane township – East London (Eastern Cape) Gugulethu – Cape Town (Western Cape) Khayelitsha – Cape Town (Western Cape) Kwamashu – Durban (KwaZulu Natal) Springs and Soweto – Johannesburg (Gauteng)

South Africa 69 In total, more than 100 people, both male and female, were interviewed for the full data set. Overall, there are more than 100 hours of recorded data generated by the different projects. These data are not currently open access but are represented in a number of publications, most recently Hurst-Harosh (2020). Other publicly available data on Tsotsitaal include the following: •

Lexical lists or Tsotsitaal dictionaries such as those found in Molamu (2003) and Magogodi (2012), and theses such as those by, among others, Ngwenya (1995), Zungu (1995) and Bogopa (1996) • Ethnographies and sociolinguistic descriptions, such as Mfenyana (1977), Ntshangase (1993), Calteaux (1994), Bogopa (1996) and Brookes (2004, 2014) In addition, some research has collected comparative data on Tsotsitaal and urban vernaculars, such as: • •

Gunnink (2012) who undertook a comparative analysis of urban Zulu and Soweto Tsotsitaal Aycard (2014) who analysed the overlap between Tsotsitaal/Iscamtho and urban varieties in White City, Soweto

Many previous studies, such as those just described, have emphasised Tsotsitaal data, while urban varieties are less well described. However, as mentioned, Tsotsitaals are syntactically based on urban isiXhosa, urban isiZulu, urban Setswana and other urban varieties of South African languages, and interview recordings often take place in the urban vernacular rather than Tsotsitaal. Tsotsitaal is a performed style, and not intrinsically suitable for interview contexts, so speakers do not maintain the stylised version when they are giving interviews. As a result, we have many recordings of urban vernaculars included in the Tsotsitaal corpora mentioned earlier. Other data on Tsotsitaal and South African urban varieties include the following: •

The project Sociolinguistics Profiles and Policy Implications of RuralUrban Migration to Cape Town (e.g. Deumert 2013) • Studies on code-switching in South Africa such as Finlayson and Slabbert (1997) Mesthrie (2021) states, “There are no written grammars of Urban Xhosa, as the variety is probably too fluid to warrant codification or formal recognition”, and he suggests that “an opportunity for a young linguist” would be the description of such a variety. The same holds for many other urban varieties of South African and other African languages.

70  Ellen Hurst-Harosh

3  Structural findings 3.1  Grammatical features of Tsotsitaal Mesthrie and Hurst (2013: 118) make the case for there being “no serious differences” between the syntaxes of the Tsotsitaal register and urban isiXhosa in their data and that both incorporate code-switching including logical connectors. They (2013: 119) provide a series of examples of the sentence “don’t go to town today” rendered in standard isiXhosa, urban isiXhosa and a more informal urban isiXhosa, along with a number of examples of the sentence in Tsotsitaal, as provided by the respondents. They show that the structure, including morpheme order and system morphemes, is the same across the examples. In addition, they show that urban forms and Tsotsitaal forms use the same contractions and omissions, which are not used in the standard form. They also highlight a number of borrowings in both urban and Tsotsitaal forms and emphasise Tsotsitaal-specific terms which, they argue, is how Tsotsitaal differs from urban isiXhosa – at the lexical level. To illustrate this point, example 1 comes from the Cape Town naturalistic project data and is part of a conversation between a group of five women in their early 20s who use Tsotsitaal. These speakers use a handful of lexical items and emphatics to mark their speech in the Tsotsitaal style, while in the full recording there were also long stretches of urban isiXhosa without such markers.

Example 1: Awhe! U-ya-ndi-thol-a? EXCL! 2S-PROG-1S-get(Z)-FV? So ak’o m-hlal’ o-fun’ So(E) NEG.CLIP Cl.1-citizen.CLIP REL-want.CLIP u-strayikh-a ke manje Cl.15.CLIP-instigate-FV PHAT now(Z) ‘Aware! Do you get me? So there’s no community member who wants to be the instigator now’. (Cebisa,4 Gugulethu 2012) In example 1, the grammatical framework is isiXhosa, and the main stylistic indicators of Tsotsitaal are borrowings from isiZulu. In urban isiXhosa, uyandithola, from isiZulu, would be replaced by uyabo, which is itself an urban isiXhosa stylistic contraction of the standard isiXhosa uyabona. Manje, the isiZulu word for ‘now’, would be replaced by the isiXhosa ngoku. Ustrayikha is a contracted form of the infinitive ukustrayikha, ‘to strike’, from English. The grammatical frame features

South Africa 71 similar contractions and clippings to those typical of urban isiXhosa. So, borrowed from English, is a logical connector; these are susceptible to borrowings in urban isiXhosa (Deumert et al. 2006). Example 2 shows a sentence from a male participant in a peer group recording of two men and one woman, also in their early 20s. He is explaining to his friends that they will not get paid for the video recording being made by the research assistant.

Example 2: Mamel-a autie, yam le weyi Listen-IMP man(T) POS.me DEM thing(T) a-yi-diben-anga n-ee-weyi zo-khrawun-a, NEG-COP-meet-NEG ASS-Cl.10-thing(T) POS-money(T)-FV u-ya-bon-a? le weyi i-diben-e 2S-PROG-see-FV? DEM thing(T) SC-meet-STAT ne-nto ye-sgila for yena mfethu, ASS-thing POS-school for 3S man(T) u-ya-zi-thol-a? 2S-PROG-OC-get(Z)-FV ‘Listen man, this thing has nothing to do with issues of money you see! This thing has to do with things related to schoolwork, for her my man, do you get it?’ (Lwazi, Gugulethu 2012) In this example, there are a number of markers of the Tsotsitaal style. For example, the final word, uyazithola, comes from isiZulu. In the Cape Town data, isiZulu appears to be used often to mark the Tsotsitaal style, perhaps because of its association with Johannesburg where Tsotsitaal originates. There are also several Tsotsitaal-related or Tsotsitaalspecific lexical items. Autie, meaning ‘man’, is an old Tsotsitaal lexical item which appears in Molamu’s (2003) description of the original Afrikaans-based Sophiatown variety. He suggests that the word autie comes from English ‘outlaw’ and is associated with the Western and gangster films that were popular in Sophiatown at that time (1940s–’50s). However, it is perhaps more likely that it comes from Afrikaans ou meaning ‘man’. It may have several interpretations incorporating these and other meanings. Weyi, meaning ‘thing’, is a common Tsotsitaal item in the Cape Town data, while khrawuna, from English ‘crown’, means ‘money’. It is converted to a verb here which equates its meaning more with ‘to pay’. There is one borrowing from English in the example – the logical connector ‘for’, suggesting that the grammatical framework is urban isiXhosa.

72  Ellen Hurst-Harosh 3.2  Grammatical features of urban isiXhosa As mentioned earlier, features of urban isiXhosa include borrowings (particularly from English and Afrikaans), contractions and clippings. Deumert (2013: 66) suggests that connectivity devices appear to be particularly susceptible to borrowing, especially in situations where at least some speakers of the speech community are bilingual. She continues: “Borrowability hierarchies . . . have emphasised the free-morpheme status of these elements and their clause-peripheral position which facilitates structural integration”. She argues that this has led in some cases to the wholesale replacement of the inherited lexical paradigm dealing with discourse/utterance organisation. Deumert et  al. (2006) provide examples of these connectivity devices in urban isiXhosa, in the logical connectors but and because, as well as if. Deumert (2013: 64) states: “Since isiXhosa has a fully developed system of logical connectors, these borrowings are not additive, i.e. they are not used to fill lexical gaps”. The frequency counts for the use of but as a replacement for kodwa and because as a replacement for kuba in her interview data do not necessarily accord with how long someone has been in the city, but may have more to do with speakers orienting towards “the indexical values of English through the manipulation of well-defined items which are found in peripheral syntactic positions, and are thus easily replaced” (Deumert 2013: 65). In this sense, the style of speaking is indexical of urbanity. Deumert et al. (2006) describe these features as emblematic/symbolic and contrastive/conversational (i.e. foreign language connectors and discourse markers are more salient and thus help to create cohesion and coherence in speech more clearly). Another feature of urban isiXhosa is the use of the discourse markers mos ‘like’ (from Afrikaans), so (from English)’, ek sê ‘I say’ (from Afrikaans) and uyabo/uyabona ‘you see’ (from isiXhosa). In an analysis of the frequency of use of these discourse markers by two young male urban isiXhosa speakers, Deumert et al. (2006) note that they might also be an indicator of “urbanity”. Discourse markers are used more by one of the speakers, which may be related to their length of stay in the city. Example 3 is of urban isiXhosa from the same group of speakers as example 2. In the example, the term imedi for ‘girl’ (from English maid or Afrikaans meid) is drawn from the Tsotsitaal lexicon, the term is in common enough circulation and has been in use since the Sophiatown era (Molamu 2003), so that it may equally qualify as urban isiXhosa. Larha, meaning ‘laughing’, and pronounced lach (or IPA /ɫɐχ/) is borrowed from Afrikaans lag with the same meaning. In general, the isiXhosa presented here would be accessible to most isiXhosa speakers and only features some clippings and borrowings. In contrast to example 2, here they have style-shifted out of Tsotsitaal and into urban isiXhosa. These kinds of style shifts may be connected to the topic (here a narrative) or the speaker, who in this case is the female participant in the group. Tsotsitaal is considered more salient for particular topics, and is gendered in its indexicality, although women do use it (Hurst-Harosh 2020).

South Africa 73

Example 3: N: Heyi

jong-a i-vuk-a se-yi-buz-a, PHAT look-IMP SC-wake-FV already-OC-ask-FV Sango! I-fun’ u-Sango i-medi Sango! SC-want.CLIP Cl.1-Sango Cl.9-girlfriend ya-yo. A-yi-kho.

A-yi-kho.

A-yi-kh’

POS-Cl.9 NEG-COP-there. NEG-COP-there. NEG-COP-there.CLIP

i-medi ya-yo. Cl.9-girlfriend POS-Cl.9

‘Look, he is waking already asking, Sango! Sango! He wants Sango, his girlfriend. She’s nowhere. She’s nowhere to be found. His girlfriend is nowhere to be found’. L: Yhooo! EXCL ‘Yhooo!’ N: A-yi-y-azi noba i-hamb-e njani NEG-COP-OC-know whether SC-go-PERF how i-medi ya-yo. Hheee! Ndi-ya-yi-larh-a. Cl.9-girlfriend POS-Cl.9. EXCL 1S-PROG-OC-laugh-FV ‘He doesn’t even know how his girlfriend left. Hheee! I’m laughing at him’. (Novulo and Lwazi, Gugulethu 2012) Outlining the features of the variety, Mesthrie (fc) states: Urban Xhosa shows partial restructuring of its grammar and a number of new loanwords. The restructuring is particularly salient, with discourse and logical connectors from English being variably used (  .  .  . elements like [why], if, so, and I mean may make an appearance  – see Deumert et  al. 2006). These are more likely to be code-switchings than borrowings, but are nevertheless a recognisable part of the modern urban style. Although borrowings are also common in Standard Xhosa, they are heightened in the urban variety. In her survey of lexical borrowing among isiXhosa speakers in Cape Town, Dowling (2011) describes how the data suggests that the speakers themselves regard the borrowed word not as borrowed, but rather as a lexical item that forms part of the first

74  Ellen Hurst-Harosh language. . . . It is the traditional or standard word that is further out of reach for many Xhosa speakers than the borrowed word. (Dowling 2011: 349) In agreement with Mesthrie, she furthermore argues that the phenomenon she is considering in her paper “is not isiTsotsi because the English words are not recontextualised, but employed in place of the Xhosa lexical items, maintaining their original English meaning” (Dowling 2011: 361). This is an important consideration and helps to differentiate between urban vernaculars/urban contact dialects and stylised youth registers – youth language often makes use of strategies such as metaphor; form manipulations, semantic manipulations, circumlocutions, near synonyms, archaisms and ideophones (Kießling and Mous 2004) – none of which are characteristic of urban isiXhosa. 3.3  Examples from multilingual contexts Moving to the more multilingual contexts of townships in Gauteng, Gunnink’s study (2012) compares Standard isiZulu with urban isiZulu spoken in Soweto, mainly the suburbs/townships of Orlando East and Jabavu, as well as with Sowetan Tsotsi(taal). She writes: As Sowetan Tsotsi is more likely to draw its base from Sowetan Zulu than from Standard Zulu, it is important to contrast Sowetan Zulu with Sowetan Tsotsi in order to ensure that the differences that are found are specific to Sowetan Tsotsi, rather than to Sowetan languages in general. (Gunnink 2012: 6) Grammatical features of Sowetan isiZulu that she identifies include differences in the use of click consonants, the marking of agreement on qualificatives, the form and uses of demonstrative pronouns, the different forms of the copula, and negation on verbs and in pronouns. She furthermore observes the frequent use of “material from other languages, such as Sotho, Afrikaans and most commonly English” (Gunnink 2012: 22). Gunnink (2012: 43) outlines how borrowing is one of the features of the urban variety of isiZulu in Soweto. She writes that: Sowetan Zulu has borrowed a negative pronoun niks, ‘nothing’, from Afrikaans, perhaps mediated by the [historically] Afrikaansbased youth language Tsotsitaal. In Standard Zulu, no negative pronouns occur, nor any other form of negation other than that marked on the verb. In Standard Zulu, English ‘nothing’ or Afrikaans ‘niks’ would be expressed with a negative verb followed by into, ‘thing’.

South Africa 75 According to Gunnink (2012: 45), grammatical features that have previously been attributed to Tsotsitaal, such as “the tendency to replace Standard Zulu palatal clicks with dental clicks, the high degree of vowel elision in Sowetan Tsotsi, and the use of English why with an English rather than Zulu syntax”, were actually all present in Sowetan Zulu, and therefore features of the urban vernacular, not Tsotsitaal itself. She does identify some examples of noun-class shift as a possible feature specific to Sowetan Tsotsi, yet does not exclude them from the urban vernacular. In general, she argues that “Sowetan Tsotsi uses the grammar of Sowetan Zulu, and not that of Standard Zulu” (Gunnink 2012: 45). Gunnink excluded Sesotho turns from her analysis, yet it is likely that the urban vernacular which forms the base language in more multilingual contexts such as Johannesburg townships might be a code-switched/mixed variety. Makalela (2013) describes such a mixed variety in five major townships around Johannesburg (Soweto, Alexandra, Tembisa, Katlehong and Daveyton), one which features borrowings from English and Afrikaans, and which appears to have a mixed Sotho and Nguni syntactic base. Still, Tsotsitaal itself is not a mixed variety, but a register of that urban vernacular. The important point here is that the often-unnamed urban varieties – urban isiXhosa, urban isiZulu or urban mixed varieties  – are often conflated with the Tsotsitaal register. Syntactically, they are the same phenomenon, but lexically, Tsotsitaal differentiates itself through the use of metaphor, semantic shift and other strategies common to youthful manipulations.

4  Sociolinguistic findings Tsotsitaal is indexical of a clever/kleva, a person denoted as a “streetwise city-slicker” defined by “dress, language, and style codes” (Glaser 2000). Historically, males using Tsotsitaal were emblematic of Sophiatown – a township just outside Johannesburg and one of the few places where Black people were allowed to own property during apartheid. It was also “a hub of music, literature, art and politics in the 1940s and early 1950s . . . However, it was also a slum, overcrowded and impoverished, plagued by high levels of crime” (Deumert 2018: 3). The emergence of Tsotsitaal took place during the period of apartheid, in the linguistically mixed context of Sophiatown. Linguistic mixing in this township was a result of migration flows to Johannesburg for work. Both African languages and Afrikaans were spoken in Sophiatown. Tsotsitaal in Sophiatown was based on an Afrikaans morpho-syntactic frame, despite the majority of speakers having an African first language (Molamu 2003). Deumert (2018) explores the reasons for this: “Although Sophiatown and neighbouring areas had initially been set aside for Coloured occupation, and Afrikaans might have been dominant in the early days, this

76  Ellen Hurst-Harosh changed rapidly: already in the 1920s, Africans made up about half of the local population”, rising to 90% in 1950. Deumert acknowledges a possible founder effect in the use of Afrikaans, but suggests that the persistent Afrikaans base of the Tsotsitaal of Sophiatown is better understood as a form of cultural-linguistic appropriation or even parody: taking the ‘language of the oppressor’ and making it one’s own, turning it upside down in the process. Afrikaans, the language of whiteness and purity [notwithstanding the Afrikaans spoken by the Coloured community], thus became the language of Blackness and hybridity. (Deumert 2018: 4–5) Tsotsitaal emerged amongst young men in townships, who were criminalised as part of the side effects of apartheid laws such as pass laws,5 which led to large numbers of Black men spending time in prison for misdemeanours. In addition, gangs arose in Sophiatown (Glaser 2000). Tsotsitaal is thought to have emerged as a language of these gangs, possibly influenced by the prison argot of the time (sometimes known as Shalombombo, see Ntshangase 1993). From 1955 onwards the residents of Sophiatown were forcibly relocated to linguistically segregated townships in Soweto, and Sophiatown was rezoned as a White residential area. Both under apartheid and post-apartheid, Black populations in townships have experienced continued inequality, and townships and street corners have continued as socialisation spaces for disenfranchised young men. In these contexts, there has been ongoing contact between different African languages, as well as African and European languages – notably English and Afrikaans. In Soweto after the removals, Tsotsitaal lexicon appears to have been adopted into the languages spoken in those townships, so it became embedded in isiZulu, Sesotho etc. Since then it has spread to other urban centres in provinces around South Africa, presumably through inter-migration as well as through popular culture and media. Tsotsitaal lexicon is now used in urban varieties of all the South African languages (Hurst 2015), although it has sometimes been described/called by other names, notably Iscamtho, which refers to a stylised version of the mixed Sotho/Zulu urban vernacular of parts of Soweto. In Cape Town and East London people appear to use the term Tsotsitaal or Ringas (from the Tsotsitaal term ring for ‘speak’) for the stylised register, while in Durban they use isiTsotsi. While taal is Afrikaans for ‘language’, isi is the noun class marker for languages. The term Tsotsi tends to refer to street criminals, and as such, Tsotsitaal is sometimes indexical of criminality, although users tend to consider it a peer group language, and do not necessarily call it Tsotsitaal (see Brookes 2014 for a discussion of nomenclature).

South Africa 77 Although the main discussion in this chapter relates to linguistic features, Tsotsitaal is part of a wider stylistic performance which includes gestures, body language, clothing styles, musical preferences, lifestyle choices, consumer preferences and other markers (Brookes 2004; HurstHarosh 2020). Different usage of Tsotsitaal linguistic and non-linguistic features might indicate different alignments within a range of possible identity affiliations, significantly associated with being “streetwise” (see Brookes 2014 for a useful case study from the East Rand region of Gauteng). The selection from this range of resources can be considered stylistic choices, rather than being tied to fixed identities of individuals. This accompanying stylised performance is one of the striking ways that Tsotsitaal can differ from the urban vernaculars. 4.1  Urban vernacular or youth language? Urban varieties or vernaculars have received various terminologies in the international literature. Dorleijn and Nortier (2013: 1) use the term “multiethnolects” to refer to “very specific slang-like linguistic varieties that pop up among urban, multi-ethnic adolescent groups” in Europe. They continue: “These varieties are among the general public often referred to as ‘youth slang’; ‘language of the street’; ‘youth language’, etc.”. As such, they do not distinguish between urban and youth varieties. This conflation is common throughout the literature. Rampton (2011: 276) highlights one of the reasons that youth and urban have become conflated. In research on the language practices of migrant communities in Europe he says: practices of stylisation and crossing have been much more extensively researched among young people than anyone else, and youth is often taken as central to their social distribution, to the extent that these ways of speaking are regularly described as ‘youth language’. He looks at the ongoing use of these practices as people age. He does not differentiate, as I do in this chapter, between youth register and mixed vernacular, but he does indicate that the nature of these urban practices may change over time with the “mixed style being adjusted to the concerns and constraints of adulthood” (Rampton 2011: 287). Similarly Møller (2009: 188) says that in Copenhagen “polylingual languaging” continues as speakers age but becomes more integrated – “ ‘mixing’ becom[es] their ‘natural’ way of speaking”. This could indicate a shift from stylised register to urban vernacular over the lifespan (from indexical of youth to indexical of urbanity). Rampton (2011: 277) proposes that the terminology related to these persistent language practices is “contemporary urban vernaculars” rather than “youth language”, due to the status of this speech being “strongly

78  Ellen Hurst-Harosh linked to youth in its indexical associations but not in its social distribution”. In terms of features, the vernacular he describes includes: “black speech”; traditional London vernacular features; some Punjabi “in ritualised utterances”; and Punjabi phonological features (Rampton 2011: 289). He also emphasises the centrality of stylisation, crossing, tropes and fragmentary appropriations of other registers/styles/languages to registers including vernaculars. He suggests that youth languages and urban vernaculars can be seen as “different sides of the same (rather multi-dimensional) ‘coin’ ”. He continues: “As a way of talking which recognises many of the other varieties circulating in the intersection of migration, ethnicity and class stratification but reproduces none, this style has a hybridity that may itself complicate the business of labelling” (Rampton 2011: 288). Focusing on urban languages in Africa, Makoni et  al. (2007: 34) describe them as “new linguistic configurations” based on indigenous languages that are adaptive responses by speakers to the changing environment of the African urban space and the new communicative needs it presents. They state that “urban vernaculars . . . are languages made up of discourse elements, lexical items, and syntactic forms drawn from a number of different languages”. Makoni et al. (2007: 39) clearly differentiate vernaculars from youth registers in their data, acknowledging their widespread use and social importance and focusing on their use by adults in everyday situations. They suggest that the use of these vernaculars allows urban residents to “move out of old ethnicities and create new identities centred on the urban experience”. Mc Laughlin (2009) also clearly distinguishes between urban vernacular and youth language. In her work, the term urban language tends to refer to urban vernaculars such as Urban Wolof “that serve as regional vernaculars and/or regional, national or even international lingua francas” (Mc Laughlin 2008: 142). She describes urban vernaculars as “most often dominant African languages that show evidence of contact with a former colonial language, but not the colonial (or official) languages themselves” (Mc Laughlin 2009: 2). She highlights lexical borrowings from French as the defining characteristic of the urban dialect in Senegal (Mc Laughlin 2008: 153), and suggests that these vernaculars are associated with modernity and urban life, and that what she calls “Wolofization” contributes to the emergence of a “de-ethnicised” or “post-ethnic” identity (Mc Laughlin 2008: 155). On the other hand, “youth and other specialised languages”, according to Mc Laughlin (2009: 8–10), are “exclusive languages” that are a result of processes of social differentiation, short-lived and change rapidly. However, despite these features, Mc Laughlin along with other authors such as Githiora (2018) argue that Sheng from Kenya is an example of a youth language that has been adopted by the general population and become an urban vernacular itself. The contestation in this chapter is

South Africa 79 that this status is currently occupied by urban Swahili (as argued by Kanana and Kebeya 2018: 24), and that Sheng is a register for speaking this urban vernacular. Similarly, Nouchi, a youth language from Cote D’Ivoire (Kube-Barth 2009), is claimed to be a “good example of a youth language that has evolved into an urban vernacular” (Mc Laughlin 2009: 15), yet Boutin and Dodo (2018: 58) argue that the urban vernacular in Cote D’Ivoire remains Ivoirian French: The French used as the syntactic base of Nouchi is a French which has long been marked by the African languages of the Côte d’Ivoire, and is already independent from European French. Nouchi stems from the designated ‘Popular Ivorian French’ (FPI) to the point that all the characteristics of FPI are present in Nouchi. Only words borrowed from other African and Western languages, and the linguistic manipulations (phonetic and morphological) are specific to Nouchi. Like an argot, only the lexicon is innovative, and even that only partly. In line with these arguments, I suggest that a distinction between youth register and urban vernacular is useful for fully understanding the dynamics of language change. The difference between urban vernacular and the urban contact dialects considered in this book has been argued to be based on the tendency of urban contact dialects to mark their speakers as belonging to a “multiethnic peer group” (Wiese 2017). Yet as we can see, this distinction is more difficult to uphold in practice, with perhaps only the youth/peer-group association lacking from more established traditional urban dialects such as urban Wolof, as well as from the urban vernaculars described in this chapter, which are nevertheless indexical of multi-ethnic urbanity. 4.2  Attitudes and prevalence/spread Dowling (2011) describes how isiXhosa-speaking people are not shifting to English usage, despite concerns about this eventuality amongst education and policy professionals. She highlights that “97% of Langa residents [a Cape Town isiXhosa speaking township], according to the national census of 2001, have Xhosa as their first language – nor is the language facing extinction” (Dowling 2011: 348), but she does highlight that research should focus on “the extent to which the language is changing” and suggests that spoken Xhosa is rapidly diverging from the standard (Dowling 2011: 348). This is in agreement with Mesthrie’s (2021) suggestion that syntactic change is happening in the urban vernaculars. These urban forms have also spread to more typically “rural” areas  – particularly rural towns, and are used by people in rural areas to mark some connection with the urban context (see also Makoni et al. 2007: 39

80  Ellen Hurst-Harosh for a discussion of rural-urban migration and how urban vernaculars are not limited to urban spaces). In regard to isiXhosa in South Africa, Deumert (2013: 63) argues, “In the present context, urbanity is centrally indexed by two different ways of speaking: a) The incorporation of English language material into an isiXhosa frame or matrix, drawing on ideologies which position English as the language of mobility and modernity . . . and a) The use of urban slang (Tsotsitaal) which indexes a streetwise and hip urban persona”. Deumert (2013: 63) furthermore suggests a third way of speaking: “deep” isiXhosa which is marked as rural. In South Africa, stylisation can therefore contribute to enregisterment with the outcome being an urban vernacular or a youth register – in each case the indexicality is different. In terms of attitudes towards urban vernaculars, Deumert (2013: 58) describes how people in her perceptual dialectology study considered the “best” isiXhosa to be spoken in the (rural) Eastern Cape, while Urban varieties outside of the Eastern Cape (mainly Cape Town) were described as ‘simple’, ‘normal’, ‘easy’, ‘vague’, ‘weak’, ‘soft’, ‘mixed’, ‘light’, ‘casual’ and ‘watered-down’, characterised by ‘a lot of misdemeanours’. The influence of other languages (mixing) appears to be the most salient feature of urban isiXhosa (Deumert 2010: 251) and this is also the case for other urban vernaculars in South Africa. Deumert (2013: 67) argues that the use of the urban vernacular, particularly regarding the use of English borrowings as logical connectors, is a signal or index of urbanity/modernity which is recognised within the particular context of the township, it sets the speaker apart from rural norms and identities.  .  .  . It represents what we might call unmarked urbanity as the use of English material is widespread and rarely commented upon. It can be contrasted with the marked urbanity of Tsotsitaal, a way of speaking which is urban yet localised, gendered and socially marked. While the urban variety is enregistered as urban and is not officially recognised/taught in schools, it marks people as belonging to a “multiethnic peer group” (Wiese 2017). On the other hand, Tsotsitaal is still associated with its criminal links. Deumert (2013: 69) says that “Tsotsitaal, although quintessentially urban, carries an ambivalent prestige. It is young, male, jazzy and urbane, but also has associations of delinquency,

South Africa 81 toughness and roughness. It is closely linked to street-corner-society . . . and thus unemployment and lack of social mobility”. The identity of the kleva personifies this ambivalence – at the same time streetwise and fashionable, the kleva is also shady, a hustler. Nevertheless, this indexicality can be attractive to young men in the townships, and Tsotsitaal is also the language of young male peer groups, friendship, fun and humour. Both the urban variety and Tsotsitaal are used popularly in media, music and social media. Tsotsitaal is used as part of youth repertoires and by older people to recall peer-group talk; and also used by women to negotiate township spaces (Rudwick et al. 2006; Brookes and Lekgoro 2014; Maribe and Brookes 2014). The urban variety meanwhile is the unmarked norm in urban spaces, used by students, township residents etc. We can conceptualise the urban variety as a contact outcome, which may lead to ethnic levelling, while Tsotsitaal is a register-specific stylised/ marked choice, and a result of manipulation. Based on available findings and evidence from South Africa, therefore, the term “urban contact dialect” in the context of South Africa is best used to refer to urban vernacular forms of African languages, such as urban isiXhosa, urban isiZulu and mixed varieties such as the Sesotho/ isiZulu mix spoken in some Johannesburg townships. These forms of language may also be referred to as kasitaal or vernac by speakers. Forms referred to as Tsotsitaal on the other hand should be considered a stylised register of the urban contact dialect of a particular place, and as such, they utilise the urban vernacular of the dominant local language as their morphosyntactic frame. The current research therefore suggests that researchers should differentiate between, rather than conflate, youth varieties and urban varieties. Notably, for the comparative project of this book, the research presented here highlights that urban contact dialects in South Africa do not necessarily always take the form of mixed languages. The form of the urban contact dialect is dependent on the particular geographical linguistic ecology of a given city and township and differs between provinces.

Notes 1 Apartheid categories are still used to refer to racial demographics in South Africa. The main categories (as used in official demographics) are: Black (African), White, Coloured (‘Coloured’ is a term used today in South Africa to refer (and sometimes self-refer) to people whose ancestry derives mainly from a mixture of Khoisan, African and Asian slaves and European settlers), Indian and Asian. 2  Townships in South Africa are (mainly) residential areas comprised of cheap government housing and informal housing such as ‘shacks’ – handmade dwellings made from found and cheap materials such as corrugated iron and plastic. Townships were established on the outskirts of major cities during the colonial and apartheid periods as residential areas for people categorised under one of the apartheid racial categorisations as Black, Coloured

82  Ellen Hurst-Harosh or Indian. Today, townships remain impoverished and under-resourced compared to other urban areas such as suburbs. 3 Urban isiXhosa is also marked by what Deumert et  al. (2006) describe as “Tempo” – referring to the compression of information in which shorter structures are favoured, along with active voice; and “Tone” – which does not refer to grammatical tone, but instead to changes in the intonation/pitch structure as well as the speed and rhythm of talking. Data on intonation and speed and rhythm of talking are currently lacking in the available corpora. 4  Names have been changed. 5  Pass laws were movement restriction laws imposed on Black men in apartheid South Africa. The principle which lay behind apartheid was “separateness”: that the various racial categories would live in segregated areas and have selfgovernance in these “homelands”. In practice, the requirement for labour meant that while White people had access to the choicest land in urban regions, other groups were designated residential areas in the city, usually on the periphery yet close enough to provide labour for industry and domestic labour (Glaser 2000; MacKinnon 2004). Pass laws controlled people’s movements through these areas, and passes were allocated to people designated under a Black population group to allow them to work in restricted areas. While versions of pass laws existed early in the settlement of the Cape Colony, the requirement to carry passes at all times was entrenched following the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923. A Black person with no legitimate work, and therefore no pass, could be arrested and detained or fined for transgression of these laws, if caught in an urban area (Glaser 2000), and so routine fines and detention became a part of life for many people who remained in an area illegally after losing employment.

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South Africa 85 Wiese, Heike (2017). Urban contact dialects. In: Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact. Salikoko Mufwene and Anna Maria Escobar (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zungu, Phyllis (1995). Language Variation in Zulu: A Case Study of Contemporary Codes and Registers in the Greater Durban Area. University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. DOI: 10.1080/10228199708566126.

5 Ghana Ghanaian Student Pidgin English Dorothy Pokua Agyepong and Nana Aba Appiah Amfo 1 Linguistic and social context Ghana is a multilingual country. According to Eberhard et  al. (2019) there are 81 languages: 73 indigenous and eight non-indigenous. English is the official language of Ghana. For this reason, it occupies a privileged position in the country. It is used as the medium of instruction in education. It is also the language used in all official government/nongovernment proceedings and interactions, diplomacy and justice delivery. English is largely associated with social prestige and power (Guerini 2007). Akan and Hausa are considered lingua francas. While Akan plays this role predominantly in the southern part of the country, Hausa is used mostly in the northern part and in slum communities in Accra (the capital city), where residents are mostly of northern descent. Thirteen of the languages can be described as ‘institutional’ since their usage extends beyond the home and is sustained by both governmental and nongovernmental institutions (Eberhard et al. 2019). In addition to these languages, Ghanaians also use Pidgin English (henceforth PE) in everyday interactions. Previous studies on Ghanaian Pidgin Enlish (Huber 1999; Dako 2002a, 2002b; Rupp 2013; Osei-Tutu 2016, 2018) have identified two distinct varieties of Ghanaian Pidgin English (GhaPE) – institutionalised (educated) and non-institutionalised (uneducated) Pidgin English. Huber (1999: 142) maintains that the label uneducated does not imply that its speakers necessarily had little or no formal education, but rather this variety is transmitted and used in non-educational contexts. This is why Ghanaians most readily associate it with unskilled labourers, lorry and taxi drivers, servants, watchmen. The two varieties form a continuum, consisting of basilectal varieties associated with less educated people, and mesolectal and acrolectal varieties which are used by those who have attained at least a secondary school level of education (Huber 1999). The main differences between DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-7

Ghana 87 these two are in their functions and the background of their speakers. According to Huber (1999), whereas non-institutionalised pidgin is used as a lingua franca in multilingual contexts by people with a low level of education, educated pidgin serves as a form of in-group language used amongst students in Senior High Schools and Universities to express group identity and solidarity. Educated Pidgin English is considered an in-group language rather than a contact language, mainly because it does not fill a communication gap. It is also a variety that is common among the youth, even though, currently, older folks also use it in their interactions (in restricted contexts). As observed by Tyyskä (2005), and reiterated by Mensah (2016: 1), “in Africa, age is not a reliable boundary in constructing the category of youth, rather, it is the demographic structure, social status, social processes and cultural influence that define this category based on cultural specific idiosyncrasies”. It is therefore quite common these days to hear PE being used by teenagers and adults above the age of 50 (who may not qualify as youth, in terms of age). Both varieties are predominantly urban phenomena that developed through migration, multilingualism, globalisation and transcultural contacts characteristic of many African youth languages (Mensah 2016). Similar to other African youth languages like Sheng, Tsotsitaal, Nouchi, Langila ya Bayankee, Camfranglais (Kießling and Mous 2004) and Yarada K’wank’wa (Hollington and Nassenstein 2015), both Pidgin English varieties often have their speakers neutralising their ethnic identities in favour of urban coolness (Kerswill 2010). Thus, the varieties transcend ethnicity (Kießling and Mous 2004: 307). Moreover, both varieties “have developed their own peculiar sociolects, patois or ritualized codes with peculiar vocabulary and recontextualized meanings of words which are borrowed extensively from neighbouring languages” (Mensah 2016: 4–5). Both are characterised by morphological and semantic manipulations, code-switching, borrowing etc. (Huber 1999; Dako 2002b; Kießling and Mous 2004). Furthermore, speakers of the two varieties also create special meanings of lexical items either from a lexifier language (in this case Standard Ghanaian English (SGE)) or from indigenous languages (Ga and Akan), which also contribute to its vocabulary. Since both varieties have SGE, Ga and Akan as their lexifier languages (Huber 1999), in discussing the linguistic features of GSPE, comparison will be based on these three languages.2

2 The emergence of Ghanaian Student Pidgin English (GSPE) It is reported that GSPE started in the prestigious multi-ethnic male secondary schools located in the coastal regions of Ghana, specifically, the Central Region (Dadzie 1985; Huber 1999; Dako 2002b) between the 1960s and ’70s. This language “emerged as a reaction against the predominance of English in the school system” (Dako 2002b: 54). Dadzie

88  Dorothy P. Agyepong and Nana A. A. Amfo (1985: 118) traces its origin to the ‘seamen’ who lived and worked in the port cities of the country. According to him, these ‘seamen’, who were associated with the latest fashions, also spoke Pidgin English (henceforth PE). Their high sense of fashion automatically impressed many teenagers, who not only emulated their mode of dressing, but also the type of English the ‘seamen’ spoke. It is speculated that these coastal schoolboys adopted PE in order to be identified with the high-status group in the community, i.e. the ‘seamen’ (Huber 1999). Pidgin English in this context served as a form of covert prestige. Another school of thought posits that the young schoolboys emulated the ‘macho’ behaviour of the soldiers that characterised the military coup era in the country during the 1970s (Dadzie 1985). These military men spoke PE. It is therefore believed that since PE connoted power, the schoolboys were impressed and subsequently began to emulate their ‘macho role models’. Note however that PE was used as a lingua franca in both contexts, instead of SGE or any of the indigenous languages.

3 Objectives This chapter discusses the linguistic and sociolinguistic features of GSPE, paying particular attention to ways in which sociolinguistic factors, such as age, gender, institution, status and religion, bring about variations. Most importantly, we discuss how GSPE has progressed from being strictly a code for out-of-classroom interactions to a code used in certain (semi-) formal domains. The rest of the chapter is organised as follows: in Section 4, we outline the methods used for data collection. Section 5 focuses on the structural findings. Section 6 is a discussion of the sociolinguistic properties of GSPE.

4  Empirical data3 The study adopted a multi-method data collection approach. This consisted of interviews, focus-group discussions and questionnaires. Data was collected in August and September  2018 from students at five senior high schools and two tertiary institutions (University of Ghana and University of Professional Studies). Three of the senior high schools – Presbyterian Boys’ Senior High School (PRESEC), Achimota Senior High School and Wesley Grammar High School – are located in the Greater Accra region. The remaining two, Mfantsipim Boys’ Senior High School and Prempeh College, are located in the Central and Ashanti regions, respectively. All the selected schools are located in urban areas in Ghana.4 In each school, the students were required to complete a questionnaire on GSPE. The purpose of the questionnaire was to solicit information such as the language and social background of participants, where they

Ghana 89 claimed to use GSPE, with whom the participants spoke GSPE, and the stage at which participants started using GSPE. In the questionnaire, participants were asked whether or not they spoke GSPE. Those who responded YES to this question and also consented to do further interviews were asked to orally render ten short sentences from SGE into GSPE. The responses from these interviews were helpful for the analysis of the structural and lexical features of GSPE. A  final aspect of the data-collection process consisted of students participating in focus-group discussions. For these sessions, participants were asked to briefly discuss, amongst themselves, topics selected from four different genres, namely academic issues, sport, politics and relationships. Our participants were predominantly males (184) since three of the schools were boys’ schools. There was however a significant number of females (94) from both the senior high schools, tertiary institutions and the adult-speaker (non-student) categories.

5  Structural findings Research on GSPE has shown that this youth language possesses unique linguistic features (Huber 1999; Dako 2002b; Osei-Tutu 2016, 2018). Features such as lexical variation, simplification of consonant clusters, open syllables, vowel change and deletion make the code distinct from SGE and the indigenous languages (Akan and Ga), which contribute to its lexicon. Furthermore, Huber (1999: 151) posits that, lexically, GSPE “shows highly productive processes of word formation and a large number of lexical idiosyncrasies as well as a high degree of geographical variability in its lexicon, while the structure is uniform”. Structurally, GSPE is characterised by a lot of code-mixing/switching and lexical borrowings, most of which are based on Akan and Ga – the two main substrates of GSPE. In consonance with Osei-Tutu (2018), we argue that not only do the features associated with GSPE contribute to its unique identity as a variety of GhaPE, but these also portray the uniqueness of its speakers. In the subsequent subsections, we discuss some of the linguistic features associated with GSPE, paying particular attention to the role that contact plays. These features are discussed under four headings – lexical, phonological, morphological and syntactic. The outcomes of contact will further be highlighted under the subsection titled Code-switching. 5.1  Lexical characteristics: lexical variation5 GSPE allows for extensive lexical variation, where there are different variants of a single word. The choice of one variant over another depends on sociolinguistic factors, such as age, status, the institution one attends, level of proficiency etc. In addition to English, two Ghanaian languages – Ga and Akan – serve as donor languages (substrates). Lexical variation

90  Dorothy P. Agyepong and Nana A. A. Amfo has been argued to be one of the things that distinguishes the so-called educated variety from uneducated PE (Dako 2002b). See example 1. The GSPE words are closer to SGE. 1. GhaPE pikin sabe thief (V)

GSPE kiddi know (pronounced [nɔ]) steal (Dako 2002b: 55)

In this study, we argue that not only do lexical variations exist within GhaPE and GSPE, but there are also lexical differences even within the GSPE used in the various schools/institutions. In certain contexts, one’s identity (for instance, the school one attends) can be revealed depending on the individual’s lexical choices. Huber (1999: 150) posits that the lexical idiosyncrasies of Pidgin in different educational institutions are indicative of its strongly social function. Lexical items become fashionable among one group of students and, whilst some are adopted by other groups and are permanently incorporated into the language, other words are soon dropped again. The choice of lexical items not only signals one’s identity, but speakers are also able to ascertain the authenticity or “properness” of an individual’s GSPE based on their choice of lexical items. For instance, it is believed that since GSPE first developed in the coastal regions, the variety spoken there is more authentic than that spoken in other parts of the country. Therefore, when students from the middle belt of the country, specifically the Ashanti region, use GSPE, almost immediately, Accra/ Cape Coast based students start questioning the speaker’s authenticity and level of competence. A point to note is that students from Kumasi/ Ashanti-based schools are often not as competent in GSPE as their col‑ leagues from the coast (Kumasi is Ghana’s second largest city and capital of the Ashanti Region). This is because, unlike their colleagues in the coastal schools (who use GSPE outside the classroom context), students from Kumasi/Ashanti-based schools use Twi as their out-of-classroom language. These students only get to learn GSPE when they move to tertiary institutions (Osei-Tutu 2016). The data that follow show the rendition of the SGE sentence How many children do you have? into GSPE by speakers from different parts of the country. 2. a. How muchee pikins . . . something . . . something . . . How muchee pikin you get? b. How many pikins you get?

Ghana 91 c. How many kiddies you get? d. How muchee kiddies you get? Examples 2a and b were produced by two of the Kumasi-based students whereas 2c and d were translations provided by two final-year students from an Accra SHS. First, the use of the expression something  .  .  . something  .  .  . in 2a before the actual translation is a clear indication of the speaker’s level of competence. Because he is not very competent in GSPE, the translation does not come easily. Also, the speaker uses the GHAPE word pikin instead of kiddie, which is what GSPE speakers would normally say. When other students were asked if pikin in 2a and b was acceptable as a GSPE form of the word child, one person retorted: “O madam! This is old school Pidgin”. It is “old school” in the sense that it is more of a GhaPE word (as indicated by Dako 2002b) than a GSPE word. That person was expecting kiddie to be used instead of pikin. In another instance, participants produced different renditions of the SGE word leave in their translations of the sentence He left school five days ago. 3. a. He lef school five days ago. b. He komot from school five days ago. c. He shun school five days ago. d. He waka lef school. Example 3 shows the different lexical items that are available for GSPE speakers when they want to talk about something or someone leaving. These include lef, komot, shun and waka lef (serial verb construction (SVC) meaning walk and leave). Sentences 3a and c were produced by two students from Presec (all male-school), while 3b and c were used by two male students from UPSA. 5.2 Phonology The lexicon of GSPE consists of words that have undergone various phonological processes  – vowel change, vowel or consonant deletion, and voicing assimilation. GSPE is also characterised by a preference for open syllables. Osei-Tutu (2018: 9) explains that these changes are motivated by the speaker’s desire to create variants of words (from either SGE or the other Ghanaian languages which contribute to the lexicon) with the aim of carving out a unique identity for themselves. In the discussion that follows, we provide examples showing the effect of these phonological processes on GSPE lexical items.

92  Dorothy P. Agyepong and Nana A. A. Amfo 5.2.1  Vowel change This process involves a change in the vowel quality of SGE words, resulting in a new variant in GSPE (Huber 1999; Osei-Tutu 2018). Here are some examples from our data: 4. a. Squad dey fool dey go poteys ‘people misbehave and go to parties’ b. . . .squad dey come them still dey colla ticket make squad go stand outside ‘people were still coming yet they still collected tickets and made them stand outside’ c. Na she dey hos ‘then she was in the house’ In examples 4a–c the boldened words poteys, colla and hos have undergone vowel changes. In 4a [pa:tis] is rendered as [pɔtes] where the medial [a] and penultimate [i] vowels in SGE are changed to [ɔ] and [e], respectively. In 4b the SGE word collect [kɔˈlɛkt] undergoes two phonological processes: deletion and vowel change. First, following from the fact that final consonant clusters are not allowed in the Ghanaian languages, the last two consonants [k,t] are deleted, after which the second vowel [ɛ] is changed to [a], an ad hoc change in this case. In 4c, the diphthong in house [haus] is replaced by [o], giving [hos] in GSPE. 5.2.2  Final consonant deletion This process, also referred to as de-alveolarisation (Huber 1999) is when word final /d/, /t/ or /l/ is removed from an existing word (either from SGE or the Ghanaian languages) in order to form a GSPE variant of that word. This is exemplified in 5a and b: 5. a. He lef skuu like five days now. ‘He left school five days ago’. b. He really ge passion give WASSCE wey he dey wan write. ‘He really has a passion for WASSCE6 and wants to write it’. The final consonants in the SGE words left and school have been deleted in 5a. The output is lef and skuu in GSPE. Similarly, the final consonant in get, (5b), is deleted, leaving ge as the GSPE variant, an indication of the open syllable preference in Ghanaian languages. 5.2.3  Open syllables GSPE behaves like some Ghanaian languages, in the sense that there is a strong preference for open syllables, i.e. syllables are not allowed to end

Ghana 93 with consonants. As a result, there are CV and CVV syllable structures. Some examples are shown in 6: 6. a. How muchee times a dey go class? ‘How many times do I  go to class?’ b. He waka lef. ‘He (walked and) left’. c. The gɛli buy me som shadda wey it dey cost waa. ‘The girl bought me a very expensive dress’. In 6a instead of [matʃ], which has the structure CVC, a lengthened [e:] is placed as the final syllable, yielding [matʃe:], CVCV, as the GSPE equivalent. Similarly, in 6b, [a] occurs as the final syllable of the GSPE variant of the word walk [wɔ:k]. Notice that there is also a change in the vowel, where SGE [ɔ:] is changed to [a] in the GSPE variant. In 6c, [i] is also inserted as the final syllable for the GSPE word [gɜli], which is [gɜ:l] in SGE. 5.3 Morphology Huber (1999: 151) observes that “[d]ue to its predominant function as an in-group language, the ‘educated’ variety shows highly productive word formation and a large number of lexical idiosyncrasies”. In this subsection we examine the various morphological ways in which GSPE builds its lexicon. Three word formation processes – borrowing, clipping and reduplication – are discussed. 5.3.1 Borrowing Akan and Ga are the two substrate languages that have contributed extensively to the lexicon of GSPE. We discuss a few sentences that contain borrowed words from Akan and Ga in example 7. 7. . . . . . . a. Yestee gbɛkɛ, you kɛch home early? ‘Did you get home early last night?’ b. You no fi to kyɛɛ. ‘You can’t stay (for) long’. c. Every gbɛkɛ biaa he dey dress junka Town. ‘He dresses to town every evening’. Example 7a contains the Ga word gbɛkɛ, which is translated into SGE as ‘evening’. The Akan word kyɛ, ‘to stay long’, is the borrowed word in example 7b. Example 7c shows quite a unique feature of GSPE. In this example, there is a combination of both Ga and Akan words, i.e. gbɛkɛ ‘evening’ and biaa ‘every’ to yield the English equivalent ‘every evening’.

94  Dorothy P. Agyepong and Nana A. A. Amfo 5.3.2 Reduplication Reduplication is very pervasive in Ghanaian languages. For instance, in Akan, nouns, verbs, adjectives and postpositions undergo reduplication for either semantic/pragmatic or grammatical purposes (Osam et al. 2013). As rightly observed by Dako (2002b), there is a lower frequency of reduplication in GSPE as compared to GhaPE. Example 8 shows the few occurrences of reduplicated words (mainly verbs) from our data. 8. . . . a. Mario, like play play adey miss your stories oo. ‘Mario, I have really missed your stories’. b. . . . wey they allow squad cot cot some pics. ‘ . . . and they allowed people to take pictures?’ In 8a the SGE verb play is reduplicated to mark intensity, i.e., the referent has really been missed. In 8b, squad represents a group, therefore the verb cot ‘to take’ is reduplicated to show that the act of taking pictures was done by more than one person, i.e., pluractional. Note that the expression cot picture is a direct translation from Akan’s twa mfoni ‘to cut photo/picture’. 5.4  Syntax: serial verb construction modelling Speakers of GSPE employ serialisation when expressing object transfer, i.e., give/pass X something constructions. When participants were asked to render the SGE sentence ‘Please pass me the salt’ into GSPE, the following variants were produced: 9. a. [Take X have me]: Chale, take the salt have me. ‘Take the salt for me’ b. [Take X give me]: A dey beg, take the salt gi me. ‘Take the salt and give it to me’ c. [Carry X have me]: Carry the salt have me. ‘Carry the salt and give it to me’ d. [Pull X have me]: Pull the salt have me. ‘Pull the salt and give it to me’ e. [Pass X give me]: Pass the salt gi me. ‘Pass me the salt’ f. [Carry X give me]: A dey beg, carry the salt gi me. ‘Please, carry the salt and give it to me’ g. [Wey X have me]: Wey the salt have me. ‘Lift the salt for me’ h. [Wey X give me]: Wey the salt gi me. ’Lift the salt for me’ i. ?[Have PRN X]: Have me the salt. ‘Give me the salt’ j. [shoot X give me] A hear sey he go shoot this one give some Adisco boy ‘I heard that he sold this one to an Adisco boy’.7

Ghana 95 The following observations can be made from the preceding data: a. Lexical variation is prominent in the examples. The SGE verb pass can be replaced with different types of verbs, e.g., take, carry, pull, wey (GSPE word for to lift). These verbs typically describe the manner/means of motion (Levin 1993) that preceded the object transfer. For instance, the salt was carried before it was actually given to the recipient, the salt was pulled before getting to its final destination etc. It is almost as if speakers have various ways in which they conceptualise object transfers. There are those that assume that the object has to undergo a pulling activity before the actual transfer is done. Others also focus on the fact that the object is lifted from its original position prior to the transfer and so on. b. Transfer is expressed by a manner/means of motion verb plus a verb of possession/verb of change of possession, as in pull/carry/pass/shoot + have/give. These combine to form various serial verb constructions in which object transfers are expressed. c. Example 9i has been marked with (?) to show the peculiar use of the possession verb to have. Instead of expressing possession as in examples 9a, c, d, g, it rather expresses manner or means of motion, just like carry, pull, take etc. During the data collection process, we observed that SVCs that contained have in the second verb slot, as in examples 9a, c, d, g, were produced by students from Presbyterian Boys’ Senior High School and Achimota School Senior High School, both located in Accra. Further investigation revealed that this construction type is unique to students from these two schools. We suspect that this could be a result of the close proximity of these schools. In our data, we did not record any such use of the have verb from any of our participants at the other schools. Since we do not have adequate data to draw strong conclusions, this finding must remain a matter of conjecture rather than a fact. 5.5  Semantic shift Osei-Tutu (2016: 196–9) makes a distinction between two kinds of semantic shift. In the first type, the difference in meaning between the SGE and GSPE words seem arbitrary, in the sense that it is difficult to make a connection between the meaning of the SGE words and their respective meanings in GSPE. The second type clearly shows a semantic relationship between the meaning associated with an SGE word and that of the GSPE word. Here are some examples:

96  Dorothy P. Agyepong and Nana A. A. Amfo Type 1: Arbitrary meaning between SGE and GSPE words 10. . . . . . a. A hear sey he go shoot this one give some Adisco boy. ‘I heard that he sold this one to an Adisco boy’.8 b. The previous year na them dey use the auditorium wey rydii ecome check like the place queer. ‘They used the auditorium the previous year but it looks like it’s now too small’. There is no apparent direct semantic relationship between the meanings of the SGE forms shoot, give and queer and their associated GSPE meanings. There seems to be no relation between the dictionary meaning of the SVC shoot ‘to kill or wound with bullet or arrow’ and the GSPE equivalent ‘to sell’. The verb give occurs as the second verb in this construction to describe the transfer of the object in question. Again, it is difficult to see the relationship between the dictionary meaning of the word queer ‘strange or odd’ and its meaning ‘small’ in GSPE. Unlike the example under Type 1, we can establish a semantic relationship between the SGE meanings of the words suck and bed and their equivalents in GSPE. Type 2: Semantic relationship between SE and GSPE words 11. . . . . . . a. Then wey Killer then he dey suck tramol for school nu? ‘Then Killer used to take in tramadol in school’. b. Like the way you go talk sey abed then ago tinop true. ‘Like the way you would say I am asleep, then suddenly, I show up’. For instance, suck in both SGE and GSPE implies taking something from outside the body and transferring it into the body through the mouth. In the same vein, it is quite easy to see the relationship between the meaning of the noun bed in SGE and its GSPE usage (note that it is a verb here). A metonymic relationship is evoked here, where a part, in this case a bed, is used to represent the whole activity of sleeping in GSPE (cf. Osei-Tutu 2016: 197). 5.6 Code-switching Code-switching and code-mixing between languages, according to Huber (1999), are widespread phenomena in urban contexts, and GSPE is no exception. GSPE speakers are predominantly multilingual. For this reason, there is a high degree of code-switching during conversations. Example 12 is the rendition (i.e. interview) of the SGE sentence Did you get

Ghana 97 home early? into SPE. The examples in 13 are excerpts from an all-male focus-group discussion. 12. Did

you

Did you ‘Did you get home early?’

shɛ-ɛ

shia early?

arrive-PAST

house early

In 12, the code-switched words are from Ga. The verb phrase shɛɛ shia means ‘to get home/arrive in the house’. This is an example of segmental code-switching and it occurs intra-sententially. 13. See the squad then no get call up no. Like jie person like . . . for the team inside. ͻde bɛbͻ no. He go take bͻͻ am. ‘Look at the team, they were not called up. Looks like they removed someone from the team. He will hit him with it. He will take it and hit him with it’. 14. That one deɛ idey oo but wontumi nyi PFA player of the season. ‘That is possible but you can’t simply remove the PFA player of the season’. 15. Matts Hummels then he be good oo but rydii asɛ ͻmmo ayɛ mmerɛ. ‘Matts Hummels used to be good but looks like they are weak now’. 16. The whole strikers ͻnno na wasa. ‘Of all the strikers, he is the weakest’. The speaker in 13 code-switches from English to Akan but does so intersententially. He produces a full sentence ͻde bɛbͻ no ‘he will hit him with it (something)’. The speaker does not stop there. He continues and produces a unitary code-switch by saying He go take bͻͻ am, where the only code-switched item is the Akan word bͻ ‘to hit’. This is an attempt by the speaker to translate the full sentence produced in the previous utterance. We see more examples of such inter-sentential code switched forms in examples 14, wontumi nyi ‘you cannot remove it’, 15 but rydii asɛ ͻmmo ayɛ mmerɛ ‘but right now it looks as if they have become weak’ and 16 ͻnno na wasa ‘he is the weakest of all’. These code-switches were produced by the Kumasi-based GSPE speakers. Recall that we have already explained that GSPE speakers from the Ashanti region, where Kumasi is located, are considered less proficient in GSPE (cf. Dako and Bonnie 2013). For this reason, it is logical to expect them to produce full Asante-Twi sentences during their interactions with other GSPE speakers. We suggest that these students code-switch in this manner for two reasons: 1) to mark their identity as proud Asante-Twi

98  Dorothy P. Agyepong and Nana A. A. Amfo speakers or 2) they are not as competent as their colleagues from the coastal regions.

6  Sociolinguistic findings In this section, we discuss some sociolinguistic features associated with GSPE. The figures discussed are from two schools: Achimota Senior High School (because it is a mixed school) and University of Ghana (where there was significant female participation). 6.1  Speaker Base GSPE is a code predominantly used by male speakers (aged between 15 and 60 years) who have at least attained the senior secondary school level of education. Speakers who progress into tertiary institutions continue to use GSPE outside the classrooms as an in-group or solidarity language. Apart from students, this code is also used by graduates of the various tertiary institutions even many years after completion (Dako 2002b). In this regard, GSPE can be classified as an ‘elite’ pidgin. Though considered a male-dominated language, there are females who use GSPE in their interactions. These female students are often stigmatised and seen as non-conformist. Dako and Bonnie (2013: 113) argue that “Student Pidgin (SP) is today the unmarked code of communication among male secondary and tertiary students and is gradually being adopted by female students in the same institutions”. The fact that, currently, GSPE is being adopted by females is also acknowledged by Rupp (2013: 13). According to her, “the use of Student Pidgin has since been spreading among some girls and is currently found in an increasing number of contexts, including the home”. We provide more evidence to support these observations. For instance, in our data, out of the 38 female participants interviewed from Achimota Senior High School, 30, which represents 78% of the total number, answered YES to the question “Do you speak Pidgin English?” These 30 participants were further interviewed. The results of the interviews show that all 30 participants are proficient in GSPE to varying extents, though their male colleagues exhibit higher proficiency levels. This is not really surprising since these females spend the majority of their time in school with males who speak GSPE in almost all out-of-classroom contexts. When one female participant was asked why she speaks GSPE on campus, she explained that: “It makes me feel cool and it also allows me to mingle properly with the guys”. GSPE in this case is adopted by some females as part of a ‘cool’ urban informal style to index their urban ‘cool’ identity. This supports Huber’s (1999) observation that females often use this code when they interact with other male speakers (to have a sense of belonging) or they simply do that for comic effect.

Ghana 99 Table 5.1 Stage at which respondent started speaking GSPE (Achimota Senior High School) Stage s/he started speaking PE

Frequency

Percent

Primary school Junior high school Senior high school N/A Total

8 22 32 9 71

11% 31% 45% 13% 100%

Table 5.2  Stage at which respondent started speaking GSPE (University of Ghana) Stage s/he started speaking PE

Frequency

Percent

Primary school Junior high school Senior high school Tertiary N/A Total

1 1 16 2 10 30

3% 3% 53% 7% 33% 100%

In sum, we can say that GSPE is gradually gaining popularity amongst females and one can anticipate that, in the next few years, as social structures change and gender relations become more equal, there may be a shift from GSPE being a male-dominated code to an all-inclusive youth code. Furthermore, GSPE is often acquired in senior high school. Tables 5.1 and 5.2 show that 45% (Achimota Senior High School) and 53% (University of Ghana) of the participants started using GSPE at the senior high school level. Speakers gain more proficiency as they progress in their levels of study. Consequently, first-year students in senior high schools are less proficient in the code in comparison to those in the senior levels. 6.2 Multilingualism Since Ghana is a multilingual nation, it is not surprising to have GSPE speakers with the ability to speak two or more (local) languages in addition to SGE and GSPE. Our findings show that Akan (34%) and Ga (23%) are the languages that GSPE speakers have in addition to SGE. This goes a long way to explain the reason why GSPE has Twi and Ga as its substrates.

100  Dorothy P. Agyepong and Nana A. A. Amfo 6.3  Domains: GSPE beyond the senior high schools GSPE is not only used in schools. It has broken boundaries in terms of its domains of usage. Currently, GSPE has progressed from simply being a school-context language to one used in the home (mostly) among brothers. Huber (1999) reports that it is often restricted to communication among brothers who have at least secondary education. Still among brothers, there is some form of restriction. For instance, when there is a considerable age difference between brothers or even a difference in status, GSPE is usually precluded. In certain interactions, when a younger brother uses PE with an older brother, it is considered disrespectful. We further investigated the frequency with which GSPE speakers claimed to use the code in formal spaces such as churches and work places, and informal and semi-formal places such as the market and on social media. The results are shown in Table 5.3. We observe the following from Table 5.3: 1. A greater percentage (37%) of the respondents do not often use GSPE in their homes 2. A high percentage (43%) of GSPE speakers report not using GSPE in church 3. A high percentage (33%) of speakers report not using GSPE in their workplaces 4. 30% of the respondents employ GSPE on social media 5. A high percentage (69%) of the GSPE speakers will not use the code when shopping in markets9 Table 5.3 Frequency with which speakers use GSPE in places other than schools (University of Ghana students) Variable

Use of PE at home Use of PE in church Use of PE at work Use of PE on social media Use of PE at the market

Very often

Often

Not so often

Never

N/A

Total

N% 2 7%

N% 3 10%

N % 11 37%

N % 10 33%

N% 4 13%

30 100%

2 7%

2 7%

5 17%

13 43%

8 26%

30 100%

2 7%

2 7%

7 23%

10 33%

9 30%

30 100%

9 30%

7 23%

5 17%

4

5 17%

30 100%

2 7%

1 6%

5 17%

21 69%

0 1%

30 100%

13%

Ghana 101 Commenting on the use of GSPE in church, Frimpong (2012) argues that, in Ghana, most people will not use GSPE in churches (as shown in our data), perhaps because it is a formal and sacred setting. It is almost as if there is a church register which does not accommodate the use of GSPE. On the other hand, it is used in gospel music to make the church service look cool and appealing to the youth, thereby attracting them to church. Apart from gospel music, GSPE is also very common amongst Ghana hip-life artists. There is also high visibility of GSPE on social media. It is very common to have people code-switch from SGE to GSPE during WhatsApp and Instagram conversations. GSPE is also used in Facebook postings. Recently, PE has been introduced to Ghanaian news broadcasting. GhOne, a TV station which delivers most of programmes in SGE, on Monday, 6 May 2019, launched a new programme tag-lined You go sabi ‘You will know’. According to the station, this move intends “reaching out to its young and inner-city audiences in West Africa”.10 In sum, we can posit that, currently, GSPE is expanding to domains often classified as “formal” (i.e., areas where SGE rather than GSPE is the preferred choice). We can think of a situation where graduates annually spill out into work spaces, with their statuses changing from being students to workers. With these former students moving into the workforce, one can expect that they will carry this code with them into these formal spaces. Assuming they continue to use GSPE as their solidarity language, will it still be similar to what they spoke when they were students? Will there be any changes in their lexicon? With these questions in mind, one cannot help but interrogate the appropriateness of the tag GSPE. For instance, to what extent can we continue to refer to this code as Ghanaian students’ Pidgin English? Also, do the speakers outside school contexts agree that they are still speaking GSPE? Confronted with these questions, we suggest that rather than referring to this code as Students’ Pidgin English, a more suitable name would be Educated Ghanaian Pidgin English (EGPE). The common denominator in this case is the fact that speakers have at least secondary education. This label then makes it easier to include speakers who have graduated from the various schools and institutions and are working or involved in other post-school activities. 6.4 Attitudes Despite its gradual expansion into certain formal spaces (Dako and Bonnie 2013), there still appear to be extensive negative attitudes attached to GSPE and its speakers. It seems to be the case that people are primarily concerned about the ability of GSPE to negatively influence their writing

102  Dorothy P. Agyepong and Nana A. A. Amfo and usage of SGE. Next are a few reactions we got when participants were asked whether people should be encouraged to speak PE. a. “No. Because it is not helping the speaking of good English”. b. “Yes, because it creates a level of friendliness”. Indeed, people acknowledge the importance of GSPE as a solidarity/in-group language, but there is also a concern that GSPE may be affecting SGE usage. It is almost as if speakers are more concerned about maintaining the ‘purity’ associated with SGE. There is therefore the perception that constantly using GSPE could contaminate one’s SGE (cf. Rupp 2013; Hampel 2017), hence the need to discourage its use. According to Dako and Bonnie (2013: 114), in Ghana, “to admit to speaking this language is obviously a confession of behaviour that is considered to be outside expected social norms”. GSPE is a code that is confined to people who have at least attained a senior secondary school level of education. Thus, it can be considered an ‘elite pidgin’. It allows its speakers to uniquely identify themselves as non-conformist, while at the same time consciously trying to set themselves apart from the older generations. Not only does GSPE serve the purpose of marking group-solidarity, but it is also a tool used to bridge ethnic differences. Currently, GSPE has extended its usage into formal contexts such as offices, churches and TV news broadcasting.

Notes 1 The abbreviations used in this chapter are GSPE: Ghanaian Student Pidgin English; SGE: Standard Ghanaian English; GhaPE: Ghanaian Pidgin English; EGPE: Educated Ghanaian Pidgin English; PE: Pidgin English; UG: University of Ghana; UPSA: University of Professional Studies, Accra; and PRESEC: Presbyterian Boys’ Senior High School. 2 We are unable to conduct a systematic comparison with GhaPE because the use of the non-educated variety is currently diminishing, and it is, therefore, not as vibrant as the educated variety. For this reason, “sociolinguistic data concerning the situations in which the non-institutionalized variety [GhaPE] is used are not available in the literature” (Huber 1999: 42). 3 There are currently no existing corpora on GSPE, to the best of our knowledge. However, the data for this study are available at the School of Languages Mellon project data bank, which is yet to be made publicly available. This is the first publication from the data collected. 4  Our main focus was to work with Accra-based schools (for proximity’s sake). We included Prempeh College Senior High School and Mfantsipim Boys’ Senior School – located in the Ashanti and Central regions of the country, respectively, because we were also interested in the role those geographical locations played in the lexicalisation of GSPE. All we needed was just a small sample size to investigate this. This explains the reason behind the low numbers for both schools. The most important thing, however, is that, since this volume is on contact dialects, we selected schools located in urban areas and the research itself was conducted in an urban area.

Ghana 103 5  With the exception of the examples duly referenced, all other supporting examples are taken from our data. 6  WASSCE is the abbreviated form of the West African Secondary School Certificate Examination. 7  One who attends Adisadel College located in Cape Coast (Central Region). 8  One who attends Adisadel College located in Cape Coast (Central Region). 9  This can be attributed to the fact that Ghanaian languages such as Ga, Ewe and Akan serve as the languages in which both sellers and buyers often communicate within market spaces. 10 This quote is from an invitation letter from GhOne inviting a colleague to the launch of the TV programme. The station uses both Nigerian and Ghanaian Pidgin English.

References Dadzie, A.B.K. (1985). Pidgin in Ghana: A theoretical consideration of its origin and development. In Mass Communication and Society in West Africa. Frank Okwu Ugboajah (ed.), 113–21. Munich: Hans Zell. Dako, Kari (2002a). Pidgin as a gender specific language in Ghana. Ghanaian Journal of English Studies 1: 72–82. Dako, Kari (2002b). Student pidgin (SP): The language of the educated male elite. Research Review 18(2): 53–62. DOI: 10.4314/rrias.v18i2.22862. Dako, Kari and Richard Bonnie (2013). I go SS; I go vas: A  Ghanaian youth language of secondary and tertiary institutions. In: Jugendsprachen: Stilisierungen, Identitäten, mediale Ressourcen. Helga Kotthoff and Christine Mertzlufft (eds.), 113–24. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig (eds.) (2019). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (22nd edition). Dallas, TX: SIL International. Online Version: www.ethnologue.com. Frimpong, George Kodie (2012). Pidgin English Ghanaian churches. Legon Journal of the Humanities Special edition: 177–98. Guerini, Federica (2007). Multilingualism and language attitudes in Ghana: A preliminary survey. A paper presented at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB6), University of Hamburg, Germany. 29 May to 2nd of July 2007. Hampel, Elisabeth (2017). “It Creates an Atmosphere of Freedom”: Functions of and Attitudes Towards Ghanaian Student Pidgin. Unpublished MA Thesis, University of Cologne. Hollington, A. and N. Nassenstein (2015). 1. Youth language practices in Africa as creative manifestations of fluid repertoires and markers of speakers’ social identity. In Youth Language Practices in Africa and Beyond. N. Nassenstein and A. Hollington (eds.), 1–22. Berlin, München, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614518525-003. Huber, Magnus (1999). Ghanaian Pidgin English in its West African Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1017/s0022226701251366. Kerswill, Paul (2010). Investigating new youth language varieties in Africa and in Europe: Points of similarity and contrast. Paper presented at the Department of Linguistics, University of Ghana, 5 August 2010.

104  Dorothy P. Agyepong and Nana A. A. Amfo Kießling, Roland and Maarten Mous (2004). Urban youth languages in Africa. Anthropological Linguistics 46(3): 303–41. Levin, Beth (1993). English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mensah, Eyo (2016). The dynamics of youth language in Africa: An introduction. Sociolinguistics Studies 10(1–2): 1–14. DOI: 10.1558/sols.v10i1–2.28005. Osam, E.K., C.O. Marfo and K. Agyekum (2013). The morphophonology of the Akan reduplicated verb-form. Journal of Language & Linguistics Studies 9(2): 45–56. Osei-Tutu, Kwaku (2016). Lexical borrowing in Ghanaian student pidgin – the case of Akan loan words and loan translations. In Celebrating Multiple Identities: Opting Out of Neocolonial Monolingualism, Monoculturalism and Mono-Identification in the Greater Caribbean. Nicholas Faraclas, Ronald Severing, Christa Weijer, Elisabeth Echteld, Wim Rutgers and Robert Dupey (eds.), 47–54. Willemstad: University of Curaçao and Fundashon pa Planifikashon di Idioma. DOI: 10.1515/9783110912173.12. Osei-Tutu, Kwaku (2018). I get maf wey you get mɔf: Pronunciation and identity in Ghanaian Student Pidgin. American Language Journal 3(2): 8–25 www. americanlanguagejournal.com. Rupp, Lara (2013). The function of student pidgin in Ghana. English Today 29(4): 13–22. DOI: 10.1017/s0266078413000412. Tyyskä, V. (2005). Conceptualising and theorising youth: Global perspectives. In: Contemporary Youth Research: Local Expressions and Global Connections. Helena Helve and Gunilla Holm (eds.), 3–13. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing.

6 Kenya Sheng and Engsh Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa

1  Linguistic and social context Kenya is a Sub-Saharan country located in East Africa. Geographically, Kenya’s neighbours are Uganda, Tanzania, Somali, Ethiopia, South Sudan and the Indian Ocean. It has a population of roughly 55  million.1 Kenya’s linguistic and social context manifests a typical societal multilingual base with more than 17 indigenous languages that are mutually unintelligible. Some of them, e.g. the Luhyia language, have more than 15 mutually intelligible dialects. The main indigenous languages originate from the Bantu, Nilotic and Cushitic families.2 They are associated with different ethnic groups and spoken as first languages and vernaculars. The country also has non-indigenous languages that are spoken by second and third generation immigrants, such as Hindi from South Asia (Gujerati and Punjabi), and Arabic from Oman and Yemen. Kenya’s official languages are Swahili, English and Kenyan Sign Language. It is worth mentioning that Swahili is also spoken in other east and central African countries and islands, including Tanzania, Zanzibar, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. In Kenya, many people, especially those without a vernacular language, use it as their first language. It is a lingua franca for the whole country and is deemed to be a relatively neutral language since it is not strongly associated with any particular ethnic group.3 However, often, one may hear somebody’s ethnic language through their pronunciation of Swahili and recognise the person’s ethnic background in their Swahili accent. English, on the other hand, is the official language used particularly in official settings. It was introduced to Kenya by British settlers during the colonial period. It is taught in schools, used for official gatherings and in official documents. It is also used in informal settings, especially among the educated. Currently, there are different varieties of English used in Kenya: Standard English4 and Kenyan English (Kenglish or Kenyanese). DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-8

106  Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa 1.1 Sheng as a youth language Sheng is the main youth language associated with Kenya. There is also Engsh, its parallel (Abdulaziz and Osinde 1997), which is less explored and will be reviewed in the sections that follow. As yet, there is still no theoretical agreement on what Sheng actually is, which perhaps shapes its uniqueness and attracts the curiosity of researchers. It has been described in many different ways by scholars. For example, whereas Osinde (1986) and Shitemi (2001) suggest that Sheng is a pidgin, Mazrui (1995) contends that it is not. Abdulaziz and Osinde (1997) further explain that Sheng is not a pidgin per se, but it is a slang bearing pidgin features, such as code-mixing. However, Mazrui (1995) and Nassenstein (2016) refer to it as a non-standard variety of Swahili characterised by code-switching. Githiora (2002) attempts to clarify all the existing information up to that point, by summing up the different possibilities of what Sheng and questioning whether it is simply a peer language, a Swahili dialect or even an emerging creole. Later, Bosire (2006) refers to Sheng as a “hybrid” language; Ferrari (2009) describes it as an urban slang. In subsequent studies, Beck (2015) refers to Sheng as a variety of Swahili in Kenya’s urban areas, and Githiora (2016) refers to it as the “vernacular” of urban youth and later (Githiora 2018) concludes that it is a new addition to the Swahili ‘macrolanguage’. Most of these descriptions are grounded on observations and different interpretations, possibly signalling Sheng’s dynamic nature. Regardless of these differences, however, there is a consensus in most studies that Sheng is a youth language and is currently not restricted to urban areas but has spread throughout Kenya’s rural areas and also spilled over into parts of Uganda and Tanzania. Additional agreements regarding Sheng are that it: • • • • • •

Was first traced in the 1960s or ’70s Originated in Eastlands/Nairobi’s ‘poor’ neighbourhoods Was facilitated by migration from rural areas to Nairobi by those in search of employment Was the language of criminality and illegal transactions Uses Swahili as the base language Was named Sheng as a combination of the terms Swahili and English, though it is not clear why it is not ‘Sweng’

1.2 Engsh as a youth language In comparison to Sheng, Engsh is relatively new and has not yet been widely studied. It was first noticed as a style in its use of informal vocabulary, colloquialisms and idiomatic expressions similar to those in native English-speaking countries. This observation was linked to the influence

Kenya 107 of pop music, movies and disco jargon. Abdulaziz and Osinde (1997) was one of the early studies that revealed that youth in the richer neighbourhoods of Nairobi inserted a lot of informal vocabulary into their spoken English. Githiora’s (2002) study followed and put Engsh into context by explaining the variations of slang in different areas of Nairobi and put it on a par with Sheng. Githiora explained that some parts of Nairobi based their slang more on English than Swahili. He characterised Engsh as a Nairobi ‘slang’ (Githiora 2002). Later studies argued that as an African youth language (AYL), Engsh is different from typical informal varieties in its identity function and wide range of communicative functions (Kießling and Mous 2004; Barasa and Mous 2017; Barasa 2010, 2018). In regard to its origin, Abdulaziz and Osinde (1997) and Kießling and Mous (2004) suggest that Engsh emerged as a reaction to Sheng by middle-class youth who wished to differentiate themselves from the class of Sheng speakers. However, Barasa (2010) suggests that Engsh is simply a form of Sheng that uses a different base language to express a posh persona. It is a symbol of being polished and fashionable (p. 309). The consensus about Engsh is that it: • • • • • •

Was first traced in the late 1990s Originated in Westlands/Nairobi’s ‘rich’ upper-class neighbourhoods Has spread to the middle class Was facilitated by the need for modernity and displays of literacy Uses English and Kenyan English as the base language Is named Engsh as a combination of the terms English and Sheng or as the reverse of Sheng by the reversal of sounds

2 Empirical data There have been many attempts to document Sheng in dictionaries and to promote it as a fully fledged urban language, but there are not many available corpora in one source. Some of Sheng’s characteristics make it a challenge for documentation. One such feature is the changing nature of the Sheng lexicon, in which words are replaced immediately after they become public (examples are in 3.4). Another reason why Sheng is a challenge to document is that it is very fluid with many lexical differences between Sheng varieties in different neighbourhoods (bazes in Sheng),5 e.g. in 2015 while the term for car was dinga or pasonol, in Nairobi’s California neighbourhood, its counterpart in the Dandora neighbourhood was ndai (Kioko 2015). An additional reason from Brookes and Kouassi (2018) is that the majority of attempts to document Sheng in dictionaries and for translation purposes mainly result in documentation of Kenyan Swahili with relatively few words in Sheng. Githiora (2016) explains that the cause of this is that many words

108  Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa in Sheng are usually adapted in Kenyan Swahili, for example, the original Sheng greeting Sasa which is no longer Sheng but Kenyan Swahili. 2.1 Available corpora on Sheng and Engsh Known Sheng sources include: •

Dictionaries and translation books: • •

•

Moga and Fee 1993’s dictionary Mbaabu and Nzuga 2003’s translation book from Sheng to English6

Narratives (Note: there is no clear agreement whether they use Sheng or code-mixing) • David Maillu 1989’s Without kiinua mgongo (literal translation is ‘without something that raises the back’), though it is interpreted as ‘without retirement benefits’ • David Maillu 1990’s Anayeku-keep (the one who keeps you), but interpreted as one who provides for you/a benefactor

• Glossary • • •

Githiora 2002’s corpus with 300 words from Nairobi neighbourhoods Barasa 2010’s corpus with around 1,000 words of Sheng and Engsh in social-media and computer-mediated communication7 Vierke 2015’s corpus with close to 100 Sheng words from lyrics and poetic aspects from the music industry8

• Social-media dictionaries and translation databases (members contribute to databases) • • • •

Sheng nation9 which has a Sheng dictionary, crossword and stories in Sheng Sheng republic10 which lists the most recent Sheng words Jambo news11 which has the 100 most recent Sheng words GoSheng’ which translates Sheng’s lexicon into English and vice versa

The two main limitations of these databases are that: 1. There is no clear distinction between Sheng and Kenyan Swahili 2. Most of the vocabulary has changed over time In spite of all these databases, there is no known database restricted to Engsh. The currently existing documented sources are illustrations in publications such as Barasa and Mous (2017), Kaviti (2015), Meierkord (2011) and Barasa (2010), as will be shown next.

Kenya 109 2.2 Existing studies of Sheng and Engsh Osinde (1986) is one of the earliest studies that described Sheng as used by youth from different linguistic backgrounds, mostly converging on the poor neighbourhoods of Nairobi (Kenya’s capital city). This was followed by King’ei’s (1987) article in Nairobi University Bulletin, recommending that Sheng needed more studies to classify it accurately in order to “put its ghost to rest”. Spyropoulos (1987) also conducted a preliminary investigation. Scientific publications in the form of journal articles and book chapters on Sheng include Beck (2010, 2015); Bosire (2006); Ferrari (2009); Githinji (2009); Githiora (2002, 2016); Kembo-Sure (1992); Mazrui (1995); Ogechi (2005, 2008); Osinde (1986); Rudd (2008); Samper (2002); and Spyropoulos (1987). The majority of these studies on Sheng have mainly focused on describing its linguistic features. The most comprehensive study on Sheng and its position in the Kenyan linguistic landscape is Githiora’s 2018 monograph. Several studies on Sheng have also been published in Swahili, mainly by researchers from Swahili departments and Swahili media, e.g. King’ei and Kobia (2007), Mukhwana (2014), Githinji (2014). In the 2000s, PhD studies, including Samper (2002), Rudd (2008) and Bosire (2009), examined Sheng by focusing on Sheng’s hybridity and its effects on youth; Sheng as a mixed language; and Sheng’s linguistic profile, respectively.

3 Structural findings 3.1 Linguistic bases of Sheng and Engsh Most studies of the structural aspects of Sheng and Engsh mainly demonstrate that Sheng is rooted in Urban Spoken Swahili (Mazrui 1995; Abdulaziz and Osinde 1997; Shinagawa 2008), while Engsh has an English base (Barasa 2010; Barasa and Mous 2017). There are no fundamental differences regarding syntax, phonology or phonetics between Sheng and Swahili, nor between Engsh and English as spoken by the middle and upper classes in Kenya. The innovation of Sheng lies in its lexicon. The nature of the relation between Sheng and Engsh differs from that between the various tsotsitaals in South Africa (Mesthrie and Hurst 2013). In example 1(b), Sheng clearly fits into Swahili’s morphosyntactic structure. 1. (a) Swahili: u-na-enda lini?

/2SG-PRES-go when/

(b) Sheng: u-na-ishia lini?

u-na-chomoka lini?

110  Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa (c) Kenglish: You are going when? (d) Standard English: When are you going? (e) Engsh: When are you enda-(r)-ing? (structure is based on Standard English) You are enda-(r)-ing when? (structure is based on Kenyan English) When are you ishia-(r)ing? OR You are ishia-(r)-ing when? When are you chomoka-(r)-ing? OR You are chomoka-(r)-ing when? 3.2 Morphosyntactic characteristics of Sheng and Engsh Sheng’s grammar nevertheless has some unique features. Ogechi (2005: 334) explains that although “many of the surface morphemes of Sheng look like Kiswahili morphemes and thus lead to claims that Sheng is Kiswahili-based, counter-claims also exist”. Three such observations are that, unlike Swahili, Sheng (see also Bosire 2006; Rudd 2008; Ferrari 2014): • • •

Has the imperfective suffix -ang/ -a(n)g as exemplified in Table 6.1. It may also indicate plurality of action and intensity. Uses the prefix ma- to mark the general plural Uses the prefixes ka and tu to mark the diminutive

• Prefix maThe plural marker prefix (ma-) exists in standard Swahili to mark collectives, but in Sheng its use is further extended to plural meaning, and not necessarily collective. For example, in Sheng, the plural form for the noun ndizi ‘banana’ would be ma-ndizi ‘bananas’, yet in standard Swahili, it is in the same form for both singular and plural, i.e. ndizi/ndizi (Ferrari 2009; Rudd 2008). Table 6.1  Sheng’s imperfective suffix -ang

English Sheng Standard Swahili Kenyan Swahili Engsh

Suffix

Negation

He/she drinks Yeye anakunyw-ang-a  Yeye hunywa Yeye hukunywa He/she kunywaz

He/she does not drink Yeye hakunyw-ang-i Yeye hanywi Yeye hakunywi He/she doesn’t kunywa

Kenya 111 • Diminutive ka- and tuSheng uses ka- (singular) and tu- (plural) prefixes as markers of diminutive classes. These forms do not exist in standard Swahili but are very common in many Kenyan Bantu languages, and in the non-standard Swahili that such speakers may use (see examples in Table 6.2). Bosire (2006), Rudd (2008) and Ferrari (2014) explain that these nonSwahili elements resemble those in some Bantu languages, e.g. Kikuyu, Luhyia, Kisii etc. They are used by speakers of these languages in non-standard Swahili, and this explains their presence in Sheng. These grammatical differences are what most anti-Sheng protesters use in their judgement that Sheng is non-standard and not “grammatical” (Githiora 2016). Engsh has many grammatical specificities derived from English varieties, e.g. some suffixes: • • • •

z for plural, similar to English pronunciation, e.g. guy-z in Table 6.2 d for past tense, e.g. kunywa-d (drank) z for habitual aspect, identical to the English -s for third person singular, e.g. kunywa-z in Table 6.1 (r)ing for the progressive aspect on loan words, e.g. kunywa-(r)ing (drinking)

Its uniqueness lies in its flexibility to manipulate and adapt these into its lexicon from other languages and varieties (Barasa and Mous 2017). Some of Engsh’s distinctive features that are not found in English include: •

Doubling of verbs to mark emphasis: • • • •

•

they like shouting-shouting that ka-guy jamz-jamz /that guy has a habit of being angry/irritated (jams) she walk-walks aimlessly/she randa-randaz he ate-ate quickly/he kula-kulad quickly

The lack of subject-auxiliary inversion in direct questions: • •

we are going where? (where are we going?) they are waiting? (are they waiting?)

Table 6.2  Sheng’s diminutive ka- and tu-

Sheng Standard Swahili Engsh English

Singular prefix ka-

Plural prefix tu-

ka-simu simu ka-phone small phone

tu-simu  simu tu-phone-z/tu-simuz small phones

112  Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa All these components originate from what Barasa and Mous (2017) refer to as the ‘Kenyan phenomenon’, i.e. they occur in Swahili, Sheng and Kenyan English – from where Engsh borrows its lexicon. 3.3 Phonological characteristics of Sheng and Engsh Due to manipulations, some phonological forms arise that are rare in Swahili but immediately recognisable as Sheng, e.g. lengthening of the final sound in a word as a process of ‘shenginisation’ resulting in final long vowels which are relatively rare in Swahili. Kanana (2019) outlines several preferred choices of sounds in Sheng, including: chapa-a ‘money’, do-o ‘money’ mathri-i ‘public transport mini-bus’ madhe-e ‘mother’ Another phonological manipulation in Sheng which is not admissible in Swahili is the formation of words ending in a consonant as a result of the addition of the palatal sh in nouns (especially in names), e.g.: • • •

Pish (Peter), Lish (Lilian), Njugush (Njuguna), Ngomomosh for Ngomongo, a name for an estate in East Nairobi (Githiora 2018: 202) mutush from mutumba ‘secondhand clothes’ from Swahili shosh from shosho ‘grandmother’ from Kikuyu

For Engsh, the phonology only differs from English in that Engsh follows the pronunciation practices of Kenya and manifests some deviant phonemes in loans such as nasal-consonant compounds (see Barasa 2010; Barasa and Mous 2017). 3.4 Lexical characteristics of Sheng and Engsh The most obvious feature of Sheng is the lexicon. As mentioned, the lexicon keeps changing, based on: • Exclusion: when words are no longer private, restricted to the in-group • Origin: different lexicon depending on the neighbourhood’s home base (known as baze in Sheng) • Creativity: invention of new vocabulary • Generation: different age groups have their in-group lexis At its core, Sheng remains Swahili; however, it maintains its identity by dramatically changing its lexicon. Imagine a tree completely overgrown by ivy.

Kenya 113 The tree is still present but what catches the eye is the ivy, i.e. the Sheng lexicon. The deviant Sheng lexicon is created by manipulating Swahili words in both form and meaning, as in other situations of lexical manipulation (Mous 2001; Kießling and Mous 2004; Bosire 2006; Kanana and Atemo 2019), including clippings as in (1), the addition of a dummy suffix (2), verlan (or syllable reversal) (3), among others. Examples from Bosire (2009). (1) baháa from Swahili Bahati (the name of a suburb), madha from madharau ‘contempt’ (2) daróo ‘classroom’ from Swahili darasa okongóo is the name of a neighbourhood known as Makongeni and source with clippings on both ends and the addition of /o/ (3) omba ‘timber/erect’ from Swahili mbao ‘timber’, mloite for ‘toilet’ Manipulations in meaning very often take unexpected and playful directions. For example, ng’ombe in Swahili is ‘cow’ but in Sheng it is ‘smartphone’; kujaa gas, literally ‘fill with gas’ meaning ‘get angry’ in Sheng. Sheng also differs from Swahili by the insertion of words from a multitude of languages, sometimes as they are, sometimes from unexpected language sources and sometimes with manipulations of form (4). (4) kiche ‘see’ from English check with syllable swapping and a slight change in meaning (Bosire 2008: 164) The fun of speaking Sheng is to seem streetwise and to use the newest innovations (Githinji 2006). Obviously, the use of Sheng words in music that is popular with youth greatly enhances its popularity. But any word becoming mainstream immediately leads to a new innovation. (5) ma-hewa ‘music’ from Swahili hewa ‘air’ (Bosire 2009) Another feature of Sheng’s lexicon is in predominantly providing a sense of masculinity since it has its roots in streetwise male youth. Additionally, there is a proliferation of words that are derogatory for girls and their bodies (Githiora 2002; Githinji 2008, see 4.1.2). In Engsh, the vocabulary can be sourced from Standard English, urban English slang, Sheng, Swahili and even vernacular languages. However, vocabulary from urban English slang is preferred, e.g. booze ‘alcohol’, and cash ‘money’, or informal English, e.g. hubby ‘husband’. 3.5 Sheng’s stability across time, reasons for stability/lack of stability In discussing Sheng’s lexicon, it is important to address the issue of stability, since Sheng keeps changing rapidly, especially at the lexical level.

114  Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa Table 6.3  Changing Sheng vocabulary over time and within different neighbourhoods English

Swahili

Sheng

Engsh

car

gari

wheelz

job

kazi

searching/looking

(ni)natafuta

money

pesa

lend me money

nisaidie na pesa

moti, dinga, murenga, ndai, ndae jobo, wera, kajara, mogonda, waks, janta sakanya, saka, tero, sorora, lola, munde, mkwanja, doo, ganji, donge, monyo, dala, chapaa, banga, kakitu niseti/niwai kakitu

jobo/joboz (ni)nasearch, nina-hunt dough, chumz, chapaa, cash nisort na cash/ nilend cash

This is easily detected, especially between varieties of Sheng from different neighbourhoods with different vocabulary with the same meaning. Similarly, these changes can be detected between different generations since the 1980s, as exemplified in Table 6.3. In comparison to Sheng, Engsh is relatively slower to change because: • It is not so much geared towards exclusion • Its lexical origin involves waiting to get vocabulary from Sheng and from English/slang • Its speakers mostly speak English and Swahili in their official circles, e.g. at work or school.

4 Sociolinguistic findings Barasa and Mous (2017) suggest that the existence of two youth languages in Nairobi is a clear sign of “sociocultural differences between competing youth codes, a phenomenon which seems rare elsewhere in Africa” (p.  49) – though as a marker of education Ghanaian Student Pidgin English is a partial parallel to Engsh (see Agyepong and Amfo, this volume). Both Abdulaziz and Osinde (1997) and Githiora (2016) concur that Engsh emerged as a counter-language to Sheng in protest at the socioeconomic class and educational level marked by Sheng. However, our observation is that currently Engsh no longer functions as counter-Sheng but as an expression of Kenyanness and being educated. Sheng and Engsh exist first and foremost in real-time conversation. A  lexical choice that deviates from the common spoken Swahili or from English and is recognisable as Sheng (or Engsh) marks the utterance as Sheng (or Engsh) and evokes various associations in the speaker.

Kenya 115 Obviously, some speech will contain more “Shengisms” than others; some of these shengisms will be considered old-school or as part of the commonly spoken urban Swahili and therefore no longer perceived as markers of Sheng, but again this depends on the context, including the audience. In certain contexts a speaker may be compelled to prove their (extra) prowess by maximising shengisms and using “deep” (=new) Sheng, for example in a matatu (Kenya’s public travel mini-buses) context, and in another context, e.g. in a bar with colleagues, a speaker may use light Sheng or Engsh. Speakers have varying command of the range of Sheng and will utilise this to a greater or lesser extent depending on their communicative intent, and even more depending on the self-image they wish to portray. Light Sheng is no longer associated with street life in the urban slums but rather with modernity, national pride and ethnic neutrality. Questions have been raised as to whether Sheng might become an independent language. Some studies, e.g. Githiora (2016) and Karanja (2010), contend that since Sheng is currently used in many domains including the media, it can be classified as an emerging “urban non-standard vernacular or dialect” (Brookes and Kouassi 2018: 396). However, these observations need to be substantiated by in-depth analysis of a variety of speech events. Such studies are still lacking. 4.1 Speaker base 4.1.1 Age As expected, the general agreement is that Sheng is spoken by young people. It has been defined as a youth identity marker (Samper 2002; King’ei and Kobia 2007; Ogechi 2008; Karanja 2010; Ferrari 2014). Githiora (2018) interprets it as a vernacular for youth. However, as noted earlier, there is a general consensus that Sheng was in existence at least in the late 1970s, which means that its early speakers are currently aged approximately 50  years and not in the youth age bracket anymore.12 Interestingly, these are likely to decrease their usage of Sheng – perhaps because they can no longer keep up with the fast-changing lexicon and thus it is embarrassing to try, and to make mistakes; or, as they become adults, their mind-sets change, thus needing a broader range of speech styles. Engsh is slower to change, less exclusionary and its lexicon is easily understood since it is not entirely new but from English slang, Sheng, Swahili and vernacular. 4.1.2 Gender The gender aspect of Sheng in early studies focused on group language amongst male youth. The female contribution was not fully visible then.

116  Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa Later, Githinji (2008) did an extensive study on gender and discovered that Sheng was gender biased, with a lot of sexism coupled with misrepresentation of women – even by women themselves in self-description. For example, women are likened to animals, e.g. chick/chicken, tortoise, antelope etc. Brookes and Kouassi (2018) contend, with Githinji (2008) and Samper (2002), that compared to men, females have little to gain by speaking Sheng. In fact, in the past, the use of Sheng by women was so disparaged that they would be negatively branded as prostitutes. On the other hand, speaking Engsh has the opposite effect. Women speakers of Engsh are considered elite, feminine and literate. Similarly, men who speak Engsh are also seen as literate but appear to be less masculine (ma-barbie)13 alongside Sheng speakers. Barasa and Mous (2017) explain that, in general, Sheng exhibits a sense of masculinity and toughness. This is the reason why they note that female speakers of Sheng tend to be addressed by a ‘lighter’ version of Sheng than their male counterparts. This lighter version leans more towards code-switching between Swahili and English or Kenyan English, or even Engsh. For example, all the words that follow, ranging from deep Sheng to Engsh, refer to ‘thousand’ and a female is less likely to be addressed using the hard/deep Sheng variant. Hard/deep Sheng: ngwanyi, tenga, ndovu, mote, kapaa, mbraumba Less deep: ngiri, brown, thao Softer/Lighter/Engsh: thao, kay (K)/ a jii (G) 4.1.3  Social class Earlier studies confirmed that Sheng is spoken in the poor neighbourhoods of Nairobi, by those with lower to middle-class incomes. With regard to social class, not much has changed. Even with its spread to other parts of the country, studies like that of Kanana (2019) confirm that Sheng is also mainly active in the low-income areas of these towns outside Nairobi. Her study investigated Sheng in Nakuru, which is 170 km from Nairobi. Sheng has therefore kept its identity as a marker of hard work and struggle. Engsh is the direct opposite of Sheng in terms of social class identity. It started in the richer neighbourhoods of Nairobi, whose inhabitants are in the upper middle class income bracket. Over time, it has trickled into the middle class, not only in Nairobi but across the country too. Barasa and Mous (2017) explain that this spread has been propelled by the many universities across the country (Kenya has more than 60 Universities, with 23 in Nairobi). All these universities attract students from all neighbourhoods who are united in their search for upward mobility. This is where Engsh gains entry to denote modernity, upward mobility, Kenyan

Kenya 117 identity and the status of being well educated. Barasa (2010: 309) points out that Engsh is used to express a posh persona. “It is a symbol of being polished and fashionable”. Notably, social distinctions are present even within in-groups. Brookes and Kouassi (2018) explain that language styles and particular lexical items are used to express social distinction by marking one’s identity and excluding others from one’s social circle (p. 402). The examples in Table 6.3 show that Sheng and Engsh vary depending on one’s neighbourhood, e.g. as seen in the varying vocabulary for ‘job’. The term wera is more likely to be used by a Sheng speaker from a lower income neighbourhood; while the term jobo is more likely to be used by an Engsh speaker with an (upper) middle-class background. These complexities have led to some form of ‘Sheng and Engsh bilingualism’ among certain people, such as youth from poor neighbourhoods who are at university or whose work often involves interactions with Engsh speakers, e.g. in hair salons. They tend to distance themselves from Sheng in interactions with their academic peers or clients, but embrace it when interacting with their peers at home. There is a need for more studies to substantiate this in detail because, from our observation, speakers of Engsh have no qualms about speaking Sheng, while Sheng speakers would not want to speak Engsh. They may prefer to use ‘lighter Sheng’, as shown in Section 4.1.2. 4.1.4  Ethnicity and multilingualism Kenya is historically a multilingual country, and ethnic differences are not the result of recent immigration. Moreover, the various ethnic identities are not minorities within a dominant other. In these respects the multilingualism and multi-ethnicity of Kenya are markedly different from those in the West. Sheng functions on this spectrum as an ethnically neutral language. The official national languages, English and Swahili, are also ethnically neutral but Sheng, being new, does not have the associations of colonialism that English still mildly has, nor does it have the associations of the coast and Islam that Swahili has to some extent. More than the official languages, Sheng is considered truly nationalistic, truly Kenyan – though it is not yet fully supported or recognised by the government. While many youth languages in the West have the function of creating social distance from the establishment, Sheng has developed a function of expressing national unity. This is an interesting development because Sheng also started out as a language of dissatisfied youth from the slums seeking to distance themselves from the establishment, and that function too has not disappeared altogether. This functional paradox

118  Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa demonstrates Sheng’s power of renewal and its resistance to codification and stabilisation. Engsh’s relationship with ethnicity is similar to that of Sheng, which is not linked to any particular ethnic group. In fact, our observation is that Engsh speakers actively use it to extricate themselves from ethnic ties in order to characterise themselves with a Western identity. Its nationalistic role is somewhat vague – its base and identity are strongly associated with English and, hence, with internationalism, inasmuch as it easily accommodates lexicon from Sheng, Swahili and vernaculars, making it recognisable as Kenyan, too. In terms of multilingualism, Engsh speakers have been through education and thus are at least bilingual speakers of Swahili and English. It is currently becoming more feasible for Engsh speakers not to have an ethnic vernacular, which could be due to interethnic marriages coupled with the use of English at home and in school, and the need for speakers to distance themselves from ethnicity. 4.2 Domains of usage So far, the space of Sheng has expanded dramatically and spilled out into new domains. However, one major domain that has always marked Sheng and cannot be separated from it is public transport, i.e. Kenya’s public travel mini-buses referred to as matatu (Swahili), nganya/gendi (Sheng) and mathree/mat (Engsh). In fact, this domain is what made Sheng popular by serving as an open boundary that extends Sheng into public use. Most city Matatus have youthful drivers – kighonyi (Sheng) and conductors – konkodi, mnumeral, madonda (Sheng) and kondi, konda (Engsh), who use Sheng as a secret code, not only to gossip, but more importantly, to share information on avoiding daily challenges, e.g. traffic police. Over time, Sheng has expanded its use to new domains and now includes all media. Githiora (2016) extensively discusses some of these domains including politics, the business sector, such as in markets, and among street hawkers as well as at work, at home, in academic institutions, e.g. schools (Momanyi 2009), and even in universities. As an example of Sheng currently being used in professional contexts, Githiora (2016: 109) presents an example of a conversation in Sheng between two bank clerks in Nairobi. However, from our observation, in such contexts, the Sheng conversation is limited to colleagues rather than clients. Similarly, even though Sheng is present in academic institutions such as schools and universities, it is mainly limited to social interactions and not found in lectures or textbooks. Interestingly though, some academic publications have included abstracts in Sheng, e.g. Barasa (2010) in both Sheng and Engsh, and Githiora (2016) in Sheng.

Kenya 119 Gradually, a number of domains have surpassed the initial demurral and currently use Sheng and Engsh without drawing much attention. These include: • • • •

Mainstream media, e.g. TV and radio programmes and commercials targeted at youth (Kariuki et al. 2015; Mutonya 2008) Entertainment, e.g. music, shows and festivals Public spaces, e.g. billboards Social media, e.g. YouTube

Despite all these new domains, Sheng (as well as Engsh) has not yet prevailed in formal education (academic syllabi), nor in certain informal contexts, for example football commentary. Our observation is that Sheng is penetrating Kenyan society step by step, genre by genre, social group by group and region by region and this process is ongoing. 4.3 Attitudes towards and perceptions of Sheng Long before there were any scientific studies on Sheng, it was already a topic of discussion in local media, although they generally looked at it askance and with much disapproval. One example of this from a confrontational linguistic perspective is a statement from a letter to the editor of the Sunday Nation newspaper14 accusing Sheng of hampering the development of official languages, especially in schools (Osinde 1986). This shows that Sheng was already being placed in parallel with the Kenyan languages and seen as a threat. Popular unrestrained confrontational attitudes towards Sheng included its depiction as a language for thugs and criminals from Nairobi’s slums (Eastlands) to mislead the police and unsuspecting victims. Others dismissed Sheng as being ephemeral and not worthy of further discussion. However, over the years, attitudes towards Sheng have become more accommodating, though the negative perspective still lingers, especially socially. This change might have been propelled by the older generations being more tolerant, since they are familiar with it as the early users and pioneers of Sheng in the 1980s. The animosity might not be about the language structure but simply because of those who feel excluded, given the fast-changing nature of Sheng. In terms of prestige, Githiora’s (2018) study on language attitudes discovered that Sheng is still not very highly valued. Respondents valued dimensions such as perceived schooling, religion, trustworthiness, age and occupation more. The results are interesting in revealing a higher esteem for Standard Swahili and Standard English, a mixed appreciation of Kenyan Swahili, and a low prestige rating for Sheng. This is perhaps why Sheng has been slow to thrive in many contexts as it awaits absolute trust from the society at large.

120  Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa Another noteworthy new form of perception of Sheng and Engsh is between youth themselves. Those who consider themselves literate and upper-class now use Engsh and leave Sheng to those without ‘swag’, known as ma-sufferers in Sheng. In contempt, Sheng’s supporters make fun of Engsh speakers and refer to them as ma-softy or ma-barbie (from Barbie girls). Seemingly, this might not be about conflict, but more a matter of recognition and acceptance of differences. Negative attitudes and perceptions on Sheng are linked to the belief that it: • Is a non-standard form of Swahili that needs to be actively suppressed • Interferes with young people’s skills in learning and speaking standard Swahili • Should be stigmatised as the language of under-educated crooks (Githiora 2002) • Is used secretively to plot to evade the law Most positive attitudes on Sheng are mainly from youth. These attitudes are linked to: • Masculinity: it projects speakers as strong and independent • Creativity: the language is creative in contexts such as music, entertainment etc. • Humour: some Sheng vocabulary is considered funny (e.g. example 3 in Section 3.4) On the opposite scale, Engsh is viewed in a more positive light. It is considered to be: • • •

More accommodating, feminine and ‘soft/light’ The language of the elite, the educated, and closely linked to English A language signalling success, e.g. coming from rich neighbourhoods

Sheng has become part of the repertoire of many Kenyans, especially in informal contexts. The quantity and depth of Sheng that are used depend on the proficiency of the speakers involved, the intended image to be portrayed, the context and content of the conversation (Mous and Barasa 2021). Githiora (2018) suggests that Sheng has spread so that now it can be described as a vernacular for urban youth. It is being actively documented and recorded, especially in different forms of media, e.g. social media, TV, radio and music. Both Sheng and Engsh have their place and function in society, and they are not in conflict with each other. This is exemplified by the current generation of ‘youth language bilinguals’, who speak both Sheng and Engsh, albeit in different contexts and for different functions.

Kenya 121

Notes 1  https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/kenya/ 2  See the full classification at: www.ethnologue.com/country/KE. 3  Even though some communities on the Kenyan coast speak it as their first language, it is not strongly associated with them in comparison to other vernacular languages. 4  Based on Received Pronunciation (RP English). 5 A detailed discussion of Sheng neighbourhoods or bazes is found in Githinji (2006) and Kioko (2015). 6  This is currently unavailable. 7  Available through the Leiden University repository. 8  Lyrics in Toklezea, Kariobangi South and Bum Dem by Ukoo Flani, Mombasa 2009, Album: Kaya Hip-Hop. 9  https://sheng.co.ke/kamusi/kamusi_alpha.php?s_alpha=A. 10  w ww.sde.co.ke/pulse/article/2001274336/sheng-republic-here-are-thelatest-sheng-words-in-town. 11  www.jambonews.co.ke/latest-100-sheng-words-that-you-should-know/. 12 According to the United Nations, youth ranges from 15–24 years old, see https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/youth. 13  Being equated to a ‘barbie gal’ in a Barbie world. 14  The Nation is one of the two most popular newspapers in English. The second is The Standard.

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122  Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa Bosire, Mokaya (2009). What makes a Sheng word unique? Lexical manipulation in mixed languages. In: Selected Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Akinloye Ojo and Lioba Moshi (eds.), 77–85. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Brookes, Heather and Roland Kouassi (2018). The language of youth in Africa: A  sociocultural linguistic analysis. In: The Routledge Handbook of African Linguistics. Augustine Agwuele and Adams Bodomo (eds.), 391–408. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781315392981-21. Ferrari, Aurélia (2009). Emergence de langues urbaines en Afrique: Le cas du sheng, langue mixte parlée à Nairobi (Kenya). Leuven: Peeters. Ferrari, Aurélia (2014). Evolution of Sheng during the Last Decade. Les Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est/The East African Review 49: 29–54. Githinji, Peter (2006). Bazes and their shibboleths: Lexical variation and Sheng speakers’ identity in Nairobi. Nordic Journal of African Studies 15(4): 443–72. Githinji, Peter (2008). Sexism and (mis)representation of women in Sheng. Journal of African Cultural Studies 20(1): 15–32. DOI: 10.1080/13696810802159230. Githinji, Peter (2009). Sheng, Styleshifting and Construction of Multifaceted Identities; Discursive Practices in the Social Negotiation of Meaning. Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM verlag Dr Müller. Githinji, Peter (2014). Kwa miaka hamsini, Sheng imekitunza Kiswahili au imekiua? [In 50 years, has Sheng conserved or killed Swahili?] In: Miaka Hamsini ya Kiswahili Nchini Kenya. [Fifty years of Swahili Kenya] I. Simala, L. Chacha and M. Osore (eds.), 34–50. Nairobi: Twaweza Communications. Githiora, Chege (2002). Sheng: Peer language, Swahili dialect or emerging creole. Journal of African Cultural Studies 15(2): 159–81. DOI: 10.1080/ 1369681022000042637. Githiora, Chege (2016). Sheng: The expanding domains of an urban youth vernacular. Journal of African Cultural Studies 30(2): 105–20. DOI: 10.1080/13696815. 2015.1117962. Githiora, Chege (2018). Sheng: Rise of a Kenyan Swahili vernacular. Woodbridge, (UK): James Currey; Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer. Kanana, Fridah (2019). Urban and youth languages in an evolving space: The case of Sheng in Kenya. In: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives of Youth Language Practices in Africa: Codes and Identity Writings. Gratien Gualbert Atindogbé, and Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue (eds.), 233–60. Bamenda: Langaa RPCIG. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvx07820.18. Kanana, Fridah and Christine Ny’onga Atemo (2019). Lexical restructuring processes in Sheng among the Matatu crew in Nakuru, Kenya. South African Journal of African Languages 39(1): 42–55. DOI: 10.1080/02572117.2019.1572321. Karanja, Lucy (2010). “Homeless” at Home: Linguistic, cultural, and identity hybridity and third space positioning of Kenyan urban youth. Comparative and International Education 39(2): 1–11. DOI: 10.5206/cie-eci.v39i2.9151. Kariuki, Anna, Fridah Erastus Kanana and Hildah Kebeya (2015). The growth of Sheng in advertisements in selected businesses in Kenya. Journal of African Cultural Studies 27(2): 229–46. DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2015.1029879. Kaviti, Lillian (2015). From stigma to status – Sheng and Engsh in Kenya’s linguistic and literary Space. In: Habari ya English? What About Kiswahili? East Africa as a Literary and Linguistic Contact Zone. (= Matatu Journal for

Kenya 123 African Culture and Society 46). Lutz Diegner and Frank Schulze-Engler (eds.), 223–54. Leiden: Brill. Kembo-Sure, Edward (1992). The coming of Sheng. English Today: 26–8. Kießling, Roland and Maarten Mous (2004). Urban youth languages in Africa. Anthropological Linguistics 46(3): 303–41. King’ei, Geoffrey Kitula (1987). Putting the Sheng ‘ghost’ to rest. Kenyatta University Bulletin 2: 22–3. King’ei, Kitula and John Kobia (2007). Lugha kama kitambulisho: Changamoto ya Sheng nchini Kenya. [Language as an identity marker: Challenges/impact of Sheng in Kenya.] Nordic Journal of African Studies 16(3): 320–32. DOI: 10.4314/kcl.v4i1.61312. Kioko, Eric (2015). Regional varieties and ethnic registers of Sheng. In: Youth Languages Practices in Africa and Beyond. Nico Nassenstein and Andrea Hollington (eds.), 119–48. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9781614518525-008. Maillu, David (1989). Without kiinua mgongo. Nairobi: Maillu Publishing House. Mazrui, Alamin (1995). Slang and code-switching: The case of Sheng in Kenya. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere (42): 168–79. Mbaabu, Ireri and Kipande Nzuga (2003). Sheng-English Dictionary: Deciphering East Africa’s Underworld Language. Dar es Salaam: Institute of Kiswahili Research. Meierkord,  Christiane  (2011). ‘U r ma treasure bila measure.’ Identity construction in Kenya’s multilingual spaces. In: Postcolonial Linguistic Voices. Identity Choices and Representations. Eric A. Anchimbe and Stephen A Mforteh (eds.), 25–30. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/978311 0260694.25. Mesthrie, Rajend and Ellen Hurst (2013). Slang registers, code-switching and restructured urban varieties in South Africa: An analytic overview of tsotsitaals with special reference to the Cape Town variety. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 28(1): 103–30. DOI: 10.1075/jpcl.28.1.04mes. Momanyi, Clara (2009). The effects of ‘Sheng’ in the teaching of Kiswahili in Kenyan schools. The Journal of Pan African Studies 2(8): 27–138. Moga, Jacko and Dan Fee (1993). Sheng Dictionary. Nairobi: Ginseng Publisher. Mous, Maarten (2001). Paralexification in language intertwining. In: Creolization and Contact (Creole Language Library, 23.). Norval Smith and Tonjes Veenstra (eds.), 113–23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/ cll.23.05mou. Mous, Maarten and Sandra Barasa (2021). Sheng and Engsh in Kenya’s media: From nganya and mathree to broadcast proggiez. In: Youth Language Varieties in African Urban Centres. Ellen Hurst and Rajend Mesthrie (eds.), 141–58. (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mukhwana, Ayub (2014). Je Sheng ni lahaja ya Kiswahi? Nadharia ya utambulisho wa lugha [Is Sheng a variety of Swahili?: Theory of language identification]. In: Miaka Hamsini ya Kiswahili Nchini Kenya. [Fifty years of Swahili Kenya] I. Simala, L. Chacha and M. Osore (eds.), 88–200. Nairobi: Twaweza Communications. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvgc60vs.21.

124  Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa Mutonya, Mungai (2008). Swahili Advertising in Nairobi: Innovation and Language Shift.  Journal of African Cultural Studies  20(1): 3–14. DOI: 10.1080/13696810802159222. Nassenstein, Nico (2016). The new urban youth language Yabacrâne in Goma (DR  Congo). Sociolinguistic Studies 10(1–2): 235–9. DOI: 10.1558/sols. v10i1-2.27925. Ogechi, Nathan (2005). On lexicalization in Sheng. Nordic Journal of African Studies 14(3): 334–55. Ogechi, Nathan (2008). Sheng as a youth identity marker: Reality or misconception. In: Culture, Performance and Identity. Paths of Communication in Kenya. Kimani Njogu (ed.), 75–92. Nairobi: Twaweza Communications. Osinde, Ken (1986). Sheng: An Investigation into the Social and Cultural Aspects of an Evolving Language. Unpublished BA thesis, University of Nairobi. Rudd, Philip (2008). Sheng: The Mixed Language of Nairobi. PhD thesis, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. Samper, David (2002). Talking Sheng: The Role of a Hybrid Language in the Construction of Identity and Youth Culture in Nairobi, Kenya. PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Shinagawa, Daisuke (2008). Notes on the morphosyntactic bias of verbal constituents in Sheng texts. HERSETEC: Journal of Hermeneutic Study and Education of Textual Configuration 1(1): 153–71. Shitemi, Naomi (2001). Pidginization: Sheng, the melting-pot of the Kenyan languages and an anti-Babel development. Kiswahili 64: 1–16. Spyropoulos, Mary (1987). Sheng: Some preliminary investigations into a recently emerged Nairobi street language. Journal of Anthropological Society of Oxford 18(1): 125–36. Vierke, Clarissa (2015). Some remarks on poetic aspects of Sheng. In: Youth Language Practices in Africa and Beyond. Nico Nassenstein and Andrea Hollington (eds.), 227–55. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9781614518525-013.

7 Finland Old Helsinki slang Heini Lehtonen and Heikki Paunonen1

1  Linguistic and social context Local dialect is an important index of a city. Helsinki, the capital of Finland, was founded in the middle of the Swedish-speaking area, and it does not have a Finnish dialect of its own. What indexes the urban identity of Helsinki is Stadin slangi, (old) Helsinki slang (Stadi is the slang name for Helsinki < Swedish stad ‘city’). This is a way of speaking that emerged in the Finnish-Swedish working-class districts of Helsinki during the swirls of urbanisation. For a long time, old Helsinki slang remained the language of Finnish-Swedish bilingual male youth groups. Already, in early 20th century newspapers, it was characterised as the “Esperanto” of working-class districts (Paunonen 1989: 585–94, 1994: 223–39, 2000: 14–17). When boys and young men from Finnish working-class families came into contact with Swedish-based slang in Helsinki, two phonologically different systems collided. The linguistic characteristics of slang have undergone enregisterment processes (Agha 2007: 55–81) in which they have come to index (male) working-class culture, urbanity and youth culture, and the ‘original’ spirit of Helsinki (Paunonen et al. 2009). The era of old Helsinki slang spans from the late 19th century until the 1940s. Its development was interrupted by the Second World War. Nevertheless, there is a continuum from old Helsinki slang to the newer youth slang. The sample vocabulary in this chapter, selected to introduce some distinctive phonological and lexical features, dates from the 1880s to the 1930s. Many of the phonological features and slang suffixes presented in Section 3 are still productive even today (Paunonen 2000: 14–32, 2006a: 50–9, 2006c: 336–61, 2017a, 2017b). It is important to stress that the contact of Finnish and Swedish can mainly be observed in the vocabulary, phonology and phonotactics of slang. The syntactic and morphological matrix was either Finnish or Swedish (Paunonen 1994: 237–8, 2000: 17–22, 28–37, 2006b: 241–2; Jarva and Mikkonen 2018: 223). One could, for instance, say friidu oli kiva mutta kundi dorka (Finnish matrix) or fridun va kiva men kunden DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-9

126  Heini Lehtonen and Heikki Paunonen dorka (Swedish matrix), roughly translated as: ‘the girl was nice but the guy was stupid’2 (Paunonen 1989: 591). In this chapter, we focus on Finnish-based slang.3 We will describe the societal and demographic background that led to the emergence of old Helsinki slang (Section 1); previous research and the data available (Section 2); old Helsinki slang’s structural characteristics (Section 3); and its social indexicality (Section 4). 1.1  Helsinki as a linguistic melting pot The story of old Helsinki slang begins with industrialisation in the 1860s. Helsinki first received workers from the Swedish- and Finnish-speaking areas nearby, then from farther away, from Finnish-speaking inner Finland (Waris 2016 [1932]: 176–94; Paunonen 1994: 223–39, 2006a: 22–6). Following this migration, the population of the city grew rapidly in a couple of decades, and the power relations of its languages started to change. Table 7.1 illustrates the expansion in the population and the distribution of its first languages from 1870 to 2018. In 1900, Helsinki had less than 100,000 inhabitants and for the first time, the proportion of Finnish-speakers exceeded 50 per cent. Swedish remained the only official language of the city until 1902, and the first Finnish street names and other place names were confirmed as late as 1909 (Aminoff and Pesonen 1981: 47–9). Under Russian rule (1809–1917), Russian was prominent in Helsinki, in addition to Swedish and Finnish. In some domains, Swedish and Russian were more prominent than Finnish: the city had many Russian merchants, and in some shops, signs were written in only Swedish and Russian. Street signs, on the other hand, were trilingual in the early 20th century (Paunonen 2016: 22–47). Many Russian hawkers and soldiers wandered the streets of Helsinki, and especially young boys and men are known to have had close contact with them until the spring of 1918, when Russian soldiers withdrew from Helsinki (Paunonen 2006a: 52–3, 2007: 26–8, 2016: 32–9). Table 7.1 Population of Helsinki and distribution of first languages from 1870 to 2018 (Waris 2016 [1932]: 370; Paunonen 1994: 227; Statistical Yearbook of Helsinki 2018: 37–8) Year

Population N

Finnish %

Swedish %

Russian %

Others %

1870 1900 1910 1970 2018

32,113 93,217 139,497 510,352 643,272

25.9 50.7 59.2 88.9 79.1

57.0 42.5 35.1 10.6 5.7

12.1 4.7 4.0 0.2 2.8

5.0 2.1 1.7 0.3 12.4

Finland 127 As can be observed in Table 7.1, the switch in the power relations of Finnish and Swedish was not the only change: since the 1990s, the number of people whose first language is something other than Finnish, Swedish (or Sámi) has grown. The languages most spoken in today’s Helsinki, after Finnish and Swedish, are Estonian, Russian, Arabic and Somali. The ‘new’ languages of Helsinki have already been absorbed into today’s youth slang in multi-ethnic suburbs (cf. Lehtonen 2011, 2016a). 1.2  Emergence of old Helsinki slang in multilingual Helsinki Old Helsinki slang developed in the late 19th century and early 20th century in working-class districts, where the linguistic features of Finnish, Swedish and Russian were mixed in various ways (Waris 2016 [1932]: 183–94; Paunonen 1989: 586–93, 2006a: 50–9, 2016: 38–41; Jarva and Mikkonen 2018: 228–9). This can be clearly seen in the phonology, phonotactics and vocabulary of the old slang. The old Finnish-based Helsinki slang was built on the older Swedish-based slang used by working-class boys (Paunonen 2006a: 51–2, 2006b: 250–1, 2016: 56–7; Forsskåhl 2015: 48–50). Morphologically and syntactically, old (Finnish-based) Helsinki slang was mainly local spoken Finnish, which was based on Finnish dialects spoken in the countryside, from where the working-class population came. One could say that Helsinki was also a melting pot for different dialects of Finnish (Paunonen 1989: 589–606, 2006a: 36–43). Furthermore, (written) standard Finnish was also present on the linguistic palette (Paunonen 1994: 231–9, 2006a: 44–8; Jarva and Mikkonen 2018: 229–30), and there was a tradition of almost written-like speech among the educated upper class in Helsinki (Paunonen 2005: 45–56, 2006a: 66–72, 2017b, 2019a, 2019b). Nevertheless, the working class spoke dialect-based colloquial registers. Thus, the syntactic and morphological matrix for slang was and is dialectal and colloquial spoken Finnish. Only a few morphosyntactic features might be regarded as slang innovations (Paunonen 2000: 22–3; cf. Jarva and Mikkonen 2018: 244–8). In fact, today’s spoken Finnish differs considerably from the (written) standard even in formal or institutional contexts (cf. Lehtonen 2011: 303–5 for references), and the morphosyntax of slang has throughout the decades been based on colloquial spoken Finnishes. The fact that it is impossible to separate ‘slang morphosyntax’ from the morphosyntax of spoken Finnishes has led to a scholarly argument about whether old Helsinki slang should be primarily regarded as an example of a Finnic language or a mixed language (Kallio 2007; Jarva 2008; de Smit 2010). It is not our aim to engage in this debate. Interaction in multilingual urban communities is fluid, and the repertoires are not easy to force into the ‘strict boxes’ of a variety approach (Quist 2008; cf. Lehtonen 2011: 313–31; Blommaert 2010; Pennycook 2010). This is

128  Heini Lehtonen and Heikki Paunonen true for the ways of speaking in Helsinki as well. The repertoires of the early modern working class in Helsinki consisted of some Finnish, some Swedish, some Russian, some standard, and some colloquial and dialectal resources. When these came together, new innovations gained social indexicality (Agha 2007: 17; Lehtonen 2016b: 18–19) related to forms of urban life, and later they were labelled as (old) Helsinki slang. These innovations were mainly lexical and phonological.

2  Empirical data and previous studies Our current knowledge based on the slang spoken in Helsinki spans from the 1880s to the present day. The earliest information on Finnish-based Helsinki slang can be found in the memoires of people born in the late 19th century. Several large dictionaries were compiled in the early 20th century, and at this time, slang was even used in some satirical magazines’ writings (cf. Paunonen 1989: 585–7, 620–1, 2000: 37–42). Most of the Finnish-based slang in Helsinki has been collected by Heikki Paunonen, alone or together with other researchers. He has systematically recorded Helsinki slang since the early 1970s by interviewing elderly Helsinki residents and organising numerous slang collection events among Helsinki residents (1976) and in several schools (1975– 2020). He has also gone through all the written sources that refer to or use slang. Since the 1980s, Paunonen has published several studies about different topics related to sociolinguistic variation in Helsinki, and on Helsinki slang more specifically (Paunonen 1989, 1994, 2000, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2007, 2010, 2016, 2017a, 2017b; Paunonen et al. 2009). In 2000, Stadin slangin suursanakirja (The Great Dictionary of Helsinki Slang) was published, with about 35,000 entries (Paunonen 2000; main reference for Sections 3.1 and 3.2 of this chapter). Since there are several different sound variants for many of the lexemes, the number of individual ‘words’ is considerable. All the informants were Helsinkibased slang speakers. The data make it possible to estimate when individual lexemes and their variants have been popular among slang speakers. Upon completion of the dictionary, the entire collection of over 200,000 slang tickets was donated to the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus), where it is available for research purposes. The data from the slang-collecting campaign in schools from 2014 are available online (see www.kotus.fi/aineistot/sana-aineistot/slangisana-aineisto). Two new dictionaries published in 2021 will offer further insights into the vocabulary of the old slang: Forsberg’s (2021) etymological dictionary, and Paunonen and Jeongdo Kim’s (2021) reverse dictionary. Slang speakers born in the late 1800s and early 20th century were even recorded by Heikki Paunonen and M.A. Numminen. The data, approximately 20 hours, were donated to Kotus, where they are available for research purposes. The data are partly digitised. In addition to

Finland 129 Paunonen’s studies, the data have been used for master’s theses. Recently, Jarva and Mikkonen (2018) published a paper on lexical mixing in conversation between old Helsinki slang speakers.

3  Structural findings This section deals with the most prominent linguistic features of old Helsinki slang: the vocabulary and its origins (3.1) and its phonology and phonotactics affected by language contact (3.2). These sections are based on Heikki Paunonen’s work (Paunonen 1989, 2000, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2007, 2016, 2017a, 2017b). 3.1  Old Helsinki slang vocabulary The vocabulary of old Helsinki slang derived mainly from Swedish, Finnish and Russian. Paunonen (2017a, 2017b) has gone through all the lexemes in his slang dictionary (2000) and evaluated when and for how long the lexemes have been used. Slightly over 7,000 lexical items, many with several phonetic variants, date from the oldest historical layer of Helsinki slang (1880–1919). Approximately 70 per cent of slang vocabulary comes from Swedish, 25 per cent from Finnish and 5 per cent from Russian (Paunonen 2017a, 2017b; cf. Jarva and Mikkonen 2018: 225– 6, 235–40, 248–50). In the 1950s, half of a speaker’s slang vocabulary would consist of words from these oldest layers. Even now, in the 2020s, a core vocabulary of approximately 1,600 words dates back to the earliest layers (Paunonen 2017a, 2107b). 3.1.1  Words of Swedish origin Finnish word structure is very different from that of Swedish. Most Finnish nouns are bisyllabic and end in a vowel. A large proportion of Swedish nouns are monosyllabic, ending in a vowel or a consonant (Elert 1970: 138–49). In Helsinki slang, Swedish words have been adjusted to Finnish morphology by the use of slang derivatives, or word-final suffixes, e.g., snöde, snöge, snögu ‘snow’ < Swedish snö; bärgga, bärika, bärtši, bärtšika ‘rock’ < Swedish berg (Paunonen 2000: 25–8, 2006b: 245–8, 2006c: 339–42; Jarva and Mikkonen 2018: 240–2). As for verbs of Swedish origin, bisyllabic verbs have remained the same, e.g. simmaa ‘swim’ < Swedish simma. However, suffixes have been used to make monosyllabic Swedish verbs adapt to the Finnish morphological matrix of slang, e.g. budjaa ‘live’ < Swedish bo. Much of the Swedish vocabulary in Helsinki slang is derived from the dialects of Swedish spoken in Finland. However, it is not always possible to determine whether a word is derived from rural dialects, from the Swedish vernacular spoken in Helsinki or from Swedish standard

130  Heini Lehtonen and Heikki Paunonen language (Paunonen 2000: 28–9, 2006b: 248–9). Some words can be traced back to the slang spoken in Stockholm by schoolboys or criminals, e.g., bööna and jentta ‘girl’, dille ‘stupid’, byylari and byylinki ‘police’, snutaa ‘steal’ (cf. Kotsinas 1996). One more model for creating new slang words originates from Stockholm: so-called Fikon language (Bergman 1964: 72–3). Its wordformation process is somewhat similar to English spoonerisms, e.g., fimp ‘cigarette stump’ from the word stump: stump-fikon > fimp-stukon (Bergman ibid.). Fikon language has been the main source of slang words beginning with fi-, e.g., the words fiutšika and fiude ‘car’ from the word autšika ‘car’: autšika-fikon > fiutšika-akon > fiutšika and fiude. 3.1.2  Words of Finnish origin Approximately one quarter of the words in old Helsinki slang are Finnish in origin (Paunonen 2017a, 2017b). A significant number of these have been derived by using suffixes typical of Helsinki slang, e.g., pitšku ‘(court)yard’, rantšu ‘beach’ < Finnish piha, ranta, talkkari ‘janitor’ < Finnish talonmies. The same suffixes have been used to form slang words from both Finnish and Swedish words, e.g., bärtši and kaltši ‘rock’ < Swedish berg, Finnish kallio. One word may have given rise to several different variants. The Swedish word skog ‘forest’ is the basis of skuge, skugeli, skugge, skuide, skuija, skutši and skutta. Slang suffixes are an endless source of variation as well as a prevailing index of Helsinki slang, even today (Paunonen 2000: 27–8, 2006c: 339–42, 2017a, 2017b). A significant number of words originate from Finnish dialects, such as heila, juntti, pimu, sussu, which already in the early 20th century were used to mean girl. Some of the vocabulary in old Helsinki slang comes from a secret language used by Finnish criminals, e.g., kekäle, keklu, skeklu, kekke, skekke ‘(hunting) knife’ < Finnish kekäle ‘ember’. 3.1.3  Words of Russian origin Russian words in Helsinki slang come mainly from Russian merchants, and especially from soldiers. Commercial vocabulary includes, for example, the words lafka ‘shop, business’, maroosi ‘ice cream’ < Russian lávka, moróženoe. Contact with Russian soldiers brought words like šagga and safka ‘food’ < Russian zakúska ‘snack with a drink’ and závtrak ‘breakfast’, tšubu ‘cap’ < Russian tšub ‘(Cossack’s) tuft of hair’ and tšapka ‘cap’ < Russian šápka ‘cap; thick hair’. The word tšubu has changed to tšuba, tšubba, tšube and the word tšapka has given rise to tšapska. These have further inspired even more synonyms based on vowel variation u ~ i, a ~ i: tšiba, tšibba, tšibbe, tšipska. Vowel variation is still used for creating new slang words (Paunonen 2017a, 2017b).

Finland 131 Over the last century, most of the slang words of Russian origin have disappeared, but based on a survey carried out by Paunonen in high schools in 2015, even today’s young people recognise about 20–30 of them. Their active vocabulary includes over ten words, such as safka ‘food’, mesta ‘place’, tšaikka ‘tea’, voda ‘water’ < Russian závtrak, mésto, tšaj, vodá, and bonjaa and snaijaa ‘understand’ < Russian ponját´, ponimát´ ‘understand’, znat´ ‘know; understand’ (Paunonen 2016: 68–73). 3.1.4.  Words of other origins Languages other than Finnish, Swedish or Russian have contributed only a handful of words to old Helsinki slang. The word kaveri came from Yiddish kháver, ‘friend’, via the slang associated with the Central European criminal underworld, in which it took the form khaver, kaver ‘accomplice’. The first records in Helsinki date back to the 1870s and the meaning ‘thief’. The current meaning ‘friend’, however, has been present from the late 19th century onwards (Muir 2009: 535; Paunonen 2016: 315–19). A few words were borrowed from German: luffaa ‘run’ and slaafaa ‘sleep’ < German laufen, schlafen (Paunonen ibid.). The first English words in Helsinki slang came from sailors and early movies. For example, the word dongarit ‘dungarees’ was adopted from sailors. 3.2 ‘Foreign’ sounds and sound combinations in old Helsinki slang This section focuses on two prominent ways in which Finnish phonology and phonotactics differ from those of Swedish: 1) sounds and 2) wordinitial consonant clusters that are ‘foreign’ to Finnish. How these are manifested in old Helsinki slang is discussed later. In addition, vowel combinations that do not follow Finnish vowel harmony are a source of variation. Following vowel harmony, the first and second syllables of a word can only contain back vowels a, o, u or front vowels ä, ö, y. The vowels e and i are neutral and can co-occur with both front and back vowels. Old Helsinki slang ignored vowel harmony. At least 19 vowel combinations that break the rules of Finnish vowel harmony have been recorded. This number is based on enquiries by Paunonen for his slang dictionary (2000) (cf. also Paunonen 1989: 604–6, 2000: 21–2). While Finnish speakers still tend to pronounce words in accordance with vowel harmony, variation such as bööna ~ böönä ‘girl’ (< Stockholm slang böna) occurs. Whether the slang name of the traditional working-class district Sörnäinen ~ Sörnäs is Sörkka or Sörkkä is a constant topic of heated discussions (Paunonen 2010: 865–72). Further ‘violations’ of vowel harmony can be observed in the lexeme sample in this chapter.

132  Heini Lehtonen and Heikki Paunonen 3.2.1  Sounds that are ‘foreign’ to the Finnish language Swedish contains several consonant phonemes that have traditionally been absent from Finnish. These include the voiced plosives /b/, /d/ and /g/ and the phonemes /f/, /š/ and /tš/ (for more about these in Swedish: Elert 1970: 72–82). Of these foreign sounds, d is present in both written and spoken standard Finnish, although it is mainly found as the weak grade variation of t (e.g. pata ‘cauldron’: genitive singular padan),4 and it was not used in spoken Finnish before standardisation. In Helsinki slang, the voiced plosives b, d, g, as well as /f/,5 occur as independent phonemes, e.g., buli ‘big’, budjaa ‘to live’, giba ‘boy, man’, skeglu ‘knife’, fade ‘father’, stiflat ‘boots’. They can also be found in geminate consonants, e.g., glabbi ‘foot’, gloddi ‘child’, blaggat ‘shoes’, (k)liffa ‘nice, fun’. ‘Foreign’ sounds have been considered a distinctive feature of slang from a very early phase, and have been added to words of Finnish origin, e.g., talkkari ~ dalkkari ‘janitor’ < Finnish talonmies. Since some Finnish speakers had difficulties with voiced stops, they substituted them with unvoiced ones, e.g. gubbe (Swedish ‘old man’) > kuppe. Voiced and unvoiced plosives varied, and several sound variants of the same lexeme were in use simultaneously, e.g., the word gubbe, ‘old man’, has the variants gubbe, guppe, kubbe, kuppe. This led to so-called hypercorrect slang variants, where Finnish unvoiced stops were replaced with voiced ones, even if they were unvoiced in the corresponding Swedish lexemes, e.g. galsa ~ kalsa < kall (Swe.). In addition, sounds that are ‘foreign’ to Finnish but typical of old Helsinki slang are š and tš, e.g., šagga ‘food’, šingraa ‘disappear’, tšali ‘boy’, tšiigaa ‘look’, tšyygu ‘20 pence’. The affricate tš is considered a very distinctive slang feature, as its use has been extended to words in which it was originally not present, e.g., sittaa ‘sit’ ~ tšittaa < Swedish sitta. The ts ~ tš affricate has, in fact, become such an iconic index of Helsinki (Paunonen 1989: 601, 2006b: 243, 2017a, 2017b) that you can sometimes here the slang name of the city Stadi in the form Tsadi ~ Tšadi.6 In total, Russian has seven sibilants: s, z, š, ž, ts, tš, štš, and for a Finnish speaker, the pronunciation of these is difficult, since Finnish only has one sibilant phoneme /s/. Thus, in Helsinki slang, the voiced z is often replaced with s, e.g., isvossikka ‘horse driver’ < Russian izvóztšik, sometimes with š, e.g., šagga ‘food’ < Russian zakúska ‘snack with a drink’. The voiced ž has been replaced with a voiceless š, e.g., šivaa(n) ‘now, soon’ < Russian žívo. The word-initial tš seems, nevertheless, to have remained, e.g., tšaiju, tšaikka ‘tea’ < Russian tšaj. The initial single š is often pronounced as tš, e.g., tšapka ‘cap’ < Russian šápka. Since š and tš are considered especially Russian in nature, they have been used to replace s, leading to a form of hyper-Russianisims such as šubu, tšubu ‘soup, broth’ < Russian sup.

Finland 133 Russian štš has, however, always been simplified, e.g., jassikka ‘box’ < Russian jáštšik. Modern Helsinki slang has retained the voiced plosives b, d, g and f, e.g., diggaa ‘like something’ < American and English slang dig ‘appreciate or like something’ (Hurme et al. 2003). On the other hand, both š and affricate tš have commonly been replaced by s and ts since the 1950s, e.g., sagga, tsiigaa. 3.2.2  Word-initial consonant clusters in Helsinki slang Word-initial consonant clusters were originally absent from Finnish,7 but in Helsinki slang they are common. Altogether, 46 different initial twosound consonant clusters and 16 initial three-sound consonant clusters have been recorded. Again, the numbers are based on enquiries by Paunonen for his slang dictionary (2000) (cf. also Paunonen 1989: 601–4, 2000: 19–21). Word-initial consonant clusters feature different kinds of variations. In clusters of two consonants beginning with a plosive (e.g. br-, pr-, dr-, tr-, gr-, kr-), voiced and voiceless plosives vary in much the same way as in singular plosives, e.g., graga ~ graka ~ kraga ~ kraka ‘collar, tie’ (< Swedish krage), bragaa ~ brakaa ~ pragaa ~ prakaa ‘break’ (< Swedish braka). The variants graga and graka are hypercorrect, whereas the variants pragaa, prakaa have been adjusted to suit the Finnish sound system. Some speakers pronounced the word-initial consonant clusters in a simplified Finnish way, e.g., rokaa ‘sell stolen goods’ < Swedish slang tråka, grepat, krepat ‘testicles’ < Swedish skräpporna. On the other hand, Finnish speakers sometimes added a word-initial consonant to words that did not originally have one, e.g., rigi ‘suit’ > brigi, drigi, frigi, krigi, prigi, trigi ‘suit’ < Swedish rigg. There are several examples in which an s is added in front of a two-sound consonant cluster. Of the preceding examples, the lexemes kraga, brakaa also have the variants sgraga, sgraka, skraga, skraka and sbragaa, sbrakaa, spragaa, sprakaa. A wordinitial s has become an index of Helsinki slang, much like the ts-affricate, as well as the ‘foreign’ voiced plosives. This is a productive practice even in modern slang (Paunonen 1989: 603–4, 2000: 21, 2006a: 53–4, 2006b: 244–5, 2017a, 2017b). Word-initial consonant clusters are even used in words of Finnish origin, e.g., frägä, sprägä ‘snot, slime’ < Finnish räkä ‘snot’. Helsinki slang has several consonant clusters that are not found in Swedish (cf. Elert 1970: 90), such as ds-, gv-, sb-, sg-, sr-, sbr-, sfr-, sgl, sgn-, sgv-, skn-, as in, for example, dseli ‘sled’, gveesi ‘cigarette’, sbettari ‘diploma’, sgagu ‘bottle’, srinnaa ‘skate’, sbrigi ‘suit’, sfragaa ‘to fight’, sgloppanat ‘shoes’, sgniidu ‘stingy’, sgvalraa ‘tattle’, skniidu ‘stingy’. The abundance of different sound variants is a particularly characteristic feature of Helsinki slang. It demonstrates how two different

134  Heini Lehtonen and Heikki Paunonen phonological systems coming into contact create variation, and eventually result in a phonological and phonotactic system that is different from both original languages. In addition to phonetic variation, Helsinki slang’s ability to use slang derivatives and word-final affixes has resulted in numerous synonyms (Paunonen 2006c: 336–42). Slang suffixes are used even today to form an almost unlimited number of new expressions, although many of these are short-lived. The use of d, b, g, f, word-initial consonant clusters, as well as slang suffixes, is a linguistic feature of old Helsinki slang that has come to index it to the extent that they can still be effectively and creatively used to ‘create’ slang (Paunonen 2000: 17–28, 2006a: 54–6, 2006b: 246–8, 2017a, 2017b; Forsskåhl 2005: 63; Jarva and Mikkonen 2018: 226–7, 233).

4 Sociolinguistic findings: Old Helsinki slang as a Kulturgut 4.1  Whose language was old Helsinki slang? Old Helsinki slang was not the language of those who moved to Helsinki from the countryside. They spoke the dialects they had learnt in their countryside homes. It was their children who spoke the slang instead of the dialects of their parents. It united Finnish-speaking and Swedishspeaking youth and gave them a sense of togetherness. Slang separated them from their parents who spoke rural dialects, and from teachers who spoke ‘correct’ language. Helsinki slang became enregistered as the spoken language of Helsinki natives, and it still carries that index. (Waris 2016 [1932]: 179–94; Paunonen 1989: 589–91, 618–19, 2000: 15–16, 42–4, 2007: 34–6, 2017a, 2017b; Paunonen et al. 2009: 452–72). Old Helsinki slang mainly ‘belonged’ to boys and young men. Many women have pointed out that they knew and understood the slang but did not speak it themselves (Paunonen 1989: 591–2, 2000: 42–4, 2006a: 52). Socially, slang was associated with working-class men, more specifically with the so-called sakilaiset subculture, comparable to Les Apaches of Paris or the Hooligans of London (Paunonen 1989: 586–7, 2016: 55–6, 171–4; Koskela 2002: 136–42). Slang was commonly referred to as ‘street (boy) language’ (Salola 1929: 13–17). Helsinki slang was strongly stigmatised until the 1960s. As late as 1969, a prominent professor of the Finnish language, Martti Rapola, called it “the auxiliary language of underdevelopment” (Suojanen 1982: 155). Slang violated purist ideas of language that the middle class cherished. In working-class districts, slang was not so strongly stigmatised, but even working-class mothers might have rejected it as bad language, unacceptable at home. Schools did not allow the use of slang anywhere in Helsinki (Salola 1929: 11–20; Paunonen 2000: 14–17, 42–4; Paunonen

Finland 135 et al. 2009). From the 1950s onwards, however, slang was used by many young people in Helsinki, regardless of their gender or social background (Paunonen 2000: 16–17, 2006a: 56–9, 2006c: 348–61). 4.2  Social indexicality of old Helsinki slang today Often, when people are asked to talk about language, they do not talk so much about language itself, but about their beliefs regarding those who they think speak the language they are describing. Being the capital city as well as the only metropolis-like centre in the country, Helsinki is subject to city vs countryside bias. Beyond the ‘busy’ Southern area of Finland, the capital is seen as hectic and pretentious. These attitudes are reflected in evaluations of ways of speaking in Helsinki, summarised by Mielikäinen and Palander (2014: 79–106). In these evaluations, slangi often stands for any kind of language spoken in the capital area. It is described as leuhka, snobistinen, teennäinen, tyly, hyökkäävä (pretentious, snobby, artificial, abrupt, aggressive), and slang more specifically as ruma, ärsyttävä, älytön (ugly, irritating, senseless). The few positive evaluations have to do with slang or spoken Helsinki Finnish being fashionable, original or rich. Not surprisingly, people born and raised in Helsinki have a more nuanced picture of slang and ways of speaking in the capital area. Helsinki-born people are sensitive to the gap between old Helsinki slang and newer slang. Vaattovaara and Soininen-Stojanov (2006) explored the attitudes of people in the capital area towards their own spoken language. They found that most of the respondents evaluate their own language in relation to Helsinki slang, although they do not consider themselves to be speaking slang. This shows that slang is an index of Helsinki’s nature as a city. We can observe an enregisterment process (Agha 2007; Lehtonen 2016b) of slang, from a repressed street language spoken by workingclass youth to a Kulturgut. To name but a few examples of this enregisterment: Anna E. Karvonen, an academic folk-musician, has dug into archives and recorded two albums of songs in old Helsinki slang. The church and the city organise popular events in which slang plays a central role. Just recently, Slangikuoro, a choir dedicated to slang songs, sang at the opening of the city’s new gem, the main library, Oodi. This crystallises the change in the indexicality of slang: the once despised language of the lower classes now represents the local identity in the hard core of written Finnish civilisation. The Stadin slangi ry association (est. 1995, http://stadinslangi.fi/ wordpress/) brings together slang enthusiasts. It aims “to cherish, gather, and explore the Helsinki spoken language  – Helsinki slang  – as well as to cherish and to gather the cultural heritage and folklore of Helsinki”. The association has a small office in the traditional working-class district and

136  Heini Lehtonen and Heikki Paunonen organises cultural events. The magazine of the association, Tsilari, publishes six issues annually. The topics often deal with cultural events in Helsinki or describe nostalgic old Helsinki in which slang was born. In the following, four randomly sampled issues of Tsilari are explored to shed light on the social indexicality of old slang today. In four issues of Tsilari (2/2012; 2/2015; 2/2016; 2/2018), roughly 69 per cent of articles were written in slang. This observation is based on a database (https://sanat.csc.fi/wiki/Tsilari)8 that lists the articles in each issue as well as the language in which the articles are written. Neither captions nor commercial ads are included in the percentages presented here. Even a basic qualitative analysis (see Examples 4.1 and 4.2) shows that defining an article as either slang or Finnish is not simple. First of all, the articles contain linguistic features of both standard Finnish and Helsinki slang, as well as features of local spoken Finnish (cf. Lehtonen 2011: 303–4; cf. Jarva and Mikkonen 2018: 244), and secondly, the vocabulary of (old) Helsinki slang is often used in an otherwise ‘Finnish’ text to create a more ‘slangish’ impression. Here we come to the core of the issue: Helsinki slang is fundamentally a spoken register, and everyone who writes it has undergone their basic education in Finnish (or possibly in Swedish). Linguistic features typical for a cohesive written article simply do not exist in slang – in Tsilari, they can only be Finnish (cf. Jarva and Mikkonen 2018: 223). The overall ‘slangish’ impression in Tsilari is increased by adding slang words to titles, even if the main text is in Finnish. For instance, toponyms are often in their slang form, even if the article is in standard Finnish. In addition, the index page favours Helsinki slang: on the opening page, most articles are introduced in slang, even if both their titles and text are in Finnish. One of the interesting features of Tsilari is its commercial advertisements written in slang. It contains advertisements for a sports centre chain, an estate agent, a renovation company and very often the local taxi service as well as a local butcher’s shop. In some ads, all of the information is ‘translated’ into slang, whereas others have a catchy slogan in slang. The use of slang in commercial ads by valued local companies is proof of its symbolic market value (Heller 2010). Slang is even suitable for promoting societal values: Tsilari (2/2015) features a campaign advertisement for the parliamentary elections for the social democrat candidate Pentti Arajärvi (who was given the honorary title of Stadin Kundi ‘Stadi chap’ in 2009 and who happens to be the spouse of former Finnish president Tarja Halonen, Stadin Friidu ‘Stadi gal’ 1999). Slang offers a way in which to show respect for local working-class culture. The chief editor’s page reveals the challenges of making a ‘street language’ fit written standards: this genre has no structural slang format, and the text easily becomes a fusion of cohesive means partly typical of

Finland 137 written genres, partly typical of oral narratives. The following examples illustrate this. Example 4.1. Chief editor 2/2014. Spoken Finnish variants and/or slang elements are in bold. Slangi kuuluu nykyaikaiseen äikänopetukseen, kertoo äikänmaikka Inkeri Hellström, jonka skolessa samlattiin alkuvuonna slangia. Kielenvaihtelu on hyväksytty, tärkeintä on että kommunikaatio skulaa. Slangin kautta nykyskole opettaa myös suvaitsevaisuutta ja tasa-arvoa, skrivaa Hellström. Slang is a part of modern Finnish as a mother tongue education, says Inkeri Hellström, a Finnish teacher, who had slang gathered in her school at the beginning of the year. Linguistic variation has been accepted, the most important thing is that communication works. Through slang the modern school also teaches tolerance and equality, writes Hellström. This is the opening of the column text. Although the article is labelled as being written in slang (in the archive), a closer look reveals that it very clearly follows the written standard enriched with some slang words (bold in the example). Some standard (even term-like) concepts index the voice of the teacher or the voice of wider societal discourses: linguistic variation has been accepted, tolerance, equality, modern education. However, there is no clear code-switching that would differentiate the voices: both the narrator’s voice as well as the teacher quotations include slang. What is conspicuously absent in this excerpt is spoken morphology and syntax. Even in the slang words, the case endings and other suffixes are in their standard form (skolessa pro skoles, samlattiin pro samlattii). This is not a consistent principle: later in the column the writer uses spoken forms such as meit vs meitä ‘we’ (in the partitive form), slepannu vs slepannut ‘to throw’ (slang word, an infinite verb form in the preterit), millasii juttui vs millaisia juttuja ‘what kind of stories’ (in the partitive plural). The quotative ‘writes Hellström’ after the quotation is syntactically written language-like, but the main verb is in its slang form skrivaa vs kirjoittaa ‘to write’ (cf. Swedish skriva). This one article by no means represents the writing of all Tsilari’s writers, but it illustrates the friction between spoken and written genres and registers. The chief editors directly comment on the meaning and appearance of slang, and it seems that they are not always in accordance with how it should be, to meet the expectations of the slang enthusiast reading the magazine. In the article cited earlier, the chief editor explicitly asks for feedback, and one of his focus points is language:9 he describes the ‘linguistic style’ of the magazine as aikamoinen blandis ‘quite a mix’, as everybody writes in their own style.

138  Heini Lehtonen and Heikki Paunonen The writer goes on to ask (in slang): Parempi snadi tuimis vai buli laimis?10 ‘Do you prefer it small and strong or big and mild?’ This question hinges on at least three major issues: is post-war school slang accepted as Helsinki slang, or does Stadin slangi only refer to old slang? Who has ownership of (old) Helsinki slang: only those who were born and raised in Helsinki (before the war) – or also those who have moved to Helsinki from other parts of Finland or even from abroad? Do you have to be ‘streetwise’ to be ‘authentic’, or is academic interest in slang accepted? The writer addresses these questions and speaks for inclusiveness (Example 4.2): Example 4.2. Chief editor 2/2014. Spoken Finnish variants and/or slang elements are in bold. Slangi ei ole salakieli vaan  byggaa bryggaa  erikielisten  stadilaisten  välille. Slangi  byggaa bryggaa  myös eri sukupolvien välille.  Gamlat starat on slangijengissä enemmistönä, mut on meit muitki. ... Ku bamlaajat vaihtuu, slangisanat muuttuu ja niiden merkitys sinksaa: “Ai sanotsä sen tollai?” Stadin slangi ry. byggaa bryggaa myös eri toimijoiden kanssa. Tällä hetkellä yhteistyöproggiksia on meneillään mm. usean skolen, Helsingin yliopiston, työväenopiston, kaupunginmuseon ja Kesäyliopiston kanssa. Niistäkin voit pluggaa tästä lehdestä. Slangi yhdistää. Slang is not a secret language; it builds a bridge between speakers of different languages in Stadi. Slang also builds a bridge between generations. The gamla staras [‘old guys’] make up the majority of the slang gang, but there are others. ... When speakers change, the slang words change and their meaning twists: “Oh that’s how you say it?” The Stadin Slangi association builds a bridge between different actors. At the moment, common projects are underway in different schools, the University of Helsinki, the workers’ college, the City Museum and the Summer University. You can read about these in the magazine. Slang unites. The writer states that slang byggaa bryggaa ‘builds a bridge’ between Helsinki inhabitants who speak different languages. By this, the writer may be referring to old slang and its Finnish-Swedish-Russian origins, but also to today’s situation in the suburbs: the newer slang equally absorbs expressions from Somali and Arabic, for instance (Lehtonen 2011, 2016a). The writer addresses people of different ages and generations as well as projects that include academic and cultural institutions. Slangi byggaa bryggaa – ja yhdistää (slang builds a bridge – and unites).11 Different representations of slang and its users are all in their own way a representation of the social indexicalities of Helsinki slang. The repertoires of sakilainen of the 19th century, gamla stara, a rapper from

Finland 139 today’s East Helsinki, as well as a researcher cherishing the traditions, share resources associated with Helsinki slang, but the interpretation of the resources and the social personae associated with them are inseparable from the time and place in which they (have) live(d) (Bakhtin 1981 chronotope; Agha 2007; cf. Blommaert 2015). Old Helsinki slang has become a presentable way of honouring one’s affiliation to local Helsinki culture. Features that index Helsinki slang are used by local rappers. And on the streets, old slang can be heard in academia, concerts, libraries and churches. Old slang and the heritage of its ‘strange’ phonology and phonotactics carry the function of a local dialect in Helsinki.

Notes 1 Heikki Paunonen is the main author of Sections  1.1, 1.2, 2 and 3; Heini Lehtonen is the main author of Section 4. Heini Lehtonen is also responsible for the overall compilation of the chapter. 2 In the first version, the copula (oli) and the word ‘but’ (mutta) are Finnish; in the latter they are Swedish (va, men). In addition, in the Swedish matrix version, the words friidu ‘girl’ and kundi ‘boy’ are in the definite form (friidun, kunden). 3 Since at least the 1940s and ’50s, Finnish and Swedish slang in Helsinki started to diverge. Finnish slang increasingly obtained words from Finnish (Paunonen 2000, 2006a, 2006c), whereas Swedish slang borrowed words from both Swedish and, from the latter part of the 20th century onwards, Finnish slang (Forsskåhl 2005, 2013, 2015). 4 The dialectal weak grade variants of t include r, l, 0: pata ‘cauldron’: genitive singular paran, palan, paan. 5 Numerous expressions demonstrate the affective nature of the phoneme /f/, e.g. on liffaa ku leffassa on klogu ‘it’s nice that there is a clock at the cinema’. 6  https://urbaanisanakirja.com/word/tsadi/ 7 They did, however, appear later in both written and spoken standard Finnish and in some dialects, influenced by Finnish Swedish dialects. 8  By Kielipankki. 9 Revealingly, the sentence Entä Tsilarin slangi tai yleensä kieliasu? ‘How about the slang in Tsilari or the language in general?’ that turns the focus towards language is strikingly standard-like between some clearly slangish sentences. 10  A saying referring to mixing an alcoholic drink. 11 In his chief editor’s column (3/2016), Kari Varvikko deals with the same issues.

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Commentaries

8 Baby steps in decolonising linguistics Urban language research Miriam Meyerhoff

The preceding chapters are variously concerned with ‘youth languages’, ‘urban languages’, ‘contact languages’ or even what we might be tempted to call ‘pidgins’ or ‘creoles’. But what is riding on naming them one thing or the other? Labelling (and by extension, relabelling) language varieties or language practices and the processes underlying them matter because how we label is a statement about our professional stance towards the users of a language and to the languages that are the objects of our enquiry. Labelling is regularly challenged and negotiated because it is also about who holds social power in the academy. Following Wiese (2015), who labels Kiezdeutsch an urban language with its origins in the speech of adolescents in multiethnic neighbourhoods (cf. Cheshire et al. 2011), the chapters in this section of the book prefer to talk about urban languages, though many also make connections between the varieties under investigation and the labels youth languages, multiethnolects or pidgins and creoles. This labelling seems a sensible sociolinguistic step that centres the contexts in which these varieties are used and the varied linguistic and sociopolitical experiences of the speakers. This labelling and the content of these chapters represent part of the gradual progress in the decolonising of contact linguistics. At the time of writing (late 2020), many people are grappling with the systematic biases entrenched in their communities, in society’s institutions, in their ways of thinking and in the shape of our academic disciplines. So a book about urban languages is both timely and forward-looking, for at least two reasons: it is timely because it raises issues about labelling and inclusion, and it raises questions about whose voices are being privileged. In these seven chapters, the practices of typically marginalised speakers and the knowledge encoded in typically marginalised languages holds centre-stage. The research, if not conducted by native speakers, has been conducted by researchers with deep, qualitative commitments in and to the communities of speakers described. And the focus is neither only on structure (privileging one branch of linguistics), nor only on practice and attitudes (privileging a different set of linguistic beliefs), but on both within each chapter. DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-11

146  Miriam Meyerhoff Recognising marginalised voices and enabling marginalised people to participate in the conversation that defines where linguistics will go next is only part of whatever the complex process is that we envision by ‘decolonisation’. I say marginalised ‘voices’, but it is worth reminding ourselves that deaf signers are among the most marginalised linguistic communities, and that there is considerable creativity and vitality in signed languages. Some of this vitality happens at the level of individuals (Iseli 2018) and some at the level of the group (Zeshan and Palfreyman 2017; Palfreyman 2020), it depends on the relative isolation of signers or their opportunities for mobility – whether spatial, social or symbolic. Lim (2021) discusses mobility and spoken languages, but her observations apply across modalities in ways that researchers such as Palfreyman explore in their research. We know that decolonising linguistics is going to look very different depending on where the process is taking place and depending on the sub-discipline involved (a point already made by Makoni et al. 2003). It certainly will not be a one size fits all exercise, which is why a collection of chapters such as this constitutes some of the baby steps that we will need to take towards a principled and reasoned decolonisation of different linguistic traditions. In the following pages, I  will outline several different avenues along which a decolonising agenda might proceed, all of which are suggested to me by the preceding seven chapters in this section. These have an impact on several branches of linguistics that deal with urban or high contact languages (sociolinguistics, linguistic typology, formal linguistics, historical linguistics). But first, I will expand a little on one of the main practical implications that a focus on giving space to new voices might entail. One of the most significant forms of exclusion in the academy lies in our citation practices, since citation metrics have (for better or worse) been elevated to a shorthand for merit in appointment shortlisting, promotion evaluations and performance reviews. Citation inclusions (and exclusions) serve to construct academic in-groups and enhance individuals’ value within the academic marketplace. This culture receives relatively little scrutiny, perhaps because so many people in the profession have so much capital invested in the status quo. But for anyone reading and listening to the discussion about the outlook for a decolonised linguistics, it is not necessarily encouraging to see signs that new forms of parochialism might be replacing old biases. A recent paper on the need to increase diversity in linguistics (which I won’t cite because I am not interested in pointing the finger at particular authors, I  am more concerned with the general point) has a long list of references, 16% of which are to the authors themselves, and half of those are to one author alone. No other single author comes close. Naturally, the authors would like to share their work widely, but they cannot be unaware of the personal brand enhancement their referencing engages in. Similarly, the reflexive

Baby steps in decolonising linguistics 147 citation of a small number of articles sometimes appears to serve more as a shorthand for signalling aspirations for in-group membership than it does as a means to critically and informatively situate the author’s claims. This is not to say that there are not some works which are foundational (the syntactic insights of Ross 1967 were profound, which is why it is so often cited more than 50 years later). It is also not to say that shorthand measures for indexing one’s intellectual viewpoint are necessarily bad from the reader’s perspective. I also acknowledge that lesser-known writers or works might need to be repeatedly cited to get noticed. But when these practices all combine and when they have acquired the kind of value they do have for individuals, they can and should be subjected to scrutiny, particularly by academics who are trying to open the academy to new voices and new perspectives. One of the extremely important contributions of a volume such as this is that it represents a refreshing destabilisation of existing hierarchies of knowledge and a recognition of the creativity of linguistic thought happening outside of the United States, in particular. My own academic parochialism was highlighted by the very large amount of research and documentation referenced in these chapters that is being undertaken in languages I do not (or cannot) read, and by linguists whose names were hitherto unfamiliar to me. This all leads me to conclude that the process of decolonising will not (or it better not) entail simply replacing one canon with another. We’re not trying to replace one narrow gene pool of ideas with a new narrow gene pool (something that is always a hazard when people are trying to engage in transformation). To put it another way, if we stand on the shoulders of giants, they are different giants depending on what part of the world we are concerned with and what our (socio)linguistic problems are. In Vanuatu (SW Pacific), it’s well-recognised that the process of decolonising knowledge and power structures is (a) ongoing and (b) enacted locally in disparate ways.1 Since Independence in 1980, Vanuatu’s polity has debated how best to forge social systems and official institutions that reflect both traditional knowledge and knowledge systems inherited during the colonial period (Nolan and Tevi 2012). The most palpable instance of this has occurred in the legal domain, where (at the risk of gross simplification) traditional or customary (kastom) practices operate alongside European-inflected judicial procedures. Both fulfil the function of ‘law’: they provide rules that govern social interaction within the context of a society, but the relationship between the two is the subject of social and legal reflection and is open to addition and change (Forsyth 2009). In other domains, such as education, where the affordances of language choice are different than they are in the law, the process of decolonisation remains a topic of even more active debate. Communities I have been involved with in Sanma Province are acutely divided over the appropriateness of the use of colonial languages in education because of their

148  Miriam Meyerhoff usefulness as a lingua franca or as a passport to social mobility, and the appropriateness of a local vernacular language which remains a powerful expression of place, identity and tradition. The relationship between colonial languages and local languages is perceived differently according to the historical particularities of a community, e.g. their sociolinguistic history, the aspirations of individuals, the (potentially transitory) allegiances across communities and so forth. Kastom (traditional) knowledge is itself a source of debate. It is, to a greater or lesser extent, iconicised by the many indigenous languages of Vanuatu, and it is embodied in the practices that shape how individuals interact with and interpret the environment and the actions of others in the community. The stability versus the mutability of traditional Vanuatu languages (often showing the impact of contact with other languages, Duhamel 2020) remains the source of debate and exchange, as is true of other social signifiers of group identity (Lindstrom 1982).

1 Corruption and opposition Perhaps the urban mixed languages (used primarily, but not exclusively, by young people) showcased in these seven chapters are themselves reflective of decolonising impulses. It’s significant that in most cases, these urban languages are seen as corruptions of some other language – whether colonial or vernacular. Through careful coverage of language attitudes as well the norms of structure and use, the chapters here show that ‘corruption’ is a productive dimension of the social meaning and structure of these urban languages. Corruption encompasses not only the feeling that there are sketchy, informal, street-wise or sub-altern connotations to these languages in many (or all) of the urban communities described, it also encompasses the specific kinds of linguistic processes that are documented in these languages. Some processes, such as clipping, seem to be documented in all these varieties,2 and clipping is notably at odds with the hyperarticulation most communities associate with clarity, education, standardness and achievement in the linguistic marketplace. It remains to be seen whether these resonances are as apparent to users as they may be to linguists. I will return shortly to syllable inversion, a linguistic process which, like clipping, can be understood as also being a kind of corruption, and which lends itself to even more wide-reaching sociolinguistic analysis.

2  The systematic study of variation A notable aspect of the linguistic descriptions provided in this book is that – far from shying away from language variation – they treat it as a fact. I began with some comments suggesting that decolonising contact linguistics involves being open to different kinds of data from a wider

Baby steps in decolonising linguistics 149 range of languages (different ‘voices’) and also to being open to the proposition that decolonising linguistics will take a different form depending on the social and historical contingencies of different speech communities. The field of contact linguistics has an ambivalent relationship with variation, so (to my mind) incorporating variation in these language descriptions represents an important decolonising step. The literature on contact linguistics generally acknowledges the central role that variation must have played in the formation and development of various contact languages. Roberts’ (1999) careful work on Pidgin in Hawai‘i showed some time ago how variation could be incorporated systematically into the analysis of urban contact languages and how quantitative methods could extract valuable data from sometimes patchy historical records.3 Cheshire et al.’s (2011) very detailed analysis of multiple variables in urban London English reinforces the case for systematic study of variation in new and emerging varieties. Work such as Roberts’ and Cheshire and her confederates’ of course requires basic descriptive work which can outline some of the linguistic features that vary – a particular problem with undescribed languages and dialects that constitute some of the new playing fields for linguists interested in variation and change (Meyerhoff 2017). These chapters provide us with information about the social and structural variability of urban varieties, alongside more categorical statements about their structure and use; in doing so they offer a more inclusive view of what is and what is not part of the linguistic record. As each chapter shows, speakers use multiple strategies to express the same semantic features or they have multiple ways of pronouncing the same (types of) words. Variation (especially socially constrained variation) remains, for many linguists, problematic. For some formal linguists it is problematic because it is unclear whether it is part of the human language faculty and if it is, it is unclear how it is best understood. Is variation an inherent property of a grammar? Does it reflect competition between grammars? Is it the gradual replacement of forms with no reference to underlying structure? Formal, generative models of grammar and functional, exemplar-based models of grammar share the problem of modelling linguistic knowledge as a cognitive process. The fact that generative linguistics starts from an assumption that exposure to a language variety triggers different settings in a biologically endowed universal grammar, while exemplar theory assumes a mental blank slate that is incrementally added to based on a speaker’s exposure to stimuli seems to me a relatively minor point of difference. Both approaches ultimately privilege the mind rather than the speech community. These seven chapters, by contrast, seem to me to offer a radical non-Chomskyan approach because they allow a place for social agency, alongside linguistic and other (possibly distinct) cognitive

150  Miriam Meyerhoff processes. This complicates the business of drawing generalisations that can be used as the basis for abstract models. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attempt some level of generalisation or abstraction. One of the valuable things about these chapters is the detail provided about structural properties of these languages, as well as attitudes, domains of use, and change over space and time. What conclusions should we draw from this (collectively) very rich and heterogeneous data? We might be tempted to throw our hands up in dismay and, looking across all the descriptions, conclude that the processes that appear to be possible in high contact varieties are so disparate that ‘anything goes’ (see Meakins et al.’s 2019 critique of this). Or we might be tempted to adopt the post-structuralist phraseology of ‘multilingual repertoires’ which typifies ‘translanguaging’ enthusiasts. I do not believe that either such defeatist stances are necessary. The seven contributions to this half of the book engage in unabashedly linguistic and structural terms with the language varieties they describe. Generally, it was a relief for me not to have to sift through the linguistically disengaged generalisations of ‘(trans)languaging’ and ‘metrolingualism’. I understand the sometimes emancipatory power of such terminology for educators, but I am sceptical of its ability to effect the kinds of emancipatory ends that it claims for itself. The goals of highlighting a speaker’s fluid ability to go beyond the isolable grammars of the different languages in their repertoires are not, in my opinion, excluded in research on code-switching. Nor, indeed, is the idea that, for people familiar with more than one language or dialect, their linguistic choices are as much a social, identificational and aspirational fact as a linguistic fact.4 It may, indeed, be the case that in some rare instances, language contact data are best described in terms of selection from a repertoire of linguistic features and that what speakers are doing requires no recourse to the labels of languages or dialects. Safar’s (2020) work on the emergence of signed languages in Mexico may lay claim to this, but (as with Iseli’s 2018 work on Vanuatu home signing) the linguistic and social situation with emergent home sign systems is radically reduced in terms of the quality and quantity of systematic linguistic input that the signers are receiving. It cannot and does not compare with the multilingual enrichment experienced by the children in Honolulu who Roberts (1999) showed were so instrumental in the creation of modern Pidgin or that the speakers in any of the communities documented here are exposed to. As linguists, saying anything goes should be a last resort strategy, because down that road lies ill-conceived lay generalisations that have long held that language mixing or contact language varieties mark language deficiencies or that contact varieties ‘have no grammar’. Such were the misconceptions about African American Vernacular English that Labov (1969) addressed and conclusively laid to rest for most linguists and many educators. However, as we have seen in the decades

Baby steps in decolonising linguistics 151 since Labov (1969), notwithstanding even more detailed and systematic studies of African American English by native speaker linguists and their collaborators (Green 2002; Charity Hudley 2007, and contributors in Mufwene et al. 1998), it is very difficult to lay to rest such lay misconceptions about pidgins, creoles and other mixed or contact languages. Such misconceptions will never be addressed, I  would argue, by relabelling the outcomes of language contact as ‘translanguaging’ instead of codemixing and describing them as speakers choosing from a repertoire of features (Garcia and Wei 2014). Aside from the fact that most people in the speech community are not fooled by terminological sleight of hand (if it looks and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck), this kind of rhetoric raises precisely the kinds of questions which have the potential to undermine the emancipatory impulses underlying translanguaging and metrolingualism. If speakers are ranging across a repertoire of features, then what are these features? Are they simply lexical? But surely we would not want to imply even accidentally that speakers combining language resources like this are not capable of inferring structural rules for the languages they are exposed to? This would be tantamount to saying that there is no grammar to these languages. But if the repertoire includes morphological and syntactic features, what underlies their combinatorial power? We find ourselves back to debates over whether the generative power of language boils down to competition between (or selection from) different grammars, an accretion of sufficient tokens to allow analogical reasoning to produce new ones, or probabilistic rules. My concern is that, when linguists try to shift the wider community’s perceptions of contact varieties and code-switching by expunging widely recognised labels that have long been the subject of meta-linguistic commentary in the community, they are engaged in a dangerous gambit. The rhetoric of ‘anything goes’ and ‘selection from a repertoire of features’ can easily feed into precisely the sort of negative attitudes about these languages and the users of these languages that are already widespread among non-linguists (and that are well documented in these chapters). In short, the rhetoric, while well-meaning, can be weaponised against precisely the linguistic practices – let’s say it, the knowledge about linguistic systems – that they wish to valorise.

3  Possible generalisations Perhaps a more present danger is that an analysis of contact languages and mixed languages that ignores structure also precludes asking questions about some of the most intriguing aspects of high contact varieties such as the ones that are showcased in this book. It is true, a lot of different processes describe the different varieties under investigation here, but there are some structural features and perceptual tropes that recur.

152  Miriam Meyerhoff One of the more striking ones for me is the widespread use of verlan, or syllable inversion, in many of the varieties discussed here. Syllable inversion is not such a typologically common feature of natural languages that we can ignore areal bundles of languages that engage in syllable inversion, sometimes quite productively. If it were only found in Camfranglais (Cameroon), we might wonder whether it is linked to its use in vernacular metropolitan French, but tellingly, it also occurs in Yanké (DR Congo) and Sheng (Kenya). It does not appear that syllable inversion is a calque of some productive Bantu substrate morphological process. This invites a more sociolinguistic view of the process, one that considers it as an areal feature, perhaps reflecting similar cultural attitudes that speakers hold about the embodiment of street-wise savviness. We recall Zhang’s (2005) analysis of variation in Beijing Mandarin where she observed that two sources of rhotacisation are commonly described as sounding “oily”, and these variants occur most frequently together in the speech of a specific persona: the Beijing “smooth operator”. That is, linguistic perception and production embody and iconicise a persona. Like Zhang’s examples, the use of verlan also lends itself to an analysis that draws together speaker stances, production, perception and social stereotyping. Consider what syllable inversion requires for it to be used productively: it requires a degree of speaker self-monitoring and an overarching control over not only the content, but also the form of the utterance. It seems an excellent candidate for actualising the street-wise, in control, savvy personas associated with the use of these urban languages. Linguistically, verlan requires the speaker to produce forms that can only be arrived at through control over the internal structure of words, because it requires the decomposition and recomposition of the form of the word. Inverted forms may, of course, through repeated use become lexicalised (and are then, as we know, available again to syllable inversion!), just as any sociolinguistic variable can move from the status of a marker to a stereotype. So the focus of any further investigation of this kind of third wave (Eckert 2018) hypothesis will depend on the careful teasing apart of specific forms, productive processes and different groups of speakers – factors that the chapters here introduce and outline for us.

4  Extensions of the ‘family tree’ One of the more provocative opportunities that surveys such as the ones included in this book open up for us is the idea that we might revisit some of the cornerstones of linguistic practice. Might it be possible, for instance, based on observing the recurrence of verlan, clipping (and frequent occurrence of some other structural features), to posit ‘families’ of high contact varieties? There are increasingly sophisticated techniques being developed to quantify feature co-occurrence and feature clustering (e.g. Meakins et al. 2019; Greenhill et al. 2020) and we

Baby steps in decolonising linguistics 153 might soon be able to group languages according to shared clusters of structures. For contact languages, this is especially appealing because we know that trying to coerce them into language families with their input languages can be problematic. Sometimes the difficulties are resolved by creative dodges like dotted lines or (with the incursion of Bayesian modelling) blurring, which reflects the extent of uncertainty about a branching node. An interesting possibility that occurs to the reader of these chapters is that we might be able to postulate families that are based not solely on shared retentions and innovations, but are instead based on shared aesthetic preferences and/or similar clusters of features or processes. As these chapters make clear, there is considerable innovation when grammars collide in an urban ecology. This creativity does not simply arise when more than two languages are in contact, as the data from Old Helsinki Slang show; contact between (largely only) two languages can also give rise to a language that is more than a sum of its parts (see also Meakins et al. 2019, and Salmons’ discussion of complexity and creativity in this volume). A number of the chapters draw our attention to the fact that urban varieties jump from major urban centre to major urban centre, a principle known in other studies of the diffusion of innovation as the ‘gravity effect’ (see Callary 1975; Trudgill 1974 for its potential in modelling language change) – something that is also difficult to integrate in a canonical tree. Exploring areal and typological clusters of features that linguists may not have perceived before will not replace the family trees constructed on the basis of cognacy. But it could extend typologies of relatedness to include the kind of horizontal transfer associated with language contact that we know has always been a part of language change. Some of the features in these clusters might have their roots in the donor languages that have come into contact, but that would be one of several possible answers (features might cluster because of similar sociohistorical facts, shared attitudes towards regional multilingualism, similar power relations between local and supra-local languages etc.), and these possibilities could be explored empirically.

5 The ecologies of languages and the ecology of contact linguistics The renewed interest in the notion of language ecologies (Haugen 1972; Lim and Ansaldo 2015; Mufwene 2001; Vandenbussche et  al. 2013) speaks to the growing realisation among linguists that some properties of language are best understood in terms of the social and historical matrix in which the language emerged and is used. The chapters here fall squarely within this tradition: they recognise that an introduction to any one of these varieties is incomplete without structural information,

154  Miriam Meyerhoff demographic information, historical information and social psychological information (Haugen 1972). A decolonising of contact linguistics involves not only opening the academy to more voices and more world views, but also not losing the precious gains we have made in the empirical and systematic study of the history and structure of language. We know a lot about the dynamic and mutually constitutive relationship between language and social groups, how it relates to social power and is implicated in giving form to speakers’ social aspirations. Unlike the post-modernist turn in sociolinguistics, which rejected the positivist fundamentals of verifiable and translatable truth, decolonising the study of language contact stands at the cusp of a particularly productive moment in intellectual history. If an openness to new ontologies does not preclude respect for and continued engagement with existing ones, decolonising contact linguistics has the potential to be more than the sum of its parts – rather like the languages it documents and studies. For example, there is an increasing number of younger and native speaker scholars working in the field of language contact who have much less invested in the old debates in creolistics, e.g. whether there is a structurally defined natural class of ‘creoles’. They are less concerned with defining what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ on structural grounds, because many of them see questions about how contact languages work, historically, linguistically and socially, as being fundamentally intertwined. Foregrounding native speakers of contact languages also fosters new ways of collecting and presenting data. The traditional speech event of storian has been used to highlight Ni-Vanuatu people’s changing attitudes to kastom in Vanuatu (Nolan and Tevi 2012), and Baker (2021) ties the experience of living in Hawai‘i with the use of Pidgin in theatre. Soong and Tonouchi (2020) may be the first academic paper related in the format of the (Hawai‘i) Pidgin speech event of talk story, and while the output looks very different to a conventional academic paper, the content covers history, social and identity politics, the structure of Pidgin and attitudes towards it in the words of someone who has devoted their life to its recognition and validation. So what would a decolonised contact linguistics look like? I start from these observations: • Decolonising will not be about replacing one canon with another – if we truly believe that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, then articles and books cited thousands of times might be considered as much a failure of imagination in our field, as the measure of individual success. • A corollary of this is that linguists as a community will reject citation metrics as indicators of esteem or success. • We will recognise the privilege afforded by fluency in the (current) academic lingua franca.5

Baby steps in decolonising linguistics 155 •

All human experience will be integral to the study of language. •

•

A corollary of this is that spoken languages will not be afforded any particular privilege over signed languages.

Variation will be seen as the natural state of language. • A corollary of this is that any study of standardised, abstracted or invariant varieties will be specifically justified.

• We will view critically theoreticians who make their contributions based on the primary data collected by others.

6  Concluding remarks This short response to the preceding seven chapters in this section of the book has tried to highlight key questions that a focus on urban languages offers us. These questions hark back to previous work in the canon on language contact and look forward to new ways of conceptualising our study of such languages and how we might relate to their speakers. I have not said anything about the depth of fieldwork represented by the work on the languages that are still being used and are still evolving. It is clear that we can’t expect this level of linguistic or social analysis without considerable time and commitment to fieldwork and to solid partnerships there. The topics I have highlighted touch on matters on theoretical linguistic importance and social and political importance. This diversity of content speaks to the timeliness of this collection.

Notes 1 I am not Ni-Vanuatu. My association with Vanuatu is based on more than 25 years off and on of linguistic fieldwork. 2 Urban Wolof may be the exception, but given that Mc Laughlin’s chapter attempts both a synchronic and diachronic survey of Urban Wolof, this may be a chance omission in the data provided. 3 Huber (2021) shows how even valuable qualitative information about the development of contact languages is evident in good historical corpora. 4 As I observed, labelling and relabelling is about wanting your feet under the table and the power to decide who else is there. This is no doubt true of my own critique of post-structuralist terminology as it is of the iconoclasm of post-structuralists. Pennycook (2016) provides a sound and non-polemic evaluation of which domains post-structuralist theory plays a useful role in and where its limits lie. 5 I have not elaborated on this here, but it should be evident why I believe this.

References Baker, Tammy Haili‘ōpua (2021). The rise of Pidgin theatre in Hawai‘i. In: The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Umberto Ansaldo and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.), 232–49. London: Routledge.

156  Miriam Meyerhoff Callary, Robert E. (1975). Phonological change and the development of an urban dialect in Illinois. Language in Society 4: 155–70. DOI: 10.1017/ s0047404500004620. Charity Hudley, Anne (2007). Regional differences in low SES African-American children’s speech in the school setting. Language Variation and Change 19: 281–93. DOI: 10.1017/s0954394507000129. Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox and Eivind Torgersen (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15: 151–96. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00478.x. Duhamel, Marie-France (2020). Borrowing from Bislama into Raga, Vanuatu. Asia-Pacific Language Variation 6: 160–95. DOI: 10.1075/aplv.19015.duh. Eckert, Penelope (2018). Meaning and Linguistic Variation: The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/ s0047404520000354. Forsyth, Miranda (2009). A Bird That Flies with Two Wings: Kastom and State Justice Systems in Vanuatu. Canberra: The Australian National University Press. DOI: 10.26530/oapen_458830. Garcia, Ofelia and Li Wei (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Green, Lisa (2002). African American English: A linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/cbo9780511800306. Greenhill, Simon J., Paul Heggarty and Russell D. Gray (2020). Bayesian phylolinguistics. In: The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II. Richard D. Janda, Brian D. Joseph and Barbara S. Vance (eds.), 226–53. NJ: WileyBlackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781118732168.ch11. Haugen, Einar (1972). The Ecology of Language: Essays by Einar Haugen (Selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Huber, Magnus (2021). Diachronic studies of pidgins and creoles: Exploring pidgins and creoles over time. In: The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Umberto Ansaldo and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.), 418–33. London: Routledge. Iseli, Jaqueline (2018). Deaf Ni-Vanuatu and Their Signs: A Sociolinguistic Study. Unpublished master’s thesis, Victoria University of Wellington. Labov, William (1969). Contraction, deletion, and inherent variability of the English copula. Language 45: 715–62. DOI: 10.2307/412333. Lim, Lisa (2021). Im/Mobilities. In: The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Umberto Ansaldo and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.), 325–47. London: Routledge. Lim, Lisa and Umberto Ansaldo (2015). Languages in Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139019743. Lindstrom, Lamont (1982). Leftamap kastom: The political history of tradition on Tanna, Vanuatu. Mankind 13: 316–29. DOI: 10.1111/j.1835-9310.1982.tb00997.x. Makoni, Sinfree, Geneva Smitherman, Arnetha F. Ball and Arthur K. Spears (eds.) (2003). Black Linguistics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa and the Americas. London: Routledge. Meakins, Felicity, Xia Hua, Cassandra Algy and Lindell Bromham (2019). The birth of a new languages does not favour simplification. Language 95(2): 294– 332. DOI: 10.1353/lan.2019.0032.

Baby steps in decolonising linguistics 157 Meyerhoff, Miriam (2017). Writing a linguistic symphony: Analysing variation while doing language documentation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 62: 525–49. DOI: 10.1017/cnj.2017.28. Mufwene, Salikoko S. (2001). The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/s0047404503234059. Mufwene, Salikoko S., John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey and John Baugh (1998). African-American English. London: Routledge. Nolan, Anna and Dickinson Tevi (2012). Kastom Governance Is for Everyone: Activities and Impacts of the Vanuatu Kastom Governance Partnership 2005– 2012. St Lucia: University of Queensland School of Political Science and International Studies and the Malvatumauri, Vanuatu. Palfreyman, Nick (2020). Social meanings of linguistic variation in BISINDO (Indonesian Sign Language). Asia-Pacific Language Variation 6(1): 91–121. DOI: 10.1075/aplv.00008.pal. Pennycook, Alastair (2016). Mobile times, mobile terms: The trans-super-polymetro movement. In: Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates. Nikolas Coupland (ed.), 201–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/ CBO9781107449787.010. Roberts, Sarah J. (1999). The TMA system of Hawaiian Creole and diffusion. In: Creole Genesis, Attitudes, and Discourse: Studies Celebrating Charlene J. Sato. John R. Rickford and Suzanne Romaine (eds.), 45–70. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/cll.20.08rob. Ross, John R. (1967). Constraints on Variables in Syntax. Unpublished PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Safar, Josefina (2020). A Comparative Study of Yucatec Maya Sign Languages. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Stockholm. Soong, Micheline M. and Lee A. Tonouchi (2020). Creoles in literature: Talking story with Lee A. Tonouchi, ‘Da Pidgin Guerilla’, on Pidgin in the local literatures of Hawai‘i. In: The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Umberto Ansaldo and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.), 250–66. London: Routledge. Trudgill, Peter (1974). Linguistic change and diffusion: Description and explanation in sociolinguistic dialect geography. Language in Society 3: 215–46. DOI: 10.1017/s0047404500004358. Vandenbussche, Wim, Ernst Håkon Jahr and Peter Trudgill (eds.) (2013). Language Ecology of the 21st Century: Linguistic Conflicts and Social Environments. Oslo: Novus Press. Wiese, Heike (2015). “This migrants’ babble is not a German dialect!”: The interaction of standard language ideology and ‘us’/‘them’ dichotomies in the public discourse on a multiethnolect. Language in Society 44: 341–68. DOI: 10.1017/s0047404515000226. Zeshan, Ulrike and Nick Palfreyman (2017). Sign language typology. In: The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon (eds.), 178–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781316135716.007. Zhang, Qing (2005). A Chinese yuppie in Beijing: Phonological variation and the construction of a new professional identity. Language in Society 34: 431–66. DOI: 10.1017/s0047404505050153.

9 Variation, complexity and the richness of urban contact dialects1 Joseph Salmons

1 Introduction The first seven chapters in this section provide a rich and remarkably coherent picture of the development of and change in urban contact dialects in “multilingually oriented societies”. I come to this as someone who has worked on contact and change in heavily monolingually oriented societies and have learned much from these contributions, as I lay out next. This commentary focuses on an issue where the chapters, taken as a whole, advance our understanding of a central point about language contact and language change: a long tradition associates language contact with simplification in various senses, something Trudgill (2011: 26) calls “securely established in the literature”. The studies in this section all demonstrate remarkable complexity emerging from contact, including both structural and social aspects. Trudgill’s 2011 book, in fact, is dedicated to sorting out the ‘social determinants’ that correlate with (to use a cautious formulation) simplification or complexification under contact. In that view, increased complexity is argued to correlate with “long-term co-territorial contact situations involving child bilingualism” (2011: 34). These chapters support and can help us sharpen and refine his conclusions while also underscoring the utter centrality of variation to language change, the core point of Weinreich et al. (1968) but one still not always fully integrated into work on language change. As part of his ongoing efforts to reorient our understanding of creole languages away from stories about (just) simplification, DeGraff (2009: 959) makes a plea for thinking far more holistically: [C]reolists have focused solely on isolated factors in the diachrony of Creole languages – either ‘substrate influence’ or ‘superstrate inheritance’ or ‘innovations’ or ‘simplification’ and so on  – while paying too little attention to the sociohistorical details of said diachrony and to the entire lexica and grammars of Creole languages, including all their innovative aspects and all their potential correspondences with both the substrate and the superstrate languages. DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-12

Variation, complexity and richness 159 This perspective, influential in creole studies, has had less impact in the broader field of language contact to date. I’ll adopt it here: change in creole genesis and under contact more generally reflects the same processes and resources as elsewhere, including our input as learners and users, our cognitive capacity for language and so on. Learners and speakers use all the resources they have access to, both structurally and socially. One difference across communities in general is the degree and type of variation available to learners and users. These urban contact dialects arise from deep pools of variation, pools which offer learners and users more resources to draw on than more socially and structurally homogeneous communities do. This commentary seeks the fuller structural and social picture, pointing to increased complexity on both sides and underscoring how both have to be considered together. Ultimately, that full picture needs to be integrated with our understanding of simplifications. At the same time, we have to consider changes that do not have a clear impact on simplicity or complexity, a potential third prong of such discussions. But what do we actually mean when we talk about simplification and complexification in language change? The question has invited quips like Trudgill’s (2011: 20) “Simplification is, paradoxically, a complex notion” and DeGraff’s (2001: 273) that “Complexity is no simple matter”, but beyond that there’s less agreement. Trudgill’s definition (2011: 21–6) identifies three characteristics: (1) regularisation of irregularities, (2) increasing transparency and (3) reduction of redundancy. The chapters in this section of the book offer a number of good examples of complexification by those measures. To the first, while Finnish vowel harmony has limited exceptions, Lehtonen and Paunonen show that Old Helsinki slang introduces new violations, adding 19 otherwise illicit combinations of vowels. To the third, Urban Wolof appears to add redundancy by complementiser doubling, using both French que and Wolof ne/ ni together. Other changes, like the introduction of serial verbs in both Ghanaian Pidgin English and Camfranglais, may not fit cleanly into those categories and thus may complicate or challenge the dichotomy. Let us turn now to an example of structural complexity running across most of the chapters and then to social complexity.

2  Increasing structural complexity Structurally, discussions of simplification in contact varieties have most often focused on morphology (especially patterns like morphological case reduction) and syntax (avoidance of null elements), while discussions of borrowing – which can arguably be thought of in terms of increasing complexity – often treat lexicon, pragmatics (such as borrowing of discourse markers) or segmental phonology (like the borrowing of segments).

160  Joseph Salmons These papers broaden that range by giving a set of phonological examples from ‘above the segment’, that is, involving prosody in a broad sense. I’ve already mentioned the violation of vowel harmony in Helsinki slang, but even more remarkable are the phonotactic innovations, where urban contact dialects are licensing more complicated syllable structures in particular. This pattern bears a resemblance to the phenomenon known as ‘hyperforeignism’ (Janda et al. 1994), namely the extensions of sounds felt to be not native or less native into borrowed words and names that actually contain sounds closer to native segments. English speakers clearly perceive /ʒ/ as foreign, for instance, and correctly so given its origins in French. They regularly use it rather than /dʒ/ where the latter would be closer to the source language form, Taj Mahal, Beijing, Tajikistan and so on. In urban contact dialects, a superficially related pattern is attested, as Mc Laughlin remarks on the “Hypercorrection of [s] to [ʃ] or [ʒ] (e.g.: franʃais ‘French’)” in Urban Wolof. A  little less directly in parallel but still connected is Nassenstein’s note that Lingala ya Bayankee borrowings with /ʃ/ can be pronounced with an affricate or cluster /tʃ/ word initially, an “emblematic” part of integration, with coincidental parallels in Helsinki. Hyperforeignisms have, to my knowledge, been talked about mostly on a segmental level and with regard to stress assignment, but the chapters on urban contact dialects give a lot of attention to phonotactic patterns. Lingala ya Bayankee shows the addition of word final consonants, lobá > lobáts (Nassenstein) and Barasa and Mous note names and words in Sheng with added final /ʃ/, e.g. mutush from Swahili mutumba ‘secondhand clothes’. Homorganic nasals (or potentially prenasalisation of initial oral stops) can be added to words of European origin “to lend a Bantoid flavor”, as Kießling puts it regarding Camfranglais. See also Lingala ya Bayankee nkópo ‘alcohol; glass of beer’ instead of kópo, ultimately from Portuguese, a pattern Nassenstein calls “common  .  .  . in other African youth language practices”. While Finnish disallows most consonant clusters, Old Helsinki Slang has introduced clusters to Swedish loanwords: sittaa ‘sit’ > tšittaa or rigi ‘suit’ > brigi, drigi, among other forms given by Lehtonen and Paunonen. Another difference between these patterns and traditional hyperforeignisms, though, brings us back to the social side: few Americans are aware of the native pronunciation of Taj Mahal or Tajikistan. Even Americans who know some French are sometimes surprised to realise that they render coup de grace without the final /s/ and the same holds for those who know some Spanish but pronounce habanero with ñ, [ɲ]. The urban contact dialects discussed in this section, in sharp contrast, involve speakers who command the relevant languages well, so people who are aware of the patterns, whether or not they consciously exploit that knowledge. This invites further cross-linguistic work.

Variation, complexity and richness 161 The urban contact dialects in question are developing or have developed from languages with mostly relatively constrained syllable structures, often CV, but involve contact languages with more complex phonotactics, including onset clusters and coda obstruents. Multilingual speakers in such settings are well positioned to transfer this kind of complexity. Given how common this pattern looks, one might ask whether there’s something appealing about phonotactics as a locus for this kind of creativity. Hyperforeignisms suggest a level of phonotactic awareness and uncommon phonotactics occur with innovative onomatopoeic and affective vocabulary in English, e.g. with tense vowel plus coda [ʃ] in forms like swoosh and sheesh (see Iverson and Salmons 2005).

3  Increasing social complexity On the structural side, the long tradition of assuming simplification under contact is still steaming along today, the work of people like DeGraff and Trudgill notwithstanding. On the social side, in contrast, these chapters build on a better-established tradition of seeing contact as driving new kinds of complexities. One consistent theme of the chapters is the problem of ‘named languages’ or varieties, as recently reviewed by Horner and Bradley (2019). Specifically, the urban contact dialects under discussion are “not easy to force” into “strict boxes”, as Lehtonen and Paunonen describe Old Helsinki slang. Virtually every chapter makes comments along these lines, e.g. Hurst-Harosh, who cites Mesthrie (2021) as seeing Urban Xhosa as being “probably too fluid to warrant codification”. Mc Laughlin notes questions about whether Urban Wolof “constitutes a variety” and that it “has no name”, while the variability of Sheng represents a “challenge for documentation”, according to Barasa and Mous. Camfranglais, Kießling says, is one of a set of varieties that “occupy social spaces outside the normative reach of standardised languages”, part of a “continuum of speaking practices”. What is more striking to me, though, is that most of these settings involve not just one but two or more new varieties, Engsh versus Sheng, two kinds of Ghanaian Pidgin English, and so on. In that same spirit, see Hurst-Harosh’s discussion not just of Tsotsitaal but of plural Tsotsitaals. At the same time, we find extension along other dimensions, namely, the use of these varieties in new and broader domains, where, for example, Sheng appears to be taking hold in the media and becoming a new part of the repertoires of “many Kenyans”. Educated Ghanaian Pidgin English is being used increasingly on social media and in entertainment, which we might expect for new varieties, but it is now also found in news broadcasting; similarly, Camfranglais is increasingly used in media, literature and education. The culmination of such trends would be what

162  Joseph Salmons Hurst-Harosh describes as urban vernaculars “becoming the unmarked norm in urban contexts”. These urban contact dialects have arisen within clearly defined social groups – for instance, every chapter except Kießling’s on Camfranglais expressly mentions associations of the urban contact dialects with young males, and other work on Camfranglais makes those associations. (While young women almost inevitably lead in sound change, different gender patterns clearly exist in other domains.) This broadening of usage, the expansion into new realms for these mostly still new varieties, augments not just the sociolinguistic resources of particular social, regional or ethnic groups in these settings but for entire populations of urban areas and nation-states as wholes.

4 Conclusion Together, these seven chapters show speakers using all the many resources they have access to, in creative ways with rich structural and social consequences. Broad and deep pools of variation make change almost inevitable. Speakers are complexifying their languages structurally, both by Trudgill’s definition but also in ways that have been less discussed in this literature, as the example of phonotactic patterns illustrates. Socially, increasing complexity is something more expected based on previous literature, again in ways that are yet more interesting. In a place like the United States, speakers struggle with a situation often defined by tensions between a hegemonic/dominant language versus minoritised languages. The social dynamics of these settings are quite different, at least, and these chapters suggest valuable ways to think about bilateral transfer between grammars, as Joshua Bousquette points out in correspondence. Many new varieties are gaining traction across populations and finding outlets in expanding sets of domains, giving more speakers more resources across more communicative settings. Salmons and Purnell (2020: 373) argue this about linguistic structures that enter a system via contact: “Once in the system, . . . any given feature can spread, recede and/or be reallocated along any available lines”. These chapters show a striking range of sources, integrations into systems and follow-on changes, in terms of structural and social meaning. In many of the case studies, we’re still seeing the emergence and establishment of patterns, and even in the two oldest varieties, there is robust ongoing change. In Helsinki slang, we find ongoing change with a new, or maybe re-, enregisterment from ‘repressed street language’ to Kulturgut. In Urban Wolof, Mc Laughlin directly documents ongoing borrowing from French, but with less phonological integration over time. These varieties remain, then, dynamic. Stepping back to the broader perspective that DeGraff advocates, we can see this full picture, structurally and socially, as the focus of the

Variation, complexity and richness 163 volume itself points to. It’s not so much that the traditional focus on simplification is wrong as it is that the topic fades away when we look at the full richness and the dynamism of these settings. These multilingual settings reflect the same sorts of change we find worldwide, drawing on particularly rich opportunities for change catalysed by the presence of tremendous variation. The studies at hand show those of us working in more monolingually oriented settings how to look everywhere for the kinds of patterns and dynamics found here.

Note 1 I’m grateful to the editors for the opportunity to comment on these chapters and participate in this project. I thank the following for discussions and comments on this manuscript and topic: Joshua Bousquette, Ellen Hurst, Mirva Johnson, Samantha Litty, Monica Macaulay, David Natvig and Dorothy Pokua Agyepong. The usual disclaimers apply.

References DeGraff, Michel (2001). On the origin of Creoles: A Cartesian critique of NeoDarwinian linguistics. Linguistic Typology 5: 213–311. DeGraff, Michel (2009). Language acquisition in creolization and, thus, language change: Some Cartesian-Uniformitarian boundary conditions.  Language and Linguistics Compass 3: 888–971. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2009.00135.x. Horner, Kristine and Andrew J. Bradley (2019). Language ideology. In: Contact Linguistics. Jeroen Darquennes, Wim Vandenbussche and Joseph Salmons (eds.), 296–307. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110435351-025. Iverson, Gregory K. and Joseph Salmons (2005). Filling the gap: English tense vowel plus final /š/. Journal of English Linguistics 33: 207–21. DOI: 10.1177/0075424205282561. Janda, Richard D., Brian D. Joseph and Neil G. Jacobs (1994). Systematic hyperforeignisms as maximally external evidence for linguistic rules. In: The Reality of Linguistic Rules. Susan Lima, Roberta Corrigan and Gregory K. Iverson (eds.), 67–92. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.26.08jan. Mesthrie, Rajend (2021). Tsotsitaals, urban vernaculars, and contact linguistics. In: Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa. Rajend Mesthrie, Ellen Hurst-Harosh and Heather Brookes (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salmons, Joseph and Thomas Purnell (2020). Language contact and the development of American English. In: The Handbook of Language Contact (2nd edition). Raymond Hickey (ed.), 361–83. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781119485094.ch18. Trudgill, Peter (2011). Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov and Marvin I. Herzog (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In: Directions for Historical Linguistics: A  Symposium. Winfred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.), 97–195. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Part B

Monolingual societal habitus

10 Tanzania Lugha ya Mitaani Uta Reuster-Jahn and Roland Kießling

1 Linguistic and social context Lugha ya Mitaani (henceforth LyM), a Swahili term meaning “language of the town quarters, or streets”, is a cover term for a spectrum of informal urban speaking practices based on Swahili. Originating in the urban centres, LyM is characterised by linguistic manipulation and borrowing. It has no discrete boundaries but must be seen as being on a continuum between style and sociolect. Its main users are commonly perceived as vijana ‘(male) youths’, the category not being defined by age alone, but also by other criteria such as being single and lacking a regular source of income. Even so, young people’s use of LyM differs with regard to degree and frequency, according to sociocultural as well as situational factors, as will be outlined later in this chapter. The centre and hub of LyM, where its creation, dissemination and rejuvenation take place, is the country’s metropolis and cultural capital, Dar es Salaam. Early descriptions of urban (Dar es Salaam) speech repertoires were published by European authors who used the term “slang” to denote it (Gower 1958; Reynolds 1962; Ohly 1987). The use by Tanzanians of the descriptive phrase lugha ya mitaani for urban colloquial speech styles is attested since the 1980s (Reuster-Jahn and Kießling 2006: 2), while a similar phrase Kiswahili cha mitaani (‘Swahili of the streets or town quarters’) is also sometimes used (Blommaert 1990; Kihore 2004). During its history, LyM changed its character according to phases in urbanisation as well as socio-economic development. While, in colonial times, the country’s multilingualism with more than 120 languages (Eberhard et al. 2021) was palpable in the towns (Brennan and Burton 2007: 34), the situation has fundamentally changed since the 1980s, as Swahili has been rapidly becoming the L1 for city-dwellers. Taking tri-glossia as the norm throughout Tanzania, as was the case 50  years ago (Abdulaziz Mkilifi 1972), would be to misrepresent the contemporary situation in urban centres.1 Despite the multilingualism in the country, the urban population is increasingly monolingually oriented towards Swahili. Indeed, LyM presupposes full competence in Swahili among its speakers. DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-14

168  Uta Reuster-Jahn and Roland Kießling Still, it has to be asked to what extent Tanzania is monolingually oriented as a society, especially with regard to the (non-official) presence of some 120 ethnically based languages, and a language policy that generally promotes Swahili but is ambivalent towards English. This discussion could yield diagnostic generalisations with respect to the characterisation of the linguistic contact phenomena. The matrix language2 of LyM, Swahili, is itself an old urban contact language that developed in precolonial times in the context of an extended trade network spanning the neighbouring countries and those on the wider shores of the Indian Ocean (Beck 2010; Whiteley 1969; Polomé 1967). Its character changed fundamentally in the course of standardisation in the middle of the 20th century and acquired an air of artificiality, while it also became inextricably associated with national pride and cultural emancipation from the colonising power. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the history of Swahili in order to be able to assess the relationship between contemporary Standard Swahili and LyM. 1.1 Swahili: Classification, structure and status Swahili is a Bantu language spoken by approximately 100 million speakers in the countries of the East African region, as well as in the East of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (Eberhard et  al. 2021). It belongs to the group of Sabaki languages within the Northeast Coast branch of Northeast Bantu (Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993). In Malcolm Guthrie’s geographical classification, Swahili is numbered G42. It is an SVO language; the syllable structure is (C)V; there is no phonemic tone, and stress is placed systematically on the penultimate syllable. The Bantu noun class system is largely in place. Nominal and verbal stems are extended and inflected with prefixes and suffixes. Since stems are not altered in the process, the insertion of foreign elements into the system is relatively easy. The status and use of Swahili ranges from lingua franca (Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi), dialect (DR Congo, East African coast), national language (Tanzania, Kenya) and national co-language (Uganda, Rwanda, DR Congo) to official co-language (Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania).3 It is also the lingua franca in eastern and eastern-central Africa, promoted by recent decisions of East African countries to make it a compulsory subject in primary school. Tanzania has pursued the most consistent language policy in favour of Swahili in the context of nation-building after independence. That Swahili has never been associated with a particular ethnic group, but rather with a culture and civilisation, made it acceptable as a national language for Tanzanians. The implementation of Swahili as the medium of instruction throughout primary school since 1967 (Roy-Campbell and Qorro 1997: 2) was instrumental in the enforcement of language policy. As a consequence of educational policies and as a side

Tanzania 169 effect of massive urbanisation, Swahili is rapidly becoming the L1 for the majority of the Tanzanian population, especially in the cities. This makes Tanzania outstanding in Africa with regard to the language situation. 1.2 The origins of Swahili as an urban contact language Swahili originated in a narrow coastal strip on the shores of the Indian Ocean spreading from what is today northern Kenya to northern Mozambique and southern Somalia. It has been labelled a “contact language par excellence” (Schadeberg 2009: 78, emphasis in the original). Contact scenarios from the time before 800 AD (before Swahili existed) are related to the extensive Indian Ocean trading network based on sailing ships, which made use of the seasonally changing monsoon winds. Arabic has made the biggest impact on Swahili through lexical borrowing. Even the name Swahili for the language goes back to the Arabic word for ‘coast’. Along the Swahili coast, a chain of port towns was established, which traded with seafarers, among themselves and with their hinterland. Because of the exchanges between them, Swahili varieties “kept a certain unity and often adopted the same loanwords” (Schadeberg 2009: 80). In the Swahili towns, a distinctly urban civilisation developed, as manifested in stone buildings, public infrastructure and sanitation, arts and crafts. Islam was adopted in the 12th or 13th century. The Portuguese started to invade the Swahili towns in 1505, aiming to control trade and extract wealth. The relationship with the local population was rather hostile and only a few lexical items were adopted from Portuguese. In 1698, Portuguese rule was replaced by Omani hegemony on the East African coast. Clove plantations on the Zanzibar archipelago, worked by slaves from the African interior, became a new source of great wealth in the 19th century, and trade caravans looking for ivory and slaves started from there and went into the African interior as far as the eastern Congo. The caravan trade provided a contact situation that resulted in the development of Swahili into a regional lingua franca of East Africa. Also in the 19th century, the European presence increased on the East African coast, culminating in colonialism: Britain became the colonial power in Kenya, Germany in Tanganyika. After the First World War, Britain was mandated by the League of Nations to rule Tanganyika, which thus became oriented towards English. Its history has resulted in the inherent character of Swahili as an urban contact language. It can thus be labelled an “old” African urban language (Beck 2010: 18), together with old urban Wolof (Mc Laughlin 2009: 73). 1.3 Standardisation, modernisation and popularisation The need in the East African British territories for a standardised medium of wider communication besides English led to the decision, in 1928,

170  Uta Reuster-Jahn and Roland Kießling that the dialect of Zanzibar town, Kiunguja, should become the basis of Standard Swahili, Kiswahili sanifu. In 1930, the Inter-territorial Language (Swahili) Committee was established and institutional structures for the implementation, promotion and expansion of the standard language were created (Whiteley 1969: 79–96). In Tanganyika, where German colonial policies had paved the way for Swahili as a national lingua franca and medium of instruction in primary school, Swahili remained privileged. After independence, Tanzanian language policy, aiming to make Swahili a fully functional national language, was part and parcel of the country’s nation-building programme. English was kept as an official language, beside Swahili, and as the medium of instruction in secondary education. The Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa (BAKITA; ‘National Swahili Council’) was established as an institution for terminological development. In addition, it controlled publications from textbooks to creative writing with regard to the standard form. In general, during the socialist ujamaa era (1967–85), the state took measures to enforce the standard language. Government efforts became less pronounced after liberalisation set in. While Standard Swahili largely spread through schools, it was popularised through the government-controlled mass media. The radio played a major role, first because cheap receivers were widely available, and second, because its use did not require literacy. Swahili newspapers and magazines were published especially for urban readers, and popular Swahili literature was produced in urban centres, especially in Dar es Salaam. Since the late 1990s, liberalisation and privatisation policies have resulted in the use of colloquial Swahili and LyM in private media targeting the less educated part of the population (press, radio and TV), as well as in Swahili videos and popular music. 1.4 Swahili in contemporary Tanzania In recent years, with the growing use of Swahili in all areas of private and public life, its lexicon has rapidly expanded. New dictionaries as well as greatly enlarged versions of older ones have appeared (BAKIZA 2010; TUKI 2006, 2014; Ndalu et al. 2013; Murungi et al. 2013; Mohamed 2011). These official efforts, however, do not always result in the actual use of the items. As Schadeberg observes: “The lexical growth of Swahili is much too vigorous to be effectively controlled by BAKITA or any other regulating institution” (2009: 85). The language therefore expands in two directions, the official and the unofficial. Thus, LyM must also be seen in light of this general expansion of the Swahili lexicon in order to cater for contemporary needs. However, there are some inconsistencies in Tanzania’s language policy. Despite the recommendations of experts, as well as declarations of intent by the government, Swahili has never been made the language of

Tanzania 171 instruction in secondary education. As a result, the formal competence of students in both official languages, Swahili and English, is negatively affected (Roy-Campbell and Qorro 1997). In addition, the government, after the end of the socialist era, allowed private English-medium primary schools. English is widely perceived as a prerequisite for whitecollar jobs, and therefore has greater prestige than Swahili. While the elite send their children to private schools, the quality of education has generally been falling since the mid-1990s (Sumra and Katabaro 2014). Surveys show that in fact there is a “learning crisis” in primary schools (ibid.: v): a Swahili text for Standard two could only be read by over 50 per cent of pupils in Standard five, while almost 20 per cent of pupils left primary school illiterate (Uwezo 2011, 2013). Widespread lack of learning and teaching materials is compensated for by oral methods in the teaching of Swahili. This oral orientation of Swahili is fertile ground for creative manipulation of the language in informal urban speech styles such as LyM. Surveys show that the performance of primary-school pupils in English is consistently worse than in Swahili. This lack of competence in English by the majority of urban youth explains why English items are not very frequent in LyM. Those items that are incorporated are mostly imported as emblematic tags from globally circulating cultural forms, especially pop music and hip-hop culture. 1.5 Dar es Salaam, the birthplace of Lugha ya Mitaani Dar es Salaam was founded in the 1860s by the Sultan of Zanzibar. Because of its natural harbour, the European colonisers made the place their capital.4 Its inhabitants were always socioculturally heterogeneous and ethnically diverse, representing the country’s 120 autochthonous ethnic groups as well as – in specific historical contexts – Arab and European elites, Indian businesspeople and multinational sailors. In that situation, “[a]n urban Swahili culture noted for its cosmopolitanism formed an important integrative influence. Swahili itself was universally spoken” (Brennan and Burton 2007: 35). The demographic profile of Dar es Salaam has always been disproportionately youthful, leading to a social cleavage dividing the young and the old (ibid.: 36). In 1987, 82 per cent of Dar es Salaam’s population was under 35  years old (ibid.: 53). In their lifestyle, they were oriented towards modernity and urbanity, which they expressed, among other ways, in forms of urban language practices, soon called Lugha ya Mitaani. The rapid influx from the rural areas led to a mushrooming of unplanned settlements, and unemployment was a constant problem, breeding a special type of urban character, the mhuni, Pl. wahuni, negatively perceived as young male loafers (Burton 2005: 1–16), whom the colonial administration sought to drive out of town (Brennan and Burton 2007: 48). The term has survived and recently been translated as

172  Uta Reuster-Jahn and Roland Kießling ‘hooligan’. The wahuni are associated with a practice of speaking called Lugha ya kihuni, a term having antisocial connotations. This points to the layered character of LyM (see Section 4.1). Dar es Salaam has become the largest and most rapidly growing city in East Africa. Between 2002 and 2012, its population doubled, reaching 4.4 million (Andreasen 2013: 2). The majority of low-income and poor households are located in mostly informal and ethnically diverse settlements sprawling at the periphery. This is where LyM is widely used. Early forms of Swahili slang were reported from Dar es Salaam in the 1950s, when after the Second World War the city grew considerably. Creative linguistic manipulation was observed in a secondary school for boys in 1959 (Clarke 1962: 205), namely in the form of nicknames for schoolmates and teachers, items of daily life and terms for girls. While coinages of that time might have fallen out of use in LyM today, the strategies of manipulation used by the students have, remarkably, been in use for a long time and live on in contemporary LyM, in particular dysphemistic hyperbole, euphemism, metonymy and onomastic synecdoche. Moreover, popular culture, in that case film, had already become a source of new lexical items at that time. The majority of terms were derived from Swahili, while only a few had English as their source, although “the boys are constantly switching from one language to the other” (ibid.). Regarding language use in the city at large, R.H. Gower (1958) drew attention to “Swahili slang”, of which young men were “the most prolific manufacturers” (250). Slang was “born in the towns” (ibid.) and was particularly applied in semantic domains such as money, bribery, food, liquor, dress and women. Gower concludes that “Swahili is rich in slang and idiom, an indication for the vitality of the language” (254). In an earlier article, Gower reports borrowing from English, especially in the semantic domains of the health service, motor transport, football, secondary schooling and fashion. He points to the remarkable ability of Swahili to accommodate loans into its structure. Swahili “slang” items were called mabomu ‘bombs’ in Swahili, and if one did not understand, one could say umenibomu ‘you have bombed me’ (Gower 1952: 156). Slang was promoted through its use in the Swahili press (Reynolds 1962). Gower stated that there was a “great need for further examples to be recorded” (1958: 254), but it seems that independence put an end to this kind of research as the focus shifted to the nationwide enforcement of Standard Swahili.

2 Empirical data Two dictionaries of LyM are available: Ohly (1987) and Reuster-Jahn and Kießling (2006).5 Ohly carried out fieldwork between the 1950s and the beginning of the 1980s, while Reuster-Jahn and Kießling conducted research between 2000 and 2006. They found that only 10 per cent of

Tanzania 173 items in their dictionary had already been attested by Ohly, and only half of these had retained their meaning. Reuster-Jahn and Kießling frame their dictionary with a detailed introduction to LyM based on ethnographic, sociolinguistic and lexicographic methods. They focus on speakers’ knowledge, attitudes and use of LyM, and they identify salient semantic domains as well as strategies of lexical manipulation and semantic change. The relatively small speaker sample represents differences in gender and age, educational level, socioeconomic background and urban as well as rural environment. Based on speaker information, the dictionary provides etymologies by tracing the formal and semantic shifts responsible for the derivation of LyM items from their source items in order to explain the underlying cognitive motivations. Most lexical items are contextualised in sentences elicited from speakers. Every lemma is indexed for at least one semantic domain so as to enable queries by semantic criteria. In follow-up articles, Reuster-Jahn explores aspects of change in LyM. Her analysis of Bongo Flava lyrics reveals a growing use of English in commercially oriented songs (Reuster-Jahn 2014), testifying to the prestige of English as well as to the growing international orientation of the music business. Reuster-Jahn (2016) argues that this and other manifestations of neo-liberal ideologies account for a decrease in the use of LyM among better off youth. Kihore (2004) analysed the use of LyM in the popular Swahili press in Tanzania, which helps to spread lexical items in the country.

3 Structural findings LyM is based on the grammatical frame of Standard Swahili with almost exclusive reliance on lexical elaboration as its constitutive and major driving force. The semantic domains affected are precisely those typically elaborated and overlexicalised in youth jargons, i.e. humans and social relations, communication (especially terms of address and greetings), body and appearance, economy (especially money), sex, drugs and alcohol, locomotion and vehicles, evaluation, violence and conflict, crime and police, and food. Standard Swahili and, to a considerably lesser extent, English constitute the main sources of LyM’s emblematic vocabulary. In both cases, source items are not simply transferred, but rather adapted by various strategies of manipulation on phonological,6 morphological and semantic levels. 3.1  Semantic manipulation LyM items sourced from Standard Swahili, as well as foreign languages, are often subjected to a range of semantic and pragmatic manipulations

174  Uta Reuster-Jahn and Roland Kießling which feature prominently in the creation of urban youth languages in Africa (Kießling and Mous 2004). These manipulations include metaphor, hyperbole and dysphemism. Juvenile speakers of LyM use them to produce gross humorous effects and at the same time to index a jocular spirit in handling linguistic norms, e.g. in the case of kimóbitel ‘slim lady’, a coinage which highlights the slim shape of the human female body by deriving the noun in class 7 from the mobile phone company Mobitel, used here synecdochically for ‘mobile phone’. Other examples are kata stimu ‘cut off steam’ and zimisha fegi ‘extinguish the cigarette’ for ‘disappoint, let down’. Hyperbole and dysphemism are achieved either by metaphors that operate with semantic incompatibilities, e.g. in idiomatic expressions such as supu ya mawe ‘hard liquor’ (< Standard Swahili ‘soup of stones’), by metonymic transfers such as onomastic synecdoche, e.g. in uosama ‘massacre’ (< Osama-bin-Laden) where names of hot spots of crises as well as powerful or terrorist personalities serve to express any manifestation of violence, or by irony, e.g. in tesa ‘enjoy a lot’ (< Standard Swahili ‘afflict pain, cause trouble’) and uawa kikatili ‘enjoy beyond limit’ (< Standard Swahili ‘be killed in a cruel way’). Hyperbole is also readily produced via the replacement of nouns by their augmentative counterparts, e.g. bongo ‘Dar es Salaam’ (< ‘large brain’ < Standard Swahili ubongo ‘brain’). Furthermore, humorous effects are achieved by taking unusual perspectives on common events, experiences and situations, either by transparent euphemisms such as tembeza bakora ‘beat up with a stick’ (< Standard Swahili tembeza ‘cause to walk about’, bakora ‘walking stick’) or by cloaking neutral concepts dysphemistically in unfavourable terms as in kula pamba ‘wear nice fashionable clothes’ (< Standard Swahili ‘eat cotton) and kunyea debe ‘be in prison’ (< Standard Swahili ‘shit in the tin’). Most LyM metaphors originate in the spheres of popular culture and entertainment, sports (mainly football), cars and traffic, electricity, telecommunications and beverages. In addition, source domains such as kinship and imagery of the rural environment (agriculture, livestock, traditional culture) are also represented, e.g. in akademiki buzi ‘big academic goat’ (< Standard Swahili mbuzi ‘goat’) which refers to a man who is used by a girl to help her with academic work in return for transactional sex. Seemingly far-fetched metaphors often reveal the frames of perception influenced by specific media consumption habits, as in the case of bastola ‘pistol(s)’ and bunduki ‘gun’ used in LyM to refer to large and protruding female hips. These coinages do not directly draw on an association of weapons with sexual power, but they do seem to be primarily motivated by parallelism in shape, i.e. the image of female hips is evoked by the image of the silhouette of a cowboy wearing bulging holsters.

Tanzania 175 3.2  Morphological manipulation Formal manipulation which is not motivated by phonotactic needs is not as prominent in LyM as in many other African urban contact languages. While clippings such as ndomu ‘condom’, suru ‘trousers’ (< Standard Swahili suruali) and denti ‘student’ (pl. madenti), acronyms such as sidii ‘prostitute’ (< CD, i.e. abbreviation of LyM term changudoa ‘prostitute’, which in Standard Swahili denotes a type of fish) and instances of the Kinyume practice, i.e. syllable metathesis, as in gunja ‘police’ (< njagu), do occur, they are clearly much less common than the semantic manipulations discussed earlier. Morphological hybridisation, i.e. the deliberate combination of lexemes and affixes that do not belong to the same source, which is widely attested in other urban contact languages of Africa such as Nouchi in Côte d’Ivoire, Camfranglais in Cameroon and Sheng in Kenya (Kießling and Mous 2006: 393–5), is strikingly absent in LyM. Apart from the morphological integration of English-sourced items, the only instance of hybridisation in LyM is the insertion of the English plural suffix to Swahili nouns as in toto-z ‘girls’ (< Standard Swahili toto ‘big child’) and ma-vi-tu-z ‘things’ (< Standard Swahili vi-tu ‘things’). Occasionally, English-sourced items can be seen to be morphologically appropriated by reanalysis of initial syllables as adnominal class markers, as in the case of kideo ‘cinema’ (< ‘video’) and vilabu ‘bars’ (< Standard Swahili kilabu < English ‘club’), where the initial syllables ki and vi of the English root have been re-interpreted as adnominal class markers 7/8 in the Swahili frame. 3.3  Comparative profile of LyM With an almost exclusive reliance on semantic and pragmatic manipulation for the creation of an emblematic lexicon, LyM stands out as a nonprototypical case, which fits only partially with the characteristic profile of juvenile urban contact languages (Kießling and Mous 2004) where phonotactic ‘violence’ and morphological hybridisation are much more heavily exploited to distort the linguistic icons of the donor language(s). This is due to the high degree of identification with Swahili as a national medium of communication in Tanzania, as opposed to other African megacities where, probably due to the adherence to exoglossic language policies, ex-colonial languages, inaccessible to larger sections of society, are still allowed to exert their influence as instruments of exclusion. 3.4  LyM and Sheng Just like LyM, Sheng, the urban vernacular of Nairobi and some other urban centres in Kenya, is based on Swahili (Githinji 2009: 7; Githiora 2018). No comparative study has been conducted so far, although

176  Uta Reuster-Jahn and Roland Kießling similarities as well as differences call for explanation. Sheng differs from LyM in its significant borrowing from Kenyan languages and from English, a fact that reflects the different language policies of the two countries. This also accounts for the uneven spatial distribution of Sheng (Githinji and Njoroge 2017). In Mombasa, the urban centre on the coast, Sheng is unpopular because of the dominance of Swahili as L1. Moreover, in contrast to LyM, there is evidence that Sheng has become an urban dialect whose use is not confined to youth, at least not in the numerical sense of age (Githiora 2018: 21). The influence of Sheng on LyM is not significant. Very few items have been borrowed from Sheng, such as the greeting formula niaje ‘Hello/how are you?’. This probably reflects the generally limited exchange between Kenya and Tanzania (see Chapter 6 on Sheng.) In contrast to Sheng, emblematic grammatical divergence from Standard Swahili is almost non-existent in LyM, except for the marginal application of adnominal noun-class prefixes lu- (Proto Bantu 11) and ka- (Proto Bantu 12) as in LyM coinages such as lupango ‘prison’ (< Standard Swahili pango ‘cave’) and kasheshe ‘mayhem’ (< Standard Swahili sheshe ‘beautiful’). Both of these noun class prefixes are absent from Standard Swahili and must have been borrowed from other Tanzanian languages. Furthermore, a semantically driven reassignment from prior gender 5/6 to gender 1/2 seems to affect some nouns for humans, e.g. m-sela (1)/wa-sela (2) ‘wild youth(s), bachelor(s)’, probably derived from prior sela (5)/ma-sela (6) ‘hooligan(s)’ in older Swahili slang.

4 Sociolinguistic findings Today’s LyM not only reflects the urban identity of its speakers, but also difficult living conditions due to high population density, the high proportion of young people, a widespread informal economy and unemployment. LyM speakers predominate among groups of male youths hanging out together. Special varieties of LyM are prevalent in socially marginal groups to mark in-group identity. In more moderate forms, LyM is predominantly used as a register. However, due to economic and political liberalisation since the late 1980s, incipient differentiation into a sociololect reflecting the social stratification of society can be observed. 4.1 Set-up of the speech community One functional aspect of LyM is its use as a marker of in-group identity among male youths, who learn it in peer groups and use it in informal settings to communicate a meta-message of belonging, solidarity and toughness. In some youth groups, demarcation and secrecy can be one of its functions. However, the actual use of LyM usually depends on socioeconomic and situational factors.

Tanzania 177 Knowledge of the lexical items represented in the dictionary compiled by Reuster-Jahn and Kießling (2006) is not confined to urban male youths, since at least half of the terms are known by older male speakers as well. Women are usually less conversant with LyM. Specific groups of youths – for example, pupils of a certain year in a specific school, youths in a particular neighbourhood or members of a soccer team – additionally mark their identity by creating specific lexical items for exclusive use by their group. Most important for the creation and use of LyM are male youths’ hangouts symbolically called vijiwe (‘little stones’).7 These can be located in open places, at pool billiards, kiosks or even in barbershops, as reported by Weiss (2002). Youths commonly referred to as vijana wa vijiweni ‘youths from at-the-little-stones’, due to joblessness, spend a lot of time at their vijiwe engaging in conversations using LyM as a pastime. The many social problems associated with joblessness, in particular the use of drugs and criminal “deals”, account for the use of secretive variants of LyM. For youth groups at the very margins of society, who have nothing to lose, a form of “deep” LyM, in Swahili referred to as lugha ya kihuni (‘speech/language of hooligans’), might have become a sociolect. “Deep” LyM can be labelled “anti-language” (Halliday 1976; Kießling and Mous 2004), while in ordinary LyM the aspect of resistance is less pronounced. Such variants are characterised by assigning new meanings to old lexical items, as well as by distortions such as meta­ thesis. A particular speech style called Kinyume (‘backwards’, cf. verlan in France) makes communicated information unintelligible to outsiders (Reuster-Jahn and Kießling 2006: 5–6).8 Given the gradual differences in knowledge and use, it might be appropriate to characterise LyM as multilayered. A similar layered or graded character of urban youth languages has been reported for Zambian Town Bemba (Spitulnik 1998: 32) and Luyaaye spoken in Kampala (Namyalo 2015). Further research is needed to decide whether a three-level model of “general”, “street” and “deep” code would be appropriate for LyM, as Namyalo (2015: 314) has suggested for Luyaaye. The most critical factors for the choice of level of LyM are age, gender and the socioeconomic situation of speakers. Above all, however, use depends on the situation. Speakers have to navigate the positive effects of LyM such as expressions of belonging to a certain group versus the negative effects of lowering one’s status (see Section  4.2). Accordingly, they will decide whether and to what degree they want to use LyM in a given context and situation. Passive knowledge of LyM exists in varying degrees among non-users. Gender is even more decisive, as female and male youths’ knowledge and use of LyM differ. For example, girls and women usually do not know the whole range of terms used by young men when they talk about women and sexuality (Reuster-Jahn and Kießling 2006: 16). They also do not engage in the same practices of boasting as male youths.

178  Uta Reuster-Jahn and Roland Kießling 4.2 Attitudes and ideologies LyM is positioned in contrast to “correct” Standard Swahili and carries contradictory social and cultural values. It is associated on the one hand with being urban, up-to-date, knowledgeable and streetwise, and on the other with deviance or breaches of traditional cultural norms. Between group members, it is mutually used as a sign of belonging. In interaction with interlocutors who do not belong to the in-group, speakers of both Standard Swahili and LyM must decide for each individual speech interaction which code and which degree is appropriate. In research conducted in 2018, Reuster-Jahn focused on the metalinguistic knowledge of urban Tanzanians concerning the appropriateness of LyM in speech situations. Some 30 persons of different age, background and gender were asked about their use of LyM. It appeared that all have at least a general knowledge of LyM because of their interaction with others, and they had clear opinions about the appropriateness and inappropriateness of LyM in speech interactions. Two claimed that they avoided using LyM for religious reasons. The most decisive factors, however, appeared to be age and gender. The use of LyM is part of the negotiation of two opposing relational qualities: status with its consideration of distance and respect on one side, and on the other belonging, which invokes proximity and solidarity. The concept of heshima ‘respect’ was unanimously referred to by the informants. They all agreed that using LyM in the wrong situation can flaw one’s status, as expressed in the statement: “If you use LyM with somebody older, you deny him/her respect. If you use LyM with people who are below you, you lower yourself”.9 However, this does not mean that LyM is only used among peers. A measured use of LyM items can carry a message of solidarity, being urban and being relaxed even in more formal settings. Striking the right balance is what matters. For example, the LyM verb sepa (‘to be off’) can be used even by middleaged people when talking to colleagues of the same age or below. It expresses a certain measure of informality permissible among equals. This symbolic character of LyM is exploited in advertisements. In 2010, for example, Coca Cola conducted a large publicity campaign using LyM items and expressions: full mzuka (‘Full spirit, super exciting’), based on metonymic extension of Standard Swahili mzuka ‘sudden apparition, spirit, ghost’; msosi (‘cooked food, dish’), derived from Engl. ‘sauce’; and kwea pipa (‘travel by plane, fly’), a dysphemistic metaphorical extension of Standard Swahili ‘climb the barrel’ (see Fig 10.1). In 2018, a beer was promoted by pointing to its affordable price using the LyM item buku (1,000 Tanzanian shilling banknote) (Fig 10.2).10 One informant, a driver in the civil service, said that when he talks to drivers of daladala minibuses notorious for their heavy use of LyM, he uses part of their register to show that he is on the same level.11 He stated

Tanzania 179 that the appropriate use of LyM helps to get friends from different social groups, to know their behaviour and how to live with them. This points to the function of LyM to hold together the social fabric in the urban centres. Thus, whereas “deep” LyM can function as an anti-language, a measured use of LyM serves the opposite purpose. Often, informants refer to members of their rika (‘age group’) as interlocutors with whom at least some LyM is appropriate. LyM is also used between colleagues of more or less the same age in the workplace. In any case, it is used less by women. Informants mentioned lugha ya kihuni (hooligan language), lugha ya kibodaboda (the language of motorbike taxi-drivers), and lugha ya vijana wa vijiweni (language of young unemployed males who hang around at their vijiwe) as distinct styles of speaking perceived as being marked by the extensive use of (jocular) insults, threats of violence and sexual abuse against each other, as well as outsiders, all walking a thin line between joking and seriousness. 4.3 Spread of LyM Youths in Tanzania are a highly mobile group who spread LyM through their physical movements. Youths from rural areas may stay in the city for some time and then go back, taking LyM with them. In addition, the Swahili press makes use of LyM (Kihore 2004), thus contributing to its spread. In the tabloid Sani, a regular cartoon explains LyM terms in a humorous way (Reuster-Jahn and Kießling 2006: 62–3). As a popular juvenile way of speaking and an icon of urban adolescence, LyM was boosted by Swahili hip-hop in the 1990s and gained popularity and acceptability in the course of the nation-wide triumphant sweep of the popular music called Bongo Flava in the 2000s, transcending social classes and ethnicity to a large extent. Bongo Flava artists used LyM in their lyrics (Reuster-Jahn 2007). The new music scene had an empowering effect on Tanzanian youth, which became apparent in the General Election of 2005 (Reuster-Jahn 2008a, 2008b). The increased prestige of Bongo Flava was also transferred to LyM as the linguistic code of artists. As a consequence, it became acceptable in wider circles of the society, and some lexical items have made it into the standard lexicon, such as changudoa (‘prostitute’) (TUKI 2014: 58) and demu (‘girl, young woman’), which were included for the first time in 2014 (TUKI 2014: 85). However, in the course of neo-liberal politics, Bongo Flava changed its character. “Mainstream” Bongo Flava became commercially and internationally oriented. This led to an increased use of English in song lyrics (Reuster-Jahn 2012, 2014) and to a decrease in prestige for LyM (Reuster-Jahn 2016). LyM is increasingly spread through social media networks, such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. This tends to level out the differences between urban centres and the periphery.

180  Uta Reuster-Jahn and Roland Kießling

Figure 10.1 Advertisements in Dar es Salaam 2010. Bottom: Wakati wa msosi ni wakati wa Coca-Cola (Time for food is time for Coca-Cola); Top: Kwea pipa na Coca-Cola (Travel by plane with Coca-Cola). LyM terms underscored. Copyright Uta Reuster-Jahn

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Figure 10.2 Billboard in Dar es Salaam 2018. Ladha zaidi kwa buku hizi  .  .  .  TSh 2000 chupa kubwa (More taste for these 1000-shilling notes [buku] … a large bottle for TSh 2000). LyM term underscored. Copyright Uta Reuster-Jahn

182  Uta Reuster-Jahn and Roland Kießling

Notes 1 Already in 1967, Polomé pointed to a trend towards Swahili as L1 even in rural areas, especially in the case of smaller speaker-groups (1967: 3). 2 The term ‘matrix language’ is used here in the sense of ‘grammatical matrix’. Moreover, most LyM-specific lexical items are derived from Swahili. While it is likely that code-switching has played a crucial role in the establishment of LyM terms of English origin, synchronically the phenomenon of LyM itself is quite different from code-switching proper as defined by MyersScotton (1993: 4). Most English-sourced lexical items have meanings that deviate from their original sources. 3 In Tanzania, Swahili is not a de jure but a de facto official language used even in the higher courts. No language is enshrined in the constitution as an official language. 4 In 1974, Dodoma in the interior of the country was made Tanzania’s political capital. 5 There is only one word list available on the internet: The Kiswahili Slang Dictionary / Kamusi ya Kiswahili cha Mitaani by Chumvi Mtembezi (http://chumvi. tripod.com/kiswahili_slang_dictionary.html), last updated in December  2000. Another list of “Swahili slang” offered by the online magazine Darhotwire (by IPP media) is not available any more (www.darhotwire. com/dar/slang.html). Some words of “Kiswahili cha Mitaani” are also given by Kihore in his article on the use of street language in the popular Swahili press in Tanzania (Kihore 2004). 6  Phonological adaptations such as the addition of epenthetic and epithetic vowels mainly operate on English-sourced items which do not conform to Swahili phonotactic rules, e.g. neti ‘prison’ (< ‘net’), dili ‘secret, affair, deal’ (< ‘deal’), sevu ‘run away’ (< ‘save’), cheki ‘look, see’ (< ‘check’), maindi ‘like, want’ (< ‘mind’). They are not diagnostic of LyM, though, since they do not seem to differ in essence from ordinary mechanisms of adaptation applied in the course of the integration of loans into Standard Swahili. 7  Vijiwe are sometimes derogatively called “jobless corners” just as unemployed youths are referred to as majobless (Cl. 6). 8  Kinyume is a very interesting but largely unresearched phenomenon. Edward Steere was the first to give a definition of Kinyume (1885: 310), as well as a list of specimens (1885: 425f). It was mentioned in passing by other scholars (Reuster-Jahn and Kießling 2006: 5). Kinyume can be approached from the perspective of “African syllable games” (Friedrich 2014). 9  Ukitumia lugha ya mitaani na mkubwa unamshushia heshima. Ukitumia lugha ya mitaani na watu walio chini yako unajishusha (Hawa L., Moshi, 22 August 2018). 10 Language use in advertising in Dar es Salaam has been examined by Charles Bwenge (2009) with regard to Swahili and English. Bwenge showed that the use of these languages is correlated with the socioeconomic status of the area where the advert is placed. Leonard Muaka (2018: 143) argues that advertisements mirror the realities of a liberalised global economy that have elevated youth to “a position where they are consumers, innovators, and major stakeholders of the linguistic trajectories in their respective speech communities”. 11 He said, “Naongea lugha yake, kwa hiyo tupo sawa” (I talk his language, therefore we are equal) (Dar es Salaam, 31 August 2018).

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184  Uta Reuster-Jahn and Roland Kießling Spitzmüller (eds.), 385–401. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. DOI: 10.3726/ 978-3-653-01326-9. Kihore, Yared M. (2004). Masuala ya kisarufi katika magazeti ya mitaani ya Kiswahili – Tanzania. Swahili Forum 11: 107–19. Mc Laughlin, Fiona (2009). Senegal’s early cities and the making of an urban identity. In: The Languages of Urban Africa. Fiona Mc Laughlin (ed.), 71–85. London: Continuum. Mohamed, Mohamed A. (2011). Comprehensive Swahili-English Dictionary. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers. Muaka, Leonard (2018). The impact of youth language on linguistic landscapes in Kenya and Tanzania. In: African Youth Languages: New Media, Performing Arts and Sociolinguistic Development. Ellen Hurst-Harosh and Fridah Kanana Erastus (eds.), 123–45. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Myers-Scotton, Carol (1993). Social Motivations for Code-Switching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Murungi, James M. et  al. (eds.) (2013). Kamusi ya karne ya 21: kamusi ya Kiswahili yenye uketo zaidi ya karne hii. Toleo la pili (2nd edition). Nairobi: Longhorn. Namyalo, Saudah (2015). Linguistic strategies in Luyaaye: Word play and conscious language manipulation. In: Youth Language Practices in Africa and Beyond. Nico Nassenstein and Andrea Hollington (eds.), 313–43. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Ndalu, Ahmed E., Hamisi O. Babusa and Suseiman A. Mirikau (2013). Kamusi teule ya Kiswahili: kilele cha lugha. Toleo la kwanza. (1st edition). Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam: East African Educational Publishers. Nurse, Derek and Thomas Hinnebusch (1993). Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ohly, Rajmund (1987). Swahili-English Slang Pocket-Dictionary. Vienna: AfroPub Services. Polomé, Edgar (1967). Swahili Language Handbook. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Reuster-Jahn, Uta (2007). Let’s go party! Discourse and self-portrayal in the Bongo Fleva-song Mikasi (‘Sex’, Ngwair 2004). Swahili Forum 14: 225–44. Reuster-Jahn, Uta (2008a). Appendix to “Bongo Flava and the electoral campaign 2005 in Tanzania” (Annotated transcription and translation of 9 songs). Stichproben – Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien 14: i–xx. Reuster-Jahn, Uta (2008b). Bongo Flava and the electoral campaign 2005 in Tanzania. Stichproben – Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien 14: 41–69. Reuster-Jahn, Uta (2012). ‘Am walking on the way kuiseti future yangu.’ The use of English in Bongo Flava music in Tanzania. In: Listening to Africa: Anglophone African Literatures and Cultures (Anglistik und Englischunterricht 80). Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier (eds.), 145–73. Heidelberg: Winter. Reuster-Jahn, Uta (2014). English versus Swahili: Language choice in Bongo Flava as expression of cultural and economic changes in Tanzania. Swahili Forum 21: 1–25. Reuster-Jahn, Uta (2016). From slang to sleek: Changing language attitudes of youth in Tanzania. Sociolinguistic Studies (Special issue: The Dynamics of Youth Language in Africa, ed. by Eyo Mensah) 10(1–2): 199–217. DOI: 10.1558/sols.v10i1-2.28023.

Tanzania 185 Reuster-Jahn, Uta and Roland Kießling (2006). Lugha ya Mitaani in Tanzania. The poetics and sociology of a young urban style of speaking. Swahili Forum 13 (special issue): 1–196. Reynolds, F.A. (1962). Lavu huzungusha dunia. Tanganyika Notes and Records 58/59: 203–4. Roy-Campbell, Zaline and Martha Qorro (1997). Language Crisis in Tanzania. The Myth of English Versus Education. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota. Schadeberg, Thilo (2009). Loanwords in Swahili. In: Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor (eds.), 76–102. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110218442.76. Spitulnik, Debra (1998). The language of the city: Town Bemba as urban hybridity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8(l): 30–59. Steere, Edward (1885). A Handbook of the Swahili Language as Spoken at Zanzibar. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Sumra, Suleman and Joviter Katabaro (2014). Declining Quality of Education: Suggestions for Arresting and Reversing the Trend. THDR 2014: Background Paper No. 9, ESRF Discussion Paper 63. Dar es Salaam: Economic and Social Research Foundation. TUKI (Taasisi ya Taaluma ya Kiswahili (2006). English-Swahili Dictionary  – Kamusi ya Kiingereza-Kiswahili. Toleo la tatu (3rd edition). Dar es Salaam: TUKI. TUKI (Taasisi ya Taaluma ya Kiswahili (2014). Kamusi ya Kiswahili-Kiingereza – Swahili-English Dictionary. Toleo la pili (2nd edition). Dar es Salaam: TUKI. Uwezo (2011). Are our Children Learning? Annual Learning Assessment Report. Dar es Salaam: Uwezo Tanzania. Uwezo (2013). Are our Children Learning? Annual Learning Assessment Report. Dar es Salaam: Uwezo Tanzania. Weiss, Brad (2002). Thug realism: Inhabiting fantasy in urban Tanzania. Cultural Anthropology 17(1): 93–124. DOI: 10.1525/can.2002.17.1.93. Whiteley, Wilfred (1969). Swahili. The Rise of a National Language. London: Methuen.

11 Denmark Danish urban contact dialects Pia Quist

1  Linguistic and social context In line with the policy of this book, the term ‘urban contact dialect’ will be used as a broad designation for urban vernacular ways of speaking that have emerged within linguistically and ethnically diverse communities in Denmark. However, ‘dialect’ is not an uncontroversial term among Danish sociolinguists. As will be outlined in this chapter, research into Danish urban contact dialects can, by and large, be grouped into two distinct traditions: one that developed from dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics, and one with roots in bilingualism research and linguistic ethnography. Danish studies taking the latter approach have explicitly argued for refraining from using any potentially essentialising label such as dialect (ethnolect, multiethnolect etc.) which might imply stable and well-defined groups of linguistic features and speakers. Although the use of ‘urban contact dialect’ applies much more to the dialectological approach, it is not the intention of this chapter to take a stance on the two (supposedly) opposed positions. Rather, the aim will be to give as thorough an account of Danish research as possible, including important insights that have developed from the tradition of linguistic ethnography. Denmark is a Scandinavian country sharing borders with Sweden to the east, Norway to the north and Germany to the south. The official language is Danish, a North Germanic language with a close resemblance to Norwegian and Swedish. Denmark is sometimes claimed to be one of the most linguistically standardised societies in Europe (Pedersen 2003, 2005), leaving little room for regional dialects (Pedersen 2009; Maegaard et al. 2020). Research has shown that Danes in general show low degrees of tolerance towards linguistic variation, including dialect variation, the use of multiethnic youth styles and foreign accents (Kristiansen and Coupland 2011; Kristiansen and Grondelaers 2013). Thus, young people in urban contact zones daily face strong monolingual expectations and ideologies in school (Kristjánsdóttir and Timm 2007; Karrebæk 2013) and in society in general (Quist 2018), with urban contact dialects presenting a sharp contrast to this. DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-15

Denmark 187 According to Statistics Denmark, as of January 2019, 5.8 million people live in Denmark. Of these, 793,601 were registered as immigrants and descendants of immigrants (including immigrants from Scandinavia and other EU countries).1 In the 1960s, a shortage of labour in Danish industries saw the first post-Second-World-War wave of immigration to Denmark. The first so-called guest workers came mainly from Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco and the former Yugoslavia. It was possible for any newcomer to settle in Denmark until the government passed a ‘halt immigration’ law in 1973. Since then, in addition to EU citizens, foreign students and specialised labour migrants, only refugees and family of immigrants already in Denmark (so-called family reunions) were allowed into the country (Steensig 2021). Since the 1980s, various restrictions on immigration have been imposed by different governments, leaving Denmark with some of the most restrictive immigration law in the EU. Today, more than 120 different languages are spoken in Denmark as a consequence of immigration (Risager 2006). Most of these have relatively few speakers compared to the larger immigrant languages. The largest heritage language is Arabic, which is estimated to have approximately 70,000 speakers spread throughout the country, but with the largest groups in the cities of Aarhus and Copenhagen. The second largest heritage language is Turkish, which is estimated to be spoken by about 50,000–55,000 people, including Danes with Kurdish origins who master both Turkish and Kurdish in addition to Danish. Then comes ‘Serbo-Croatian’ (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) with approximately 40,000–45,000 speakers, and Kurdish with 30–40,000 speakers. Arabic and Turkish are the two dominant donor languages contributing to lexical borrowings into Danish urban contact dialects (cf. Section 3). The majority of post-Second-World-War-era immigrants have taken up residence in the largest cities in Denmark, i.e. Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense and Aalborg. In several places, immigrants live in suburban social housing areas with affordable apartments and terraced houses. Several of these areas have been categorised by the government as ‘ghettos’. Every year, the Danish government releases a list of residential areas (the so-called ghetto list) that, based on five criteria, identify certain places as ‘problematic’. One of these five criteria concerns the number of immigrants and descendants of immigrants from ‘non-Western countries’. If more than 50 per cent of the residents in an area are immigrants from ‘non-Western countries’, it is a candidate for being categorised as a ‘ghetto’. The other criteria cover levels of crime, unemployment, education and income. Most of the research into urban contact dialects that will be presented in this chapter has been conducted in areas that appear on the government’s ‘ghetto list’. These areas frame the complex contexts in which young people need to navigate, relate to and respond to stigmatised images of their neighbourhoods and homes in their everyday lives. One linguistic consequence of this is that emerging contact dialects are

188  Pia Quist used simultaneously as indicators of localness (indexing qualities such as home, safety and friendship) and of a more oppositional style (indexing, for instance, toughness, gangsters, masculinity and danger). Building on different research traditions and using different methodologies, sociolinguistic research into Danish urban contact dialects confronts such complexities by focusing on micro-level interaction and negotiation as well as macro-level structural developments.

2 Empirical data Danish urban contact dialects have been studied for more than two decades in the three biggest cities in Denmark: Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense, though most extensively in Copenhagen. Many of the studies combine a range of different methods, including ethnography, self-recordings, interviews and recordings of group sessions. Although Table 11.1 provides a fairly comprehensive overview of research in Denmark that in one way or another deals with urban contact dialects, it would not be possible to account for all the many studies that have been carried out in Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense (for some recent overviews, see Quist and Svendsen 2015, 2020; Quist 2010b). The first Danish study that aimed to describe new, emerging speech varieties in urban multilingual contexts was carried out in 1998–9 (published in 2000). Inspired by the work of the Swedish sociolinguist UllaBritt Kotsinas (1988, 1992), Quist conducted ethnographic observations among young people in three different parts of Copenhagen, collecting self-recordings, recordings of group conversations and interviews from each location (Quist 2000). The study concluded that a new way of speaking Danish was emerging among young people in Copenhagen, suggesting the term multiethnolect to describe this phenomenon. During the 2000s, three studies of multilingual ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger 1998) were carried out by Quist (2008, 2010), Maegaard (2007) and Madsen (2008, 2015). Common to these studies was paying close ethnographically informed attention to the social dynamics among the participants. However, while Quist and Maegaard situated their work in third-wave sociolinguistics (Eckert 2012), studying the social meaning of sociolinguistic variables, Madsen placed her work in the British tradition of linguistic ethnography (Rampton et  al. 2004). Quist and Maegaard combined their ethnographies with quantitative analysis and deployed statistics, and Madsen presented detailed analyses of speech using a mix of tools from CA, discourse and interaction analysis. Since the community of practice studies carried out by Maegaard, Madsen and Quist, ethnography as a main ‘entrance’ to investigating young urban speech has, generally speaking, become the norm in Danish studies. Ethnographic fieldwork is commonly supplemented with selfrecordings (cf. Møller and Schøning 2009), interviews by a researcher of

Copenhagen Quist 2000 Quist 2005 Maegaard 2007 Madsen 2015 Møller 2009 Pharao and Hansen 2005, 2010 Stæhr 2010* Stæhr 2014* ** Quist 2018 Stæhr and Madsen 2017* Pharao et al. 2014, 2015 Hyttel-Sørensen 2017* ** Nørreby 2018* ** Ag 2018* ** Aarhus Vedsgaard Christensen Zachariassen 2017 Odense Skovse 2018; Quist and Skovse 2020; Quist 2019** x

x x x x x x x x x

x x

x x (on- and offline) x

x x x x x

x x x x

x x x x x

x x

x x x x x

x x x x x

x x

x x x x

x

x x

x

x

x

x x x

x

Participant Interview Group SelfExperimental Data from Data from observation (researcher and recordings recordings data social media rap lyrics participant)

Table 11.1 List of studies of urban contact dialects in Denmark with indication of type(s) of data. Research projects marked with * were conducted as part of the “Copenhagen Studies of Everyday Languaging”. Research marked with ** use data that are included in the LANCHART corpus (https://lanchart.hum.ku.dk/)

Denmark 189

190  Pia Quist participants and set-up recordings of group sessions – some in the form of a focus-group conversation where participants are asked to discuss a certain topic (e.g. Hyttel-Sørensen 2017; Skovse 2018), or set up around an activity like, for instance, a board game (Quist 2005). In one study from Aarhus, Vedsgaard Christensen (2012) made group recordings in schools and youth clubs; these were not set up by the researcher but were situated recordings of friends talking in the youth club, and interactions centred around computer games and group work at school. Besides interviews and self-recordings, Vedsgaard Christensen conducted some retrospective interviews in which she talked with the participants about the linguistic characteristics that she had observed in their speech. Maegaard (2007) and Vedsgaard Christensen (2012) used verbal guise tests to complement their findings. They wanted to test whether the speech styles that they had observed were restricted to the local areas in which they had made their observations. To do this, they played speech samples to young people in other parts of the city in order to test whether they were able to recognise the speech style, and also whether they would attach identity traits like ‘tough’, ‘girlish’, ‘posh’ etc. to the speakers using those speech styles. Verbal guise techniques were also used in later studies by Pharao et al. (2014, 2015) and Møller (2009), which showed some of the same overall results, e.g. that voices with characteristic staccato-like prosody (see Section  3.2) were described by respondents using labels such as ‘immigrant’, ‘rough’ and ‘gangster’, troublemaker’ etc. The longitudinal research project “Copenhagen Studies of Everyday Languaging” comprises an array of subprojects that in different ways and from different angles have studied language practices in a linguistically diverse state school in Copenhagen (Madsen et  al. 2013, 2016). Some of these subprojects include the use of urban contact dialects in the analysis, although a central theoretical standpoint adopted by the project members was to avoid the use of terms that could lead to an “a priori and naturalised division of linguistic resources into distinct language” (Madsen et  al. 2016: 1). Instead, they prefer the term ‘languaging’, developed by Jørgensen (2008, 2010) to refer to the human practice of combining linguistic features from all available means “to achieve their communicative aims as best they can” (Jørgensen 2010: 145) (see more on this in Section  4). Different types of data have been collected over the years since the project was initiated in 2009, but all the studies refer to ethnography as the core source of knowledge. Over several different time periods, the project has carried out ‘team ethnography’ following participants in and outside school (Madsen et  al. 2013). Besides selfrecordings, recordings of group conversations and interviews, researchers have also included data from Facebook (Stæhr 2014; Ag 2018) and analysed rap lyrics written by the participants themselves (Stæhr 2010; Stæhr and Madsen 2017).

Denmark 191 Most of the data indicated in Table  11.1 are accessible only via the respective researchers. Research projects that are marked with ** have included their data in the LANCHART corpus, which is a large corpus of spoken Danish at the University of Copenhagen (https://lanchart.hum. ku.dk/).

3 Structural findings Despite Denmark being a relatively homogeneous speech community with a high degree of dialect levelling, some regional differences are apparent, particularly regional prosodic differences (Grønnum 1992). Thus, Vedsgaard Christensen in Aarhus and Skovse, and Quist in Odense, find that young speakers of urban contact dialects combine multiethnolectal features with features associated with the local regiolect (Christensen 2012; Skovse 2018; Quist and Skovse 2020). However, the majority of features that linguists have described as ethnolectal are the same across the different locations that have been studied. All grammatical and phonological features, it seems, are the same, though with some variation in the lexicon. An outline of these will be presented in this section. The linguistic features characterising Danish urban contact dialects include syntactic and morphological features, certain phonological characteristics and a handful of lexical borrowings, mainly from Turkish and Arabic. 3.1 Syntax and morphology 3.1.1  Verb-second rule A recurring characteristic of Danish urban contact dialects that has been noted since the first studies in Copenhagen in 1998 is variation in the verb-second rule (Quist 2000: 151). Standard Danish requires the inversion of verb and subject in main clauses beginning with an adverbial, or in subordinate clauses, compared with main clauses beginning with subject or object. Young speakers of Danish urban contact dialects might for instance say: når du er i puberteten, du tænker mere (‘when you are in your puberty you think more’), where standard Danish would have inversion of the subject and verb in the main clause: når du er i puberteten, tænker du mere (‘when you are in your puberty think you more’) (example taken from Quist 2000). However, several studies have also shown that young speakers vary this feature according to the speech situation (Madsen 2008) and stylistic practice (Quist 2005). Similar variation of the verb-second rule has been studied in Sweden (Ganuza 2008, 2010) and Norway (Opsahl and Nistov 2010; Svendsen and Røyneland 2008), as well as Germany (see also Chapters 10, 12 and 15 in this volume).

192  Pia Quist 3.1.2  Grammatical gender Studies also report variation in the use of the grammatical gender system. Standard Danish has a two-gender system with neuter and common genders. We find a tendency in Danish urban contact dialects to simplify the system so that common gender articles and pronouns are sometimes used when neuter is preferred in standard, for example, den der blad (‘that magazine/common gender’) instead of the standard det der blad (‘that magazine’/neuter). This feature, however, has not yet received as much academic attention as the variation of the verb-second rule (and young people do not seem to be aware of it themselves). This may be connected to the fact that this feature does not seem to be as frequent as the other characteristics mentioned here. 3.1.3  Pronouns in extra-position Finally, among the grammatical features, studies from Aarhus describe the phenomenon of ‘pronouns in extra-position’ or ‘subject doubling’. Pronouns in oblique case are sometimes placed in ‘extra-position’ at the beginning of an utterance: [1] Mig jeg har ikke et eneste billede på min telefon Me I have not one single photo on my phone ‘Me I don’t have any photos on my phone’ or at the end of an utterance: [2] Hey hvad vil du dig Hey what want you(nom) you(oblique) ‘Hey what do you want?’ This feature was noted by Vedsgaard Christensen in the first study in Aarhus (Christensen 2012: 134–8) and described in more detail by Zachariassen (2017), also in Aarhus. Where the subject in these examples is in the nominative, just as in standard language, an extra personal pronoun, mig, dig in oblique case (i.e. a case other than nominative, e.g. accusative), is placed just before or just after the subject. That is why Vedsgaard Christensen suggests calling the phenomenon ‘subject doubling’. However, Zachariassen finds in her data that a pronoun in the extra-position in some cases does not correspond to the subject in the utterance, and she

Denmark 193 therefore prefers to call the phenomenon ‘pronouns in extra-position’, for example: Dig hvad af You(oblique) what of ‘You what?’ Hvad København dig What Copenhagen you(oblique) ‘What about Copenhagen?’ Pronouns in extra-position can serve different purposes, but as Vedsgaard Christensen (2012) mentions, the most common one seems to be its deictic function, used to point someone or something out, for instance a new speaker (change of addressee, as in 2) or emphasising a subject (as in 1) (see also Zachariassen 2017: 511–21). Skovse (2018: 93) gives a few examples of pronouns in extra-position used by speakers in Odense, but the phenomenon has not (yet) been described in any of the Copenhagen studies (although it is mentioned anecdotally as part of the speech in Copenhagen, too). 3.2 Phonology When it comes to pronunciation, both prosody and segmental phonological features have been described as characteristic of Danish urban contact dialects. First of all, an emblematic stress pattern has been noted in various studies; first by Quist, who described the speech of young Copenhageners as “staccato-like” with “weaker but more stresses” (Quist 2000: 154–5). With the aim of offering a more detailed phonological description of what made “multiethnolect” sound “staccato”, Pharao and Hansen (2010) set up an acoustic, experimental study in which, among other things, they manipulated vowel lengths in speech samples. The test results showed a tendency for phonologically long vowels (in standard) to be shortened (in multiethnolect) and long vowels with secondary accent to have a longer duration compared to standard. They suggested that these characteristics might contribute to the overall ‘staccato’ impression. Furthermore, it is a recurring feature of Danish urban contact dialects that speakers vary their use of the Danish ‘stød’ (glottal restriction). There is a tendency among speakers to omit ‘stød’ in contexts where standard Danish would have ‘stød’ (e.g. Quist 2008). Conversely, young speakers may add a ‘stød’ to new words, as for instance noted in the case

194  Pia Quist of the Turkish loan word ‘lan’, which means ‘man’ or ‘boy’, as in this example from Møller (2010: 133): ja selvfølgelig skal man ikke generalisere lan’  ‘Yes, of course you shouldn’t generalise, man’ – where the ’ indicates the ‘stød’ pronounced on the consonant /n/. The two phonological variables /r/ and /t/ have also been described as characteristic of Danish urban contact dialects. Maegaard (2007) was the first to notice and give a phonetic account of the prevocalic [t] variant pronounced with affrication and palatalisation [ts]/[tj], for instance in words like total and tusind (‘total’ and ‘thousand’). The standard pronunciation would be with a [t]. In the same study (2007), Maegaard also described the prevocalic unvoiced r in words like rød and gruppe (red and group) pronounced as [ʁ̥] where the standard variant would be [ʁ]. Both the /r/ and the /t/ variables are shown to have indexical meaning among the participants in the studies from Vollsmose in Odense (cf. later in this chapter, Skovse 2018). 3.3 Lexicon Lastly, the Danish studies identify a range of lexical items that are associated with Danish urban contact dialects. These are words from the largest heritage languages, first and foremost from Arabic and Turkish, but sometimes also from languages such as Urdu, Berber, Serbian and Kurdish depending on the local context. Some words are only registered locally and not found elsewhere (for instance lak (‘hey’ or ‘hello’) in Odense, whose origin is unclear, Skovse 2018 (93). The words are typically used with slang and discourse regulating functions. Some of the most frequently used words in Danish urban contact dialects are (note, there are no regulated spelling conventions): Jalla (Arabic: ‘hurry up, come on, move away’), habibi (Arabic: ‘friend, darling’), wallah (Arabic/ Turkish: ‘by Allah, to swear by Allah, I swear’), lan (Turkish: ‘man’ or ‘young man’), para (‘money’, from Turkish), kɪz (‘girl’, from Turkish). Wallah is used as a discourse marker that emphasises the correctness or significance of what is being said. It is placed in front of or after an utterance, for instance wallah, jeg siger dig det var en god fest (wallah, I  tell you it was a great party), denoting ‘it is true that the party was great’. Wallah is arguably the oldest and most emblematic marker of speech styles associated with immigrant urban youth in Denmark. It was used in one of the earliest media representations of urban youth dialects in the animated online game Mujaffaspillet (‘The Mujaffa Game’) launched online by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation in 2000. One of the phrases in the game, wallah min fætter (‘wallah my cousin’), gained instant popularity and was copied and parodied by young people who

Denmark 195 otherwise did not use urban contact dialects (Quist and Jørgensen 2007). In the Odense study (Quist and Skovse 2020), one of the participants referred to wallah as “normal”, implying that it is used so frequently that they don’t even consider it part of any non-standard style or dialect. Again, this is an example of the fact that the boundary between what is considered standard and non-standard is dynamic and always situated. Another recurring word in Denmark is the Turkish word lan (‘man’ or ‘young man’) (Quist 2000; Madsen 2015; Møller 2010). Among the young speakers of urban contact dialects, lan is used as an emphasiser, for instance det er sejt, lan (‘it is cool, man’). Lan is also used as a label or proper noun for a person, friend or stranger, e.g. hey, lan (‘hey, man’). Møller (2010) showed in a detailed analysis of a group of TurkishDanish young people from Køge that lan is used with Danish pronunciation with stød [lanˀ] (see preceding section). All the features mentioned here, grammatical, phonological and lexical, reoccur across the cities of Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense, although apparently with more observed ‘pronouns in extra position’ and more words from Arabic in Aarhus than in Odense and Copenhagen. More­ over, all the features appear to be present in all the communities studied since 1998 until today. Even though in the first study Quist did not note or write about the /t/ variable, listening again to the old data from 1998 reveals that the speakers, in fact, also then used the non-standard, palatalised [tj]. Thus, the characteristics that have been presented here seem to form a – so far – more or less stable pool of linguistic resources that alone or in clusters, and in certain contexts, may be associated with multi-ethnic urban youth, and which we as linguists may term an urban contact dialect. As I shall argue in the following section, however, there is a vast degree of variability that needs to be taken into consideration too, not only among speakers in urban youth groups, but also among individuals. Arguably, no speaker uses all the mentioned features all the time. Some may only use some of the lexical features combining them with an otherwise standard Danish pronunciation. And others may use all of the features in peer-group interactions, but none of them in, for instance, educational contexts. The question, therefore, is to what extent the term ‘dialect’ is appropriate for the pool of features described in this section. This is an ongoing discussion reflecting the different approaches in Danish sociolinguistics – the topic of the next section.

4 Sociolinguistic findings It is possible to distinguish between two lines of research traditions in Danish urban contact dialects. One emanates from dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics and may broadly be categorised under the notion of ‘third wave sociolinguistics’ (Eckert 2012); the other one has developed from research in bilingualism, studies of code-switching and

196  Pia Quist interaction analysis subscribing to the theory of languaging (Jørgensen 2008, 2010). For the purpose of giving a simple overview of Danish studies, these two lines of studies will be presented in separate sections. However, it should be mentioned that many of the researchers who contribute to each type of study also work across and fruitfully draw on and combine both research traditions (e.g. Pharao et al. 2014, 2015; Quist and Jørgensen 2007). 4.1 Third-wave studies Whereas the main objective in the first study by Quist (2000) was a structural account of the new urban speech styles in Copenhagen, Maegaard (2007) and Quist (2005) took the local community of practice as their starting point, allowing them to include in the study all participants regardless of ethnic or linguistic background. In this way, (features of) urban contact dialects were studied in relation to all other linguistic registers present among the participants. Both Maegaard and Quist explicitly positioned their studies within third-wave sociolinguistics, a line of research that investigates the social meaning of variables in styles, taking variation to constitute “a social semiotic system capable of expressing the full range of a community’s social concerns” (Eckert 2012: 94). In these studies, then, urban contact dialects were approached as forming part of a social semiotic system that also included speech styles that were different from  – and even opposed to  – them. Based on ethnographic observations in a large state school in Copenhagen, Maegaard found that besides the central dividing social category of gender, participants distinguished between what they called “Danes” and “foreigners”. This distinction, Maegaard argued, emerges from social practices and not merely ethnic background. Maegaard studied ten phonetic variables and how they related to social categories. Seven of these phonetic variables were “traditional non-standard variables” known from earlier studies of Copenhagen speech (Maegaard 2010: 194), but three of them were new, and the study showed that they were used by and associated with those who in the community were called ‘foreigners’. These were the devoicing of /r/, the palatalisation of /t/ (cf. Section 3) and the dentalisation of /s/, which Maegaard found was used by the groups called ‘foreign girls’ and ‘nice Danish girls’ (but not by boys and ‘tough Danish girls’). [tj] was used by ‘tough ethnically mixed boys’ and devoiced /r/ by ‘foreigner’ boys and girls alike. Maegaard concluded that the three new phonetic variables contribute to practices that construct the category of ‘foreigners’. As mentioned in Section 3, devoiced /r/ and [tj] have also been found in other studies, even outside Copenhagen, to denote features that belong to Danish urban contact dialects. This is not the case for dentalised /s/ (which is why it is not described in further detail in Section 3), although this variable has shown to work in complex ways, and is sometimes a

Denmark 197 feature used by speakers of urban contact dialects. Based on Maegaard’s findings, Pharao et  al. (2015) developed a verbal guise test to investigate indexical meanings of dentalised /s/. Their results showed that nonstandard dentalised /s/ indexes ‘femininity’ and ‘gayness’ when it occurs in ‘modern Copenhagen’ speech, but when it occurs in speech associated with urban contact dialect (in their study termed ‘street language’), these indexical meanings disappear and seem to be overruled by values like ‘gangster’ and ‘foreigner’. Thus, their study confirmed the general argument in third-wave sociolinguistics that no variable is meaningful in itself, but becomes socially meaningful in semiotic systems (or indexical fields, Eckert 2008). The community of practice was also the starting point in Quist’s study in 2005. Quist conducted five months of ethnographic fieldwork in two high school classes in the diverse Copenhagen neighbourhood of Nørrebro. Use of urban contact dialect features (in the study called ‘multi­ ethnolect’) was studied as part of an investigation into local stylistic practices (Quist 2008). Quist identified seven style clusters, two of which contained urban contact dialects. A style cluster is a set of practices that recur and cluster over time and thereby produce recognisable styles. A style cluster would include practices such as participants’ movements, friendships, clothing, smoking and listening to music, but also linguistic practices such as the use of multiethnolect features. Quist concluded that multiethnolect features in this community of practice formed part of a multitude of stylistic and linguistic resources; for example, among boys, multiethnolect features were used by those who in school classes were called ‘foreigners’. They were observed to show little or no interest in class teaching; they used their computers for games, chat and music; their preferred place to hang out during lunch breaks was the hallway between classrooms; they had images of cars as computer wallpaper etc. (Quist 2008: 61). In contrast to this style cluster was a group of boys who would never use multiethnolect. They would, for instance, signal active engagement in class teaching: they stayed in the classroom during breaks, working on their homework together, they used their computers for school work etc. Some of the core performers of this style cluster had an ethnic background other than Danish (e.g. Pakistani), which made Quist stress, in line with Maegaard (2007), that practices and not ethnic background predict the use of multiethnolect. In a recent study located in Odense, the third biggest city in Denmark, urban contact dialect was studied alongside the use of the regional dialect (called Funen) (Quist and Skovse 2020). All participants in this study, except one, had parents who immigrated to Denmark as adults (mainly from Somalia, Iraq and Lebanon). As prosody seems to be a central (if not the most important) resource for distinguishing registers (Grønnum 1998), Skovse (2018) set out to operationalise and conduct a quantitative analysis of the use of Funen intonation (considered salient in Funen

198  Pia Quist Table 11.2 Categorisation of participants according to amount of Funen intonation and staccato-like prosody combined, sorted according to quartile distribution. The boys’ names are in bold. All names are pseudonyms (from Quist and Skovse 2020)

Frequent Funen intonation  Some Funen intonation  No or very little Funen intonation 

Frequent staccatolike prosody 

Some staccatolike prosody 

Very little or no staccatolike prosody 

Aaryan, Mustafa, Bilal, Luong Ahmed

Husayn

Ihsan, Rami

Ekin, Nyomi

Nhung, Marley, Antam, Bo Leila, Falisha Yacoub, Mujin, Hakim Famida, Haritha, Sorena Sandara, Sjamilla, Rhea, Sashiga, Sulejma, Hayah, Naiima, Souz, Zudora, Sahara, Szaza, Syoma, Adiba, Ashanti, Dinah, Inara, Nuray, Salinah, Yahaira, Susu

dialect) and the staccato-like prosody that is associated with urban contact dialects (see Section 3; for further details and discussion of methods and procedures, see Skovse 2018 and Quist and Skovse 2020). Results showed a clear gender division. Most of the girls did not use staccatolike prosody or Funen intonation, whereas a group of boys used both staccato-like prosody and Funen intonation (see Table 11.2). Interestingly, the study also showed that the four boys (Aaryan, Mustafa, Bilal, Luong) who combine staccato-like prosody and Funen intonation are seen as the ‘tough’ boys among the participants in the study. The study concluded that urban contact dialect in Odense is used stylistically in the context of the social landscape together with the regional dialect to index not only ethnicity, but also qualities such as localness, toughness and masculinity. 4.2 Interactional sociolinguistics and languaging J. Normann Jørgensen developed his theory of languaging on the basis of studies of code-switching (Jørgensen 2010) conducted as part of the longitudinal research project the “Køge Project” (Jørgensen et al. 1991). Jørgensen studied interactional developments among Turkish-Danish bilinguals from when they started school in 1989 until they finished 9th grade in 1998 (Møller et al. 1998) and found code-switching practices to be more linked to social positioning among children than it was to linguistic skills and performance in a traditional sense (Jørgensen 1998). The methodological focus on turn-by-turn analyses of bilingual conversations, paying close attention to social categories, identity and power, was

Denmark 199 taken up and developed further by Jørgensen’s students and colleagues, paving the way for the languaging research group and the research project “Copenhagen Studies of Everyday Languaging” (see Section 2). Several studies connected to this project have included research on urban contact dialects. Or rather, they have included features associated with urban contact dialects in their analyses when they were present in the interactions under study – which they often were since these studies were situated in urban, diverse contexts (Madsen et al. 2016: 3). Foregrounding the fluidity of linguistic boundaries, it is central to the research group that they treat ‘lects’ and ‘languages’ as the ideological constructs they are, and to avoid “a principled, a priori and naturalised division of linguistic resources into distinct language” (Madsen et al. 2016: 1) – speakers use “features or resources rather than using languages as coherent bounded and distinct entities” (ibid.: 9). Some studies have focused particularly on the processes in which linguistic features are ‘enregistered’, i.e. how speakers ideologically cluster linguistic features into socially meaningful and recognisable registers (Agha 2007; Stæhr 2014). Karrebæk (2015), for instance, analysed the uses of wallah and argued that it could index both ‘Arabic’ and ‘urban youth style’, invoking stereotypical meanings such as ‘masculine’ and ‘streetwise’, but also that, as a free floating shibboleth, it is prone to reenregisterment over time (ibid.: 46). Also employing Agha’s terminology of enregisterment (Agha 2005, 2007), Madsen, Møller and Jørgensen analysed meta-pragmatic statements by young speakers about what they called “street language” (Madsen et  al. 2010; Madsen 2013). Through analyses of the ways young speakers talk about language, the researchers gained insights into values and ideologies connected to different registers. Madsen et  al. observed that the young speakers in their study distinguished between two distinct ways of speaking that were different from what they perceived as “normal” (Madsen 2013: 121). One was labelled “street language” (gadesprog) (which would more or less refer to the linguistic resources that make up Danish urban contact dialects; see Section 3). But it was also called “perkeraccent or perkersprog (equivalent to ‘paki accent’ or ‘language’) or slang ‘slang’ ” (Madsen 2013: 121), indicating its status as linked to minority speakers. In contrast, participants also talked about a register they called “integrated” (integreret), which was associated with, among other things, teachers’ ways of speaking. Linguistically, “integrated” was characterised by complex sentences and technical words. Table  11.3 provides a list of values that each register was found to index among the participants. Madsen then argued that such values connected their speech to more macrolevel ideologies of ‘class’ in the sense of ‘high’ and ‘low’ societal status (Madsen 2013: 133–5).

200  Pia Quist Table 11.3 Value binaries associated with integrated and street (from Madsen 2013: 134) Integrated (majority)

Perker (minority)

High Academic Polite Reason Feminine Adult 

Low Street Tough Emotion Masculine Youthful

4.3 Style-shift To finish this chapter, I  will turn to a recent study by Quist (2019) of style-shift among 21 speakers in the diverse suburb of Vollsmose in Odense. The study does not fit in under the previous section headings as it confronts a dominant view in the sociolinguistic study of urban contact dialects. Whether third wave or subscribing to the theory of languaging, linguistic practices are generally conceived as performative practices, assigning agency and control to the individual speaker (e.g. Quist 2012, but perhaps most clearly expressed by the theories of languaging, Jørgensen 2010, and poly-languaging, Møller 2010). Despite apparently similar linguistic backgrounds and life experiences, some speakers come across as eminent style-shifters who are able to control different features of grammar, phonology and lexicon, while others seem to struggle and be unable to change their speech in different situations. Drawing on work by Sharma (2018; Sharma and McCarthy 2018), Quist argues that by the ‘performative turn’ in the study of urban contact dialects, we (to use Sharma’s words) “risk losing sight of cognitive effects and implicitly assuming equal control of variants in an individual’s repertoire” (Sharma 2018: 3). Quist (2019) investigates the use of urban contact dialect across three different speech situations: a conversation with a student counsellor, an interview with a researcher and conversations amongst groups of friends. The study showed great differences between the degrees to which the participants style-shift between urban contact dialect and Standard Danish. Some speakers do not style-shift at all, but use urban contact dialect in all three situations; others only use urban contact dialect in the recordings of groups of friends; and one of the participants speaks standard Danish in all three situations. These differences in how much each speaker changed style across situations were then compared to insights from ethnographic observations and the mobility histories of each participant. Results showed that: (1) girls tended to change speech style more than boys; the majority of boys did not change across the three situations; (2) one’s position in the social landscape reflected some of the variability; boys who were seen as (and also labelled by others as)

Denmark 201 “nerds” style-shifted across situations, whereas “tough boys” used the same urban contact dialect in all three situations; and (3) a biography with a varied mobility history resulted in a greater likelihood to styleshift, although an early stage in a second language acquisition process meant less tendency to change style. These results not only suggest that style variability (like language variation in the traditional sense, cf. Section 4.1) forms an integral part of stylistic practice. In addition, and following Sharma (2018), Quist argues that variability in the use of urban contact dialect seems to be connected to factors such as style dominance and control. Because of different linguistic biographies, and thus differences in the amount of exposure they had to the registers in play among the participants, some speakers appear to struggle more to control styleshift than do others. Further research is called for, particularly research that includes an openness to potential (cognitive) factors which influence style choice and control.

Note 1  Statistics Denmark counts a person as an immigrant if that person was born outside Denmark, and a descendent of an immigrant is a person whose parents were born outside Denmark and/or have non-Danish citizenship.

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Denmark 205 Quist, Pia and Bente Ailin Svendsen (2020). Urban speech styles of Germanic languages. In: The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics.  Michael Putnam and Richard Page (eds.), 714–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781108378291.031. Rampton, Ben, Karen Tusting, Janet Maybin, Richard Barwell, Angela Creese and Vally Lytra (2004). UK Linguistic Ethnography: A discussion paper: UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum. Risager, Karen (2006). Hvilke sprog tales der i Danmark? Sprogforum 16(49/50): 94–6. Schøning, Signe and Janus Møller (2009). Self-recordings as a social activity. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 32(2): 245–69. DOI: 10.1017/s0332586509990060 Sharma, Devyani (2018). Style dominance: Attention, audience, and the ‘real me’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 47(1): 1–31. Sharma, Devyani and Kathleen McCarthy (2018). Attentional load and style control. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 24(2): Article 15. Skovse, Astrid Ravn (2018). Udgangspunkter og orienteringspunkter: En undersøgelse af socio-geografisk orientering, hverdagsmobilitet og sproglig praksis blandt unge to steder i Danmark. [Outsets and destinations. On the relationship between socio-geographic orientation, everyday mobility and linguistic practice among adolescents in two Danish settings]. PhD dissertation, University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Humanities, Copenhagen. Steensig, Jakob (2021). Nyere indvandrersprog i Danmark. In: Dansk sproghistorie: dansk i samspil. E. Hjorth, H. G. Jacobsen, B. Jørgensen, B. Jacobsen, M. K. Jørgensen and L. K. Fahl (eds.) (Bind 5, 313–25). Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab. Stæhr, Andreas (2010). “Rappen reddede os” – Et studie af senmoderne storbydrenges identitets-arbejde i fritids- og skolemiljøer. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism, 54. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Humanities. Stæhr, Andreas (2014). Social media and everyday language use among Copenhagen youth. Copenhagen: Københavns Universitet, Det Humanistiske Fakultet. Stæhr, Andreas and Lian Malai Madsen (2017). ‘Ghetto language’ in Danish mainstream rap. Language and Communication 52: 60–73. DOI: 10.1016/j. langcom.2016.08.006. Svendsen, Bente Ailin and Røyneland, Unn (2008). Multiethnolectal facts and functions in Oslo, Norway. International Journal of Bilingualism 12: 63–83. Wenger, Etienne (1998). Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/cbo9780511803932. Zachariassen, Ditte (2017). Ekstrapositionerede pronominer i optagelser fra Aarhus Vest. MUDS – Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog 16: 507–24.

12 Norway Contemporary urban speech styles Bente A. Svendsen

1 Social and linguistic context 1.1 Norwegian as a majority language: a covert monolingual habitus Norwegian and Sámi (since 1990, implemented in 1992) are the two official languages of Norway. As a consequence of being a former colony under the Danish crown,1 there are two official written standards of Norwegian, bokmål (‘Book language’, based on the former Danish language) and nynorsk (‘New Norwegian’), a state-constructed post-colonial Norwegian language, based primarily on the dialects on the West Coast, replacing Aasen’s Landsmaal in 1929 (Vikør 2015). In contrast to many European nation-states, the Norwegian linguascape has been described as a paradise in which “there is an enormous social tolerance for linguistic diversity” (Trudgill 2002: 31). Such general praise must be taken with a pinch of salt, particularly in light of 19th and 20th century official language policy and harsh practices whereby strangers in paradise were expelled, i.e. discriminated against, abused and even forcibly sterilised,2 particularly speakers of Sámi languages and the official national minority languages Kven, Romani and Romanés (Vlach Romani) (Wiedner 2016). There is no officially recognised spoken standard language in Norway (cf. Jahr and Mæhlum 2009) and, in general, dialects are considered prestigious and the default choice in national broadcasting, Parliament, government and education. There are, nevertheless, dialect and language hierarchies, hegemonies and language policing, where some languages and dialects have higher prestige than others, and language and dialect mixing is generally looked down upon (Jahr 1988; Sandøy 2013; Svendsen 2006; van Ommeren 2016). The emergence of more recent urban contact dialects, the topic of this chapter, or what I refer to, following the usage of Rampton (2015), Agha (2007) and Eckert (2008), as contemporary urban speech styles or CUSs (Svendsen 2015), was first documented in Oslo, the capital, around the turn of the millennium. DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-16

Norway 207 1.2 Multilingual reality and urban diversity Norway is a linguistically diverse country. However, in contrast to many other countries, there are no census data on the language composition or linguistic characteristics of the Norwegian population, their command of languages or language-use patterns, such as languages spoken at home. There exist studies of local dialect vitality (e.g. Røyneland 2009) and of attitudes (e.g. Sandøy 2013), but relatively few on language competence in and use of languages other than Norwegian (but see, for example, Lanza and Svendsen 2007; Brevik and Hellekjær 2018). In 2014, the first large-scale national study on language use at school and in the home was conducted (Svendsen et  al. 2015). Data were collected through a citizen sociolinguistic method (Svendsen 2018; Svendsen and Goodchild 2021), engaging young citizen scientists in all grades in primary, secondary and upper secondary school in each county of the country. Most of the 4,500 pupils who participated claimed competence in three languages, and 530 of them stated that they use two or more languages on a daily basis. In addition to the two official languages (Norwegian and Sámi), there are, as highlighted earlier in this chapter, many dialects, and English is mandatory from first grade and is known and used by almost the entire population. Its use is currently increasing in certain domains, particularly in academia and in business (e.g. Språkrådet 2018). Norwegian linguistic diversity also comprises Norwegian Sign Language and the official national minority languages (cf. earlier in this chapter), and many other more recent minority languages. According to Statistics Norway (henceforth SN 2020), 14.7% of the total population of 5.3  million have migrated to Norway, and 3.5% of the population have two immigrated parents. There are people from 220 of the world’s regions and nations living in Norway. The five largest immigrant groups comprise people from Poland, Lithuania, Somalia, Sweden and Pakistan (SN 2020). Oslo hosts the largest immigrant population (33%), according to SN (2020), meaning individuals who have migrated to Norway including children of two immigrated parents. In Bergen, the second largest city, the figure is 18% and 16% in Trondheim, the third largest Norwegian city (SN 2020). Oslo is today as divided as it was in the 1950s with respect to house prices, education, welfare, life expectancy and income (Ljunggren 2015; Oslo Municipality 2019), reflecting an old socio-economic divide between the east and west sides of the river Aker. The traditional working-class area was located east of the river, whereas the bourgeoisie/upper-class area was to the west. Today, the majority of the immigrant population live in the eastern city districts (Oslo Municipality 2019). However, people from western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand live mainly in the west and in one of the gentrified city districts in the east, whereas people from Asia, Africa and South America reside mainly in

208  Bente A. Svendsen the eastern parts, i.e. in the inner city and in the suburbs northeast of and southeast of Oslo. Research on CUSs in Oslo has been conducted in the multilingual neighbourhoods in the eastern areas in the inner city and in one of the southern suburbs, and the socio-economic divide of Oslo is clearly visible in young people’s orientation, experience and recounting (see section 4).

2  Existing studies 2.1  Scope and range of Norwegian research on CUSs Scandinavian researchers were pioneers in the study of CUSs, initiated by Kotsinas (1988). In Norway, the first study on CUSs was a master’s thesis on lexicon (loan words and slang) among city dwellers in Oslo (Aasheim 1995). Around the turn of the millennium, several slang studies were carried out in Norway (e.g. Drange 2002), including slang associated with CUSs. A specific focus on structural and functional aspects of CUSs arose in 2005 with the UPUS/Oslo project (lit. “developmental processes in urban linguistic environments”). A large body of research on CUSs has been conducted within this project, as well as in the wake of it, and this research forms a substantial part of this chapter. Most research on CUSs has been conducted in Oslo, the only research con ducted outside it being two studies in Trondheim (Hårstad 2010; Strandheim 2018) and one in Bergen (Ellingsen 2015). Hårstad’s (2010) study was part of the UPUS project, for which research was conducted in four Norwegian cities, Oslo, Trondheim, Bodø and Tromsø, while Strandheim’s (2018) and Ellingsen’s (2015) studies are to a large extent modelled on the Oslo part of the UPUS project. The Norwegian research on CUSs is, as shown later in this chapter, still rather sparse. The areas that have received most attention are lexicon and syntax (V2-variation), as well as the use of CUSs in identity work. There has been minimal work on the morphological features of CUSs (but see Opsahl 2009a) and, surprisingly, none on phonology, despite its central role in people’s conceptions of this register (cf. Ims 2013; Svendsen and Røyneland 2008). Some researchers have paid attention to music (hip-hop), literature and textbooks, and the role such sociocultural expressions play in the enregisterment processes of CUSs (e.g. Cutler and Røyneland 2015; Knudsen 2010; Opsahl and Røyneland 2016). Moreover, some sociologists have conducted research in the multilingual neighbourhoods of Oslo (e.g. Sandberg 2005; Rogstad and Vestel 2011; Vestel 2009). Parts of this sociological research are included in this chapter, but first we present the UPUS/Oslo project and the UPUS database, as well as other available databases, which have been used in many of the Norwegian studies of CUSs.

Norway 209 2.2  Available databases and infrastructure The data in the UPUS/Oslo project were collected between 2006 and 2008 by Aarsæther, Opsahl, Nistov, Røyneland and Svendsen, and made available through a digital corpus developed in collaboration with the Tekstlaboratoriet (the “Text Laboratory”) at the University of Oslo. The UPUS/Oslo corpus consists of video-recorded dyadic semi-structured interviews and dyadic peer conversations, with no researchers present, with 48 adolescents born and raised in Oslo, living at that time in two multilingual areas (Svendsen and Røyneland 2008). Some of the adolescents have Norwegian-born parents (15) and some have one (7) or two immigrated parents (26). The majority of them consider Norwegian to be their “mother tongue”, either as their sole language or in addition to another language (Svendsen 2009). Some of the studies (Opsahl 2009b; Opsahl et  al. 2008) use another corpus for comparative purposes, viz. the NoTa-corpus (Norsk Talespråkskorpus/Oslo, “Norwegian Spoken Language Corpus, Oslo section”), from 2004–6. The NoTa-corpus was also developed by the Text Laboratory and consists of interviews with and conversational data from 166 respondents in Oslo and surrounding areas. The corpus is statistically representative with respect to several social variables. In addition, there are two databases available for further (comparative) analyses, which also include data on CUSs; these are a slang corpus, www.slang.no from 1997–8, for which data were provided by adolescents in Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø, and the database developed in connection with the national Norwegian Research Council’s annual Research Campaign 2014, Ta tempen på språket! (“Taking the temperature of language!”), www.miljolare.no/aktiviteter/ord/ (Svendsen 2018; Svendsen et al. 2015). Additionally, there are dictionaries of what is presumed to be the lexicon of the most explored CUS in Norway, among which Kebabnorsk ordbok (‘Kebab Norwegian dictionary’, Østby 2005) is the most extensive and prominent.

3  Structural findings Many of the Norwegian researchers on CUSs have found, as elsewhere in Scandinavia and in other Germanic languages, such as Dutch and German, that straight word order or non-inversion is a characteristic feature of CUSs (Freywald et al. 2015; Ganuza 2008; Hårstad and Opsahl 2013; Kotsinas 1988; Nortier 2001; Opsahl and Nistov 2010; Quist 2000; Svendsen and Røyneland 2008). Most Germanic languages (not including Modern English) adhere to the V2 constraint. This means that the finite verb occupies the second position in the clause, irrespective of which constituent occupies the first position. In a clause where another element has been topicalised or fronted (X), such as an adverbial or an embedded clause, and in interrogatives, the canonical subject position is

210  Bente A. Svendsen after the finite verb, and before any of the verb complements (XVS), as exemplified in Norwegian in (1b), marked in bold: (1a) hun gikk på kino i går ‘she went to the cinema yesterday’ (1b) i går gikk hun på kino yesterday went she to the cinema ‘yesterday she went to the cinema’ Opsahl and Nistov (2010) studied inversion and gender simplifications in the UPUS/Oslo data (cf. Section 2). They found clear situational differences in terms of non-inversion (XSV) in topicalised declarative main clauses; the proportion was more than three times higher in the peer conversations than in the interviews, although the numbers of possible contexts for XSV were higher in the interviews. They argue that XSV is characteristic of language use in in-group settings, and particularly when adolescents adopt a high involvement speech style. XSV seems to be triggered by particular topicalised adverbs such as egentlig (‘actually’). Moreover, Opsahl and Nistov (2010) argue that there seems to be an interplay between syntactic and morphological features characterising this in-group speech style; grammatical gender simplifications seem to accompany the use of XSV. The instances of gender simplifications are, however, relatively few in the corpus as a whole, and at the individual level too. Nistov and Opsahl (2014) argue, taking a sociolinguistic approach to syntax, that “violations” of the syntactic V2 constraint have developed from an interactional accommodation strategy to intentional usage imitating in-group prestigious patterns that index coolness, toughness and “foreignness”. The results for V2 variation from UPUS/Oslo are taken further and compared with data from Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany (Freywald et al. 2015). By comparing language use in situated discourse in four different projects, these authors argue, in line with Kotsinas (1988) and Quist (2000), the instances of XSV are not a matter of incomplete acquisition, but rather form an integral part of the grammar of the “contemporary urban vernaculars” in question (albeit not in the Dutch data). In interviews and written texts, XSV is rare or even absent. Their comparison evokes questions of whether we are witnessing ‘mere’ language contact phenomena or processes of language change, reminiscent of the loss of V2 during the Middle English period (cf. e.g. Kroch et al. 2000). In Bergen, in her study calqued on the UPUS/Oslo-project, Ellingsen (2015) finds that there are differences in language use in interviews and in peer conversations. These differences are lexical and grammatical, as well as prosodic. Ellingsen argues that an informal situation where peers

Norway 211 interact triggers the use of CUSs. Interestingly, Ellingsen finds a discrepancy between young people’s statements and linguistic data. When asked whether there exists a unique form of Norwegian in multilingual environments in Bergen, almost all participants answered positively. Ellingsen cannot, however, on the basis of her analysis, state that this is the case. As she points out, “it cannot be taken for granted that the adolescents share the same perception of the speech style”, and features used by some of the adolescents were not observed in others (Ellingsen 2015: 150). In Trondheim, Strandheim (2018) investigated the language use in peer conversations and metalinguistic comments in interviews conducted with eight adolescents in a multilingual neighbourhood. She concludes based on linguistic analysis and metalinguistic comments that there is a “multiethnolectal style” in use among these and other young people in that neighbourhood. In her data, she finds instances of “non-inversion” in group conversations, as well as the use of loans. The lexemes are mainly adjectives and interjections, and they are often invectives. As in Ellingsen’s (2015), Svendsen and Røyneland’s (2008) and Ims’ (2014) studies, a “staccato” prosody is reported, but not examined. Since Aasheim’s (1995) study, there have been several studies of youth slang (e.g. Bjorvatn 2015; Drange 2002; Opsahl et  al. 2008; Svendsen et  al. 2015; Svendsen 2018). These studies investigate the use of slang words primarily from languages that are more recent in Norway, such as Arabic, Punjabi, Urdu, Berber and Turkish. Many of these words and expressions are highlighted as invectives in the research, in the media as well as in slang dictionaries (e.g. Østby 2005). Additionally, as in other countries in Europe, wallah (from Arabic ‘I swear by Allah’) is frequently reported in lexical studies of CUSs (Quist and Svendsen 2020). Opsahl (2009b) analyses, for example, the distribution and functions of wallah as a discourse marker, alongside its Norwegian counterparts such as  sverg,  jeg sverger  and  helt ærlig  (‘swear’, ‘I swear’ and ‘quite honestly’). Based on an interactional analysis of conversations among young people in the UPUS/Oslo corpus and in the NoTa corpus, Opsahl (2009b: 221) argues that the conversational style of adolescents in multiethnic areas in Oslo is characterised by an “extended degree of epistemic focus and expressions pointing explicitly towards the news value of utterances”. Discourse markers are also discussed in light of grammaticalisation processes. Ekberg et al. (2015) reveal through a cross-linguistic analysis of lexical particles that have been assumed to be more frequent or salient in CUSs, viz. Swedish sån, Norwegian sånn and German so (‘such (a)’), that the items undergo parallel development. By comparing language use in situated discourse in three different projects on CUSs, the authors demonstrate ways in which semantic and syntactic restrictions are relaxed in favour of a pragmatic expansion of lexical items as young people use them. They argue that some salient linguistic phenomena might appear

212  Bente A. Svendsen at first glance to be unsystematic reductions (such as “lack of articles” or “overuse of filler elements”). A closer look reveals systematic developments that build on an interaction of semantic loss and functional gain. In their analysis, they demonstrate that these developments are not restricted to CUSs, reminding us of processes of general language change.

4  Sociolinguistic findings 4.1  Identities and performances in interaction Many of the Norwegian and international studies on CUSs emphasise that CUS is one of many styles or registers in the young people’s repertoire, and that adolescents vary – as we all do – their speech according to the context (e.g. place, conversational partner and topic). Moreover, these studies point out that CUSs are used to signal in-group identities (Quist and Svendsen 2020). In a Norwegian context, these sociolinguistic and sociocultural studies have either investigated young people’s language use in various contexts, young people’s metalinguistic commentaries on their and others’ language use, or their non-habitual language use, such as crossing and stylisation. In two early master’s theses, Seim (2006) and Røynesdal (2007) demonstrate how language in general and CUSs in particular are linked to identity and how ethnicity is brought into play as a negotiable category among young people in multilingual neighbourhoods in Oslo. Aarsæther (2010) explores, based on the UPUS/ Oslo data, how girls of “ethnic Norwegian descent” in the inner city use “multiethnic youth language” to contrast with the posh West End. He points out that a majority of the adolescents in question perceive multiethnic youth language as an optional linguistic practice. Moreover, he emphasises a link between the use of multiethnic youth language and ethnicity, although such linguistic practices are by no means restricted to speakers with immigrant backgrounds (Aarsæther 2010). He thus highlights the salience of place and traditional socioeconomic categories as explanatory factors for the use of CUSs. In the UPUS/Oslo data, there are young people who emphasise that “speaking like a ‘foreigner’ ” is a strategy for performing a dangerous persona and gaining respect (Aarsæther 2010: 121, cf. Cutler and Røyneland 2015). This aligns with, as pointed out by Aarsæther (2010), Sandberg’s (2005) study of the strategies that adolescent males in the city centre of Oslo, in areas around Oslo central station, use as strategies for self-presentation. Public spaces in city centres are, according to Sandberg (2005: 46), often arenas for a macho street culture where it is important “to be able to defend yourself and to have friends that are willing to back you in fights. It is also important to pose as dangerous in order to avoid trouble”. Sandberg interviewed 30 youths, and he highlights a young man who grew up in Norway with his Norwegian mother, with only sporadic trips to his father’s country of

Norway 213 origin. The young man has, nonetheless, a clear self-perception of being “a foreigner” and he speaks with a Norwegian grammar “typical of people who do not have Norwegian as a first language” (Sandberg 2005: 33, my translation). In the UPUS/Oslo data, we find similar biographies, as pointed out and analysed by Svendsen and Røyneland (2008). Madsen and Svendsen (2015) explore and compare non-habitual language use in situated discourse, i.e. stylisation practices among adolescents in linguistically and culturally diverse areas in Copenhagen and Oslo. In both data sets, one of the most frequent types of stylisations involves projections of stereotypes associated with ethnicity. Madsen and Svendsen argue, however, in line with Rampton’s (2009) studies in the UK and Jaspers’ (e.g. 2011) studies in Antwerp, that ethnically marked stylisations are often indexical of other types of social division and inequality. They explain the differences in indexical values ascribed to CUSs in Denmark and Norway partly by ideological differences. In Norway, language is seen as a core value of identity and is strongly linked to place, whilst in Denmark there is a stronger tendency to understand all vernacular speech styles as non-standard, and as a contrast to what is perceived as an “academically ‘suitable’ style” (Madsen and Svendsen 2015: 228). 4.2  Macro-societal value ascriptions and language ideologies Semiotic registers or speech styles are typically found to be ideological formations (Agha 2007: 157) where the social existence of registers depends on the fact that stereotypes make them communicable across large sociodemographic scales and time-spans (p.  279). According to Agha (ibid. p. 150), these stereotypes are typically reflected in metapragmatic labelling or typifications of language and their users; in positive or negative accounts of typical speakers; in standards of appropriate usage; or in standards of the social worth of a language. Labelling is thus a vital part of an enregisterment process. In Norway, the emic label kebabnorsk (‘Kebab Norwegian’) was first used academically by Aasheim (1995), modelled on the Swedish term kebabsvenska (‘Kebab Swedish’), an emic term that was used alongside rinkebysvenska (‘Rinkeby Swedish’). The media took up the term, and Ims (2013) found in a quantitative analysis involving more than 100,000 respondents that the label is in use by people all over the country. Other labels were also in use, such as innvandrernorsk (‘immigrant Norwegian’) and highly derogatory terms such as pakkisnorsk (‘Paki Norwegian’) and apespråk (‘monkey talk’), as well as an Anglicism, retarded (cf. Kulbrandstad 2004 for other labels). Hårstad (2010) in Trondheim also found such pejorative labels among the 29 participants in his study of the ascribed values of crossing into what he labels an “ethnolectal” or “multiethnolectal speech style”. Several of his respondents used derogatory expressions like “crooked Norwegian”, “bad language”, “lame-ass Norwegian” and “broken Norwegian”

214  Bente A. Svendsen (Hårstad 2010: 233, his translation). According to Ims (2013), the respondents’ place of residence and their gender influence the labels they use. Men use more negative labels than women, and kebabnorsk is used, although with great variation, more in Oslo East than Oslo West. Ims (2013: 71) suggests that kebabnorsk as a label “has gone through a process of discursive neutralisation meeting with the unambiguously derogatory terms such as those mentioned above”. Svendsen and Marzo (2015) also suggest that there has been a discursive neutralisation of the term kebabnorsk over time. In 2008, Svendsen and Røyneland found that many of the self-proclaimed users of CUS perceived kebabnorsk as a pejorative term. In 2013, Svendsen conducted ad hoc interviews with young people passing by in the square in the same city district where she collected data in the UPUS/Oslo project in 2006, dressed in a white lab coat and with a poster saying “Please help a professor” (some thought she needed money). Svendsen found that all the interviewees (around 35) – answering an open question about how people speak there – stated that people round here speak kebabnorsk, indicating that discursive neutralisation had taken place (Svendsen and Marzo 2015: 62). One way of exploring the macro-societal value ascriptions and language ideologies vital to a register (Agha 2007) is through media discourse analyses, as done by Milani (2010) for rinkebysvenska (‘Rinkeby Swedish’) in Sweden and by Androutsopoulos (2010) in Germany (“ethnolectal German”). In Norway, there are few studies of discourse on CUSs in the mass media (Ims 2014; Svendsen 2014; Svendsen and Marzo 2015). Ims (2014) analyses how three Norwegians with immigrant backgrounds speak Norwegian and how the way they speak is ideologised and differentiated in a television programme aired on Norwegian television (NRK1) in 2010. By using the theoretical-analytical framework of Irvine and Gal (2000), Ims reveals how media contribute to the ascription of particular values to the various registers along the traditional dimensions of urban versus rural, standard versus dialect and high status versus low status, where the ‘Kebab Norwegian’ of the eastern part of Oslo is valued the lowest. Svendsen (2014) analyses the debate on ‘Kebab Norwegian’ that took place in the Norwegian press in June  2009. She identifies processes of erasure, iconisation and fractal recursivity (Irvine and Gal 2000), and demonstrates that the debate promotes a picture of the linguistic practices among adolescents in multilingual urban spaces as incomprehensible and deviant, and as “bad Norwegian” which inevitably leads to unemployment. ‘Kebab Norwegian’ is presented as a given, delimited way of speaking and its users as a specific, homogeneous group, namely “young people with an immigrant background”, rendering the immense social and linguistic diversity among them invisible. Svendsen emphasises that this representation of a particular way of speaking also serves to objectify specific representations of a linguistic and social reality. This kind of objectification is, according to her, far from value-neutral and constitutes

Norway 215 an ideological battlefield of social identities, interests and values, where traditional conceptions of social and ethnic categories are challenged (cf. also Mesthrie et al. 2022). 4.3  Kebabnorsk in textbooks and popular culture: hip-hop as a social movement For a way of speaking to become socially recognised as “indexical of speaker attributes by a population of language users” (or enregistered), it has to be conventionalised (Agha 2005: 38). Registers are dynamic or “living social formations” (ibid. p. 39) and prone to change over time, e.g. in social domain, range and valorisations. Over the years, there have been studies showing how CUSs, originally associated with local neighbourhoods, move from their local origin and are further entrenched or formed/reformed through popular cultural expressions, e.g. through rap and hip-hop culture, advertisements, commercials, text books, novels, movies and theatre plays (e.g. Kariuki et al. 2015; Källström 2010; Knudsen 2010; Milani et  al. 2015). Such trajectories play a vital role in processes of enregisterment. The Norwegian research on CUSs has, as elsewhere (e.g. Mous et  al. 2015), emphasised the link between CUSs, globalisation and hip-hop affiliation (Brunstad et al. 2010; Cutler and Røyneland 2015; Knudsen 2010; Opsahl and Røyneland 2016; Røyneland 2018; Svendsen and Røyneland 2008; Svendsen and Marzo 2015). According to these researchers, the use of CUSs in rap lyrics is an act of identity, an act of belonging, a way of demonstrating social and cultural resistance, as well as a form of advocacy for a broader conception of, or a transformation of, the traditional sociocultural norms of being “Norwegian”. Knudsen (2010) explores the connections between hip-hop music culture and CUS in central Oslo from both a sociolinguistic and a musicological perspective. He analyses the connection between the stylistic and rhythmic requirements of rap music and “multiethnolectal language features”, such as a straight word order, to match the typical basis of most hip-hop beats. According to Knudsen, the hip-hop crew’s (Minoritet1) “street language” creates links to a local environment, and challenges linguistic norms for acceptable language use; they use their “hybrid language variety” as part of their own socially critical project, challenging everything including the parents’ generation, public authorities and prevailing attitudes in society. Brunstad et al. (2010: 224, 249) outline developments of hip-hop in rural and urban Norway, and argue that hip-hop has had a significant influence “on the formation of a Norwegian multiethnolectal speech style” and serves the function of a “resistance vernacular”. Cutler and Røyneland (2015), like Røyneland (2018), emphasise, as do other studies, how hip-hop is used as a way to resist and transform traditional social and ethnic categories. By particularly exploring

216  Bente A. Svendsen YouTube rap music performances, Cutler and Røyneland (2015) find that the linguistic resources that rappers use, including resources associated with CUSs, index locality: they speak from a place; they use resources from the so-called hip-hop Nation Language, their heritage language and other languages. By comparing data from Norway and the US, Cutler and Røyneland illustrate the glocal character of rap and hip-hop. They show how rappers use linguistic resources to express social and discursive stances, e.g. solidarity with or distance from an interlocutor, a street orientation, as well as a status as an insider/artist. They emphasise that hip-hop is used as self-performance, as a way of accentuating the gangster persona or projecting images of dangerousness. During the last decade, other popular cultural expressions have contributed to the ongoing enregisterment process of kebabnorsk. Pedersen (2016) analysed the novel Alle utlendinger har lukka gardiner (‘All foreigners have closed curtains’), by the young author Maria Navarro Skaranger (2015). This book received a lot of positive attention in the press, and was launched as the first novel written in kebabnorsk. A film based on the book was released in March 2020. Pedersen (2016) analysed the book linguistically and discussed the extent to which the written form could be characterised as authentic or representative of CUSs as described in the research literature, as well as how identities are constructed in the book. She found that the linguistic forms  – particularly the systematic use of a straight word order – were not in accordance with the research that has been conducted on young people’s language practices where the context-dependent altering of speech registers is emphasised (cf. earlier in this chapter). Thus, the book contributes, according to Pedersen, to construct a unified language variety with no variation. In 2018, the book Tante Ulrikkes vei (‘Aunt Ulrikke’s road’) by Zeshan Shakar was published (Shakar 2018). It was also very well received, and described as a masterpiece by the press (Shakar 2018 Atekst Retriever 2019). The book describes the two lives of Mo and Jamal when they grew up in Stovner, a multilingual area in a northeastern suburb of Oslo. Mo is voiced with the written standard language bokmål, whereas Jamal is given the voice of a kebabnorsk speaker. Anda (2019) analyses these portrayals in light of the reproduction of stereotypes and language ideologies (Irvine and Gal 2000), and finds that bokmål is linked to educational success and progress, and kebabnorsk to family disturbance and school dropout. Hence, the connection between kebabnorsk and socioeconomic failure is further entrenched and repeated, contributing to reproductions of stereotypes (cf. Bhabha 1983; Svendsen 2014). ‘Kebab Norwegian’ has found its way into textbooks. Through a semiotic discourse analysis of all high school textbooks, Opsahl and Røyneland (2016) investigate the way rap lyrics are included and linked to CUSs. They argue that the negative ways of presenting CUSs in the mass media are challenged in the textbooks by including rappers’ voices

Norway 217 and the way these performers advocate CUS as a dialect or sociolect in its own right. Opsahl and Røyneland argue that hip-hop and rap lyrics play a vital role in a re-evaluation and legitimisation process of CUSs in Oslo, and that there is, as emphasised by Ims (2013) and Svendsen and Marzo (2015), ongoing change in the valorisations of kebabnorsk. However, the future social life of CUSs in Norway, i.e. their use, stability, development, spread and public perception, is in need of continued research.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the other researchers in the UPUS project, Finn Aarsæther, Stian Hårstad, Ingvild Nistov, Toril Opsahl and Unn Røyneland, as well as to Paul Kerswill and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on this article. This work is partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265.

Notes 1 Due to the Black Death or Great Plague, Norway was part of the Kalmar Union from 1397, under the Danish crown from 1536–1814 and under the Swedish crown until 1905. 2 Because of the 1934 sterilisation law, many Romani women were forcibly sterilised (NOU 2015). In the work camp Svanviken, established in 1907, with the purpose of making wanderers (Romani people) to settle down, between 1949 and 1970, 38 families were brought to Svanviken. Fifteen of the mothers were sterilised (NOU 2015). Svanviken was established in 1907 and closed in 1989.

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Norway 221 Quist, Pia (2000). Ny københavnsk ‘multietnolekt’. Om sprogbrug blandt unge i sprogligt og kulturelt heterogene miljøer. Danske Talesprog 1: 143–212. Quist, Pia and Bente A. Svendsen (2020). Urban speech styles of Germanic languages. In: Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics. Michael T. Putnam and B. Richard Page (eds.), 714–35. Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781108378291.031. Rampton, Ben (2009). Interaction ritual and not just artful performance in crossing and stylization. Language in Society 38(2): 149–76. DOI: 10.1017/ s0047404509090319. Rampton, Ben (2015). Contemporary urban vernaculars. In: Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century. Linguistic Practices Across Urban Spaces. Jacomine Nortier and Bente A. Svendsen (eds.), 24–45. Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/cbo9781139061896.003. Rogstad, Jon and Viggo J. Vestel (2011). The art of articulation: Political engagement and social movements in the making among young adults in multicultural settings in Norway. Social Movement Studies 10(3): 243–64. DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2011.590028. Røyneland, Unn (2009). Dialects in Norway  – catching up with the rest of Europe? International Journal of the Sociology of Language 196–197: 7–31. DOI: 10.1515/ijsl.2009.015. Røyneland, Unn (2018). Virtually Norwegian: Negotiating language and identity on YouTube. In: Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer Mediated Communication. Cecilia Cutler and Unn Røyneland (eds.), 145–68. Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781316135570.009. Røynesdal, Hind (2007). Diversitet og aksept: språkpraksis og språkhaldningar blant sju ungdomar på Holmlia. MA thesis, University of Bergen. Sandberg, Sveinung (2005). Stereotypiens dilemma. Tidsskrift for Ung-doms-forskning 5(2): 27–46. Sandøy, Helge (2013). Driving forces in language change  – in the Norwegian perspective. In: Language (De)standardisation in Late Modern Europe: Experimental Studies. Tore Kristiansen and Stefan Grondelaers (eds.), 125–51. Oslo: Novus. Seim, Inger M.H. (2006). Identitet og etnisitet i samtale. En analyse av innhold og struktur i en samtale mellom to ungdommer i et flerkulturelt miljø i Oslo. MA thesis, University of Oslo. Shakar, Zeshan (2018). Tante Ulrikkes vei. Oslo: Gyldendal. Skaranger, Maria Navarro (2015). Alle utlendinger har lukka gardiner. Oslo: Oktober. Språkrådet (2018). Språk i Norge – kultur og infrastruktur [Language in Norway – culture and infrastructure]. Rapport. https://sprakinorge.no/ [Accessed 7 May 2019]. Statistics Norway (2020). www.ssb.no/en/ [Accessed 28 April 2020]. Strandheim, Kristin (2018). “Viss de e andre fålk som sjønne sæ like my på de, så kainn vi snakk meir sånn tradisjonell trøndersk”. En sosiolingvistisk studie av registervariasjon hos ungdom fra flerkulturelle miljøer i Trondheim. MA thesis, NTNU. Svendsen, Bente A. (2006). Fra språklig enhet til språklig pluralisme? Språk og identitet i det offisielle enspråklige Norge. In: Normalitet. Thomas H. Eriksen and Jan-Kåre Breivik (eds.), 227–52. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

222  Bente A. Svendsen Svendsen, Bente A. (2009). Flerspråklighet i teori og praksis. In: Flerspråklighet i skolen. Rita Hvistendahl (ed.), 31–60. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Svendsen, Bente A. (2014). Kebabnorskdebatten. En språkideologisk kamp om sosial identitet og verdier. Norsk tidsskrift for ungdomsforskning 1: 33–62. Svendsen, Bente A. (2018). The dynamics of citizen sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 2(2): 137–60. DOI: 10.1111/josl.12276. Svendsen, Bente A. and Samantha Goodchild (2021). How we talk about language: Exploring citizen sociolinguistics. Rymes, Betsy, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 201 pp. 1st edition, ISBN: 9781108725965. Journal of Sociolinguistics, https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12511. Svendsen, Bente A. and Stefania Marzo (2015). A ‘new’ speech style is born. The omnipresence of structure and agency in the life of semiotic registers in heterogeneous urban spaces. European Journal of Applied Linguistics 3(1): 47–85. DOI: 10.1515/eujal-2015-0008. Svendsen, Bente A. and Unn Røyneland (2008). Multiethnolectal facts and functions in Oslo, Norway. International Journal of Bilingualism 12: 63–83. DOI: 10.1177/13670069080120010501. Svendsen, Bente A., Else Ryen and Kristin V. Lexander (2015). Ta tempen på språket! Forskningsrapport. Oslo: Norwegian Research Council. www.mil jolare.no/aktiviteter/ord/ [Accessed 15 January 2019]. Trudgill, Peter (2002). Sociolinguistic Variation and Change. Edinburgh University Press. van Ommeren, Rikke (2016). Den flerstemmige språkbrukeren: En sosiolingvistisk studie av norske bidialektale. PhD thesis, NTNU. Vestel, Viggo J. (2009). Limits of hybridity versus limits of tradition? A semiotics of cultural reproduction, creativity, and ambivalence among multicultural youth in Rudenga, East Side Oslo. ETHOS: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 37(4): 466–88. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2009.01069.x. Vikør, Lars (2015). Norwegian: Bokmål vs Nynorsk. Språkrådet. www.sprakradet. no/Vi-og-vart/Om-oss/English-and-other-languages/English/norwegian-bokmalvs.-nynorsk/ [Accessed 11 May 2019]. Wiedner, Jakob A.P. (2016). (De)mystifying Norwegian Romani – the discursive construction of a Minority Language. PhD thesis, University of Oslo.

13 The Netherlands Urban contact dialects Frans Hinskens, Khalid Mourigh and Pieter Muysken*

1  Introduction: Linguistic and social context The Netherlands has a number of urban contact dialects. The country is highly urbanised: more than half of the population currently lives in the 22 largest urban agglomerations, and these are growing, while the population in peripheral rural areas is shrinking. Since immigration is also largely an urban phenomenon, cities are the place where new contact varieties emerge. 1.1 Urban contact dialects We take a broad multidimensional view of urban contact dialects (Muysken 2010). There is a rich sociolinguistic landscape in which a number of ethnolects of Dutch interact. The term Dutch ethnolect refers here to a speech variety which largely follows the patterns of traditional urban dialects and of colloquial regional standard Dutch, but has specific features which set it apart from more standardised Dutch and which are (or were, originally) indexical of a general immigrant identity or of a specific ethnic identity. From the perspective of multilingual communities, varieties of Dutch are only one part of the repertoire of different speaker generations. For one thing, there are the heritage languages, maintained to different degrees (Aalberse and Muysken 2018). Turkish and Papiamento show relatively high language maintenance, while Moroccan Arabic and Berber are maintained less. The Surinamese creole language Sranantongo and Surinamese Hindustani or Sarnami are not well maintained. All heritage languages, as far as is known, are undergoing change in the Netherlands. Several multilingual communities also show code-switching and code-mixing as documented particularly for the Turkish, Moroccan,

* Pieter Muysken died on 6th April 2021, far too young. It has been a privilege to work with him and we miss him dearly. May his spirit live on in our work.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429487958-17

224  Frans Hinskens, et al. Dutch Antillean and Moluccan communities. To some extent codemixed speech is part of urban contact dialects, primarily in in-group communication. Practices of inter-ethnic communication in the Netherlands go under the label of straattaal, lit. street language. This straattaal often comprises a variety of Dutch with some Sranantongo and other non-Dutch lexicon and a Moroccan Dutch accent (Appel and Schoonen 2005; Nortier and Dorleijn 2008). Some of these practices are examples of crossing (Rampton 2005), as documented by Nortier (2000, 2001) and Cornips and de Rooij (2013). However, the broader straattaal is highly variable, and may adopt phonetic, morphosyntactic, pragmatic and especially lexical features from various sources. 1.1.1  The changing Dutch polycentric urban landscape In contrast with France and Britain, the Netherlands does not have a single large urban centre. Rather, a network of cities, many of them concentrated in the central western part of the country, create a de facto urban conglomeration with 6.6–8.2  million inhabitants. However, the cities in this conglomeration, labelled the Randstad (‘Rim City’), have clearly separate local identities, with corresponding urban dialects like ‘Hagenees’ (The Hague dialect) or ‘Amsterdams’ (Amsterdam dialect). The complex mosaic of multilingual communities in the Netherlands is coupled with a rich tapestry of urban contact dialects. There are three main groups (Hinskens and Muysken 2007; Hinskens 2011; Muysken 2010, 2013): • Traditional languages in multilingual settings, including Town Frisian and Yiddish • Post-colonial languages, including Indonesian, Surinamese and Antillean • Newer immigrant languages, including Turkish, Moroccan and Chinese Migration from the Dutch former colonies dates from the period when Indonesia (1945) and Suriname (1975) declared their independence. The Dutch Antilles (including Curaçao and Aruba) are still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, though now with a more autonomous status. In the period between the World Wars, the rapidly growing coal-mining industries in the southeast (province of Limburg) attracted thousands of labourers from Germany and from other Central and Eastern European countries.1 While there has been labour migration from Mediterranean countries such as Spain, Portugal and Italy since the 1950s, in the 1970s bilateral labour recruitment agreements signed with Turkey (1964) and Morocco (1969)

The Netherlands 225 Table 13.1  Population categories of the Netherlands in 2018 in official statistics Allochtonous

Autochtonous

3,971,859

13,209,255

NonWestern Western

2,242,843 1,729,016

First generation Second generation

2,079,329 1,892,530

led to important impulses for migration. Since then, a continuous stream of migrants have come from many different countries. The group of Chinese origin, for example, is extremely heterogeneous, also including people from former Dutch colonies, such as Indonesia and Surinam. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), in 2018, the national total of 17,181,114 registered inhabitants comprised people from 240 different countries or overseas territories. Statistics about migration are strongly influenced by the criteria used to classify people. In the broader political discourse in the Netherlands, which underlies social policies and municipal budgeting, two principal distinctions are made by policymakers: • “Allochtonous” (roughly non-native) vs “autochtonous”, where allochtonous includes first-generation immigrants, born outside the Netherlands, and second-generation immigrants with at least one parent born outside of the Netherlands • “Western allochtonous” (ultimately originating in Europe, North America, Oceania, Indonesia and Japan) vs “non-Western Allochtonous” (ultimately originating elsewhere) These classifications reflect a Self/Other distinction deeply embedded in Dutch society, possibly connected to the colonial past. All secondgeneration immigrants are classified as non-native and there is an odd Western/non-Western split without cultural correlates (notice, for example, that Japan is “Western” here). In any case these labels provide the following gross statistical categories for 2018 (http://statline.cbs. nl/consulted 20 October 2018): “Non-Western” immigrants are concentrated in the larger cities, and since 2017 people with an immigration background have formed a majority in The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. The figures given here and in the next section do not include third-generation immigrants, even though many of them also use urban contact vernaculars which index migrant identity or ethnicity. At the same time, many of the people included as “allochtonous” in these statistics view themselves as “Dutch” or “Rotterdammer” rather than as “Moroccan” or “Polish”.

226  Frans Hinskens, et al. 1.1.2  Multilingual communities: an overview This section provides basic information on multilingual communities in the Netherlands, following the broad division of “traditional”, “postcolonial” and “newer immigrant” languages suggested before. Among the “traditional” varieties, there are several regional languages in the Netherlands considered either dialects or separate languages, including varieties of Limburg Dutch and Lower Saxon Dutch. In around 1995, the status of non-standard varieties of Dutch appeared on the political agenda in the Netherlands, triggered by the discussion regarding the recognition of regional languages within the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (cf. De Tier et al. 2010). For Frisian, in the northern province of Friesland, there is a long tradition of research on the urban contact vernacular, called Stadsfries or Stedsk in Frisian, with 40,000 speakers. The variety spoken in the Frisian capital is called Liwwadders or Leewaddes, but it is also spoken in other towns. Much vocabulary is close to Dutch, while the grammar is more Frisian. More traditional studies are those by Fokkema (1937) and van Bree (1997); see Jonkman (1993) for a sociolinguistic perspective and Versloot (2017) for a contact linguistic perspective. Turning to the post-colonial immigrant communities, there are 361,594 inhabitants (in the year 2018) with an Indonesian background in the Netherlands. This is a very diverse group ranging from former colonial expats to recent immigrants, with various language registers ranging from Javanese and Malay to colonial Indonesian Dutch (Indisch Nederlands). The group which has maintained a distinct contact vernacular is the Moluccans or Ambonese group. Moro (2016) has studied changes in Ambon Malay as a heritage language, while Huwaë (1992) analysed code-switching patterns in this community. The vernacular of the young people in this group is referred to as Melayu Sini. The second multilingual community with a post-colonial background are the Surinamese (351,681 in 2018). The non-prestige lingua franca in Surinam is Sranantongo; this language is also spoken in the Netherlands, but has lost ground. Surinamese Dutch is a well-recognised ethnolect in the Netherlands, while in Surinam it functions as a lingua franca (De Kleine 2013). Sranantongo vocabulary forms an integral part of straattaal. Muysken (2017) offers a recent overview of Surinamese Dutch, also taking the Netherlands situation into account. Immigrants from the former Dutch Antilles (157,114 in 2018) mostly have Papiamento as their heritage language. There is relatively little work on this group’s language use (but see Kootstra and Şahin 2018; Sahin 2015). Turning to other immigrant groups, the Turkish community in the Netherlands (404,459 in 2018) occupies a strong position. It has many speakers, tight networks and strong ties to Turkey. Both Turkish as a

The Netherlands 227 Heritage Language and Turkish-Dutch code-switching have been studied in detail by Backus (e.g. 2012). The community with a Moroccan background (396,539 in 2018) is mostly Berber (mainly Tarifyt and Tacheliyt) and Moroccan Arabic speaking. Particularly, Tarifyt Berber is overrepresented with a large population from the Rif Mountains in northern Morocco. While there has been relatively little work on Moroccan Arabic as a Heritage Language (exceptions include El Aissati 1996; Boumans 2006), there is extensive literature on code-switching involving Moroccan Arabic (e.g. Nortier 1995; Boumans 1998). As stated, the Chinese community (74,234 from China, 18,410 from Hong Kong, but also Chinese-origin immigrants from other regions) is highly diverse, but rapidly growing. While traditionally many Chinese languages/dialects were spoken, there has been a shift towards Putonghua (Beijing standard Mandarin), in part due to the language policies of the People’s Republic of China. Heritage Chinese in the Netherlands has been studied by Aalberse et al. (2017). Other immigrant groups hail from the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, the United Kingdom, various countries in North-East (Somalia, Eritrea) and West Africa (Ghana, Nigeria), as well as Western Asia (Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria).

2 Case studies 2.1 Introduction Next we will present two case studies on ethnic varieties of Dutch, one carried out in Nijmegen and Amsterdam, the other in Gouda. Over the years there have been other recordings, particularly from a large multidisciplinary neighbourhood study in Utrecht (TCULT, 1998–2002; Bennis et  al. 2002; Nortier 2000, 2001a, 2001b). Cornips and de Rooij (2013) present data from Rotterdam. No systematic databases have been created in these studies, but some of the TCULT data are part of the Dutch Bilingualism Database (DBD). 2.2 The Roots study The research project “The roots of ethnolects. An experimental comparative study”2 focused on variation in the speech both of young people with mainly Dutch-born forebears and of Dutch-born children of migrants of Turkish and Moroccan descent. It zoomed in on ethnolects of Dutch in the cities of Amsterdam and Nijmegen (cf. the map in Figure 13.1). The approach is language-centred rather than ethnographic (Hinskens 2011). One set of research questions concerns the linguistic makeup of ethnolects: to what extent are they rooted in substrates, in endogenous

228  Frans Hinskens, et al.

Figure 13.1  The locations of the cities and towns discussed in this chapter. Source: With permission from StepMaps.

non-standard varieties, or typical of second language acquisition phenomena? A  second set concerns the place of the ethnolect in speaker repertoires. Can speakers of an ethnolect shift to more standard varieties and to non-ethnic non-standard varieties? A third set concerns the distribution of features across ethnic groups. The data for this project were collected following a factorial design (see Table  13.2), with equal numbers of young male speakers from Amsterdam and Nijmegen, and from three backgrounds: Moroccan, Turkish and mainly Dutch-born forebears, and two age groups  – with age group serving as an apparent time or cross-sectional operationalisation of acquisition, one of the hypothesised roots of ethnolectal variation. The speakers with Moroccan and Turkish backgrounds grew up bilingually in the Netherlands and are also native speakers of a Dutch variety.

The Netherlands 229 Table 13.2  Speaker design in the Roots study City

A Amsterdam

N Nijmegen

Background

M Moroccan-Dutch T Turkish-Dutch D with strong inter-ethnic ties C with weak inter-ethnic ties M Moroccan-Dutch T Turkish-Dutch D with strong inter-ethnic ties C with weak inter-ethnic ties

Age group 10–12 years old

18–20 years old

6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6

6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6

The Dutch teenagers with mainly Dutch-born forebears were split into a group with strong ties (D) and one with weak or no network ties (C) with boys from other ethnic groups. Except for the boys3 from monolingual Dutch families who have few if any friends from other ethnic groups, four recordings were made of every single speaker; three involve conversations, one with a speaker whose main background is Moroccan, one with a speaker with a Turkish background and one with a speaker with mainly Dutch forebears but with friends from other ethnic groups. Additional recordings comprise individual elicitation sessions. 2.3 The Gouda study The Gouda study was run in the period 2014–17 as part of “Advancing the European Multilingual Experience”.4 The striking phonetic features of Moroccan Dutch in Gouda were its primary focus. Gouda is a relatively small town within the Randstad and was chosen for two reasons: it has proportionally the largest Moroccan Dutch community in the Netherlands with approximately 10 per cent of the total population (approximately 70,000). This community is highly homogeneous with most people originating from the same Tarifiyt Berber speaking region (cf. de Mas 2017). The Gouda corpus contains interviews with a total of 18 male Moroccan Dutch teenagers aged 14–21 years. All were born and raised in or near Gouda and use Dutch as their main language in in-group as well as in out-group communication. Most speakers also speak some Tarifiyt Berber and/or Moroccan Arabic. In addition, a smaller number of interviews with teenagers from monolingual Dutch families, Moroccan

230  Frans Hinskens, et al. Dutch female teenagers and adult Moroccan Dutch L2 speakers were conducted for comparative purposes. Interviews were done in different settings to ensure, as much as possible, a relaxed and natural speech style. All interviews were conducted in Dutch by one of the authors (Khalid Mourigh), who has the same background as the interviewees. Therefore, occasional Berber or Moroccan Arabic code-switching occurs. The two major heritage languages have influenced Moroccan Dutch, albeit in an indirect way. The speakers from Gouda vary a lot in their speech. Some shift along a stylistic continuum depending on their stance, while other speakers maintain a relatively ‘strong’ Moroccan Dutch pattern, involving a number of co-occurring features.

3 Structural findings We present some phonetic, morpho-syntactic and lexical findings from the Roots and the Gouda studies. 3.1 Phonetic features First, we discuss phonetic features, an important focus of our research. Coronal fricatives. The data in the Roots study show several different types of variation in the realisation of the voiced and voiceless coronal fricatives /z, s/. The variation in the realisation of /z/ is partly endogenous, in that it is frequently devoiced to [s], which is fairly common in colloquial standard speech (as typically spoken by monolingual speakers of Dutch) in a large part of the Dutch language area. Innovative variants include: • Overlong [zː], although there is no phonemic length contrast in Dutch consonants. An utterance containing this variant is (1): (1) [zː]e wil nou niet she want.3sg now not ‘She doesn’t want now.’ Mustapha (Moroccan-Dutch, 20 years old, Nijmegen) •

A dental realisation, resulting in a ‘hiss’ with much frication, hence [z̪ ] or, voiceless [s̪ ], as in (2): (2) ik heb geen [z̪ ]in meer, man I have.1sg no  desire anymore, man ‘I don’t feel like it anymore, dude’ Mustapha (Moroccan-Dutch, 20 years old, Nijmegen)

The Netherlands 231 •

Regressive voice assimilation to a preceding obstruent as in (3): (3) nou moet i[ɡz]ien ~urban dialect: i[ks]ien now must I see ‘now I must see’ Emre (Turkish-Dutch, 20 years old, Nijmegen)

This sandhi voicing of a preceding obstruent by a voiced fricative does not occur in any endogenous variety of modern Dutch; it is perceived as a strong marker of bilingual Dutch. It may be supported by the phonology of Tarifiyt Berber, in which obstruent clusters are typically either voiced or unvoiced (McClelland 2008). The dental realisation may be related to the fact that both Turkish and Moroccan Arabic have been described as having dental /z, s/.5 Variation in the place of articulation and voicing has been studied quantitatively by Van Meel et al. (2013). One of the striking features in the Gouda study is Dutch sibilant palatalisation. /s/ can be palatalised in syllable-initial consonant clusters preceding a continuant (/x/, /l/, /m/ or /n/), while /z/ can be palatalised in syllable-initial consonant clusters preceding /w/. It is argued that sibilant palatalisation functions as a stance-taking device in in-group interaction, indexing either a tough or a laid-back mode of interaction (cf. Mourigh 2017). In addition to palatalisation, the /z/ shows the typical Moroccan Dutch characteristics of overlong pronunciation, voice and regressive voice assimilation to preceding voiceless obstruents (cf. Van Meel et al. 2013) in Gouda as well. However, overlong pronunciation is not typical only of /z/; other (coronal) consonants, in appropriate contexts, can be lengthened as well (cf. Mourigh forthcoming). Analysis of regressive voice assimilation shows that all voiceless obstruents preceding /z/ show [+voice] assimilation, sometimes even extending to a preceding obstruent cluster, as in example (4b). (4) a. gewoon een sportzaal [spɔɾdza:l]   ‘just a gym’ b: die   mannetje  heeft    ze geld gepakt [he:vd zə]   dem man.dim  have.3sg  3sg.poss money take.pp   ‘that little guy took his money’ L2 Moroccan Dutch speakers show similar voice assimilation rules for /z/. One might therefore surmise that one of the substrate languages shows similar voice assimilation; however, the evidence for this is not very strong. Regressive voice assimilation is limited to specific contexts in Tarifiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic. Vowel quality and length. Among the other variable phenomena analysed in the Roots study are the front unrounded diphthong /ɛi/ and the contrast between /ɑ/ and /a/.6 /ɛi/ shows dialect variation in both

232  Frans Hinskens, et al. diphthong vs monophthong and in the height dimension – the traditional dialect variants being [ɛ:] and [a:] for the Nijmegen and Amsterdam urban dialects, respectively. Alongside the standard Dutch realisation [ɛi], a new non-standard diphthongal variant [ai] is used by all speakers. /ɛi/ does not occur phonemically in Turkish, Arabic or Berber. The same holds for the phonemic contrast /ɑ – a/. Dutch has countless minimal pairs, as in (5). (5) h[ɑ]k – h[a]k b[ɑ]n – b[a]n

‘heel’ – ‘hook’ ‘excommunication’ – ‘job’

This contrast is based on a double distinction, as the segments differ both in length or ‘duration’ and in terms of back-front. In the anonymised receipt from an originally Turkish, L2 Dutch speaking tailor (Figure 13.2), mention is made of a repair to the right pocket, Dutch rechterzak; the latter word has been jotted down as , /zak/, another Dutch noun, meaning ‘business; affair’. The monophthongs in Gouda Moroccan Dutch are generally centralised and compressed and the place of articulation of vowels often overlaps. For example, Gouda Moroccan Dutch speakers with a strong accent show much overlap of the vowels /i/, /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ in terms of F1 and F2, while Gouda speakers from monolingual Dutch families keep these vowels more separate (cf. Mourigh forthcoming). The front vowel /eː/, which is often a diphthong in Dutch dialects, is realised in a number of different ways in Moroccan Dutch, e.g. as a monophthong. As for mean vowel duration, monophthongs hardly differ between the two groups; however, in Dutch dialects short and long vowels are more clearly distinguished. Other phenomena. In the Roots study several speakers with a Turkish background nasalise any lax vowel preceding /n/ followed by another consonant in the same syllable. Features come from the community languages, L2 acquisition processes and traditional urban dialects; some features (e.g. variable gender marking) are typical language acquisition phenomena as well as stylistic indices. The number of different variants of existing linguistic variables is sometimes higher than in indigenous varieties. For example, the southern Dutch dialects (including the one spoken in Nijmegen) have a palatal realisation of the velar fricative /ɣ/, whereas the western and northern dialects do not. The Turkish Dutch and (even more so) Moroccan Dutch speakers in our sample add uvular and pharyngeal realisations, thus widening the spectrum of variants; these variants are multi-ethnolectal in their distribution. In Gouda all consonants in Moroccan Dutch can be lengthened in specific contexts: (a) Consonants that regressively assimilate in connected speech. (b) Schwa-retention – if a schwa is in an open syllable, either one of the preceding or following consonants is lengthened. (c) Lengthening

The Netherlands 233

Figure 13.2 A  receipt from an originally L2 Dutch speaking tailor, illustrating phonological reanalysis of the /ɑ-a/ contrast and variation in inflectional gender marking.

234  Frans Hinskens, et al. is sometimes used to add emphasis to the utterance. These segments are considerably longer than in other linguistic environments and they are longer than the same consonants realised by their ethnic Dutch peers (cf. Mourigh, forthcoming). (6) a. dat is zelfde [dədzːɛlvdə] ‘That’s the same’.

[z] = 0.186 ms7

b. bij ons altijd, altijd in de pan [ɪndpːan]

‘With us always, always in the pan’.

[p] = 0.139 ms

c. is gek [əsxːɛk] ‘Is crazy’   [x] = 0.131 ms Gemination is phonological in Tarifiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic, where all single consonants have geminate counterparts. In both languages, geminates or long consonants are formed through assimilation, schwa-retention or the addition of emphasis. Furthermore, coda /r/ is often realised as an alveolar tap [ɾ] in Gouda Moroccan Dutch, a development that runs contrary to the rise and spread of vocalised variants in Dutch, especially the rise of the retroflex/bunched approximant realisation [ɻ] among younger speakers (cf. Sebregts 2015). 3.2 Morpho-syntactic features Features of Moroccan and Turkish Dutch in the Roots study include variation in (morpho-) syntax, including gender marking, the variable omission of functional elements such as object pronouns, subject pronouns, and the locative and quantitative pronoun er. Gender. Dutch grammatical gender cannot be predicted from the phonological form of a noun; it is largely arbitrary. Only some derived nouns have a clear predictable gender based on the suffix. Grammatical gender is marked in determiners (definite articles, demonstratives), relativisers and (through suffixation) on adnominals such as adjectives. In the heritage languages at issue the picture is different: while Turkish has no gender to speak of, Moroccan Arabic and Berber mark gender in affixes, both nominally and verbally. In the Roots recordings the neuter definite determiner het8 is frequently replaced by common gender de,9 as in (7a): (7) a. op het laatst

moeten

ze

naar

at last must 3pl.pro to ‘at last they have to go to the army’

de

leger

the army

The Netherlands 235 Volkan; Turkish-Dutch, 12 years old, Amsterdam; standard Dutch has het leger The – ə is often suffixed on adnominals in neuter indefinites, the only place in the paradigm where schwa does not occur in standard Dutch, as in 5b: (7) b. tegenwoordig komt de krant altijd met eh met negatieve nieuws ‘these days the newspaper always comes with eh with negative news’ (Erhan; Turkish-Dutch, 20  years old, Amsterdam; standard Dutch has negatief nieuws) Since rits, ‘zippers’, has common gender, in a Dutch indefinite constituent the adnominal ends in – ə, hence nieuwe rits, rather than nieuw rits, as in the Turkish Dutch tailor’s receipt (Figure 13.2). This finding confirms the observations in Nortier (2000, 2001). In Gouda Moroccan Dutch the overgeneralisation of common gender is also found, as in Dutch urban youth varieties generally (cf. Nortier 2001; Cornips 2008; Hinskens et al. 2021). Common gender is overgeneralised in different contexts. It is used for example on diminutive nouns, which always take neuter gender in standard Dutch. (8) die [dat] mannetje, de eigenaar van die [dat] ding ‘That little guy, the owner of that thing’. Possessive marking. Another interesting development is the use of an innovative possessive construction, besides the three known from indigenous Dutch: (9) a. Piet’s dochter

‘Piet’s daughter’ (lit. Piet’s daughter)

b. Piet z’n dochter

‘Piet’s daughter’ (lit. Piet his daughter, with a reduced form of the possessive)

b’. Marie d’r trui

‘Marie’s sweater’ (lit. Marie her sweater, with a reduced form of the possessive)

c. De trui van Marie

‘Marie’s sweater’ (lit. the sweater of Marie)

236  Frans Hinskens, et al. In Moroccan Dutch, all of the preceding constructions can be used, but it also has another possessive construction, using the element de, as in (10). (10) a. hij heeft binnen op mijn vader de hoofd gericht ‘Inside he aimed at my father’s head’. (lit. my father de head)



b. Emilio de broer ‘Emilio’s brother’ (lit. Emilio de brother) Word order. A feature that stands out in the Gouda study is the violation of the Dutch V2 rule, which stipulates that the verb follows the first constituent in a main clause. It is quite often violated following adverbials, leading to V3 order (cf. Nortier 2001; Meelen et al. 2020). (11) a. je

weet

toch, soms

op de grond

You know eh, sometimes I throw something on the floor ‘You know, sometimes I  throw something on the floor’.