African Adaptation Processes in English

Abstract

The multilingual situation in Africa has led to the development of ‘hybrid’ languages in multi-lingual and multi-cultural situations. These hybrid languages are sometimes associated with urban youth born and bred in multicultural environments. In this category we place the Kenyan variety referred to as ‘Engsh’. We compared this hybrid urban language with Nigerian Pidgin English to establish whether there are any sociolinguistic similarities between the two African indigenized varieties of English. This entailed analyzing the grammar of the two varieties then scrutinizing the semantic shift processes to assess whether the languages express any African world view in terms of semantic interpretation. The significance of this study is to demonstrate the extent to which African speakers have adapted the grammar and lexicon of English (a former colonial language) to reflect their unique African speech styles and cultural experiences