Contestant Hybridities: African (Urban) Youth Language in Nigerian Music and Social Media

Abstract

African urban and youth language (AUYL) varieties as deployed in Nigerian popular culture manifest as a ‘contest of hybridities’ and generate distinct descriptive and analytical challenges, by virtue of the complex linguistic, literary and socio-political inputs to their content and structure. While the varieties pay tribute to notions of hybridity, transculturality and globalism, they nonetheless challenge any representation of ‘hybridity’ as a state of cultural indeterminacy. Indeed, Nigerian AUYL manifests a dominant Africanity, in the form of a linguistic and literary composition that is tilted in favour of indigenous dictions. It also manifests a politics of root identity and a renaissance outlook that sometimes challenges the relentlessly hyped notion of ‘borderless identities’. The analysis here therefore speaks to the need for a quantum hybridity perspective in the appreciation of contact linguistic phenomena in postcolonial settings. In this chapter, salient features of youth language varieties in Nigerian popular culture are examined from a combination of linguistic and literary perspectives; identified linguistic and sociolinguistic features (such as deviant syntax, the deployment of youth topoi, ‘mixilingualism’, pop-conscious neologism, and pop multisemanticity, among others), coalesce with literary notions such as ‘intentional’ and ‘unintentional’ hybridity. Examples drawn from the music of historical youths and contemporary youngsters in the music industry demonstrate how antagonistic, resisting or contesting coding, along with sundry non-cooperative bilingual practices, translates to deviant linguistic forms and peculiar sociolinguistic characteristics.