Global repertoires and urban fluidity: youth languages in Africa

Abstract

AbstractThe linguistic practices and creativity of youths reflect an amazing way of dealing with the dynamics of urban and global African city life. Communities of practice (CoP) emerge, in which global trends, local concepts and cutting-edge styles, identities of resistance and contested spaces all play a role and impact on the linguistic practices of youths. The implementation of linguistic manipulative patterns that are often acquired from other youth languages, as well as strategies such as translanguaging, borrowing, language crossing and bricolage, brought about through local, global and pan-African contact and trends, including music cultures such as Hip Hop and Reggae, have molded youth identities and urban practices. The focus of this article is on youth languages found in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Kinshasa/Goma (DR Congo), where the multilayered range of social and linguistic impacts of globalization has led to new linguistic practices and identities. Both speakers’ fluid patterns of contact and manipulation across digital (Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Twitter) and real spaces, and their manipulative strategies in the formation of new “repertoires”, are analyzed in the article. Youth languages, especially in the African context, have usually been described as modern, urban and fluid. We argue that these characteristics also hold for other linguistic practices and non-urban contexts, and that youth languages differ in terms of the speed and manner in which these processes and modifications occur or are deliberately employed.