Innovative use of Shona ideophones within an adolescent community of practice

Abstract

Abstract This paper focuses on a nonnormative linguistic practice involving ideophones (nyaudzosingwi) among a Shona-speaking adolescent community of practice in urban Zimbabwe. Ideophones occupy a special position in Shona’s ethnolinguistic repertoire; they are culturally and linguistically salient, and highlighted in Shona classroom instruction. The perspective of Zimbabwe’s educational establishment is at odds with the on-the-ground situation, in which ideophones are exclusively the purview of older rural speakers. This dynamic puts young Shona speakers in a difficult situation: to succeed educationally, one is required to use ideophones, yet they are not a natural part of youth language. To balance these competing demands, young Shona speakers have developed a new use around ideophones that highlights the incongruity of balancing between being a “good Shona student” (fluency in “deep” Shona that eschews English influence) and a modern Shona subject (proficiency in English, upwardly socially mobile) by using them for unserious, comedic effect, where the humor deliberately derives from the idiosyncrasy of a young Shona speaker using ideophones. We also find a reduction in the morphosyntactic environments in which ideophones appear, in that they are always required to be introduced by a verbal element, and always the active form -ti, never the passive form -nzi.