KiKAR: a Swahili variety in Kenya's colonial army

Abstract

The paper discusses attitudes, identity construction, agents of linguistic change, and the outcome of dense language contact in Kenya's colonial army during the early decades of the twentieth century. The growth and development of a simplified Swahili variety in the Kenyan battalions of the King's African Rifles (KAR) during the inter-war period was influenced by the European officers' attitude towards Africans and their languages, the military's overarching desire to construct a distinct identity in the colony, and the diverse ethnolinguistic background of African soldiers. While the colonial military provided the ethnographic settings in which the new Swahili variety emerged, it was the African soldiers who were the principal agents in the restructuring and maintenance of KiKAR. The paper further illustrates the structural and lexical simplification of KiKAR based on data contained in KAR's language teaching manual: Newell's (1933) Notes on Ki-Swahili as Spoken by the K.A.R. KiKAR provides a rare glimpse into the outcome of an early contact situation involving diverse African languages and English during Swahili's pre-standardization era.