The AUYL Truel

Abstract

Great post-independence migration from rural areas to urban centers has brought contact and competition to African linguistic gene pools. In Nairobi, Kenya, the main contestants are a trio of English, Swahili, and the indigenous language, making the duel a truel. Though the obvious outcome has been an ecological imbalance in socioeconomics (Mufwene 2008), few studies, other than Laitin and Eastman (1989: 52), have addressed the motivations and constraints on the speakers of the dueling languages. This paper introduces the concept of the truel from game theory (Kilgour & Brams 1997) to analyze and illuminate the linguistic tussle between an ex-colonial language, a native lingua franca, and local African Urban Youth Language (AUYL) practices (e.g., Sheng and Engsh). Mufwene and Vigouroux (2008: 23) argue that the elite keep the ex-colonial language as an entitlement. Nationalists support Swahili as a Pan- Africanist unifier. Historically, however, no one wishes to support anyone else’s mother tongue, so the indigenous language loses out. A series of motivations for each language variety is described, and it is shown that in each case, the player takes a rational strategy in the competition, but produces the illusion that the indigenous language has lost out. This new approach dramatically reduces the impression that the native speaker of indigenous African languages has lost the linguistic battle, and hence makes the rational choices of linguistic practices clearer.