This book aims to expand on theoretical developments in the sociolinguistic subfield of youth language, concentrating on data and research from the African continent. Twentieth-century developments like urbanisation, particular kinds of multilingualism and the rapidly increased proportion of young people in urban centres have made this a growing area of research. Urban centres are characterised by the presence of numerous national, official and vernacular languages. Diversity increases with migration from rural areas due to the underdevelopment of rural economies and a lack of paid employment in those areas. Equally significant are cross-border migration and cross-continental mobility due to economic and political factors. To cite the numbers of languages in three of the countries that feature in this book: Kenya has as many as 69 languages, Cameroon has 230 and Côte d’Ivoire has 60. This multitude of local languages coexist in major cities with colonial languages – French, English and Portuguese in most cases (Lewis, Reference Lewis2009). McLaughlin (Reference McLaughlin2009: 2) describes the extent of societal multilingualism on the continent and suggests that it is intensified in the cities. In Abidjan, the largest city in Côte d’Ivoire, the last few decades of increased migration from rural areas and from neighbouring countries has led to a situation where 30 per cent of the current population are non-Ivorian, and the Ivorians are represented by 60 native ethnic groups with a diversity of languages (Kube-Barth, Reference Kube-Barth and McLaughlin2009). Since 1950, the urban percentage of the population in sub-Saharan Africa increased from 11 to 39 per cent in 2015 (United Nations, 2018). Based on World Bank data from 2017, the urban annual growth rate in sub-Saharan Africa ranged from 1.4 to 5.7 per cent, with the urban population of 427 million predicted to double in the next 25 years (Saghir and Santoro, Reference Saghir and Santoro2018).

At the same time, the advent of modern information communication technologies (ICTs) has led to a global ‘information society’, with resultant effects on African business, investment, advertising and consumer brands, media and technology and music and film. This has led to rapid transformation in Africa, particularly in its economically and technologically networked urban centres (Muller et al., Reference Muller, Cloete and Badat2001). While globalisation and diversity are not new in Africa, ICTs have greatly increased the scale of these phenomena. Globally, increasing numbers of people ‘from different linguistic, social and geographic backgrounds’ now access communication technologies (Deumert, Reference Deumert2014: 54). Such access has led, in Africa, to increasing intersection of the local and global in language practices in both digital and physical contexts (Kanana and Hurst-Harosh, Reference Kanana and Hurst-Harosh2020).

A striking feature of urban Africa is the prominence of youth. Some 20 per cent of the population in Africa is between 15 and 24 years of age, and 65 per cent of the population are below the age of 35, with nearly 50 per cent under the age of 19 (United Nations, 2014). This astonishingly high proportion, allied to the changes cited above, is key to the internal linguistic changes, language shifts and modifications to language repertoires of the previous generations. Sociolinguistics has long been aware of adolescence as a key stage of experimentation with new forms of behaviour, peer groups, fashion, musical tastes and, above all, language. In modern societies, this is the stage of the efflorescence of teenage slang and innovations of a primarily sociophonetic nature (in intonation, phonation and segmental variation), implicated in new indexicalities and stances pertaining to youth, gender and class (see e.g. Eckert, Reference Eckert1989; Chambers, Reference Chambers2003; Rickford, Reference Rickford2013). In multilingual urban Africa, these themes are realised in the development of male ‘street speech’, which shows changes initiated by young males rather than being controlled by elders. (Such control in traditional rural societies can be seen in the now declining practices of isihlonipho ‘young women’s language of respect inculcated prior to marriage’ and isikhweta ‘young men’s initiation language’ in Southern Africa – see Finlayson Reference Finlayson1998, Reference Finlayson and Mesthrie2002.)

Since the 1950s onwards, these new ways of using language connected with street corners rather than classrooms have come to the notice of researchers. Some of these ways of speaking have attracted names like Nouchi (in Côte d’Ivoire), Sheng (in Kenya), Tsotsitaal (in South Africa), Camfranglais (in Cameroon), etc. The countercultural and youthful associations of these language practices lead to striking linguistic innovations and hybridity, raising questions about their relations to the coexisting urban languages around them, which are also immersed in different kinds of multilingual fluidities (e.g. borrowing and switching phenomena primarily with the erstwhile colonial languages). It is therefore perhaps understandable that the history of youth language studies has been open to terminological and conceptual confusion, structural misunderstandings (e.g. of the nature and involvement of code-switching) and a lack of appreciation of the performative moments and modes in which male youth engage.

For example, analysts have made puzzling claims about the growth of youth language practices into ‘full’ languages and about their spread to wider and larger populations and to different media in the world of advertising, informal postings on the Internet and in soapies on television.Footnote ¹ There are claims that they have become the unmarked urban vernaculars (e.g. McLaughlin, Reference McLaughlin2009) and even more startlingly that they are candidates for new national languages (Kießling and Mous, Reference Kießling and Mous2004). This book aims to describe and understand the emergence of these ‘youth languages’ and to clarify their relation to language use in the mainstream. By the end of this book, it will be manifestly clear that ‘youth languages’, in the sense defined in this field, are not to be confused with the general urban languages/varieties/vernaculars of all city dwellers – of rich or poor, young or old and of male, female or other genders. Claims of autonomy and candidacy as national languages are wide of the mark and to be ingested with liberal pinches of salt. Nevertheless, the youthful practices of males are worthy of scholarly attention in their own right: we can gain new insights from the ways they have baffled many analysts.Footnote ²

At the outset, we alert the reader that the label ‘youth languages’ – like so many labels in linguistics – is somewhat problematic, if we conceive of ‘languages’ as implying something more-or-less autonomous, structurally coherent and somewhat bounded. More nuance would be conveyed by thinking of the label as prototypically covering ‘male, in-group, street-aligned, youth language practice’, which offers a better connection to ways of speaking and using language. Kießling and Mous (Reference Kießling and Mous2004) argue that these phenomena warrant the label ‘language’ because they are named and are unintelligible to outsiders. However, it is unclear as to who does the naming and how these practices acquired names. The slang lexis varies across male social networks and does not have the semantic coverage of urban vernaculars (Mesthrie, Reference Mesthrie, Meyerhoff and Nagy2008). Although Kießling and Mous (Reference Kießling and Mous2004) suggest that youth languages may have structural differences from the mainstream, most subsequent analyses note that these structural differences are also part of local informal urban vernaculars. Nevertheless, some of the generalisations made by Kießling and Mous do stand up to close analysis – notably that, in addition to a highly innovative lexis, youth languages tend to:

1. (1) ‘[H]ave their basis in another language that is spoken in the city by the same youth’;

2. (2) Involve extensive code-switching, but ‘code-switching in itself is insufficient to describe the concept of urban languages’;

3. (3) Enable speakers to ‘transcend ethnicity and to indicate identification with a certain age group’; and

4. (4) Show the ‘outcome of the inherent desire among the youth to stay abreast of the latest anti-norms’ (Kießling and Mous, Reference Kießling and Mous2004: excerpted from 304–306).

These points are amplified, clarified and modified in the chapters of the present book. Furthermore, we articulate new dimensions by drawing on notions like performativity and style, which mostly call into question whether these are ‘languages’ in the sense suggested by earlier writers. Here we pick out some of the main general trends.

Most of the chapters treat African youth language as a dynamic practice rather than a relatively static, easily isolable variety. Moreover, they emphasise that youth languages cannot be studied conclusively without carefully considering the other (non-youth) languages of young peoples’ repertoires. Whereas lexical semantics is the most obvious and exciting part of youth language practice to both users and analysts, it is necessary to also examine the less conspicuous and hitherto little investigated parts of language and usage: phonology (including tonology), word structure, syntax, pragmatics and gesture. Again, these components are expectedly dynamic and multiply layered, as suggested above. The fourth important point is that youth languages have several subgroups of users, with different sets of roles, intentions and relations to the mainstream, making it more plausible to posit and study a continuum of varieties rather than a single uniform youth language in a city or other area. Finally, we have felt it necessary to explicitly reflect on methods employed previously and current and future best practices, since this has not always been optimally addressed in the field. Let us review each of these five points briefly.

1. (1) All of the authors stress the dynamism of the practices and varieties they elucidate. In fact, it is regrettable that the label ‘youth language’ does not quite highlight this dynamism. A recent term used in a book title by Stentstrom and Jorgensen (Reference Stenstrom and Jorgensen2009) is ‘youngspeak’, which is more suggestive, although no doubt – like all labels – this one also has some irrelevant connotations and is perhaps too general. Hurst-Harosh’s concept of stylect is also meant to reflect this dynamism (as opposed to a more rooted dialect). In Chapter 6, Mous and Barasa stress that to a large extent Sheng boils down to a particular set of speech acts; that is, crossings into an informal mode, which they term ‘the Sheng shift’. Hence, linguists of the region should – in our view – ponder over some of their previous accounts that enregister an untenably static and perhaps commodified version of it. Dynamism is especially visible in lexical innovation in youth languages, in which keywords are not allowed to stand still, and outsiders and linguists/lexicographers constantly have to play catch up. As Brookes (Reference Brookes2014 and Chapter 3 in this volume) emphasises, by the time a keyword enters into wider slang or informal usage, core group members are already renovating it. At this core level, the referential function is frequently downplayed in heightening other functions relating to establishing hierarchies and male bonding. However, as the word spreads, it tends to assume greater referential value, rather than what Jakobson (Reference Jakobson and Sebeok1960) called ‘conative’ (i.e. addressee-orientated, directive or – better still – hierarchical) functioning. The give-and-take between young peoples’ isiXhosa and youth language practices (Tsotsitaal) on the radio, as studied by Dowling in Chapter 2, also shows such referential shifts back and forth.

2. (2) Dynamism can also be seen in the way youth languages relate to the other languages in a community’s repertoires. Here the sociological term ‘dialectical’ is appropriate in defining the relationship between one concept and another as interlocking but nevertheless in opposition to each other. Thus, Sheng is most visible and powerful when speakers cross over from a general Kiswahili space into a more disruptive and exhibitionist youthful space, though one that is largely androcentric. Brookes (Reference Brookes2014: 1) describes this practice as a ‘performance register’ and speaks of moments when core group members ‘break into performance mode’ (Chapter 3). This echo from Dell Hymes ([1975] Reference Hymes1981) reminds us that the shift in code is also a shift in intention and performativity.

3. (3) All of the chapters are concerned in one way or another with the intertwining of youth language practices with the urban varieties around them. In Chapter 1, Simango shows how Myers-Scotton’s 4-M model for the syntax of code-switching applies equally to Urban isiXhosa, as well as talk about and ‘in’ Tsotsitaal. Mesthrie’s reanalysis of Ngwenya’s (Reference Ngwenya1995) MA thesis in Chapter 4 shows that Tsotsitaal is easily relatable to the feature pool (see Mufwene, Reference Mufwene2001) of urban isiZulu for syntax, but not necessarily to that of standard isiZulu. Thus, the opposition to older and rural standard isiZulu is complete (in lexicon, syntax, kinesics, gestures, etc.), but not to urban isiZulu, with which the syntax and – presumably – phonology are shared. This feature pool is itself dynamic and open to modes of code-switching. In Chapter 5, Kießling shows that in Cameroon the hybridity of Camfranglais among youth is consistent with existing (and perhaps pre-existing) French–English bilingual practices. In Chapter 7, Boutin is more certain about the pre-existence of many Nouchi grammatical features in the French of Côte d’Ivoire. Several chapters (Chapters 4, 6 and 7) stress that youth languages take the variability of urban grammar to an extreme in terms of the frequency of non-standard variants. We may say that they show a downshift along a syntactic continuum.

   Yet, as Brookes cautions in Chapter 3, we should not take this to mean that the youth language practices described in this book are necessarily a subset or register of an urban variety. This is due to the performative and heavily gender-biased nature of the former, as noted above. Urban varieties are outcomes of contact, while these youth language practices add the further dimension of lexical manipulation par excellence by young males in engaging in street corner banter and the establishment of masculine authority and hierarchies. While urban varieties in Africa and elsewhere are often claimed to lead to ethnic levelling (the removal of distinctions between ethnic identities in mixed urban contexts in Kenya particularly), youth language often leads to micro-differentiation of peer groups: some people become in-group and some out-group in terms of youth practices.

4. (4) As Mesthrie (Reference Mesthrie, Meyerhoff and Nagy2008 and Chapter 4 in this volume) suggests, many of the seeming paradoxes and counter-claims relating to early accounts of youth languages can be resolved by characterising them as a continuum from secret, to deep, to light varieties. The terms ‘deep’ and ‘light’, which are not linked to Chomskyan theories of syntactic levels, were first used in relation to the urban African languages of the Johannesburg area (Finlayson et al., Reference Finlayson, Calteaux and Myers-Scotton1998). They relate well to different groups’ involvement in tsotsitaal practices, notably the core pantsula groups in relation to bhujwas and softies of the townships, as studied by Brookes (Reference Brookes2014). In Chapter 4, Mesthrie takes the continuum model further by positing different ‘orders’ of tsotsitaal, referring to the ‘deep’ variety of the core groups of innovators as first-order tsotsitaal practice and the lighter usage as second-order tsotsitaal practice. Usage in other than the spoken and performed modes is conceived of as tsotsitaal of the third order, as used in advertising, satirical or humorous writing and so forth. This broad typology can be fleshed out by paying closer attention to other effects like online communication and occasional use in other gender groupings. This also applies to the more ‘encrypted’ varieties of Nouchi, which, according to Boutin in Chapter 7, are starting to spread. Since they occur at the ‘deep’ end, encrypted varieties are candidates for first-order status.

   Many of these characteristics are reminiscent of Halliday’s (Reference Halliday1976) now classic characterisation of antilanguages; that is, secret languages of the underworld of Elizabethan London and contemporary Calcutta (now Kolkata). Halliday’s formulation is relevant to our broader conceptualisation of youth languages, although the notion of a continuum from secret to light varieties means we do not claim that all youth languages are necessarily antilanguages. An antilanguage is a language that is set up in opposition to the lingua franca of a community as a conscious alternative to it. They are ‘languages relexicalised’, and their purpose is often assumed to prevent outsiders from understanding communication within the ‘antisociety’ that uses them. ‘An “anti-society” is a society that is set up within another society as a conscious alternative to it. It is a mode of resistance, resistance which may take the form either of passive symbiosis or of active hostility and even destruction’ (Halliday, Reference Halliday1976: 570). Two of the main linguistic features of an antilanguage, according to Halliday, are relexicalisation and metaphor. He states that the opposition to the norm is done through metaphor: the antisociety is a ‘metaphorical variant’ of society (Halliday, Reference Halliday1976: 576), and ‘antilanguage is a metaphor for an everyday language, this metaphorical quality appears all the way up and down the system’ (Halliday, Reference Halliday1976: 578).

   Halliday (Reference Halliday1976: 571) describes relexicalisation as a process producing ‘new words for old’ and relying on a principle of ‘same grammar, different vocabulary; but different vocabulary only in certain areas’, being those that are central to the activities of the antisociety. He also describes ‘overlexicalisation’ – the proliferation of synonyms – as part of a ‘neverending search for originality, either for the sake of liveliness and humour or, in some cases, for the sake of secrecy’ (Halliday, Reference Halliday1976: 571). Overlexicalisation is a result of verbal competition and display, and synonyms can be distinguished by their attitudinal components (Halliday, Reference Halliday1976: 571).

5. (5) Finally, this book includes an explicit account of methodological considerations, which have thus far been absent from the literature. As the chapters in this book show, different points of research entry are necessary depending on the specific emphasis of the analyst. Methods used adopt one of: (1) a purely linguistic perspective, (2) a more broadly semiotic perspective, (3) an individual identity/agentive perspective stressing the creativity of youthful users at play or (4) a social identity perspective examining how young males interface language with social structures. The challenge remains to locate and win the confidence of speakers at the core rather than the periphery, with the latter being easier to access than the former.

Youth languages occupy a curious position from the perspective of language evolution, ecology and feature pools (Mufwene, Reference Mufwene2001). We have generally cautioned against a reification of these practices, which flourish at their core as performative modes. On the other hand, we have noted that they become intertwined with urban varieties, and they may even contribute to them insofar as some lexical items may enter the mainstream due to, among other things, special use in the advertising industry and media. This is particularly evident in Dowling’s Chapter 2 on isiXhosa in informal radio programmes. There is also the intermediate position of online chat communication among young people (Deumert, Reference Deumert, Cutler and Røyneland2018), which may lead to what were originally ‘youthisms’ (Chapter 4) becoming occasionally accepted as general informal language. Youth languages are thus immersed in the melting pots of urban language change.

However, on the whole, the special intentions, stances, performativities and age-graded liveliness of youth languages keep them away from the mainstream. They deserve separate and special attention that differs from the classic concerns of language contact and change. Any talk of pidginisation, creolisation, new language acquisition and contact between formerly distinct codes must be deferred to the urban varieties around them. The continued entanglements of these ‘full’ but highly variable urban languages with modern African urban life and its established languages, as well as with former colonial languages, especially French and English, make Africa an important site for twenty-first-century research.

The chapters in this book cover youth language practices in four countries: Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya and South Africa. Youth language practices in South Africa, or what we will also refer to as ‘tsotsitaals’Footnote ³ following Mesthrie (Reference Mesthrie, Meyerhoff and Nagy2008; Chapter 4), mostly co-occur in repertoires that include urban African languages, which have become quite fluid in their openness to large-scale borrowing and switching. It is therefore necessary to understand and characterise that fluidity first. This is ably done in Chapter 1 by Silvester Ron Simango, from a structural/generative perspective, using insights from grammatical theories of code-switching, namely Myers-Scotton’s (Reference Myers-Scotton1993) Matrix Language Frame model and the 4-M model (Myers-Scotton and Jake, Reference Myers-Scotton and Jake2000). He shows that while youth languages stand out because of their lexical (and attitudinal) displays, the apparent grammatical convergence claimed to be taking place between the languages in the mix is the same as that taking place more generally in the urban varieties of isiXhosa. Simango demonstrates a greater degree of structural coherence in terms of notions like matrix and embedded languages and system morphemes. The chapter analyses data primarily drawn from a corpus of naturalistic-like conversations recorded in East London, in the Eastern Cape Province, which include informal discussions about Tsotsitaal.

Chapter 2, by Tessa Dowling, goes a step further in discussing what differentiates standard isiXhosa from other urban varieties of the language, including ones in the Tsotsitaal style. The standard variety has acquired an established status in different domains – specifically religion (traditional and Western) and formal written texts. The chapter focuses on the spoken varieties of younger users that are gaining prestige and wider acceptability through the ease with which they embrace modern consumerism and multilingualism. An analysis of a corpus of contemporary spoken isiXhosa transcribed from the official isiXhosa national broadcaster Umhlobo Nenene is undertaken, with attention given to features across texts and text varieties in news broadcasts, breakfast chats, advertisements and football commentaries. The analysis includes an identification of elements indexical of tsotsitaals entering mainstream spoken Urban isiXhosa, thereby losing their ‘youth’ or ‘antilanguage’ associations.

In Chapter 3, Heather Brookes shows how youth make lexical and other linguistic choices to index attitudes, stances, alignments and identities in the service of social distinction, based on several years of observation and sociolinguistic analysis in Vosloorus, a township east of Johannesburg. She shows how young men break into performance mode during peer interactions, noting that these performances have become enregistered as styles of talking that index different social categories among young men. She describes how linguistic innovation and change in slang styles occur across male social networks. Among the different social categories of young men, it is those who spend most of their time on the township streets that are considered the most streetwise and authentic in terms of espousing a ‘true’ township male identity. Through their skilled performances in peer interactions on the township streets, they are often innovators in linguistic change, based on their status and social power within male networks. The chapter demonstrates how notions of authenticity in relation to social identity, social aspirations and orientation to society influence the flow of linguistic innovations in youth language practice. It also shows that multivalency accounts for how some of the slang lexicon associated with male youth enters into urban vernaculars, rather than linguistic spread and the development of ‘new’ local languages.

Chapter 4, by Rajend Mesthrie, draws together some of the arguments and theoretical implications of previous studies of Tsotsitaal and other ‘named’ youth varieties of South Africa. He points to the importance of research and data gathered by young scholars (almost as a prerequisite), but he cautions that their claims and conclusions must be tested by other means, especially our expectations from contact and variationist sociolinguistics. Mesthrie stresses that the syntactic focus of his chapter is but one of several and necessarily multiple perspectives needed to get to grips with youth language practices. The chapter reanalyses some claims about syntactic innovations previously claimed to be unique to tsotsitaals. He does this by considering a broader view of the syntax of Bantu languages beyond a narrow and formal standard. He finds almost no difference in the syntax of the wider urban vernacular and the youth language practices of Tsotsitaal in the empirically rich MA thesis of Ngwenya (Reference Ngwenya1995), despite the claims made in the study about the autonomy of Tsotsitaal. A semblance of autonomy occurs when making a comparison with the standard, but Mesthrie argues that the latter is irrelevant now to the ‘vibe, jive and jibes’ of township life, where it is the modern urban variety that provides a syntactic matrix for youth language practices.

In Chapter 5, Roland Kießling discusses some grammatical features of African urban youth languages by focusing on Camfranglais in Cameroonian cities such as Yaoundé and Douala. Antilanguages have been characterised as dependent styles of speaking that graft onto the grammar of another language, thereby developing an ephemeral emblematic lexicon, but few or no grammatical structures of their own. Camfranglais stands out in that its grammatical features cannot be entirely reduced to a French matrix. Instead, it draws on the grammar of Pidgin English as well. This African urban youth language is thus associated with a hybrid and autonomous grammar that combines connotations of adolescence, progressiveness, urbanity and Cameroonian identity. This study calls for further comparative research on code-switching between Pidgin English and Cameroonian French, if used by females, for example, without antilinguistic intentions.

Chapter 6, by Maarten Mous and Sandra Barasa, discusses the development in Kenya of Sheng (showing largely Urban Kiswahili syntax with salient English lexis) and Engsh (showing the reverse; i.e. largely the syntax of English and lexis from African languages). While African urban youth languages may start as antilanguages of the streets, many of them gain a wider receptive community due to their gradual spread into the informal transport environment, song lyrics (and thus the radio) and comic strips and cartoons (and thus the printed press). The use of these two youth languages, Sheng and Engsh, in these media has the effect of making them acceptable to a larger part of the society, but mainly as a style associated with male youth and modernity.

In Chapter 7, Akissi Béatrice Boutin focuses on hybridity in Nouchi, a widespread youth language of Côte d’Ivoire. She relates this to the general hybridity found in Ivorian French, exploring the relationship between the two. She focuses on whether Ivorian French may be said to be a true hybrid, as it is no longer totally identifiable with French or any African language. Rather, certain features from all of these source languages can be found. The chapter thus expands on the theme of the overlaps between youth language and a broader hybrid urban variety, while ultimately differentiating between them.

Chapter 8, by Ellen Hurst-Harosh and Eyo Offiong Mensah, reflects on the preceding chapters and highlights some considerations regarding methods of data collection in African youth language research. The chapter considers the questions of authenticity and naturalistic data in relation to youth language data. Familiar issues pertaining to the observer’s paradox in sociolinguistics apply (regarding the avoidance by speakers under outside observation of the very forms that the outsider linguist wishes to hear). The chapter illustrates the wide range of data outcomes in youth language research to make the argument that the most important move is to define the object of analysis.