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Languages of Urban Africa (Advances in Sociolinguistics)

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Languages of Urban Africa (Advances in Sociolinguistics) The Languages of Urban Africa Advances in Sociolinguistics Series Editor: Professor Sally Johnson, University of Leeds Since the emergence of sociolinguistics as a new field of enquiry in the late 1960s, research into the relationship between language and society has advanced almost beyond recognition. In particular, the past decade has witnessed the considerable influence of theories drawn from outside of sociolinguistics itself. Thus rather than see language as a mere reflection of society, recent work has been increasingly inspired by ideas drawn from social, cultural, and political theory that have emphasized the constitutive role played by language/discourse in all areas of social life. The Advances in Sociolinguistics series seeks to provide a snapshot of the current diversity of the field of sociolinguistics and the blurring of the boundaries between sociolinguistics and other domains of study concerned with the role of language in society. Discourses of Endangerment: Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages Edited by Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller Globalization and Language in Contact Edited by James Collins, Stef Slembrouck, and Mike Baynham Globalization of Language and Culture in Asia Edited by Viniti Vaish Linguistic Minorities and Modernity, 2nd Edition: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography Monica Heller Language, Culture and Identity: An Ethnolinguistic Perspective Philip Riley Language Ideologies and Media Discourse: Texts, Practices, Politics Edited by Sally Johnson and Tommaso M. Milani Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies Edited by Sally Johnson and Astrid Ensslin Language and Power: An Introduction to Institutional Discourse Andrea Mayr Language Testing, Migration and Citizenship Edited by Guus Extra, Massimiliano Spotti and Piet Van Avermaet Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese Semiotic Landscapes Language, Image, Space Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow The Languages of Global Hip-Hop Edited by Marina Terkourafi The Language of Newspapers: Socio-historical Perspectives Martin Conboy The Languages of Urban Africa Edited by Fiona Mc Laughlin Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704, New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 © Fiona Mc Laughlin and Contributors 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-8470-6116-4 (Hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Publisher has applied for CIP data. Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group Contents Acknowledgments vi Notes on Contributors vii 1 Introduction to the languages of urban Africa 1 Fiona Mc Laughlin 2 The historical dynamic of multilingualism in Accra 19 M. E. Kropp Dakubu 3 The story of old-urban vernaculars in North Africa 32 Atiqa Hachimi 4 The spread of Lingala as a lingua franca in the Congo Basin 50 Eyamba G. Bokamba 5 Senegal’s early cities and the making of an urban language 71 Fiona Mc Laughlin 6 Discourse, community, identity: processes of linguistic 86 homogenization in Bamako Cécile Canut 7 The multiple facets of the urban language form, Nouchi 103 Sabine Kube-Barth 8 On assessing the ethnolinguistic vitality of Ga in Accra 115 James Essegbey 9 Multilingualism and language use in Porto Novo 131 Wale Adeniran 10 Language choice in Dar es Salaam’s billboards 152 Charles Bwenge 11 Innovations on the fringes of the Kiswahili-speaking world 178 Haig Der-Houssikian 12 Polarizing and blending: compatible practices in a bilingual 191 urban community in Cape Town Kay McCormick References 210 Index 229 Acknowledgments This book owes much to the University of Florida’s Working Group on the Languages of Urban Africa, supported initially by a grant from the Office of Research and subsequently by the Center for African Studies. Funding from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences pro- vided me with the resources to prepare the manuscript. I am grateful to all three units for the role they played in supporting this project. In addition to those who have chapters in this volume, others who con- tributed to the working group include Akintunde Akinyemi, Masangu Matondo, Mantoa Rose Smouse, Abubakar Alhassan, Rahmane Idrissa, and Mamarame Seck. Many of the chapters in this volume were first presented at an international workshop held at the University of Florida in 2006, and I thank Salikoko Mufwene for his valuable contribution as the workshop discussant. I am grateful to Corinna Greene and Ikeade Akinyemi, members of the staff of the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida, for their help in organizing the workshop. I also acknowledge the support of Ann Wehmeyer, Chair of the Department of African and Asian Languages and Literatures, Caroline Wiltshire, Chair of the Program in Linguistics, and Leonardo Villalón, Director of the Center for African Studies. Rania Habib deserves special thanks for her work as my research assistant and for making sure that things ran smoothly at the workshop. Finally, I thank Matt Marsik for creating the map of Africa for this volume. Notes on contributors Fiona Mc Laughlin is an Associate Professor of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on the sociolinguistics of language contact in Senegal as well as on the phono- logy and morphology of Atlantic languages. She has published articles in journals such as Phonology, Language in Society, Journal of the Inter- national Phonetic Association, and Studies in African Linguistics, and she has contributed chapters to several edited volumes including Lan- guage and National Identity in Africa (Oxford 2008), Globalization and Language Vitality: Perspectives from Africa (Continuum 2008), Adjec- tive Classes: A Cross-Linguistic Typology (Oxford 2004) and Linguistic fieldwork (Cambridge 2001). She is a former director of the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal, and has taught at the Université Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis in Senegal and the Université Abdou Moumouni Dioffo in Niamey, Niger. Her current research focuses on urban Wolof in Senegal. Wale Adeniran teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. His research focuses on cross-border languages in West Africa and he has published articles on Francophonie as modern cultural imperialism in sub-Saharan Africa, and on decolonizing foreign language teaching in Africa. He is currently working on the sociolinguistics of Porto Novo, a city at the border of Benin and Nigeria. Eyamba G. Bokamba is a Professor of Linguistics and African Languages at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he serves as director of the Program in African Languages in the Department of Linguistics. He is well known for his distinguished work on Bantu syn- tax, multilingualism and codeswitching, varieties of African English, language planning, and policy in Africa, and African language pedagogy. He is the co-author, with Molingo Virginie Bokamba, of Tosolola Lin- gala: Let’s Speak Lingala (National African Language Resource Center, University of Wisconsin 2004). His most recent publications on the lan- guage ecology of D. R. Congo include chapters in the volumes Language and National Identity in Africa (Oxford 2008) and Globalization and Language Vitality: Perspectives from Africa (Continuum 2008). His cur- rent research focuses on multilingualism in sub-Saharan Africa. Notes on contributors Charles Bwenge is an Assistant Professor of African Sociolinguistics and coordinates the program in African languages at the University of Florida. His research focuses on institutional communicative interac- tions particularly in political and commercial advertisement discourses in Swahili-speaking east Africa as well as on African language pedagogy. His most recent publications include “Codeswitching in Tanzanian par- liamentary discourse: a communicative innovation” in Issues in Politi- cal Discourse Analysis, “Is ‘msonge’ a house? Visualizing a novel in the L2 classroom: the case of Swahili” in the Journal of the National Coun- cil of Less Commonly Taught Languages, and “Bringing Codeswitching into an L2 Communicative Classroom: the African experience” in the Journal of the African Language Teachers Association. His current research focuses on the interactional dynamics between Swahili and English in the globalized marketplace of east Africa. Cécile Canut is a Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at the Université de Paris-Descartes. Her research has focused primarily on multilingual- ism in Mali, and she is the author of Le spectre identitaire, entre langue et pouvoir au Mali (Lambert Lucas 2008) and Dynamiques linguistiques au Mali (Didier Érudition 1996). She is also the editor of Imaginaires linguistiques en Afrique (Harmattan 1997) and co-editor of Comment les langues se mélangent: codeswitching en francophonie (Harmattan 2002). In Une langue sans qualité (Lambert Lucas 2007) she develops an interdisciplinary approach to the field of linguistic anthropology, incorporating discourse analysis and psychoanalysis. M. E. Kropp Dakubu is a retired Professor
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