Swahili Forum 13 (2006): Special Issue “Lugha Ya Mitaani in Tanzania”

SSWWAAHHIILLII FFOORRUUMM 1133 Edited by: Rose Marie Beck, Lutz Diegner, Clarissa Dittemer, Thomas Geider, Uta Reuster-Jahn SPECIAL ISSUE LUGHA YA MITAANI IN TANZANIA THE POETICS AND SOCIOLOGY OF A YOUNG URBAN STYLE OF SPEAKING WITH A DICTIONARY COMPRISING 1100 WORDS AND PHRASES Uta Reuster-Jahn & Roland Kießling 2006 Department of Anthropology and African Studies Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany ISSN 1614-2373 SWAHILI FORUM 13 (2006): SPECIAL ISSUE “LUGHA YA MITAANI IN TANZANIA” Content 1. Introduction: Lugha ya Mitaani 1 1.1 History of colloquial non-standard Swahili speech forms 1 1.2 Special forms of Lugha ya Mitaani 4 1.2.1 Campus Swahili 5 1.2.2 Secret codes derived from Swahili 5 1.2.3 Lugha ya vijana wa vijiweni 6 1.2.4 The language of daladalas 8 1.3 Overview of the article 9 2. Methodology 10 2.1 Field research 10 2. 2 Acknowledgements 12 2. 3 The making of the dictionary 12 3. Sociolinguistics of Lugha ya Mitaani 13 3.1 Lugha ya Mitaani as youth language 13 3.2 Knowledge, use and attitudes 14 3.3 Diachronic aspects of Lugha ya Mitaani 17 4. Lexical elaboration 18 4.1 Humans and social relations 20 4.1.1 Humans 20 4.1.2 Women 21 4.1.3 Men 23 4.1.4 Homosexuals 23 UTA REUSTER-JAHN & ROLAND KIEßLING 4.1.5 Social relationship 24 4.1.6 Social status 24 4.2 Communication 24 4.3 Body & Appearance 25 4.4 Economy, Money & Occupation 26 4.5 Sex 27 4.6 Drugs & Alcohol 28 4.7 Movement & Vehicles 28 4.8 Evaluative terms 29 4.9 Experience 30 4.10 Trouble & Violence 30 4.11 Crime & Police 30 4.12 Food 31 4.13 Disease 31 4.14 Geography & Place 32 4.15 Education 32 4.16 Sports 33 4.17 Weapons 33 4.18 Cultural innovation 33 4.19 Time 33 5. The poetic making of Lugha ya Mitaani 34 5.1 Hyperbole and dysphemism 35 5.2 Humoristic effects 37 5.3 Metaphors 39 LUGHA YA MITAANI IN TANZANIA 5.4 Cognitive motivation 41 5.5 Onomastic synecdoche 43 5.6 Multiple semantic extensions 44 5.7 Folk etymologies 45 5.8 Phraseologisms 46 5.9 Manipulations of form 50 5.10 Donor languages 52 6. The construction of youth identities in discourse practice 53 7. Lugha ya Mitaani and the media 60 8. Lugha ya Mitaani in a historical perspective 66 8.1 Lugha ya Mitaani in contrast to other phenomena of language birth 67 8.1.1 Pidginisation and creolisation 67 8.1.2 Codeswitching 67 8.1.3 Lugha ya Mitaani and Sheng 70 8.2 Semantic change 75 8.3 Sociosymbolic change 76 9. Conclusion 78 Abbreviations 79 Bibliography 80 Appendix 1: Lugha ya Mitaani texts written by John Degera 88 Appendix 2: Diachronic change in the campus lexicon at Teacher Training College Nachingwea 90 Appendix 3: Dictionary of Lugha ya Mitaani 93 SWAHILI FORUM 13 (2006): SPECIAL ISSUE “LUGHA YA MITAANI IN TANZANIA” LUGHA YA MITAANI IN TANZANIA THE POETICS AND SOCIOLOGY OF A YOUNG URBAN STYLE OF SPEAKING WITH A DICTIONARY COMPRISING 1100 WORDS AND PHRASES UTA REUSTER-JAHN & ROLAND KIEßLING “Na ukweli si uongo ndani ya Bongo tumia ubongo.”* 1. Introduction: Lugha ya Mitaani 1.1 History of colloquial non-standard Swahili speech forms Swahili has been moulded in a long process by many factors over many centuries (Chiraghdin & Mnyampala 1977, Khalid 1977, Nurse & Spear 1985, Shariff 1973, Whiteley 1969). One of the latest chapters in its history is the standardisation and implementation as national and official language in Tanzania after independence. The language issue was given high priority by the government since it was considered a crucial factor in the process of nation building. It can be said that the language policy has been successful in making Swahili the common language of Tanzanians. Especially in urban areas Swahili is more and more becoming the first language of children. This does not only apply to ethnically mixed marriages, but is increasingly observed in town areas also for families where both parents share the same mother-tongue. The National Swahili Council was given the task of further developing as well as guarding the standard form in textbooks for schools, in literature, in music texts, and in radio and television broadcasting. However, while Standard Swahili was taught in schools and written * Central thoughts of this paper were presented to the audience of the 18th Swahili Colloquium in Bayreuth, 6.- 8.5.2005. Special thanks for illuminating remarks and encouragement to Mohamed Abdulaziz, Rose Marie Beck, Clarissa Dittemer, Mikhail Gromov, Ralf Großerhode, Said A.M. Khamis, Omar Babu Marjan, Ridder Samsom, and Farouk Topan. We also wish to thank our colleagues Lutz Diegner for valuable and extensive comments on a draft version of this paper, and Maria Suriano for contributing a few items to the dictionary. The slogan in the title is taken from Dola Soul on the cassette “Ndani ya Bongo” by II Proud (1997), cited after Gesthuizen & Haas (2003: 2), and it means: “and the truth is not a lie in Dar es Salaam use your brains”. UTA REUSTER-JAHN & ROLAND KIEßLING in books and newspapers, people in town quarters where Swahili was spoken developed and used a colloquial style of speech by enriching the standard form with “slang” expressions and lexemes. In 1958, R.H. Gower reported the existence of Swahili slang, which, according to his observations was “born in towns” with young men being “the most prolific manufacturers of slang” (1958: 250). In the eighties it was common to call colloquial forms of Swahili “lugha ya mitaani” (“language of the town quarters”, or “street language”)1. In 1987, Rajmund Ohly published a slang dictionary with an introduction, based on fieldwork carried out between the 1950s and the beginning of the 1980s2. Obviously, he was not familiar with the expression “Lugha ya Mitaani”, instead he uses the sociolinguistic terms “usemi wa mitaani” (style of speaking at the town quarters) and “msimu”3 to denote slang (Ohly 1987a: 4). Recently, many people in Tanzania speak of “lugha za mitaani” (‘languages of the town quarters’, or ‘street languages’), using the plural to point to the fact that there exists a whole range of varieties of non-standard language, depending on local and social factors. Yared Kihore also recognises diversity when speaking of “vilugha vinavyojulikana kama Kiswahili cha mitaani” (‘local languages known as Kiswahili cha mitaani’; Kihore 2004: 6). The more recent development of lugha za mitaani reflects very much the social, economic, and political liberalisation in Tanzania, which started in the late 1980s. Little research has been done on the complex of these locally coloured colloquial Swahili variants, and we hope that our work will prepare the ground for further, more detailed studies. Since we acknowledge the existence of variants, we will use Lugha ya Mitaani (henceforth abbreviated LyM) to denote the phenomenon as such, whereas we will apply the term Lugha za Mitaani (henceforth abbreviated LzM) when we speak of the complex of variants. It is not at all clear in which way the LzM are related to each other. Most probably there are varieties which can be labelled sociolects. This might be the case with the language of sub-cultural groups. In most cases, however, LzM are used as a register in certain informal situations. We suppose that there is a continuum between register and sociolect. Some elements of LzM also gradually become unmarked and diffuse into the normal language, where they more or less persist, and some eventually become part of the standard language.4 Evidence for this process can be obtained by comparing the first and second edition of the Kamusi ya Kiswahili Sanifu (Dictionary of Standard Swahili, TUKI 1981 and 2004), which shows that a number of words have now become acknowledged as part of the standard language, for instance mchecheto ‘worries, pressure, confusion’, changudoa ‘prostitute’, or kasheshe ‘mayhem’. 1 This is confirmed by Reuster-Jahn who often encountered this expression while living in Tanzania between 1985 and 1988, especially when she was asking for the meaning of colloquialisms. 2 Ohly used 1) data collected in the 1950s and published in the journal “Swahili”, 2) data collected by T.S.Y. Sengo before 1974, and 3) data collected by himself between 1975 and 1982 (Ohly 1987a: 1-2). 3 According to Ohly msimu is derived from simulizi, but it seems also probable that it is SS *msimu ‘season’, referring to the seasonal character of Lugha ya mitaani lexemes. 4 Ohly makes a similar statement with respect to “Standard colloquial language” (1987a: 4). 2 LUGHA YA MITAANI IN TANZANIA In 1990, J. Blommaert referred to the phenomenon of non-standard forms of speech as “Kiswahili cha mitaani”, which he characterised as: “[...] a complex of English-interfered Kiswahili variants, appearing in most of the urban areas of present day Tanzania. It is assumed to be the medium of popular amusement through music and comic books, and seems to be the jargon of fashionable youngsters. Here, English interferences are mostly idiomatic in nature (…) and are heavily integrated.” (1990: 24) While it is true that recent LyM-variants of Swahili are interspersed with mostly idiomatic English expressions, we reject the notion that English elements are constitutive for Lugha ya Mitaani. In older forms, and especially in areas distant from the urban centres and outside university and college campuses, lugha za mitaani until the 1990s were almost free of English. The primary characteristic of lugha za mitaani in general is that they deviate from Standard Kiswahili by their special lexicon which is in a constant process of rapid renovation.

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