Evolution of Sheng During the Last Decade
Les Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est / The East African Review 49 | 2014 Varia Evolution of Sheng during the Last Decade Aurélia Ferrari Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/340 Publisher IFRA - Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique Printed version Date of publication: 1 September 2014 Number of pages: 29-54 ISSN: 2071-7245 Electronic reference Aurélia Ferrari, « Evolution of Sheng during the Last Decade », Les Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est / The East African Review [Online], 49 | 2014, Online since 07 May 2019, connection on 08 May 2019. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/340 Les Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est / The East African Review Les Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est Evolution of Sheng during the Last Decade Aurélia Ferrari Introduction Sheng, popularly deined as an acronym for “Swahili-English slang” (Mazrui, 1995), emerged in the 1960s in the multicultural environment of Nairobi. It is an urban language which combines mainly Kiswahili and English but also other Kenyan languages such as Kikuyu, Luyha, Dholuo and Kikamba. Sheng is characterized by an important linguistic lexibility. It does not have an oficial status even if it widelyis spoken, especially by the youth. Originally used as a vehicular language between people from different regions, it is becoming a vernacular language, some people born in the 1980s or later having Sheng as their irst language. Sheng is not a unique linguistic phenomenon in Africa. In the last ifty years, urbanization and globalization have prompted the emergence of new urban linguistic codes. Such codes are based on multilingual speech and characterized by unstable vocabulary.
[Show full text]