From the Hood to Public Discourse: The Social Spread of African Youth Languages

Urban youth language in Africa is increasingly present in various public and family contexts, rather than being limited to marginalized urban identities—new contexts associated less with resistance than with openness, unboundedness, and inclusion. This implies changes of style, exclusiveness, identity marking, and domains of usage. Analysis of Yanké in Kinshasa and Yarada K’wank’wa in Addis Ababa shows that new unbounded identities of youth language speakers are associated with more fluid and accessible communities of practice, reflecting new modes of regulating ingroup boundaries and conveying language rights to outsiders (including older people from all social strata). This accompanies new developments in speakers’ ideologies and constructions of identity.