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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 925

Part of Session 123: Non-standard and youth varieties in urban Africa (Other abstracts in this session)

Communicative practices among urban black male youth in a Johannesburg township.

Authors: Brookes, Heather Jean
Submitted by: Brookes, Heather Jean (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

A number of studies describe an informal ‘variety’ sometimes referred to as Tsotsitaal or Iscamtho spoken in urban areas in South Africa (Mesthrie 2008). Several scholars have analysed its semantic and structural nature noting its rapidly changing lexicon and matrix language structure (Slabbert and Myers-Scotton 1996). Some linguists have suggested that there are two varieties, an Afrikaans (Tsotsitaal) and a Zulu (Iscamtho) based variety, with separate linguistic origins (Ntshangase 1995). However, there is still much debate about the nature of this linguistic phenomenon, its users, functions and role. This debate may be partly because few scholars have studied it in situ relying instead on elicitation and users’ reflections.

This paper examines the use of this ‘variety’ in a township community east of Johannesburg. Data are drawn from 14 years of ethnographic work consisting of observation, video and audio recordings of spontaneous interactions and interviews with community members.

Our research shows that young men engage in a particular type of communicative practice with their peers from the age of 16 until their late twenties. This period is a transitional stage between child and adulthood when young men are expected to socialize on the township street corners with their peers. Once they are too old for street corner groups, they may still use their particular way of talking with their peers, but it is outdated belonging to only their particular generation. Women do not communicate in this way although some women may use certain features of male talk for stylistic effect. Young men do not generally name their speech and only very occasionally describe it with the verb, ukuringa ‘to ringa.’

Young men utilize the dominant language spoken in their local area (South Sotho or Zulu) as the base/matrix language. Their communicative practices incorporate many of the features of antilanguages (Halliday 1976; Kiesling and Mous 2004). However, gesture and intonation are also key components. Phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic features as well as gesture and intonation vary from section to section in the township and among street corner groups. These differences form a contiuum of intelligibility from those that are close to the urban varieties of Bantu languages spoken among township members to ways of speaking that are largely untelligible. This continuum reflects different social groupings among young men from ‘respectable’ to ‘disrespectable/ delinquent.’ These social groupings are characterised by diverse orientations to local, urban, national and global identities, and they draw from a number of different linguistic varieties in the multlingual urban African context to index these identities. The spread of lexical and other features moves upward through the social hierarchy from the ‘delinquent’ through to ‘respectable’ groupings. Young men perceived to be ‘delinquent’ are linguistic innovators. These linguistic innovations filter through to other groups via a number of social mechanisms. These data suggest new ways of understanding the boundaries between urban varieties and youth communicative practices as well the factors that shape these types of linguistic phenomena.