Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Ultimate Matthew Effect for Sheng

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Sociolinguistics in African Contexts

Part of the book series: Multilingual Education ((MULT,volume 20))

  • 560 Accesses

Abstract

The Matthew effect is simply the accrual of social benefits or detriments over time. This paper explores the social science term not only from a linguistic perspective but also with an ecological aspect. Sheng, like other urban vernaculars, germinated in a superb hotbed of language mixing. Speakers of different languages were forced to co-exist, and a need for an unmarked ecological corridor emerged. This article, however, is more concerned with the disadvantages faced by first language speakers. By asserting that Sheng is nothing but a game or slang, the “educated” not only hinder education of native speakers, but also deny them status as a minority community in their own country, the ultimate Matthew effect.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Armstrong, J., Blackwell, S., Iannucci, A., Roche, T., & Martin, I (Writers), and Iannucci, A (Director). (2007). Part One: The Rise of the Nutters (#2.1) [TV series]. In A. Iannucci, (Producer), The Thick of It. New York: BBC Worldwide.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beck, R. (2010). Urban languages in Africa. Africa Spectrum, 45(3), 11–41.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bujra, J. (1974). Pumwani: Language use in an urban muslim community. In W. H. Whiteley (Ed.), Language in Kenya (pp. 217–252). Nairobi: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carroll, L. (1990). Chapter II: The garden of live flowers. In Through the looking glass (pp. 7–12). Champaign: Project Gutenberg.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davidson, B. (1986). The story of Africa. London: Mitchell Beazley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dawkins, R. (1982). The extended phenotype: The gene as the unit of selection. Oxford: Freeman.

    Google Scholar 

  • Diamond, J. M. (1992). The third chimpanzee: The evolution and future of the human animal. New York: HarperCollins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. New York: W.W. Norton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eastman, C. M. (1992). Codeswitching as an urban language-contact phenomenon. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 13(1–2), 1–17.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field. Journal of SocioLinguistics, 12(4), 453–476.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ferrari, A. (2006). The popularization carriers of sheng vocabulary and perpetual word creation. Le Francais En Afrique, 21, 227–236.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ford, D. Y. (2003, June 20). Two other wrongs don’t make a right: Sacrificing the needs of diverse students does not solve gifted education’s unresolved problems. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 26, 283–291. doi:10.4219/jeg-2003-302.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Furedi, F. (1973). The African crowd in nairobi: Popular movements and elite politics. The Journal of African History, 14(2), 275–290.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gibbons, A. (1998). Which of our genes makes us human? Science, 281, 1432–1434.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Giddy, C. (1974). Cycads of South Africa. Cape Town: Purnell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Githinji, P. (2006). Sheng and variation: The construction and negotiation of multiple identities. Unpublished dissertation in linguistics. Michigan State University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gorelik, G., & Shackelford, T. K. (2011). Human sexual conflict from molecules to culture. Evolutionary Psychology, 9(4), 564–587.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gorman, T. P. (1974). The development of language policy in kenya with particular reference to the educational system. In W. H. Whiteley (E55) Language in Kenya. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 397–453.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 205, 581–598.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hake, A. (1977). African metropolis: Nairobi’s Self-Help City. London: Chatto and Windus for Sussex University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hancock, I. (1987). A preliminary classification of the anglophone atlantic creoles with syntactic data from thirty-three representative dialects. In G. Gilbert (Ed.), Pidgin and creole languages: Essays in memory of John E. Reinecke (pp. 264–333). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harris, J. R. (1998). The nurture assumption: Why children turn out the way they do. New York: Free Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haugen, E. (1972). The Ecology of Language. In A. S. Dill (Ed.), The ecology of language: Essays by Einar Haugen (pp. 325–339). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hebdige, D. (1979). Style as bricolage. In Subculture, the meaning of style (pp. 102–106). London: Methuen.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heine, B. (1979). Some linguistic characteristics of african-based pidgins. In I. F. Hancock (Ed.), Readings in creole studies (pp. 89–98). E. Story-Scientia: Ghent.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Hinskens, F., Auer, P., & Kerswill, P. (2005). The study of dialect convergence and divergence: conceptual and methodological considerations (pp. 1–48). In P. Auer, F. Hinskens, & P. Kerswill (Eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hock, H. H. (1991). Principles of historical linguistics (2nd ed.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Howard, E., & In Osborn, F. J. (1965). Garden cities of to-morrow. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hymes, D. H. (1971). Pidginization and Creolization of languages: Proceedings of a Conference held at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, April, 1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • K’Akumu, O. A., & Olima, W. A. (2007). The dynamics and implications of residential segregation in Nairobi. Habitat International, 31(1), 87–99.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Karanja, L. (2010). ‘Homeless’ at Home: Linguistic, cultural, and identity hybridity and third space positioning of Kenyan Urban Youth, Canadian and International Education/Education canadienne et internationale. 39(2), Article 2. Available at: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cie-eci/vol39/iss2/2

  • Kerswill, P., & Trudgill, P. (2005). The Birth of New Dialects. In P. Auer, F. Hinskens, & P. Kerswill (Eds.), Dialect change: Convergence and divergence in European languages (pp. 196–220). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kreuter, G. (1962). The vanishing genius: Lewis Terman and the Stanford Study. History of Education Quarterly, 2(1), 6–18.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, F. J., & Feldman, M. W. (1999). Evolutionary consequences of niche construction and their implications for ecology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 96(18), 10242–10247.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • LeBreton, F. H. (1936). Up-country swahili exercises: For the soldier, settler, miner, merchant, and their wives, and for all who deal with up-country natives without interpreters (15th ed.). Richmond: R.W. Simpson.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lonsdale, J. (2002). Town Life in Colonial Kenya. In A. Burton (Ed.), The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa c. 1750–2000 (pp. 207–222). Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa.

    Google Scholar 

  • Makoni, S., Makoni, B., & Rosenberg, A. (2010). The wordy worlds of popular music in eastern and southern Africa: Possible implications for language-in-education policy. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 9(1), 1–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Markham, B. (1983). West with the night. San Francisco: North Point Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mattheier, K. J. (1996). Convergence of varieties: Reflections on a component of a theory of language variation. Sociolinguistica, 10, 31–52.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maxon, R. M. (1986). East Africa: An introductory history. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McConnell, T. (2007). Of all the gin joints in all the world; Tristan McConnell in the Big Baobab Pub, Modjadjiskloof, South Africa. Sunday Times [London, England] 7 Jan. 2007: 4. Retrieved from http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/cars/article57630.ece

  • Merton, R. K. (1968). The Matthew effect: The reward and communication systems of science. Science, 199, 55–63.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, C. (1971). The lunatic express: An entertainment in imperialism. New York: The Macmillan Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Milroy, J. (2001). Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization. Journal of SocioLinguistics, 5(4), 530–555.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mufwene, S. S. (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mutonya, M. (2007). Redefining Nairobi’s Streets: A study of slang, marginalization, and identity. Journal of Global Initiatives, 2(2),169–185. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/jgi/vol2/iss2/5/

  • Mutonya, M., & Parsons, T. H. (2004). KiKAR: A Swahili Variety in Kenya’s Colonial Army. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics (JALL) Walter de Gruyter, 25(2), 111–125.

    Google Scholar 

  • Myers-Scotton, C. (1979). The context is the message: Morphological, syntactic and semantic reduction and deletion in nairobi and kampala varieties of swahili. In I. F. Hancock (Ed.), Readings in Creole studies (pp. 111–127). E. Story-Scientia: Ghent.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Myers-Scotton, C. (2002). Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Neale, B. (1974a). Kenya’s Asian Languages. In W. H. Whiteley (Ed.), Language in Kenya (pp. 69–85). Nairobi: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Neale, B. (1974b). Language use among the Asian communities. In W. H. Whiteley (Ed.), Language in Kenya (pp. 263–317). Nairobi: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ngware, M. W., Oketch, M., Ezeh, A. C., & Mudege, N. M. (2009). Do household characteristics matter in schooling decisions in urban Kenya? Equal Opportunities International, 28(7), 591–608.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nietzsche, F. W., & Common, T. (1900). Thus spake Zarathustra. New York: Modern Library.

    Google Scholar 

  • Odhiambo, A. (2002). Kula Raha: Gendered discourses and the contours of leisure in Nairobi, 1946–63. In A. Burton (Ed.), The urban experience in eastern Africa c. 1750–2000 (pp. 254–264). Nairobi: British Institute in Eastern Africa.

    Google Scholar 

  • Odinga, A. O. (1967). Not yet uhuru: The autobiography of oginga odinga. Nairobi: Heinemann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Patel, R. B., & Burke, T. F. (2009). Urbanization—An emerging humanitarian disaster. New England Journal of Medicine, 361(8), 741–743.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peters, M. (2006). Not your father’s cliché. Columbia Journalism Review, 45(2), 14–14.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pinker, S. (2002). The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. New York: Viking.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plotz, D. (2005). The genius factory: The curious history of the Nobel Prize sperm bank. New York: Random House.

    Google Scholar 

  • Prah, K. K. (1998). Between distinction and extinction: The harmonisation and standardisation of African languages. Colloquium on harmonising and standardising African languages for education and development. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rampton, B. (1985). A critique of some educational attitudes to the English of British Asian school children, and their implications. In C. Brumfit, R. Ellis, & J. Levin (Eds.), English as a second language in the United Kingdom: Linguistic and educational contexts (pp. 187–198). Oxford: Pergamon.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ree, R. H. (2005). Detecting the historical signature of key innovations using stochastic models of character evolution and cladogenesis. Evolution, 59(2), 257–265.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rickford, J. R. (1997). 12. Suite for ebony and phonics. Discover, 18, 82–87.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rigney, D. (2010). The Matthew effect: How advantage begets further advantage. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rudd, P. W. (2013). The AUYL Syndrome: A Case Study of Discrimination and Linguistic Human Rights Violation, paper presented at The African Urban and Youth Language Conference (AUYL 2013) at The Lady Hamilton Hotel, Cape Town, by the University of Cape Town, South Africa (July 05, 2013).

    Google Scholar 

  • Samper, D. A. (2002). Talking sheng: The role of a hybrid language in the construction of identity and youth culture in Nairobi, Kenya. Unpublished Dissertation in Folklore and Folklife. University of Pennsylvania.

    Google Scholar 

  • Singler, J. V. (1987). The City, the Mesolect, and innovation. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2(2), 119–147.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Singler, J. V. (1988). The homogeneity of substrate as a factor in Pidgin/Creole genesis. Language, 64(1), 27–51.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spronk, R. (2014). Exploring the middle classes in Nairobi: From modes of production to modes of sophistication. African Studies Review, 57(1), 93–114.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360–406.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Terman, L., & Oden, M. (1955). The gifted group at middle life, vol. 5 in genetic studies of genius. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tooley, J., Dixon, P., & Stanfield, J. (2008). Impact of free primary education in Kenya. Educational Management Administration and Leadership, 36(4), 449–469.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Trudgill, P. (2004). New-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • United Nations Settlement Programme. (2003). The challenge of slums: global report on human settlements 2003. London/Sterling: Earthscan Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • van Kleef, G. A., Oveis, C., van der Löwe, I., LuoKogan, A., Goetz, J., & Keltner, D. (2008). Power, distress, and compassion: turning a blind eye to the suffering of others. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1315–1322.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van Valen, L. (1973). A new evolutionary law. Evolutionary Theory, 1, 1–30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vitale, A. J. (1980). Kisetla: Linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects of a pidgin swahili of Kenya. Anthropologicael Linguistics, 22(2), 47–65.

    Google Scholar 

  • Waters, D. P. (2010). Language as extended phenotype? The evolution of language. Proceedings of the 8th international conference (EVOLANG8), Utrecht, Netherlands, 14–17 April 2010. Singapore: World Scientific, pp. 519–520.

    Google Scholar 

  • Watt, J. M., & Breyer-Brandwijk, M. G. (1962). The medicinal and poisonous plants of southern and eastern Africa: Being an account of their medicinal and other uses, chemical composition, pharmacological effects and toxicology in man and animal. Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weber, M., In Gerth, H. H., & Mills, C. W. (1946). From max weber: Essays in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Werlin, H. H. (1974). Governing an African City: A study of Nairobi. New York: Africana Publishing Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Whiteley, W. H. (1969). Swahili: The rise of a national language. London: Methuen & Co. LTD.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wines, M. (2005, June 21). Rain queen is dead, but debate over her power lives on. New York Times, A4(L).

    Google Scholar 

  • Young, M. D. (1958). The rise of the meritocracy, 1870–2033: An essay on education and equality. London: Thames and Hudson.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English and Modern Languages, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, KS, USA

    Philip W. Rudd

Authors
  1. Philip W. Rudd
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Philip W. Rudd .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of French, University of Buea, Buea, Cameroon

    Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue

  2. Humanities Education Development Unit, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa

    Ellen Hurst

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Rudd, P.W. (2017). The Ultimate Matthew Effect for Sheng. In: Ebongue, A., Hurst, E. (eds) Sociolinguistics in African Contexts. Multilingual Education, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49611-5_15

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49611-5_15

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49609-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49611-5

  • eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation