The Impact of Youth Language on Linguistic Landscapes in Kenya and Tanzania

Abstract

Twenty-first-century youths are dynamic and so is their language. Their use of language informs both micro and macro language policies and language use in different domains. With the added advantage of the social media where the local meets the global, this type of language practice may be viewed as a linguistic revolt from below. It is well established that many African countries have legitimized their former colonial languages to serve official roles at the expense of local languages. However, in the often pervasively multilingual communities, language use in informal settings best reflects how ordinary people use language in daily life. Therefore, based on data collected in the cities of Nairobi and Mombasa in Kenya and Dar es Salaam and Arusha in Tanzania between 2012 and 2016, this chapter reports on how youth language is manifested in advertisements that are displayed on city signage. The chapter argues that the realities of a liberalized global economy have shifted the focus from corporate to small-scale entrepreneurs, thus elevating the youth to a position where they are not only consumers but also innovators and determinants of the linguistic direction in their respective speech communities. This is due to the fact that their innovation has caught the attention of the market that taps into youth language as a resource. Therefore, using an eclectic sociolinguistic approach that borrows from ideology, identity, language policy, and audience design approaches, the chapter investigates and reports on how linguistic landscapes utilize youth language to mirror these changes in the major cities of Kenya and Tanzania. This kind of approach allows for a recognition and reconfiguration of language policies that are based on evolving local linguistic ideologies that were never considered in past language policy formulations.