Abstract
African urban and youth language (AUYL) varieties as deployed in Nigerian popular culture manifest as a ‘contest of hybridities’ and generate distinct descriptive and analytical challenges, by virtue of the complex linguistic, literary and socio-political inputs to their content and structure. While the varieties pay tribute to notions of hybridity, transculturality and globalism, they nonetheless challenge any representation of ‘hybridity’ as a state of cultural indeterminacy. Indeed, Nigerian AUYL manifests a dominant Africanity, in the form of a linguistic and literary composition that is tilted in favour of indigenous dictions. It also manifests a politics of root identity and a renaissance outlook that sometimes challenges the relentlessly hyped notion of ‘borderless identities’. The analysis here therefore speaks to the need for a quantum hybridity perspective in the appreciation of contact linguistic phenomena in postcolonial settings. In this chapter, salient features of youth language varieties in Nigerian popular culture are examined from a combination of linguistic and literary perspectives; identified linguistic and sociolinguistic features (such as deviant syntax, the deployment of youth topoi, ‘mixilingualism’, pop-conscious neologism, and pop multisemanticity, among others), coalesce with literary notions such as ‘intentional’ and ‘unintentional’ hybridity. Examples drawn from the music of historical youths and contemporary youngsters in the music industry demonstrate how antagonistic, resisting or contesting coding, along with sundry non-cooperative bilingual practices, translates to deviant linguistic forms and peculiar sociolinguistic characteristics.
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Notes
- 1.
The characterisation of youth languages as ‘anti-languages’, ‘semi-secretive languages born out of sub-cultures of alternative societies’ (Simpson 2004: 104), derives from Halliday’s (1978) work on language as a social semiotic . This classification may be seen, however, as being on the one hand complementary to, but on the other hand in conflict with, a more general characterisation of youth language outside of antagonistic or felonious milieus.
- 2.
- 3.
Myers-Scotton’s (1993b) Matrix Language Frame (MLF) analysis, which is based on an analysis of clause structure in code-switching , appears difficult, though perhaps not impossible to apply here, due to the extreme fluidity of the AUYL mixture.
- 4.
Cf. ‘the mumu lived in west London but got a girl to get a black cab all d way from East London just to kerewawa with her for over £100, and he claims he was broke’ (http://www.stelladimokokorkus.com/2013/09/men-who-scam-women-for-lovemoney.html).
- 5.
See, for example, among numerous others: http://www.naijaloaded.com.ng/2014/06/18/revealed-secret-true-meaning-dorogucci-finally-discovered/; www.herald.co.zw/dr-sid-explains-the-meaning-of-dorobucci/.
- 6.
For example, kerewa, from the song of the same title by the Nigerian duo, Sule Zoo, means ‘illicit sex’ or ‘adultery’ within the context of the song. However, it is glossed uniquely by the ‘urban dictionary’ as ‘sex with an African woman’! Similarly, the meaning of 4kasibe, from a song by DJ Zeez (Kingsley Elikpo) is variously given as ‘an expert in what one does’(www.nairaland.com/289576/fokasibe); ‘u get mouth, ure are being heard in the 4 cardinal parts of the world’ (www.nairaland.com/154214/dj-zeez-4kasibe-album-released); ‘break wide apart … your head is spread everywhere’ (www.urbandictionary.com), etc.
- 7.
Bakhtin (1981) interestingly deploys combat register in describing such ‘intentional hybridity’; hence the interacting codes are ‘set against each other dialogically’, comprising ‘conscious contrasts and oppositions’ (1981: 360). This register is rendered more prominent by later commentators such as Young (1995: 22), who asserts, following Bakhtin, that hybridity ‘enables a contestatory activity’ and describes an ‘antithetical movement of coalescences and antagonism’ (cited in Guignery 2011: 2–3).
- 8.
Ogede ti pon actually derives rhetorically from the Yoruba proverb with unmistakable sexual innuendo, Bi ogede ba ti pon e ya tete bo je (‘Eat the banana once it ripens’ [before it gets spoilt]).
- 9.
See Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge Journals—http://www.journals.cambridge.org) vol. 8(1) and 8(2) for criticisms, defence and controversies around this framework.
- 10.
Compare the segment by Olamide referred to in the foregoing: ‘I want to lowo; I want to lola; I want to lalafia’ (‘I want to have money/be rich; I want to have riches; I want to have good health/be healthy’), and the parallel Yoruba sequence Mo fe lowo ; Mo fe lola ; Mo fe lalafia, which also translates as, and has a similar SPC structure as: ‘I want to have money; I want to have riches; I want to have good health’, that is, ‘I’/Mo (S) ‘want’ /fe (P) ‘to have money’/lowo (C). (Note that l’owo is a contraction of li/ni owo in Yoruba.)
- 11.
Cf. Homi Bhabha: ‘any group or society that has been oppressed wants an acknowledgment of its own history, a history which has been hidden or denied’ (cited in Makos 2010), and Poxi Presha: ‘People do not want to lose their tradition, they still want it but in a modern way’ (cited in Beck 2000: 27).
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Oloruntoba-Oju, T. (2018). Contestant Hybridities: African (Urban) Youth Language in Nigerian Music and Social Media. In: Hurst-Harosh, E., Kanana Erastus, F. (eds) African Youth Languages . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64562-9_9
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