The intersection of microvariation and pragmatics in urban and youth varieties in Africa

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Nico Nassenstein
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561343256

Urban language varieties and youth language practices present a new research opportunity for analysing linguistic variation both at a morphosyntactic level, and in terms of the pragmatics behind such variation (as in the study of humour, politeness, gesture). Crossovers between urban and youth varieties and practices complicate their categorisation as e.g. languages, varieties, styles, or registers, and instead require interactional analyses, reflecting the concerns of decolonial approaches to non-standardised language practices in multilingual contexts. Youth languages in Africa seem to exhibit features in common across different geographical and linguistic contexts but the extent of linguistic and pragmatic similarities has not been investigated in any systematic way. In addition, the urban vernaculars which commonly form the grammatical base language for youth practices are under-described, along with both youth and urban varieties arising in smaller urban centres. This project builds on previous research into microvariation in Bantu languages, a group of ca. 500 closely-related African languages, and innovatively combines it with sociopragmatics approaches to youth language in Africa. It aims to establish a corpus of naturalistic video data of youth and urban varieties collected in lesser studied urban centres in South Africa, Uganda and Kenya. By focusing on varieties with three relatively well-studied base languages (isiXhosa, Rutooro, Kiswahili) the project will build upon existing language descriptions and corpora by adding urban language data and youth language data to enable firstly microtypological analyses of differences between closely related Bantu varieties (assisted by language technologies); secondly the analysis of the (socio)pragmatic contexts and meanings that lead to these variations, via rich naturalistic audio-video data; and thirdly cross-site comparisons of the findings.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel
• Partner Organisation: The Israel Science Foundation
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Alena Witzlack-Makarevich