# African Urban Youth Languages

African Urban Youth Languages is an umbrella term for languages formed and spoken in the urban areas of Africa that have resulted from language contact in their populations that has been caused by migration into cities in the latter part of the 20th century. It encompasses languages such as Camfranglais, Indoubil, Lingla ya Bayankee, Nouchi, and Sheng. There is some degree of linguistic prejudice against calling these languages, but they are not pidgins nor creole languages. The have been variously named "urban vernaculars" or "urban youth languages" in linguistic literature, although the name African Urban Youth Language, coined for a linguistics conference in Cape Town in 2013, has come to be the accepted name, not least because of the simplicity of its acronym AUYL.

## Broad terminology

The language classification here encompasses slangs and argots. In general, the label is applied by linguists based upon the language speakers' evident intents to create a linguistic identity of their own.
Similarly, the youth classification does not mean that only the young speak the language, but rather that the languages are founded in the sort of rebelliousness found in the young against the established, "standard", languages. They qualify for being what Michael Halliday termed, in 1978, antilanguages. From the perspectives of the speakers of standard languages they are indeed as Halliday said "oblique, diffuse, and metaphorical", and give the appearance of being exclusionary of those speakers. But from the perspectives of the AUYL speakers themselves, they are rather seen as the better reflection of the admixed culture and reality around them, with its distorted globalizations, anti-colonial identity, and cosmopolitan nature, than the established languages of more historic colonial settings. AUYLs are for their speakers means of rejecting tribalism and elitist colonialism, even though for non-speakers they may be markers of immorality and low status.

## Common features

One of the common features of AUYLs is that their speakers often are polyglots, and the languages are not created out of a need for a common language to bridge a communications gap.
Another is that almost all of their names are endonyms — they have not been named by outsiders. This is in contrast to youth languages from outside of Africa, where languages like Multicultural London English and Kiezdeutsch are named in other languages.
Some of the derivations of the names are:
* Indoubil is named from "Hindou" and "Bil", and implies the identity of an Indian version of Buffalo Bill.
* Nouchi's name comes from "nun sii", literally "nose skin", and implies "moustachioed tough guy".
* The name Camfranglais is a portmanteau of "Cameroun", "Français", and "Anglais", i.e. Cameroon's mixture of French and English.
* Lingala ya Byankee is the language — "Lingala" — of Yankees, meaning American cowboys.
* Sheng is Swahili and English. Although there is an alternative endonymic derivation that it is metathetized "English" to "Lisheng", with the "Li-" prefix then analysed as an unnecessary Bantu prefix that should be removed.
* Tsotitalla is the "taal" (language) of the "tsotis" (city slickers).
Borrowing from English is also common, as is applying metathesis to borrowed words (from English, French, and elsewhere) as a form of symbolic rebellion against the "normal" world's straightforward ways of borrowing.
Whilst multiple languages are not only mixed through a form of code switching between individual words in a sentence and even mid-word as affixes from one language are applied to (sometimes clipped) words from another, the grammatical structures of the languages are largely taken from a single base language: e.g. Swahili for Indoubil and Sheng, and Afrikaans for Tsotitaal.