from Part One - Multilingualism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2022
Urban contact dialects emerged in urban settings among locally born young people and can serve as markers of a new, multiethnic urban identity. The chapter brings together instances of such dialects from Europe and Africa, two regions where these phenomena have received a lot of attention from contact-linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. In both settings, local contexts for urban contact dialects are characterised by an openness to multilingual practices. In African contexts, this multilingual perspective is usually also present at the macro level of the larger society; in Europe, the societal context is generally characterized by a more monolingual (and monoethnic) habitus. The comparative perspective adopted here shows that these differences in macro context support different structural and sociolinguistic outcomes, including contact-induced and contact-facilitated change; urban contact dialects taking the form of multilingual mixed languages or new vernaculars of a national majority language; the possible spread of these dialects to become general markers of youth or modernity; and negative public perceptions involving different language-ideological patterns.
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