Impact of reading European literature among young people

This chapter will discuss the role of the media in the development of Sheng (showing largely African language syntax with salient English lexis) and Engsh (showing the reverse; i.e. largely the syntax of English and lexis from several African languages) in Kenya. While African urban youth languages may start as anti-languages of the streets, many develop a much wider speech community due to their gradual spread from the street and the informal transport environment into song lyrics and thus the radio, and into comic strips and cartoons and thus the printed press. The use of these two youth language varieties in these media has the additional effect of making them acceptable for a larger part of the society as a style of youth and modernity and rendering this style fit for advertisement and use on television, such as in soap operas. This development is illustrated with Sheng and Engsh examples.

This chapter discusses some grammatical features of 'African urban youth languages', focusing on Camfranglais in Cameroonian cities such as Yaoundé and Douala. While anti-languages have been characterised as parasitic styles of speaking that graft onto the grammar of another language, developing an ephemeral emblematic lexicon but little or no grammatical structures of their own, Camfranglais stands out in that its grammatical features cannot be entirely reduced to a (Standard) French matrix. Rather, it presents various phonological, morphological and syntactical properties mostly transferred from Cameroonian Pidgin English and its Bantoid substrate languages, most probably via a spectrum of varieties of Cameroonian French. However, as long as the distribution of these features along the continuum Camfranglais–Cameroonian Pidgin English–second-language varieties of French (and English) remains unclear, it cannot be decided whether Camfranglais has indeed developed a hybrid grammar peculiar to itself. On the functional level, Camfranglais retains some typical anti-language characteristics with a tendency to expand as a style of speaking that indexes positive values such as integration, solidarity, progressiveness and a cosmopolitan Cameroonian identity.