New perspectives on morphosyntactic variation in African youth language practices

Abstract Recent years have seen an increase in scholarly attention paid to youth language practices in Africa, with studies examining a range of linguistic phenomena. A parallel development has seen the emergence of work studying morphosyntactic microvariation in Bantu languages, with a view to better understanding structural variation in closely related languages or varieties. This special collection brings together those working in the fields of youth language practices and morphosyntactic variation in Bantu, with a view to exploring the synergies in these areas, as well as moving this domain of inquiry forward. The contributions are united by the authors’ commitment to addressing specific morphosyntactic phenomena which may have otherwise gone unnoticed, or which are less documented in the existing literature – in particular, in the scholarship on the respective base language or dominant language. We hope that the collection of papers both contributes to this body of work and inspires others to take up some of these issues in future research.