The Linguistics of Urban Youth Languages in Africa

This article provides an overview of research on African Urban Youth Languages focusing on common linguistic features identified in existing studies. It outlines a distinction between urban vernaculars that form the base languages of youth styles, and youth styles themselves, that draw on strategies of play or manipulation. It describes morphosyntactic, phonological, and lexical features that may be specific to youth language practices and that support deeper pragmatic analysis. The article also discusses the theoretical developments that led to expanded interest in this field—namely, the third wave of variation studies, the sociolinguistics of mobility, and the decolonial turn—and discusses the field's implications for variation studies and sociolinguistics.