An article on “As Africa’s Cities Change, So Does Youth Slang” on The Atlantic’s City Lab quotes Dr. Peter Githinji, Associate Professor of Linguistics at Ohio University.
Dr. Peter Githinji
The fusion languages springing up now in Africa’s cities, however, are likely just the beginning. Africa’s urbanization rate will be among the world’s fastest from now until 2050. Unless some kind of national language policies are enacted, says Peter Githinji, a linguist specialist at Ohio University, slang-based languages will ultimately become the norm in Africa’s burgeoning urban centers.
“[T]he more we’re participating in these global cultures and the more we’re having rural-to-urban migration,” Githinji says, “they’re actually going to transform themselves to the point where we’re no longer calling them ‘urban languages.'”
Comments