Former Fellows

Urban languages are inventive and innately sociological. More than in other contexts, urbanity in Africa has strong linguistic dimensions, and in distinct ways, corresponds to social realities. West African countries typically comprise multiple ethnic extractions and hundreds of languages. It is from these raw mixes of diversity that the cities continue to draw, and on which they grow. The research looks at the extent of corresponding multiplicities, or the homogeneities that characterize the linguistic pulse of these cities, and examines the correlatives dynamics of urban languages on ethnic cartographies.My work interrogates the socio-discursive layers of African urban languages and their structuring implications for new ethnicities in three of West Africa’s most urbanized cities: Lagos, Abuja and Accra. I explore their layers of creativity – as induced by struggle between non-native and indigenous tongues, and their ideological motivations. With ethnographic data, the work surveys the spatial connections between language styles and urban identities; and how, against the backdrop of multilingualism, a new notion of ethnicity is emerging in Africa’s megacities.The study rethinks the ongoing debates on language-city relation and provides a better understanding of urban language phenomenon in West Africa’s cities by exploring their conceptual links to ethnic formation. This would feed directly into the pool of Theories from the South within the broader spectrum of urban language studies. Also, data and findings arising from the project will inspire comparative works on cognate sociolinguistic contexts.