Guest speaker: Nico Nassenstein (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz)

This semester's Field Methods class, taught by Suzi Lima (faculty), is very pleased to welcome virtual guest speaker Nico Nassenstein, a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. His talk, "Linguistic change in Lingala: Urban language use and the emergence of new registers", will be taking place on Wednesday, March 10, at 6:00 PM. Please note that registration is required by March 9; see the email from Suzi for details.

Lingala is a Bantu language classified by Maho (2009) as C.30b [lin], which is spoken by approximately 40-45 million speakers (or more), see Meeuwis (2020) for an overview. Over the course of its history, Lingala (and its pidginized predecessor based on Bobangi; Meeuwis 2019) has been subject to interventions and adaptations by colonial agents, missionaries and linguists since the 1890s, and has given rise to a multitude of registers and ideas how and which Lingala represents 'correct' or 'incorrect' varieties (see for instance the list discussed in Sene Mongaba 2013, including Lingala ya basango, literary Lingala, Kinshasa Lingala etc.). Apart from Bangala, Lingala’s closest sister language in the northeastern parts of DR Congo (classified by Maho 2009 as C30a), and the northwestern dialect of Lingala, the variety used in the capital Kinshasa has been treated in most of the available recent studies (Motingea 2006, Meeuwis 2010, 2020). However, Kinshasa Lingala is no homogenous language but varies and is interpreted by different speakers depending upon the context of their interactions. What Sesep (1990) still labelled as Indoubil/Hindubil or the language of Kinshasa’s cowboys (Gondola 2016), is nowadays known as Lingala ya Bayankee or Yanké (van Pelt 2000, Nassenstein 2014) and is slowly changing from a youth language practice and 'street language' to a common medium of communication in urban Kinshasa, developing into an urban contact dialect or urban register (Wiese and Kerswill 2021). As a parallel development, Lingala speakers all around the world make increased use of a public language game or ludling, Langila (Nassenstein 2015), which expresses strong language ideologies of worldliness, global repertoires and 'fashionable' language use – especially across social media such as WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. In my talk, I trace processes of current linguistic change that are observable in these urban and global language practices based on Lingala and bring them into relation to general patterns of contact and change in Bantu languages. I therefore try to connect early processes of change and compare them with current Kinshasa Lingala and its diverse registers. From a perspective of microvariation, my hypothesis is that despite the linguistic manipulations and agentive language use by urban youth etc. specific morphosyntactic changes in Lingala correspond with those found in other Bantu languages prone to urban diversification and multi-register emergence, e.g. Kiswahili (G.40), Kinyarwanda (JD.60) and Luganda (JE15).