2 - Emerging Dialect Areas of Swahili: Evidence From Structural Variation, Speaker Perceptions and Language Attitudes

Despite being a major East African lingua franca with more than 100 million speakers across East Africa, recent developments of variation in Swahili and the emergence of new dialects has hardly been studied systematically (cf. Bakari 1985, Shinagawa & Nassenstein 2019). Yet there is considerable variation resulting from dynamic situations linked to, among other factors, the emergence of urban youth languages, new dialectal differences linked to more recent projects of nation building, as well as effects of multilingualism and language contact, both structural and sociolinguistic.

In this paper we address this gap by presenting a comparative study of Swahili variation drawing on structural and sociolinguistic data gathered through elicitation, interviews and observations in four locations in Kenya (Kilifi, Kisumu, Lamu, Nairobi) and four locations in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam, Iringa, Moshi, Mtwara). We focus on three morphosyntactic variables (habitual marking, locatives, and noun classes and agreement) and show how these are linked to results from sociolinguistic perceptual and attitude surveys. The data suggest a broad emerging dialectal division into four main areas: Kenya Mainland, Tanzania Mainland, Coastal Dialects, and Western Swahili. In addition, urban centres, in particular Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, display separate dynamics, showing influence from several dialectal regions, and the emergence of urban varieties such as the youth language Sheng in Nairobi.

Our results help to better understand the emerging dialectal variation in Swahili while at the same time providing novel and complex evidence for dialectology and variationist theory and methodology (Kasstan 2017).

 

Co-Author 1
Hannah Gibson, Fridah Erastus Kanana, Teresa Poeta and Julius Taji