Tsotsitaal and decoloniality

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on South African tsotsitaal and other African (Urban) Youth Languages (AYL), which are youth language repertoires or styles of speaking the vernacular, and which are present in a wide range of African countries today. Halliday’s (1976) concept of antilanguage has been applied by previous researchers to theorise youth language practices, and is a useful way to understand aspects of these phenomena such as relexicalisation and metaphor. However, the term itself reproduces a monolingual and hegemonic conceptualisation of language, and contributes to a criminal conceptualisation of tsotsitaal speakers. This article proposes that alternative ways to describe and understand AYL phenomena are needed. By applying the conceptual framework of ‘decolonial thinking’, the article makes the case that tsotsitaal, AYLs and youth language in general, challenge forms of dominant power and oppression, and for this reason, might be considered as ‘decolonial practice’.

KEYWORDS:

• antilanguage
• decoloniality
• African languages
• youth language
• tsotsitaal

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the South African National Research Foundation under Grant 90273; and SANPAD under Grant 10/69.

Notes on Contributor

Ellen Hurst-Harosh is currently working as a senior lecturer in the Humanities Education Development Unit at the University of Cape Town where she teaches academic literacies, discourses and genres. Her research interests are concerned with multilingualism and style in African languages, with a special focus on: youth and urban varieties; language and migration; language and globalisation; language and higher education.

Notes

1 While youth varieties seem particularly prominent in urban spaces, these practices are also present in rural areas (Kioko 2015), and the ‘urban’ part of the acronym is thus being dropped.

2 ‘Townships’ in South Africa are working-class areas found mainly on the border of major South African towns and cities, that were reserved for people classified African, coloured or Indian under the apartheid classificatory system. Today, townships remain impoverished and under resourced compared to urban areas such as suburbs.

3 I would like to thank my research assistant and co-author (Hurst & Buthelezi 2014) Mthuli Buthelezi who suggested the word ‘rebellious’ for tsotsitaal lexical and grammatical features.

4 Scamto is a Sowetan term which refers to tsotsitaal.