African Urban and Youth Languages

The European Conference on African Studies, held in 2017 in Basel, Switzerland, provided a platform for scholars working on African youth languages from bases in Africa, Europe and North America to jointly examine issues relating to the rural -urban divide in African youth languages. This is documented in the current volume. Contributors ponder the virtual absence of indigenous, non-colonial languages of Africa in studied African youth language corpora. They demonstrate that, notwithstanding the surface linguistic appearance of the African youth languages and practices that have engaged the attention of scholars, the languages ultimately bear the mark and intensity of the rural and indigenous as a major and sometimes dominant component. This points to the need for paradigms or models that incorporate rural-indigenous factors in African youth language scholarship.