Enregistering Modernity, Bluffing Criminality: How Nouchi Speech Reinvented (and Fractured) the Nation

Abstract

This paper traces processes of the enregisterment of modernity in French and Nouchi (an urban patois) in Côte d’Ivoire, arguing that the struggles to define the indexical values of Nouchi and the performative bluff of urban street life associated with it have played a central role in the production of Ivoirian national identity. Speakers of Nouchi integrate references to American pop culture with local Ivoirian lexical content, which allows Nouchi use ambivalently to index both modernity and autochthony. In so doing they overturn the hierarchical schema of evaluation defined by proximity to the French standard. Nouchi indexes a new pan‐ethnic Ivoirian identity based on the alternative modernity of cosmopolitan urban youth. Urban youth reject the Francocentric elitism of the postcolonial state but themselves exclude Northern migrants, whom they qualify as less than modern, from Ivoirian citizenship. [modernity, enregisterment, French, Nouchi, indexicality, Côte d’Ivoire]

Rastafarian-Herbalists’ Enregisterment of Multilingual Voices in an Informal Marketplace

“…A number of recent studies have used enregisterment as an analytical concept to understand the practice of language and multilingualism in performance (see Roth-Gordon 2009); the processes involved in determining whether one dialect or variety as a register is accorded higher status than others through metapragmatic activities (Dong 2011); how language varieties index politics and citizenship (Newell 2009); and the enregisterment of identity in multilingual settings (Goebel 2011). All of these studies implicitly or explicitly demonstrate how linguistic voice is put forward through cross-cultural and cross-racial interactions.…”

"A Language of Many Hats": The Rise of Sheng and other Linguistic Styles among Urban Youth in Kenya

“…The English word -coast‖ has undergone some phonological alterations before being used in Sheng, hence Kostoo. Prefix ki-is also used to mark diminutives in Swahili (Hinnebusch and Mirza 1998 The various contrasts that Zawadi draws between coastal and Nairobi youth points to the fact that speakers of Sheng and of competing variants define themselves in opposition to each other using -acts of alterity‖ (Newell 2009 (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992 (Newell 2009: 178) I outline a few of these African urban youth vernaculars and how they relate to the Sheng phenomenon in Kenya in the following section.…”

“…Contemporary urban Africa is ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous (Kiessling and Mous 2004;Makoni et al, 2007;McLaughlin 2009;Newell 2009 What youth have in common is not their age but their exclusion from power and their dependence on the ‗men', ‗fathers', or ‗elders' in their societies. The category of youth was and is …a movable feast, a derogatory term masquerading as flattery and used by those in positions of power to define ever-shifting groups of subordinate people.…”

“…From a linguistic point of view, speakers of these urban youth vernaculars such as Nouchi reverse the norms by mixing and switching between the various language varieties in their repertoire, and innovatively manipulating the form and meaning of borrowed lexicon (Abdul-Aziz and Osinde 1997; Kiessling and Mous 2004;Makoni et al 2007;Newell 2009;Spitulnik 1999 …”

“…So, speakers' association with any of these language varieties promotes in-group solidarity, and also creates a variety of -us‖ vs. -them‖ distinctions such as rural-urban, young-old, coastal-upcountry, and tough-soft. These oppositional identities are renegotiated and maintained through -acts of alterity‖ (Newell 2009 The discussion also demonstrated that the state only responds to issues of language when it feels threatened and abandons the project as soon as the political -dust‖ settles (Mutahi 1979). This practice suggests that the state does not rank language policy at the top among other priorities.…”