Identity Construction and Linguistic Manipulation in Randuk.

This paper gives an overview of the Randuk language, its use, develop-ment and the role it plays in marking speakers’identity. The paper is based ondata collected from youths belonging to three different social groups:Shamasha(street boys), mechanics and university students. This data was collectedthrough interviews and participant observation and the resulting analysisdemonstrates that Randuk contains all the features of urban youth languagesin Africa outlined by Kießling and Mous (2004). The language reveals strategiesof linguistic manipulation (phonological, morphological and semantic) of pre-existing forms from Arabic and other languages–principally English. Metathesis,prefixation, suffixation, coinage, borrowing, metaphors, metonymies, onomasticsynecdoches and dysphemisms are frequently used in Randuk. The use of theseforms clearly indicates the identity of the speakers. This means thatshamasha,mechanics and university students employ linguistically manipulated formsderived from their respective environment or community of practice. As such,one can observe the co-existence of different varieties of Randuk as realizedby students, mechanics,shamasha, blacksmiths, soldiers and footballers. Theanalysis also shows that Randuk is gradually gaining new domains representedby the daily newspapers, whose writers, especially the sarcastic ones, resortto Randuk words to serve certain functions. The ultimate consequence of thistendency will be an increasing spread of Randuk among a number of com-munities, leading to some form of standardization of the language.