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The emergence of complex language practices in multilingual urban Africa has gained significant attention in linguistics. Kisangani Swahili, a dynamic urban variety spoken by over a million people in Kisangani and Tshopo District (DR Congo), exemplifies this phenomenon. This variety reflects speakers' linguistic choices, revealing their knowledge of Lingala and French. While French influences Kisangani Swahili primarily at the lexical level, Lingala and, to a lesser extent, non-Bantu languages like Zande contribute to morphosyntactic variation. The geographical distribution of Lingala and Swahili in different neighborhoods fosters fluid phonological, morphological, and syntactic choices, showcasing speakers' ideological concepts of identity and self-expression. This work presents the first grammatical description of Kisangani Swahili, emphasizing language convergence, metatypy, and irregularity through a variationist sociolinguistic lens. It explores phenomena such as structural adaptability to 'standardized' Swahili or Lingala and calquing as expressions of linguistic agency. The description includes the sociolinguistic context, phonological inventory, morphosyntactic structure, pragmatic analysis, and a selection of texts and a word list, offering a comprehensive overview of this urban Congo Swahili regiolect.

Nico Nassenstein University of Cologne The present study of Yanké, the Lingala-based urban youth language spoken in Kinshasa (DR Congo), aims at analyzing both the identity construction of Yanké speakers – who are mostly street children, street vendors and Kolúna gangsters –, as well as their phonological, morphological and semantic strategies of linguistic manipulation. Unlike other urban African youth languages such as Sheng, Nouchi or Tsotsitaal, Yanké has not yet been documented or described extensively according to its deviating social, lexical and grammatical frame. The sociolinguistic analysis comprises insights into the creation of a new urban youth identity, societal and also young speakers' perceptions of linguistic prestige, language attitudes as well as the general theoretical study of youths' social practices. The grammatical study offers an analysis of sociophonological deviation, deliberate as well as arbitrary morphological changes and an overview of semantic change and manipulations. A collection of Yanké dialogues, texts as well as a comprehensive Yanké dictionary complete the current study of Kinshasa's new urban language. The present analysis of Yanké demonstrates the linguistic mechanisms found in ephemeral linguistic codes emerging in urban Africa, emphasizing the fact that these languages deserve full academic attention. ISBN 9783882885428. LINCOM Studies in African Linguistics 90. 173pp.