Kisangani Swahili

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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.