 Indeed, we are up and running. I had prepared a long and winding introduction to Ellen, and tracing her she's been to various homes of life, but seeing that we're 20 minutes late, that was a traffic shot, and just say that we're extremely happy that Ellen Hersch is with us this afternoon. Ellen is from the University of New York, so her sound has worked extensively on multilingualism, social linguistics, language, contact, and youth languages. That's one of her main research programs for Kairi, and she's going to talk to us today about youth language, and in particular, I'm talking about Sotsitsa, which you can say more about, and particularly on metaphor in Sotsitsa. Ellen, thank you so much for your patience, and I'm sorry if you're running late, but now it's all yours. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. Okay, so I'm going to get straight into it. I timed the talk, and it was only about 45 minutes, so hopefully we'll catch up some time. So, yeah, I'm going to talk about metaphor in Sotsitsa, and I'll explain a bit more about what Sotsitsa is in a minute. But the reason that I'm looking at metaphor is because metaphor has been talked about a lot in terms of youth languages, and I wanted to dig into this a little bit when we talk about metaphor in youth languages, what do we mean, and what kinds of forms of metaphor and so on. So, some of this comes out of the work of Michael Halliday. So, Michael Halliday described the concept of anti-language. He talked about an anti-language as a language which is generated by an anti-society, and an anti-society is set up as a conscious, this is in Halliday's terms, it's set up as a conscious alternative to establish social norms, and so an anti-language is a conscious alternative to the language of the wider society, and it distinguishes itself primarily through relexicalization, which is the principle of the same grammar, different vocabulary, and through metaphor, and those are the two main things that Halliday talks about in terms of anti-language. So, this concept of anti-language has often been used to explain youth languages, and particularly what I refer to as African urban youth languages, although that's a kind of problematic description in various ways, I call them AUYLs, and these are manifestations of youth language that have become prominent in various urban centers in the African continent. So, examples of AUYLs are Shang in Kenya, Camfranglais in Cameroon, or Francanglais, which is a similar related variety, Nushi from Ivory Coast, and Totsital from South Africa. There's lots of other ones, some of them haven't got names, so I'm going to speak about Totsital particularly, and I've done an analysis of the use of metaphor in Totsital. So, the paper aims to contribute to our understanding of youth languages in Africa by investigating how metaphor operates in Totsital, for what purposes it's used, and what levels it manifests at, in order to evaluate really whether the term anti-language is a useful one for understanding AUYLs, African urban youth languages. So, first of all, Totsital, Totsital can't be described as a language in the sort of traditional sense of a bounded homogenous unit, and that idea of language is anyway being challenged in current social linguistic theory. So, Totsital really needs to be considered as a language practice, which involves the use of particular lexical resources, language resources, to engage in the performance of an urban street-wise identity. This performance also involves non-verbal resources, such as clothing styles, musical preferences, lifestyle choices, and so on, and there are sort of different sub-categorizations within sort of youth that speak Totsital, and you know, it's township youth in South Africa. So, yeah, some group might be called clevers, and then you get groups called softies, and these sort of sub-categorizations within youth social groups. I proposed the term style-elect in my PhD a few years ago to refer to the phenomenon because it's so linked to style in youth culture. Totsital originated in the township surrounding Johannesburg in the 1940s, so it's been around for quite a long time. It's since spread to all parts of South Africa, and as I say, it takes different names in different parts of the country. It's primarily used by young men in urban centers, and Heather Brooks, who's also worked on the phenomenon, she argued that the period between childhood and adulthood is the time that young men tend to form networks and groups on street corners in South Africa's peri-urban townships, and Totsital has thrived in that context as a way to confer status amongst groups of young men. Linguistically, Totsital primarily involves lexical innovations or re-lexicalization, so I've been working with Raj Mesri for a number of years, and we did an analysis of the variety of Totsital found in Cape Town, and we found that the grammatical structure of Issyk Khursar, which is the African language used in the townships around Cape Town, or the predominant African language, the grammatical structure remains intact, and so the main manifestation of Totsital is in the use of alternative lexical items, so it's a stylized register, that was the sort of terminology we ended up using, and this is in keeping with the understanding of Totsital as a linguistic resource which is employed for a particular identity performance. You can't call it a vernacular, you can't call it a mixed language, and it's not a language independent of the first language of speakers. So in Soweto, in Johannesburg, there are, you know, in townships, there are very mixed townships in terms of the languages that are used, and a student of ours, Pierre Acard, has talked about how in Johannesburg, Totsital uses a mixed base language, but Totsital itself isn't the mixed base language, Totsital is a stylized version of that base language. So the mixed base language in Johannesburg is actually the vernacular in the multilingual townships there, but in Cape Town people predominantly speak Isikosa. And then I've done some more work with another student in Tulibu-Tilesi, we did a comparison of Zulu-based Totsital from Durban, and then Cape Town Croser-based Totsital, and we showed that these different varieties of Totsital in the different regions of South Africa, they sometimes use different lexical items in the different regions, but there's also some overlap on a national level, which gives Totsital a sort of national identity. So there's a sort of set of terms, and everybody knows Totsital no matter what base language they're used in. Okay, so just to go back to anti-language, so anti-language, as I said a term developed by Halliday in 1976, a number of researchers have used the term to theorize the phenomenon of Totsital in South Africa, so a researcher called Makudu in 1995 applied the term to Totsitals from near Johannesburg, and Makudu focused on two aspects of Halliday's concept, over lexicalization and metaphor, to explain some of the processes being used in Totsital. Since Makudu's work, the term has been utilised by other Totsital scholars, and then Kiesling and Moose in there, they did a comparison in 2004 of a number of AUILs, African Urban Youth Languages from around the continent, including Sheng, Indubil, Nushi and Totsital, and they argued that many of these languages fall into the category of anti-language. So since then, numerous scholars on African Urban Youth Languages working in Africa have since used that term, and it's also been used beyond African Youth Languages, so for example, Li in 2014 uses the concept to provide an analysis of Chinese rap, so it's being used in other youth languages as well. But Halliday's concept has strong links to criminal subcultures, and for this reason it's relevance to Totsital studies I think needs to be reassessed. Totsital use is not restricted to criminal activities, but it's used by a broad section of township youth for purposes of social identity, affirmation and for individual style. And African Urban Youth Language, it does share some features with Argot, and some AUILs apparently have their roots in these kinds of criminal varieties, although it's never quite clear how these youth languages are developed. But many Urban Youth Languages incorporate slang words from criminal varieties, which bestows covert prestige. But many Urban Youth Languages progress beyond this, and Keezing and Moose say, this is a quote from their 2004 paper, Urban Youth Languages start out as linguistic emblems of opposing identities and are perceived first in the frame of falling standards. So falling standards in the discourse of the coming of Sheng, there's this idea that Sheng is leading to falling standards in language amongst youth. But they say, growing more and more into emblems of a newly emerging project identity, by being adopted by larger portions of the urban population, these socio-legs cease to be anti-languages, instead they become established as norms themselves and might be on their way to becoming new national languages. And this is still contentious, we're not sure if that's the direction, for example, that Sotsital is going to go. But the idea is that they're not restricted to criminal languages. So Halliday's formulation of anti-languages partly based on the work of Paul Gorecki, I don't know if that's the right pronunciation, he was working on the subculture of Polish prisons. And anti-language is, in Halliday's work, anti-languages is the language of an anti-society. He says an anti-society is a society within another society as a conscious alternative to it. It's a mode of resistance which may take the form of either passive symbiosis or of active hostility and even destruction. So it's very, it's anti, that's the anti part of the term. In Halliday an anti-language exists solely in the context of re-socialization, this is a quote as well, and the reality it creates is inherently an alternate reality. He argues that the alternate reality is not so different from the norm but in fact may be a metaphorical variant of it. So the main way that an anti-language distinguishes itself is through re-lexicalization, which Halliday says is a process of new words for old. Halliday suggests that this re-lexicalization is partial, not total, and that the principle is that of same grammar, different vocabulary, but different vocabulary only in certain areas, typically those that are central to the activities of the subculture. And he suggests this may be related to criminal acts, law enforcement, penal institutions and so on. He adds that an anti-language distinguishes itself because obviously there's re-lexicalization in other sort of phenomena. He says an anti-language distinguishes itself through over-lexicalization, so the proliferation of synonyms, which he describes as part of a never-ending search for originality, either for the sake of liveliness and humor or in some cases for the sake of secrecy. And then he talks, he looks at another orthomalic who looked at the underworld language of Bengal and he pointed to 24 synonyms for the word girl. And he says this is indicative of a range of predictable connotations, so in particular areas there's more synonyms. But some of the lexicalized terms in an anti-language have no semantic equivalence in the standard language and these are new concepts relating to the particular social reality of the anti-language itself, or the anti-society. And then Halliday focuses particularly on the use of metaphor to achieve re-lexicalization. So he describes numerous metaphorical variants and then he says that the third quote there, it's this metaphorical character that defines the anti-language. An anti-language is a metaphor for an everyday language and this metaphorical quality appears all the way up and down the system. There are phonological metaphors, grammatical metaphors, morphological lexical and so on. Beyond just lexicon, Halliday states that the whole phenomenon of an anti-society should be interpreted as a metaphor or rather metonymic to society, an extension of it, while its realization in both social structure and in language are metaphorical. And he suggests that while much of language is metaphorical and anti-language is distinguished from everyday language because it is itself a metaphorical entity and hence metaphorical modes of expression are the norm. We should expect metaphorical compounding, metathesis, rhyming alternations and the like to be among its regular patterns of realization. So it's one of the main sort of strategies of an anti-language. So just quickly about metaphor itself, Gibbs in a recent overview of the latest scholarship on metaphor explains that metaphor is not simply an ornamental aspect of language but a fundamental scheme by which people conceptualize the world and their own activities. He refers to the broad extent of metaphor in human life and particularly at two levels, individual instances of metaphor in language and in non-verbal expression in gestures and so on. And then larger scale patterns of metaphorical thought. So in contemporary metaphor scholarship, metaphor is seen as part of a larger system of human cognition. And because of this ubiquity in the human experience, metaphor does not seem to require any extraordinary human effort to be produced and understood. We do it naturally. We use metaphor quite naturally. And he says this is in contrast to claims about innovative and creative aspects of metaphor. It's often said that metaphor is incredibly innovative and creative but these ideas have been critiqued in recent years. On the other hand, new metaphors are created over time and that does require innovation. So new metaphor might arise from new cultural contexts, formations and interpretations. So the second quote there, metaphor emerges from the interaction between body and culture. And this is Ning Yu. So she says, I think it's a sheet, while metaphorical mappings are largely grounded in bodily experience, the choice of one from many possible options depends largely on cultural understanding and interpretation. So it's embedded in cultural systems. That's how metaphors emerge. For this reason, metaphor used by youth, I think is particularly interesting because it's youth who are at the forefront of new cultural interpretations. As you can see from their central place in the production of popular culture, for example. So metaphors used by youth can also reveal their responses to cultural contexts. In Halliday's description of anti-language, the skillful use of language seems to be the primary purpose of metaphor. So anti-language is used for originality, liveliness and humour. This seems consistent with descriptions of youth language and slang more generally. For example, Alan here explains that dictionaries usually characterise slang by describing its informality, unconventionality, ellipsis and then bizarre metaphors, playfulness and so on. Wydalski, that second quote, is describing semantic change in African American slang and explains how semantic change is a well-established vehicle for language development. It quintessentially involves two main processes, figuration, which again makes use of metaphor, related figurative means and semantic shifting. Although metaphors are not exclusive to youth language, therefore they're found in all sorts of slang, they're one of the central strategies described by researchers in the field of youth language. Keasing and Moose state that in terms of linguistic manipulation strategies, anti-languages of the urban youth type predominantly employ borrowing, truncation, morphological hybridisation, metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole and disphemism. And that these components are a result of viewing a state of affairs from an unusual angle, which I think is quite a nice way of thinking about it. Brooks, who works on Sotsital, she suggests that these kinds of innovations in the youth language in Sotsital confer status in peer groups. And she writes that the young man who displays the most entertaining and original use of speech and gesture controls and leads the street corner group. And the properties of metaphors make them ideal sites for showcasing or contesting somebody's skillful use of language in those contexts. So I think that's the next page. The first quote here. According to Stern, one can either understand the content of a metaphor or fail to grasp it, just as we can succeed or fail to get a literal content. Parties can disagree over a metaphor, either over what it says or when they agree on its content over its correctness. And once we understand the metaphor, we can also judge it to be successful, appropriate, forceful or apt. So in youth language, metaphor becomes an ideal vehicle for humour, where peers can make jokes and illusions that resonate with one another. Cameron describes metaphors as a third space outside the conversation where speakers can align and agree. In youth language, we can posit that the judgment of a metaphor comes in whether it's received positively by interlocutors, particularly whether they find it funny. So if a metaphor is well-received and considered salient, there'll be a positive response, people might find it funny and it might get repeated and it might make it later into a peer group lexicon as sort of an almost conventionalised metaphor. And Cameron again, she talks about conventionalisation of metaphor and she says conventionalisation is a dynamic process that takes place within the talk of a particular discourse community and from which emerges a metaphor that can act as common currency in future talk. Salient lexical items in youth language may also encrypt more than one meaning and perhaps contributing to their salience because they can resonate in different ways with different people in different contexts. So for example, discussing the representation of women in the Kenyan youth language, Sheng, Peter Gatinji explains from an ascetic angle, the bottom quote there, from an ascetic angle, the female word for buttocks like my finishings associates buttocks with finesse, beauty and completeness. So it's finished, it's been perfectly finished, but it can also give the literal meaning of organs that appear at the rear. So these multiple interpretations provide the possibility for different positive responses to the term. So then more people find them funny and more people might repeat these kinds of coinages. And then just the last few things about metaphor. So Cameron describes how metaphor clusters in talk. So it appears in clusters as people are talking and it's also sometimes absent but meaningfully absent. She suggests that clustering tends to be topical. So in youth talk, metaphor might therefore cluster around a topic which invites re-lexicalization or over-lexicalization, such as those identified by Halliday and by myself and Boothlazy. So in Sotsitaal's speech, it might cluster around topics such as money, smoking and drinking, girls and sex, cars and driving, social media and technology, fighting and violence, crime and police. These were all areas that we found were over-lexicalized in Sotsitaal. Describing the markers of youth language, Zimmerman explains that research suggests that new coinages are actually really rare. But he argues that neologism must be looked for and that special attention should be paid to the naming of youth culture concepts, that is the creation of new concepts because that might be where new coinages happen and where new metaphors are generated. So this link between youth culture, the naming of new concepts and the generation of new metaphors can conceivably contribute to variation in that the generation of new concepts and metaphorical links by youth can ultimately make their way into vernaculars. And I'm going to give you some data now which I hope illustrates some of the manifestations and effects of these metaphorical processes in Sotsitaal. So yeah I think I'll just talk about the data quickly. I'm going to then very quickly show you a video just to, so you've got an idea of the people who are talking and then I'm going to go through the handout and if you haven't got a handout there's still some here but I think they were all given out. Okay so the data that I analysed for this paper is natural speech data. It was generated by a multi-sided research project. It was funded by Sandpad and the South African Netherlands programme and I ran the project from 2010 to 2013 so the data is quite recent. The fieldwork sites were peri-urban townships near the major major cities in South Africa so just outside Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and East London and in each of these sites I employed or we had students who were local research assistants and they collected, transcribed and translated the video and audio recordings of peer group conversations and usually they knew the group. In fact I think in all cases they knew at least part of some of the people in these groups. So we tried to make it as natural as possible and they recorded more than one recording and you know I think that the data eventually came out quite sort of natural in terms of how people were talking even though it was video recording it wasn't just audio but people did sort of relax in the end and it seems to be quite natural speech data. So that's just the numbers of participants and so on. Johannesburg currently unknown we've still got a PhD student working on the data up there and she's got huge quantities of it so we've got more coming. Yeah just to say the differences between urban causes so obviously in the recordings there's the young people are speaking and they're using the stylized registered tzotzi tal but they're speaking urban causes and so me and Raj Mastri wrote an article about the difference between urban cause and tzotzi tal the register and we said as I mentioned earlier that tzotzi tal is like the highly stylized register of the urban form so the urban form is the base and then tzotzi tal is a stylized register which is sort of embedded into that into that base. The same principle holds for other tzotzi tal so Gunning's done some work on the sweat and tzotzi tal which shows the same thing so this means that in the examples that I've given in the handout the speakers are predominantly using this stylized register of the urban form but sometimes they're using simply the urban form but I'm going to talk about which resources are present in a particular interchange I'm looking particularly at metaphor in the tzotzi tal resources not metaphor in the urban form is the cause but it's very difficult sometimes to separate those two and there are crossovers and sometimes there's borrowings and other resources which aren't necessarily strictly identifiable as tzotzi tal but they kind of act as part of that register in the analysis and then also you know definitions of register of sorry definitions of metaphor can vary enormously as well so I've tried to focus on very deliberate metaphors that are clearly identifiable as metaphors rather than things that are sort of borderline metaphorical and the way I've identified metaphor linguistic metaphor is identified through the use of either words or phrases that potentially link to a vehicle or source domain which is distinct from the domain of the surrounding ongoing talk so it's sort of quite clear that it's not connected to the ongoing talk and then some metaphors have been conventionally heavily conventionalized in tzotzi tal and I've included these in the analysis although the speakers might not be aware of the metaphorical source of the lexical items they they appear as conventionalized metaphors in the data okay so um this is just a very quick I hope video showing some of the some of the groups so this is the group from Cape Town so there's a lot of gesture you can see the gesture let's go those guys are rappers the cake so this i get a lift on all the people yes sir yes sir welcome what's a bushing mat that's the problem with the street I feel like the family keeps going 주구 i stay at the back of the house i'm going to go to the kitchen i know your program i'm not program, i would not take Egypt This is Jan, it's back. Okay, so that's some of the contexts of talk. That last one is, they're called the, it's Kotani, it's like this subculture, quite a recent new subculture. And they speak an extremely stylized version of, well, we're not even sure if it's related to Sotsi Tal. So there's, yeah, there's different kinds of groups in different contexts. The guys who are sort of playing the coin, the coin game on the corner and so on. And then the guys sitting in the field, they're DJs and they're always chatty about music and stuff. But you can see it's quite, you know, there's some very interesting sort of natural data coming out of the different, the different sites. And you can, yeah, wow. Yeah, we're paying a lot in transcripts. It takes a very long time to transcribe some of those groups, you know. Yeah, and yeah, lots of people talking over the top of each other. And obviously we're getting people from that area to do the transcriptions because they know the Sotsi Tal from that region best and so on. But we've actually had to get sort of more than one person doing the transcriptions as well because some people don't know the slangs so well. And yeah, it's been an interesting process. Okay. All right, so in terms of the analysis of the data, I was looking at metaphor in youth language in Sotsi Tal at two levels of analysis. So I was looking at the words, first of all, the lexical items themselves, and then phrases and sentences. So in terms of the words, you've got a table there on the handout. And I've listed some of the words that came up in the data that we've managed to transcribe so far anyway. So the data is peppered with metaphorical lexical items. So the ones that we've found are mainly conventionalised, which means they appear repeatedly in the data across different sites. So we'll find the words in Cape Town and also in Durban and also in Johannesburg and so on. There are also large stretches of data with very few metaphors, indicating that speakers are using the urban variety rather than a heavily stylised variety. And in these sections, metaphors that do appear are the very conventionalised, very common terms or borrowings. So you've got words like straight, which means the equivalent of shore, fresh, which means cool, and then old Sotsi Tal terms such as his spanner, which I'm going to talk about, and outie. So these are words that have been around in Sotsi Tal really from the 1940s for a really long time, and they're pretty much used in the vernacular as well by most people in the urban centre. So they're sort of borderline not stylised any more, they're more like vernacular township language. So just to go through some of the words in the table, so you've got, so like I say, these are all conventionalised, either in the local variety of Sotsi Tal. So you've got kuma, and I'm going to have to do that again, kuma and sing, and these are singes, sorry, and these have only been found in the Durban data. But then spanner, smoco, ringer and bloma, those are all found in all of the regional Sotsi Tal varieties, so they're kind of national Sotsi Tal terms. So the first word there, blom, that stems from Afrikaans bloom, meaning flower or the English bloom. So in Sotsi Tal it means to live, to stay or to hang out. And so someone is blooming on a street corner, it means they're sort of hanging out on the street corner, literally they're flowering on the street corner, which we think is quite nice. Then Bronco there, you can see the second clip, there were three, I think either three or four girls sitting in a row, they're the only girls that we've managed to get data from, and they use this word Bronco, meaning girlfriend, so I don't know if it's their, they self-identify as lesbians, so I don't know if it's limited to their group, I haven't found it anywhere else in the data. So obviously it comes from English bucking Bronco, and with obvious connotations as well. Then you've got Ghazlam, which means friend, it means it's literally blood of mine from Zulu Ghazi Lam. Masher, which means to go to walk, that's found, I've seen that a lot in the Durban data, which comes from English to March, we think that's where it comes from. Obaba, which means police, literally in Zulu it means fathers. Auti, so Auti is another old, long-standing Tzotsital word, which means man, it comes from Afrikaans o, originally from Dutch oa, which I'm probably not pronouncing right, meaning old man. But the etymology of that one's actually also been linked to English outlaw, so Auti as in outlaw, associated with Western and gangster films that were popular in Johannesburg townships at the time of the emergence of Tzotsital, so in the 1940s. So Kulma, which means explosion and explosion in Zulu, they in the Durban data they're using that to mean, they've used it to mean both leaving, so you're exploding out of there or laughing, so exploding with laughter. Ringer, it's another very long-standing term in Tzotsital, which means to talk, and we think that there's two different etymologies given for that, so it might have derived from the ringing of a telephone bell, so to talk on the telephone, or from the social practice of standing in a ring talking, so you're ringing with your friends. And that's also used actually to refer to Tzotsital, so some people call it ring us. Then we've got Rouge, and that means a 50 round note, South African 50 round note, it refers to the colour of the note itself, so yeah. Smokko, oh sorry, is cinj, or cinj, from English cinj, I'm assuming, we don't know, but we assume that and it means either matchbox or matchstick. I'm going to come back to shy in a minute. Smokko means trouble or problem in Tzotsital, derived from English smoke, and it might be semantically linked to the phrase, there's no smoke without fire. And then finally, Spanner, this is another long standing Tzotsital item, it means work, so is Spanner to work, and it originates in Afrikaans in Span, meaning yoke, as in a team of oxen, so you yoke together your team of oxen and to pull a wagon. The word's also been borrowed into standard kosa, as isipana, meaning teamwork, and that might actually be the route that it took into Tzotsital rather than a direct borrowing from Afrikaans. So many of these lexical items are so embedded in Tzotsital and so long standing that it's unlikely that the speakers are aware of their metaphorical origins. More recent or localised terms such as cinj and bronco might be more linked to their metaphorical origins. And a number of the words have different possible etymological or metaphorical explanations, including multiple salience. So I mentioned outie could be outlaw or could be our. In the case of Shaya, which is one of the examples there, it's used in lots of different ways. It appears to have multiple uses in the Durban data. And so the examples that I've given show Shaya being used metaphorically to mean speaking, drinking, smoking or taking taking a hit from a bucket, which is a smoking device. Or literally as hitting, which is the where it's taken from in Zulu, Uku Shaya. So this multiple salience means that this word appears repeatedly in stylised Tzotsital discourse in Durban particularly. Okay, so as we can see the the presence of metaphors, despite the presence of metaphors, there's little evident creativity in the in innovation at the word level. And I haven't I haven't noticed very many neologisms that that the transcribers can't translate most of the words they've heard before. So the majority Tzotsital lexical metaphors are conventionalised. The more innovative metaphorical work happens at the sentence level, where there's some interesting clustering of metaphors in the data. And these clusters gather around a particular topic as Cameron suggested. So a metaphor is first offered by one speaker, and then that metaphor is extended by the original speaker and by other participants. Different synonyms are given, and participants engage in play with meanings and words. This, of course, it takes place in normal speech as well. And it's not unique to Tzotsital or even to youth language. But these the extended stretches that I've found in the Tzotsital data led me to term these clusters as play clusters. And it's possible, I think that synonyms offered here might be picked up later as coinages, depending on their salience. So some of the examples, the first example there, and it's the one that starts off smoke, smoke gangster, so foolish, foolish, and then smoking heroes. So this is the guys that are sitting around there smoking. And then one of them starts off by participant one says they're burning at the sock, at the soccer grounds, the, the groundini, meaning that they're smoking at the soccer ground. So they're sitting in the soccer ground, smoking together. So he says they're smoking, they're burning at the soccer grounds. And the second speaker extends that metaphor of burning by saying the ground is on fire in English. So he switched into English, he says the ground is on fire. The original speaker then agrees in Zulu that he says, Aksana no arti es altisha. So no water can even put it out. And sorry, if anybody speaks Zulu, my accent's really bad. I'm just, it's, it's a, it's a causal accent. So he says no water can even put it out. And then the second speaker extends that metaphor again by saying a ground, the ground is blazing. The first speaker confirms the salience of that metaphoric metaphoric extension by repeating, it's blazing. And interestingly, another Sotsitaal synonym for smoking is blaze, the English word blaze. So they say, you know, I'm blazing. But here they're using the Zulu equivalent of that. So the play in this example takes place within between Zulu and English. And it extends this metaphor of fire around the act of smoking. The second example is an extended game of what Mariebe and Brooks just published an article, they talk, they, they describe a game of Guaro, which is a game of teasing or verbal dueling. And so Brooks, Mariebe and Brooks write that Guaro is a performance genre that plays an important role in male sociability. Its explicit function is to entertain and amuse. However, it also functions as a way of exploring and negotiating social status, hierarchies and alignments in friendship groups. Guaro is sometimes a playful way of challenging the dominant member in the group and increasing one's status by demonstrating linguistic superiority. And obviously there are equivalents in other youth, youth varieties as well, youth cultures and there's, there's rap, rap offs and those kinds of things. So I think these are all sort of related. So they start off one of, one of them says, use boom, you're a pussy. So that's how the game kicks off. And then the second person says, you know who's pussy you are, you are Cezani's pussy. And then the third person says, you know who's pussy you are, you're Casta Semenya's pussy. And they go on like this, calling each other by the name of somebody's genitals. So Casta Semenya, the first person, the second person, sorry that they come up with is she's a South African runner. And there was some debate during the Olympics around her gender status. So obviously they're coming up with, you know, people whose pussy it would be really funny to be. And they go on, you know, who's you are, queen from generations, generations as a soap opera in South Africa. I don't know who queen is, then who's also from generations. So they go into the whole generations soap opera thing. Tiger's wife from Zone 14. Zone 14 is another South African show. Catie Way is also she's from generations. Saka Sumezi. And Sumezi is a flamboyant South African male dancer, stroke actor. And then the P1 there says, you know, who's you are, you're Sarah Bartman's. And P2 says he overcame you know, Sarah Bartman, sure, that's you've lost, he's one. So Sarah Bartman, the winner proposes Sarah Bartman, she's also known as Sachi Bartman or the Hot and Top Venus. So she was a koi koi woman from South Africa, who was exhibited as a freak show attraction in the early 19th century in Europe because of her supposedly unusual physical features. So the metaphorical extension of this game includes pre-colonial South African history, and, and, you know, and takes into consider what this implies regarding European attitudes towards Sarah Bartman's genitals, which they actually put her genitals on show in the Museum of Paris for a century and a half after her death. So this earns the participant an instant win. I mean, you can't you can't beat that, right? Okay, and then the third example, the third game, the third sort of play cluster. The participants are discussing how one of them is going to be beaten up by a woman. And so his friends teasing him that this woman's going to beat him up. And so he proposes it's going to be like kneading dough, and he does this sort of gesture, he's going to be like kneading dough, you're going to be beaten to a pulp, you know. And from there, they move on to a more contemporary metaphor. So, yeah, so he starts off my brother, have you seen someone needing dough, she'll make you her dough cousin and you'd be you'd think that you're being beaten by a young man, she's going to thrash you severely. And then it goes on. If she keeps you held held down, she'll stab you persistently. Like that my brother delete faces delete, they repeat delete. And then he says again, delete. She's just doing one thing. She'd format you. She's making you her memory card, she's going to format you or presumably reformat you. Yeah, so they move into this sort of contemporary metaphor around computer technology or and yeah, around technology. So I think in all of these examples, the speakers are taking obvious enjoyment from metaphorical play. The metaphors are evaluated for salience and resonance. And the best ones are confirmed and repeated or confirmed by winning the game. And these play clusters are often accompanied by expressive use of gesture, such as in the needing dough example, which can increase participants understanding of why the metaphor is salient. And then there hasn't been evidence that, you know, I haven't been able to find this from the data that we've got yet. But it could be postulated that a salient metaphor such as reformatting might be remembered and repeated on future occasions by peer group participants. And then this could ultimately lead to new coinages. And so somebody could eventually get called abatement, you know, and it's a shortcut metaphor for, you know, your your an abusive term or whatever. But this is beyond the scope of the current data. Obviously, you could only find that out through longitudinal data. So in terms of the findings up to now, and obviously, I'm still doing still analyzing the data, but Sotsitile resources include a large number of lexical items with metaphorical origins, which have become conventionalized within the discourse community. The Sotsitile data sort of upholds the idea that novel metaphors occur rarely in spontaneous talk. And so we've found few instances of what you could what you could describe as coinages, they're mostly conventionalized. The play clusters that I've talked about have a number of possible functions. So, you know, people have talked about competition and status in peer groups. But there's also, I think, a very undervalued aspect of people having fun making jokes and trying to make each other laugh in peer groups. And I don't think we talk about that enough in use language research. And, you know, there's a socializing, there's a friendship for affirming role for metaphor. And, you know, these things around multiple salience and so on, can lead into that. So the data I think shows how this process clusters around specific topics, such as smoking, it leads to over-excalization in topic areas central to youth culture in agreement with Halliday's concept of anti-language, so the smoking example, that play cluster, for example. Speakers, I think, drawn a wide variety of resources to make their metaphors. So there's this very traditional metaphor around needing bread. And then there's a technological metaphor about reformatting. And then there's a metaphor linked to pre-colonial history, which, you know, they might have got from school or from wherever. So youth make these linkages between contexts, meanings and knowledges in their use of metaphor. And I think that is a creative process. Yeah, and so just as conclusion, the impact of youth culture and language on language variation is still little understood. I think we need more data over time if we want to see how coinages are taken up and how these processes contribute to variation. And then the terminology of anti-language itself, Halliday's idea around anti-language, should perhaps be reconsidered in the light of recent social linguistic developments away from the idea of language as clearly bounded homogenous units towards language as practice in which people draw on a wide range of resources, different languages, different dialects, different styles to communicate. And I think this is a theoretical approach well suited for today's highly multilingual African urban centres. While the term anti-language tends to imply a bounded homogenous unit in opposition to some imagined norm. So I think that's quite limited. So for this reason, although his concept of anti- language is a useful one for understanding youth language varieties and how metaphor operates and how over-excalisation takes place, I think the term itself and particularly its criminal connotations weren't reimagining. Thank you very much to the course of the presentation. Can we have a look at a house in West Africa, one of the sub-demays which has been substantial in the context of the lexicon and metaphors, the response to age and HIV, quite substantial in the lexicon there, from indigenous terms. There's actually somebody's written about that in Cape Town as well. I think it's in Corsa, so I think it was Cape Town based research about synonyms and avoidance terms for euphemisms for HIV. Absolutely. Right, yeah, that's definitely happening in South Africa as well. I haven't found any, there was one passage in some of my data and they were talking about HIV. They called it the Triple H syndrome. Oh no, that was something else. That was something else. But they were talking about, yeah, they did come up with a synonym, I can't remember it off the top of my head, but yeah, a synonym for HIV. I wonder if that wouldn't necessarily be restricted to youth as well. No, it wouldn't. It would be quite across the spectrum. I think it tends to be urban. Right. I think it's probably true. Hi, thanks very much for a really interesting talk. I have a couple of questions, one of which is perhaps not fair. One of them was, so this obviously about tritical, to what extent do you find kind of cross linguistic analogies within anti-languages or whatever you sort of want to consider them in terms of metaphor? So for example you have this word for hit, I'm just sort of thinking in Swahili you have similar kind of uses for slang or whatever like hit. So if you're speaking Swahili instead of the word speak, you can use piga, which is physically to hit something, as well as having other extensions, and also twanga, which is more like when you're pounding something with a pestle of water, so you can say whether you're hitting something, which is what I'm making around here. And also your example of mother of mine, I mean even in the area, these kind of things. To what extent some of those metaphors are broader? And the second question was whether you can say something about the urban nature of this, so of course you're looking at urban youth languages, but is there something specific about the urban context or do you have these kind of things happening in non-urban as well? I mean I think your first question is really we've got the exploding, you know exploding with laughter and we say that in English and there's been some work, I'm not that familiar with that side of metaphor research, but there has been some work about those cross-cultural metaphors, and that comes back to the sort of bodily experiences and those kinds of things, so there is some work more in the metaphor literature on that, so yeah, it would definitely be worth looking at. I was thinking about another one as well, hitting the road. So they say hitting the road in Kozotsotsital and we say that in English too, so yeah, there's definitely some cross-language metaphors going on there. And then your second question urban. Yeah, I mean I think, I've tried to think about that quite a bit and I said at the start, there's some problems with the term African urban youth languages because it's not just youth using them actually it's not just in the urban centres and you know, but the main use of Sozotsital happens in these peri-urban townships and I think it's something to do with the township structures and also the sort of socio-economic situation so I mean, Brooks spoke about this, the street corner youth sort of groups, they're not gangs, sometimes people say youth gangs, but they're not gangs they're groups of youth, they're unemployed and they spend a lot of their time with each other on street corners and in that context that's where these sort of stylised registers seem to be used the most but then they do get taken back to rural areas and you find the same thing, you know East London is a more urban city but Sozotsital has been there for a very long time in the urban townships as well but it's a more rural context so I mean, there's problems with the definition of rural and urban anyway in South Africa so yeah, it's a lot less sort of simple than the term implies yeah yeah I was very interested about the socio-economic of the way to think of the national language in terms of the language and what happens when you extend things because of different languages using the word especially as opposed to the use of English right I mean that was a quote from Kiesling and Maus and they were looking at a number of different ones so they were looking at Sheng I can't remember all of them Sheng, Indubil Lingala, Ya something so they're looking at various ones including Sozotsital Estumto which was the Joburg name for it and their argument was that that they used to be sort of restricted to use by sort of criminal subcultures a lot of these kinds of forms but that now they are being used by all youth but that was an analysis that was done in 2004 and Sheng people are saying that Sheng is sort of becoming a vernacular particularly in Nairobi but then again it's how you define what is Sheng so I'm making a distinction between Urban Cosa and Sozotsital's stylized register and I don't think a stylized register can become a national language that's my argument but the context might be very different in the suburbs of Nairobi and it might be that you can't easily separate the vernacular from the stylized Sheng register in the same way that we're doing and it might be that in the future we won't be able to do that either but I think that because it's people are generating a language to distinguish themselves to style a particular urban identity that saying that it's likely to become a national language would defeat the purpose of that stylized register so I don't think that they can become national languages I understand that yes, people are now differentiating between Sheng that's become more established more established institutionalized Sheng almost as opposed to because one of the things people say about youth languages is that once people like us think we come along and investigate them the young people are going to change they're going to do something else the secrecy is part of it and that's kind of happening I think but also the speakers have become older they were like 14, 15 when it probably happened they're like the 50s so you can hardly call it youth language well you ask some of the older guys that we've interviewed in South Africa and you ask them and they're like no we speak the real Tzotsital they don't say that's not Tzotsital that's something else you know and the youth are like oh those old people they don't know the latest stuff so it's this constant innovation which would defeat the you wouldn't be able to sort of say this has stabilized right, yeah My name is the finally it tells me more of it Any evidence of the contact with Fanagolo speakers in the mining areas what's the evidence, any contact? No, no that's being used it's still being used in the mining areas so there was some recent it was quite interesting there was a recent massacre I don't know the Maracana massacre and some of the miners on one side were still using that but it was clearly Fanagolo, I mean it was taught within the mines so it was standardized well it's also in use in Natal but by Indian shopkeepers to their Zulu clients that was what Raj just, he was looking at that again recently and Clarissa Surek Clarke as well wrote something about that so it's within a very particular context and it doesn't cross over with as far as we know at this stage older people as well so it's not a use practice I think we have to we are going to reconvene at the Institute of Education by anybody and continue to discuss it in the meantime I would like to thank Ellen Bremers for an interesting and fascinating talk thank you