ABSTRACT
Youth in many countries on the African continent have developed distinct ways of speaking with their peers. These ways of speaking often appear to be quite different from the first language varieties of African languages spoken in these communities. As a result, they have attracted a great deal of attention because, in many cases, the way they speak is almost unintelligible to other members of the communities in which they reside. This lack of intelligibility has tempted linguists to call them ‘languages’ and to analyze and classify them within the framework of autonomous linguistic systems. These ways of speaking have names given to them either by linguists or community members but not by the users themselves.
