Identity Construction and Linguistic Manipulation in Randuk

This paper had been presented for promotion at the university of Khartoum. To get the full text please contact the other at Sudan_98@hotmail.comThis paper gives an overview of the Randuk language, its use, development and the role it plays in marking speakers‟ identity. The paper is based on data collected from youths belonging to three different social groups: Shamasha (street boys), mechanics, and university students. This data was collected through interviews and participant observation and the resulting analysis demonstrates that Randok provides all the features of urban youth languages in Africa as outlined by Kiessling and Mous (2004). The language reveals strategies of linguistic manipulation (phonological, morphological and semantic) of pre-existing forms from Arabic and other languages - principally English. Metathesis, prefixation, suffixation, coinage, borrowing, metaphors, metonymies, onomastic synecdoches and dysphemisms are frequently used in Randuk. The use of these forms clearly indicates the identity of the speakers. This means that Shamasha, mechanics, and university students employ linguistically manipulated forms derived from their respective environment or community of practice. As such, one can observe the co-existence of different varieties of Randuk such as students, mechanics, Shamasha, blacksmiths, soldiers, and footballers. The analysis also shows that Randuk is gradually gaining new domains represented by the daily newspapers whose writers, especially the sarcastic ones resort to Randuk words to serve certain functions. The ultimate consequence of this tendency will be an increasing spread of Randuk among a number of communities leading to some form of standardization of the language