East African English (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania): phonology

The geographical limits of East Africa are not always clearly defined. Sometimes it ranges from the Red Sea down to the end of the Rift Valley somewhere in Mozambique. More usually the northern part (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibuti and occasionally Sudan) is treated separately as North East Africa and the southern part with Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe is referred to as Central Africa, or with Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho and the Republic of South Africa as Southern Africa (cf. also Schmied 1991). This contribution will concentrate on the “heartland” of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania since they share a common “anglophone” background, despite some interesting differences in colonial heritage. These three countries are also characterised by a complex pattern of African first languages (mainly from the Bantu and Nilosaharan language families), a common lingua franca (Kiswahili) and an equally complex mixture of Christian, Islamic and native African religious and cultural beliefs. The revived East African Community (1967–1976 and from 1997) is a sociopolitical expression of this common heritage.

Although many sociolinguistic (like code-switching and borrowing) and linguistic features (like vowel mergers and syllable-timed rhythm in pronunciation or overgeneralization in grammar and a formal tendency in style) can also be found in other parts of Africa, East African English (EAfE) can be distinguished clearly enough from other varieties to justify a coherent descriptive entity. Today such a description can only be based on authentic data from three types of empirical sources: exemplary quotations from individual recorded utterances, a quantified and stratified pattern retrieved from a corpus of EAfE, like ICE-East Africa (described in the volume on morphology and syntax), or quantitative results from internet search engines or tools using the www as a corpus.

The following description tries to give a coherent picture by emphasizing reasons and patterns, rules or rather tendencies, since no reason is unique and no rule applies to 100%. These patterns are illustrated by short examples and finally set into a larger co- and context by examples from real English. As in most dialectal and sociolinguistic research one isolated marker may indicate a characteristic usage clearly, but usually only a cluster of features gives us the authentic flavor of EAfE. In this sense it is a descriptive abstraction, not necessarily an established, recognized norm, which should become clear from the following survey.