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UCT RESEARCH REPORT 2012
Texting Africa – Multilingual Digital Writing
Digital communication technologies, in particular popular and affordable texting, have opened new spaces for the
informal use of written African languages.
Research Project
Research has to date focused largely on the global
North – Manuel Castells and his colleagues note in
Mobile Communication and Society:
“‘We know a
good deal about Norway because of the quality of the
Norwegian research in the field, while we know little
about Nigeria because of the scant reliable evidence
on this important country.”
The Texting Africa project contributes to closing the
research gap by focusing on digital literacy practices
in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa.
Data include text message corpora and screen data
for other digital applications like Facebook and
Twitter, as well as survey, interview, observation and
focus-group data.
The project began in 2010, but recent publications
have focused on the role of creativity and linguistic
play in digital writing. Good texters have an ability
to manipulate language and create new words and
expressions and, while much of this formal creativity
happens in English or French, writers make skilful use
of African language resources.
The data shows such practices to be widespread, and
multilingual linguistic creativity to be a hallmark of the
genre. For many African writers – educated in a school
system which privileges former colonial languages
– digital writing is a place where they write African
languages on a regular basis, unsupervised, a space
where African languages are cool and alive.
The project, led by Professor Ana Deumert (AXL,
Linguistics), is funded by the National Research
Foundation and South Africa Netherlands Research
Programme on Alternatives in Development. The work
benefited from research collaboration with Dr Kristin Vold
Lexander, University of Oslo, and a specialist in texting
in Senegal. Future collaboration is anticipated with the
recently launched Centre for Multilingualism in Society
Across the Lifespan (MultiLing, University of Oslo).
The Texting Africa project contributes
to closing the research gap by
focusing on digital literacy practices