Mapping Nairobi's Linguistic Profile

Professor Iribe Mwangi (University of Nairobi) will discuss his collaborative work with AFAS professor Mungai Mutonya mapping Nairobi's linguistic mosaic, a project supported in part by a 2020 Carnegie African Diaspora & International Institute of Education Fellowship.

Nairobi's population is increasingly diverse, younger, and linguistically versatile. Recent demographic reports show that over half of the city's four million residents are under thirty-five years and identify with disparate ethnicities and nationalities. Besides the fifty or more Kenyan languages spoken varyingly across the county, speech communities from Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Africa, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, and Zimbabwe continue to enrich the city's linguistic mosaic. The talk will discuss the ongoing mapping project that seeks to define the obscure, intricate, and frequently overlapping language boundaries across Nairobi's sub-counties.

Speaker Bio:

Professor Iribe Mwangi is an Associate Professor and Chairman of the Department of Kiswahili at the University of Nairobi. He holds B.Ed, M.A and PhD degrees in Kiswahili and linguistics. A leading translation and communication consultant, Prof. Iribemwangi is a linguist who specializes in Kiswahili phonology, morphology and sociolinguistics. He has written over 65 books, book chapters and journal articles in these and other areas of language and linguistics. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Iribe-Mwangi

Note: Prof. Mwangi will be visting AFAS from Oct. 3 to Oct. 7, meeting with faculty and students, discussing continued collaborations with the University of Nairobi, and delivering this talk. We will update the event page with date, time, and location details shortly.