Mobile phones and Mipoho's prophecy: The powers and dangers of flying language

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the ideologies surrounding the poetic forms of Giriama text messaging in the town of Malindi, Kenya. I argue that young people use rapid code‐switching and a global medialect of condensed, abbreviated English as an iconic index of a modern, mobile, self‐fashioning, sexy, and irreverent persona, whereas their use of the local vernacular (Kigiriama) tends to reroot them in the gravitas of social obligations and respect relationships. In text messages, then, English and local African tongues are sometimes treated as foils for each other, suggesting that, rather than merely being mimicked, the English medialect is flavored by distinctly local concerns. Indeed, among many Giriama elders, the poetic patterns of text messaging are construed as a special breed of witchery in which hypermobility and linguistic innovation threaten ethnic coherence and even sanity itself. I suggest, however, that the use of Kigiriama in text messaging may point not to the abandonment of ethnicity but to new ways of being Giriama that are simultaneously local and modern. [mobile phones, text messaging, globalization, Kenya, witchcraft, language ideology, code switching]

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