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KiKAR
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KiKAR
KiKAR (also known as Kikeya) is, or was, a Swahili pidgin spoken among the King's African Rifles (KAR) of British colonial East Africa (now Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania). Although there were, by design, no native Swahili speakers among the KAR, Swahili still functioned as the lingua franca, and a simplified version of it served as a military jargon and pidgin for the troops.
Most of the remaining knowledge of KiKAR comes from H. W. Newell's unpublished guide titled Notes on Ki-Swahili as Spoken by the KAR. Newell was an officer who served with the 5th battalion and who wrote the guide to help newly seconded officers get a grasp of the language.
It is not clear if KiKAR is still spoken. Maho (2009) does not list it as extinct.
The name KiKAR is formed from the Swahili prefix 'ki-' which denotes 'the language of', for example in kiSwahili meaning "the Swahili Language". In this case, KAR is the acronym abbreviation of King's African Rifles, who spoke the language, and thus it could be translated as "the language of the King's African Rifles".
Before the introduction of Swahili as the official language of the KAR in the late 1930s, KiKAR was used to tackle the communication problem which arose from the cultural diversity of the recruits who came from such ethnolingusitic groups as the Luo, Kalenjin, and Kamba peoples, and also from the fact that the presiding British officers were unlikely to speak Swahili and certainly did not speak any of the other East-African languages.
Mungai Mutonya and Timothy H. Parsons of the Washington University in St. Louis explain the formation of KiKAR as the natural response to such an impasse:
The natural tendency for groups of people faced with such a linguistic impasse is to seek a compromise language that breaks existing communication barriers.
— Mungai Mutonya and Timothy H. Parsons, KiKAR: a Swahili variety in Kenya’s colonial army
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KiKAR
KiKAR (also known as Kikeya) is, or was, a Swahili pidgin spoken among the King's African Rifles (KAR) of British colonial East Africa (now Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania). Although there were, by design, no native Swahili speakers among the KAR, Swahili still functioned as the lingua franca, and a simplified version of it served as a military jargon and pidgin for the troops.
Most of the remaining knowledge of KiKAR comes from H. W. Newell's unpublished guide titled Notes on Ki-Swahili as Spoken by the KAR. Newell was an officer who served with the 5th battalion and who wrote the guide to help newly seconded officers get a grasp of the language.
It is not clear if KiKAR is still spoken. Maho (2009) does not list it as extinct.
The name KiKAR is formed from the Swahili prefix 'ki-' which denotes 'the language of', for example in kiSwahili meaning "the Swahili Language". In this case, KAR is the acronym abbreviation of King's African Rifles, who spoke the language, and thus it could be translated as "the language of the King's African Rifles".
Before the introduction of Swahili as the official language of the KAR in the late 1930s, KiKAR was used to tackle the communication problem which arose from the cultural diversity of the recruits who came from such ethnolingusitic groups as the Luo, Kalenjin, and Kamba peoples, and also from the fact that the presiding British officers were unlikely to speak Swahili and certainly did not speak any of the other East-African languages.
Mungai Mutonya and Timothy H. Parsons of the Washington University in St. Louis explain the formation of KiKAR as the natural response to such an impasse:
The natural tendency for groups of people faced with such a linguistic impasse is to seek a compromise language that breaks existing communication barriers.
— Mungai Mutonya and Timothy H. Parsons, KiKAR: a Swahili variety in Kenya’s colonial army