The Age Factor in Linguistic Variation: A Reference to the Use of Kiswahili at Busia Border Town in East Africa

This paper deals with age as a linguistic variable in the use of Kiswahili among ordinary citizens in Busia town at the Kenya-Uganda border. I chose age over other possible factors because it emerged as a salient ground for variation in the use of Kiswahili among ordinary citizens in my PhD research on language as a lived practice. Thus, the paper is intended to demonstrate how the ordinary citizens in Busia use Kiswahili across three different age categories: the youth, the adults, and the elderly, and what this variation reveals about how Kiswahili is socially construed and constructed by its speakers. Specifically, three objectives are embedded in the discussions of the paper, 1) to ascertain the age-related patterns of the use of Kiswahili in Busia town, 2) to explore the salient age-related linguistic forms of Kiswahili used by each age category, and 3) to provide a sociolinguistic account for the patterns and forms that emerge. The findings reveal several complex age-based patterns of the use of Kiswahili, but generally show that the youth prefer slang-like and other “sub-standard” forms of Kiswahili, the adults employ some standard forms of Kiswahili but with extensive code-mixing between Kiswahili and English, and the elderly prefer their vernaculars to Kiswahili, which (vernaculars) influence the forms of Kiswahili that they sporadically speak. The paper concludes that Kiswahili, just like any other language, is dynamic and prone to variations based on various contextual and social factors. With this conclusion, the paper recommends further extensive studies that can shade more light on other linguistic variables such as level of education and gender, and how these complement the age variable in the use of Kiswahili within the context of this study.