The Swahili of Lubumbashi is considered a Swahili creole, having as substrate languages a great number of African (Bantu) languages together with French and Flemish. In this way the situation of SL does not correspond at all to Valdman's (1978) description of "langue-base" and "langue-substrat" as the dominating and dominated variety in a given socio-political context.
There are substantial similarities with other creoles on the phonological, syntactic and lexical levels - phonological simplification and restructuring, gender and nominal agreement, structure and realisation of TMA, copulas and particles ("adverbs") as auxiliaries, parataxis etc. - without any (historical) evidence for a common proto-system. Similarly, we find frenchisation and especially swahilisation connected to the socio-political context and the system of values. French was and is the dominant language, but Swahili has much more importance for the self-esteem of the Katangans.
As Fabian points it out in Language and Colonial Power referring to the different role of Lingala and Swahili: "Swahili as spoken in Katanga was a symbol of regionalism, even for those colonials who spoke it badly."
Genesis of Swahili of Lubumbashi
The classical three stage model of creole development does not apply
to the genesis of the Swahili creole in Katanga. There was never a stable
phase of pidgin - SL became the mother tongue of inhabitants of Katanga
before being stabilized. The genesis of SL and the current situation are
not in agreement with Hall's description of a creole: "When a pidgin has
become nativized, the history of the resultant creole is, in essence, similar
to that of any other language. Hence, whereas a pidgin is identifiable
at any given time by both linguistic and social criteria, a creole is identifiable
only by historical criteria - that is, if we know that it has arisen out
of a pidgin." (Hall 1966:122) Arguments against the three step model have
been brought forward in more detail by A. Valdman (1977) and A. Bollée
(1977) with regard to the development of French-based creoles in the Indian
ocean. Most of them are equally valid for SL.
At the beginning, Fanangalo, the widely used pidgin variety in the mine
areas of Southern Africa, served as a medium of communication for immediate
needs (especially under working conditions), but it was pushed aside and
never became a creole in Katanga for political reasons.
Swahili had been spoken by a limited number of people in the region
at least since the arrival of the Arabs. It had been equally useful for
European traders, missionaries and "explorers". The variety which became
the dominant means of wider communication in the first quarter of this
century was a kind of up-country Swahili, different from the coastal varieties
which later became the basis for a (British controlled) "standard" variety.
It was spoken (written, codified, thought) depending on the language-user's
respective competence.
As a result of the specific multilingual situation, the applied colonial
and postcolonial politics, the fast growth of the cities, and the high
rate of immigration and emigration we have:
(1) a creolized central variety (or still better "central varieties")
of SL,
(2) a "broken" variety (broken varieties) of SL (or up-country Swahili),
(3) lexical borrowing from French and Swahili (and also from other
Bantu languages) or language switch, and transfer of syntactic structures
from "Standard Swahili" to SL as individual and spontaneous phenomena.
These cases of interference are often caused by the intention of the speaker
to use a more highly valued language variety.
Double negation should be considered as obligatory
in the creole variety of SL. It is used less frequently or not at all in
the more formal contexts of "mazungumzo", due to the speaker's intention
to produce "Swahili bora". In utterances of "broken" Swahili it seems to
be optional.
Double negation is one of the phenomena which
clearly distinguish SL from Standard or "Common Swahili". Double negation
in SL has been developed through internal structural expansion in the context
of creolization and not because of interference. Double negation of this
type is also a structural element of Afrikaans and the Portuguese based
creoles of the Golf of Guinea. The similarity is, however, limited. Den
Besten (1986) traces double negation in Afrikaans back to interference
from Khoekhoe, and the Portuguese creoles are themselves already base-languages.
Bollée, Annegret, 1977. Remarques sur la gènese des parlers créoles de l'Océan Indien. in: Jürgen M. Meisel (ed.), Langues en contact. Tübingen: Narr, pp. 137-149.
den Besten, Hans. 1986. Double negation and the genesis of Afrikaans. in: P. Muysken & N. Smith (eds.) Substrata versus universals in creole languages. pp. 185-230. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Fabian, Johannes. 1982 Scratching the surface: observations on the poetics of lexical borrowing in Shaba Swahili. in: Anthropological Linguistics 24, pp. 14-50.
Fabian, Johannes. 1986. Language and Colonial Power. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Fabian, Johannes. 1990. History from below. The "Vocabulary of Elisabethville" by André Yav. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hall, Robert A.. 1966. Pidgin and Creole languages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Schicho, Walter. 1980. Kiswahili von Lubumbashi. Wien: Afro-Pub.
Schicho, Walter. 1981. Le Groupe Mufwankolo. Wien: Afro-Pub.
Schicho, Walter. 1982. Syntax des Swahili von Lubumbashi. Wien: Afro-Pub.
Schicho, Walter. 1985. Lingual varieties as a means of acting in the extempore-plays of the "Groupe Mufwankolo", Lubumbashi / Zaire. in: J. Maw & D. Parkin (eds.), Swahili Language and Society. Wien: Afro-Pub, pp. 67-76.
Valdman, Albert. 1977. Créolisation sans pidgin: le système des déterminants du nom dans les parlers franco-créoles. in: Jürgen M. Meisel (ed.), Langues en contact. Tübingen: Narr, pp. 105-136.
Valdman, Albert. 1978. Le Créole: structure, statut et origine.
Paris: Klincksieck.