“Venezuela hawaii, chelsea!” Creative onomastic practice and playful (re)labelling in Langila from the Congo

Abstract

This contribution focuses on Langila, a language practice or “speech style” that emerged in the first decade after the millenium in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, characterized by lexical creativity and specific phonological manipulative strategies. I analyze Langila speakers’ use of global place names, fashionable brands, and names of institutions, and to some extent specific (manipulated) personal names as pseudo-onomastic references from an anthropological-linguistic perspective, understanding “games with names” (Storch 2019) as a cultural practice that contributes to the novelty factor in specific ways of speaking in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa and in social media. It is crucial for the discussion of “labelling” and “branding” practices in contexts of cultural importance in African languages to consider why and how speakers use, manipulate, and recontextualize semiotic links to names of artefacts, places, and people – and how this changes the onomastic value of these named, unnamed, and renamed