Morphological leveling of noun class agreement in urban Swahili

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v11i1.6078

Keywords:

Swahili, variation, subject agreement, sociolinguistic, noun class

Abstract

In Nairobi Swahili, some speakers exhibit variability between expected, standardized subject-verb agreement markers and non-canonical variants. This paper investigates agreement variation for singular and plural animal-referent nominal subjects in noun classes 9 and 10. The data are drawn from sociolinguistic interviews and a picture description task for a socially-balanced sample of 12 young adult speakers. The non-canonical variants i- and zi- occur most frequently in the speech of men and in interview style. Men use i- and zi- at similar rates for all the nominal subjects, whereas women’s use is predicted by an interaction of subject number and animacy. Further work is required to determine the diachronic picture and to elucidate whether speakers’ multilingualism plays a role.

Author Biographies

  • Mofart Onyoni Ayiega, Michigan State University

    Mofart Ayiega is a PhD student in Linguistics at Michigan State University. His research focuses on morphosyntax, morphosemantics, and language variation and change in Bantu languages. In particular, he investigates morphological variation in subject–verb agreement with animate nouns in Swahili.

  • Suzanne Evans Wagne, Michigan State University

    Suzanne Evans Wagner is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Michigan State University. She is a sociolinguist, primarily interested in intra-individual linguistic malleability in post-adolescence and its intersection with language change in the community. With Betsy Sneller, she is working on the longitudinal MI Diaries project, which examines language variation and change in the US state of Michigan. With Isabelle Buchstaller, she is series co-editor of Routledge Studies in Language Change.

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Published

2026-06-19

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 1 (2026): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Mofart Onyoni Ayiega, Suzanne Evans Wagne

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.

How to Cite

Onyoni Ayiega, Mofart, and Suzanne Evans Wagner. 2026. “Morphological Leveling of Noun Class Agreement in Urban Swahili”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 11 (1): 6078. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v11i1.6078.