Mapping Nairobi's Linguistic Profile

Nairobi's population is increasingly diverse, younger, and linguistically versatile. Recent demographic reports show that over half of the city's four million residents are under thirty-five years and identify with disparate ethnicities and nationalities. Besides the fifty or more Kenyan languages spoken varyingly across the county, speech communities from Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Africa, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, and Zimbabwe continue to enrich the city's linguistic mosaic. The talk will discuss the ongoing mapping project that seeks to define the obscure, intricate, and frequently overlapping language boundaries across Nairobi's sub-counties.