ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an interesting and cohesive collection of articles documenting, the call ‘Standard Average European hosts Africa and Asia in the new millennium’. Urban varieties belong to all genders and age-groups in a variety of functions, “male youthspeak” is more restricted. Urban varieties are defined by their difference from the older standard and dialect forms of the languages, and are in the process of settling on their own norms, difficult as that may be in a brave new world of code-switching, rapid technological lexical expansion and the intrusions of European languages. The modern products, pastimes and concepts that prove increasingly attractive to young people come packaged in English; at best, speakers manage a hybridity between community language and colonial and/or European language. The opening up of a linguistic and stylistic continuum is well illustrated in Yazgül Simsek & Heike Wiese’s account of the new migrant forms of German.
