Attributional and relational influence of numerals in S’ncamtho metaphors

Abstract

Abstract Youth varieties in Africa such as S’ncamtho, the Ndebele-based youth variety in Zimbabwe, and urban vernaculars interact with urban and modern experiences which offer them new materials and experiences to base their metaphors on compared to older metaphors in the base languages. This paper explores the use of numeral qualities and associations in the conceptualisation and orthographic representation of S’ncamtho metaphors. S’ncamtho is popular with urban youth and this makes social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS and Instagram key in the performance of the youth variety, a performance that includes the creation, use and contraction of metaphors. Numerals offer phonetic attributes which are exploited in S’ncamtho as metaphors for contracting longer words into shorter ones for fast and economic writing on social media. Numerals are also used as frames to create analogies which elicit euphemistic and general S’ncamtho metaphors. Qualities of numerals such as sound, form and association are used to derive S’ncamtho metaphors and a unique numeral aided orthography to represent some of these metaphors in writing. The research deploys relational and attributional tenets of metaphor theory to analyse the numerical mappings in S’ncamtho metaphors.