A casual farewell that promises future contact, used among Nairobi youth to signal belonging to the city's constantly evolving street language culture.
Tutuliyaanga is how you signal the conversation's ending while keeping the door open. It's the verbal equivalent of a wave that says both goodbye and see you soon — not a final parting, but a pause with the promise of reconnection. Among Nairobi's young people, it marks you as someone who speaks the living language of the streets, not the formal Swahili of textbooks or news broadcasts.
The phrase emerged around 2020 as part of Sheng, Nairobi's constantly reinventing street language that pulls from Swahili, English, and indigenous Kenyan languages. But unlike viral phrases that explode across social media, tutuliyaanga spread the old way — through actual conversations on actual streets. It lives primarily in speech rather than text, which explains why you might not find it trending anywhere despite hearing it everywhere in certain circles.
What makes tutuliyaanga interesting isn't just what it means, but what it does. It's a citizenship test. Use it naturally and you signal belonging to Nairobi's urban youth world. Stumble over it and you've marked yourself as outside that circle. The phrase exemplifies how Sheng speakers constantly create new ways to express even basic concepts like farewell, keeping their language fluid enough that it resists being fully grasped by those who aren't living it daily.