Academic literature on the topic 'African Languages (See Also Swahili)'

Abstract INTRODUCTION: New immigrant families from continental Africa account for an increasing proportion of pediatric patients with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) in Canada and North America. As families enter the western medical system they face a myriad of tests and medications as well they encounter language barriers, endless forms and large teams. Previous experiences with healthcare also influence families' expectations and adjustment.There is no published data exploring the experiences of these families to help guide practice. Resources such as the Canadian Pediatric Society guide on immigrant health are not specific to SCD. We set out to examine cultural sensitivity methodologically in order to improve delivery of care. Research Questions: What are newcomer families' experiences with SCD in Canada and their home country?What are the prevailing values and beliefs related to SCD that shape the attitude and behaviors of newcomer families?How do newcomer families perceivethe current delivery of medical care (the barriers and the facilitators)? METHODS: Focused ethnography was used to understand the socio-cultural context in which newcomer families from Africa experience their child's SCD; to explore their perspectives, beliefs, how they manage daily life and experience the western medical system. A sample size of12-15 participants was selected to reach saturation.Participants were selected using purposeful and convenience sampling and semi-structured interviews were held with the primary caregiver(s) with use of aninterpreter if needed. Research Ethics Board approved. RESULTS: Saturation was reached at 10 families and 12 were interviewed due to recruiting methods. Demographics:12 caregivers (N=8 females; N=4 males); most were in their forties and from Congo, Nigeria or Liberia. The majority had 3 or more children, were married and employed. The majority did not have extended family within the region. Languages spoken at home were English, French, Yoruba, Swahili orMoorie. They immigrated to Canada between 2002 and 2015 For themes see table 1. CONCLUSIONS: Participants' attitude, perception and knowledge about SCD were profoundly affected by their experiences in their countries of origin. These mostly negative experiences (seeing children suffering without appropriate medical care; observing social stigma, etc.) were deeply embedded and determined their response to SCD in their children. 1. Practice guideline: Allow for sufficient time and provision oftranslation services to explore the families' experience with stigma within country of residence and origin as well as embedded in the healthcare system and the community. Despite the prevalence of SCD in their home countries the diagnosis was a surprise. The path towards acceptance was slow, emotionally convoluted and not linear. Acceptance of the diagnosis is a process and devastating in the context of previous experiences. 2. Practice guideline: Review diagnostic information early and have easily accessible information about SCD available for parents/family network. This information will also need to be reviewed with the child at key developmental time periods. SCD has a dominant impact on life causing renegotiation of all relationships: spousal, family, community, co-workers and school staff. Managing SCD influenced daily routines imposing structure which was disrupted for hospitalizations. Families were reluctant to leave children unattended in the hospital and thus sacrificed personal and employment goals. Social support is limited and families cope alone.Families tend to seek practical support and deny the desire for emotional support. 3. Practice guideline: 3a)Screen for potential isolation and explore whether other caretakers are aware of diagnosis and disease specific care 3b) Given the tendency to deny emotional support needs, lack of nearby extended family and the stigma in the community setting up networks that provide both practical and instrumental support could be meaningful and more likely utilized resources. The life-long complexity of SCD creates anxiety for the child's life expectancy. Families trust in medical expertise, improvements in medical treatments and their faith/religious beliefs are foundations for hope. 4. Practice guideline: HCP working with families should ensure awareness of clinical advances and develop means to easily share knowledge as it will strengthen hope for the future. Table 1 Table 1. Disclosures Bruce: Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria; Apopharma: Consultancy.

The subject of this research is the African paremiology. The object is the history of studying proverbs in the Swahili language. The author examines the chronology of studying this field of linguistics by Western European and African scholars, cites their major works, and describes the peculiarities of their scientific views. Special attention is given to the works of the founders of African paremiology, as well as the perspective of modern scholars of Tanzania and Kenya upon the scientific heritage of proverbs and sayings of the Swahili language. The article employs the theoretical research methods, namely the comparison of theoretical works in the Swahili and English languages. The analysis of a wide range of works in the Swahili language alongside the works of certain European authors, allows reconstructing the chronology of the process of studying Swahili paroemias, as well as highlighting most prominent African and European scholars in this field of linguistics. The novelty of this research lies in the fact that this topic is viewed in the domestic African Studies for the first time; foreign linguists also did not pay deliberate attention to this question. The author’s special contribution consists in translation of the previously inaccessible materials of the African and Western European into the Russian language, which helps the linguists-Africanists in their further research.

Most African countries have adopted the languages of ex-colonial masters as media of instruction (MoI). In Tanzania, English has remained the sole MoI from secondary to post-secondary education despite the endemic multilingualism in the country. Such a monolingual tendency in a multilingual setting has raised debates on how learners manage their studies through English, a language which is scarcely used in their everyday conversation. Thus, the current paper investigates learners’ strategic use of ethnic languages (EL) Nyakyusa and Swahili in the learning of the English language and other selected subjects. It also examines teachers’ and learners’ attitudes to the use of ethnic languages in the teaching and learning process in Tanzanian rural secondary schools. The study was carried out in Kyela District, Mbeya Region, among Form One and Form Two students whose first language is Nyakyusa, but who also use Swahili often when talking to peers at home and around the school compound. We used classroom observation and focus groups to collect data. The analysis revealed that some learners made use of Swahili and Nyakyusa for a number of reasons, including seeking assistance from fellow students whenever they came across a new English word/expression in the classroom. We also found that teachers and students reacted differently to the use of languages other than English in the classroom. While students believed that they would not be able to learn anything if their language was completely unused in the class, teachers believed that the use of Nyakyusa and Swahili was inappropriate. Consequently, teachers controlled learners’ use of Swahili and Nyakyusa in the class and around the school.

The Socio-Cultural Context of Greetings in Swahili1 Today most linguists agree that language and culture are tightly connected. It is also argued that in order to communicate successfully, we need to achieve a level of socio-cultural competence along with an ability to use the grammar and the lexicon of a particular language. There are many kinds of cultural norms and values that one has to obey, as there may be fundamental communication and discourse differences between one language and another. This paper is primarily concerned with some issues of discourse strategies and pragmatics of African languages. While the study focuses on greeting practices among the Swahili, it also investigates how learners acquire the pragmatics of Swahili greetings in a foreign language context, and how Swahili, as a language of wider communication, is infl uenced by cultural norms and values of its speakers, for whom Swahili is not a primary language.

Indigenous African languages are categorized as under-served in Natural Language Processing. They therefore experience poor digital inclusivity and information access. The processing challenge with such languages has been how to use machine learning and deep learning models without the requisite data. The Kencorpus project intends to bridge this gap by collecting and storing text and speech data that is good enough for data-driven solutions in applications such as machine translation, question answering and transcription in multilingual communities. The Kencorpus dataset is a text and speech corpus for three languages predominantly spoken in Kenya: Swahili, Dholuo and Luhya (three dialects of Lumarachi, Lulogooli and Lubukusu). Data collection was done by researchers who were deployed to the various data collection sources such as communities, schools, media, and publishers. The Kencorpus' dataset has a collection of 5,594 items, being 4,442 texts of 5.6 million words and 1,152 speech files worth 177 hours. Based on this data, other datasets were also developed such as Part of Speech tagging sets for Dholuo and the Luhya dialects of 50,000 and 93,000 words tagged respectively. We developed 7,537 Question-Answer pairs from 1,445 Swahili texts and also created a text translation set of 13,400 sentences from Dholuo and Luhya into Swahili. The datasets are useful for downstream machine learning tasks such as model training and translation. Additionally, we developed two proof of concept systems: for Kiswahili speech-to-text and a machine learning system for Question Answering task. These proofs provided results of a performance of 18.87% word error rate for the former, and 80% Exact Match (EM) for the latter system. These initial results give great promise to the usability of Kencorpus to the machine learning community. Kencorpus is one of few public domain corpora for these three low resource languages and forms a basis of learning and sharing experiences for similar works especially for low resource languages. Challenges in developing the corpus included deficiencies in the data sources, data cleaning challenges, relatively short project timelines and the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic that restricted movement and hence the ability to get the data in a timely manner.

This article provides a first analysis of the expression of phasal polarity in Swahili. Phasal polarity (henceforth PhP) refers to linguistic concepts which express the phase of a given situation in relation to a prior and/or subsequent phase, as well as expressing whether a certain situation holds or not. These concepts, represented here in English as a meta-language with already, no longer, still and not yet, are interrelated in interesting ways and form a semantic sub-system. In contrast to many other Eastern Bantu languages, we show that the dedicated expressions for PhP concepts in Swahili are mainly adverbs, with limited use of verbal affixes. It also stands out in the area by not having any gaps in the expressibility of PhP concepts, and by making use of internal negation. In order to target present-day spoken Swahili, the results are based on speaker interviews, through the use of carefully introduced contexts. The main strategy for expressing already was through the verbal affix sha-. There is also an adverb tayari ‘ready’ to express this concept, which occurs not infrequently in our results. We show that there are differences in their distribution, and hypothesize that this could be related to an ongoing change in the use of (me)sha- in relation to perfective me-. For all other PhP concepts, adverbs are used as the main strategy. There was variability in speaker responses in the use of constructions which we have considered contextual paraphrases rather than dedicated PhP expressions. The current work is inspired by a recent increase in interest in PhP systems in languages of the African continent, previously relatively unexplored (Kramer 2021). The analysis is based on the parameters for cross-linguistic comparison as presented by Kramer (2017)

Youth ‘languages’ are an important topic of research in the domain of linguistic change through language contact because the change is rapid and observable and also because the social dimension of change is inevitably present. Engsh, as a youth language in Kenya expresses not only modernity and Kenyan identity but also, the status of being educated, and it differs in this respect from Sheng, the dominant Kenyan youth language. The element of Engsh that expresses this aspect most directly is the use of a grammatical system from English whereas Sheng uses Swahili. In lexicon, Engsh draws upon Sheng and urban English slang. This is a first extensive description of Engsh. The social function of Engsh is interesting in that class is expressed in it, which is not often reported in African urban youth codes. Also the fact that Engsh is a non-exclusive register, which expands through its use in (social) media and most of all in computer mediated communication.

Language has long defined the discourse of African literature. Africa’s colonial experience has left its enduring legacy of colonial languages which have been imbibed to the detriment of the usage of indigenous African languages. Accordingly, even in the creation of literary works, the African writer has had to resort to the colonial languages as the medium of expression. Since it is implausible to think of the literature of a people outside the context of their languages, there has arisen a debate on the appropriate language that can be used in African literary expressions. One school of thought represented by Wali and Ngugi see it as absurd to refer as ‘African’, a literary work whose medium of expression is English (a foreign language). They argue that for any literary work to be truly “African”, it has to be written in an African indigenous language. Wali posits that until African writers come to terms with writing literary works in native languages they pursue a dead end. Ngugi also opines that language is so deeply rooted in culture that decolonization is impossible as long as English or any colonial language remain the medium of expression. He argues that using English as the medium of African literary expression amounts to linguistic imperialism. Achebe on the other hand, believes that African writers should embrace writing African literature in any foreign language because this offers African writers a useful means of reaching a wider audience and ensuring African literature a prominent space in the global literary landscape. There is also the alternative of African writers threading the middle ground in this debate by adopting and adapting the foreign language through translating from the foreign language to the local and vice versa to reach a wider audience, achieve universal intelligibility and acceptability. This review essay takes the position that African writers can use the tool of translation to promote the local languages through the process of adoption and adaptation.

Introduction: African women who migrate to the USA have a rich tradition of using herbs and spices to promote health. We conducted formative research on nutritional practices among East and North African women in the USA, focusing on whether traditional herbs and spices could support adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Methods: In all, 48 adult African women living in San Diego, California participated in focus groups in July 2015. Inclusion criteria were 18 years or older, and able to answer focus group questions in one of five languages: Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili or English. Results: Participants identified 62 unique spices and herbs that are traditionally used in meal preparation for flavour and health benefits. Participants also reported awareness that nutrients, foods, food groups and approaches to growing and preparing foods are important considerations for healthy diet. Barriers to healthy eating included costs, constraints around growing food in a different soil and climate than Africa, family size and the widespread availability of fast food. Groups identified opportunities for collaborations with researchers through educational programmes, and recommended seed and recipe exchanges that promote healthy eating across culturally heterogeneous African communities. Conclusion: A culturally informed behavioural intervention focused on spices and herbs would be feasible and accepted by African women in San Diego. This intervention may support adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans during the nutrition transition and broader dissemination of practices that promote health across heterogeneous communities of Africans living in the USA.

This paper is aimed at arguing chapter 9, 10 and 11 of the book “Bilingual Community Education and Multilingualism: Beyond a Heritage Language in a Global City by Ofelia Garcia, ZeenaZakharia, and BaharOtcu”, published in 2013. Arguing those three chapters, the reviewer explore the issue deeply, give arguments on the strengths and weaknesses of their analysis,and finally, the reviewer takes a conclusion.Examining these chapters, the reviewer identified that in chapter 9, the author showed the issue interestingly. Also, the authors were very good at presenting the issue of heritage language initiatives.It is obvious also to see that the way the writers presented the certain phrases add an attractiveness to read this chapter.However, it is hard not to argue that the authors have some constraints to explore deeply on specific languages of Africa. Since there are various languages in African society. In Chapter 10, the reviewer would say that the authors have shown their expertise perfectly, since they addressed the issue in a very comprehensive way on how and why the Iranian community in New York engage in bilingual community education, In Chapter 11, the authors showed their strength of the analysis. Also, the strength of this chapter is on the way the authors show their good knowledge politically by explaining what happened in the mid- 2000s in U.S. policy, and the implication of this policy. In chapter 10 and 11, the reviewers didn’t identify the weaknesses of the author.