Journal articles: 'African Linguistic'

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BOBDA, AUGUSTIN SIMO. "Linguistic apartheid: English language policy in Africa." English Today 20, no. 1 (January 2004): 19–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026607840400104x.

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THIS paper examines English language policy in Africa from colonial times to the present day. Colonial policy was marked by a linguistic apartheid which consisted in driving Africans away from the language, first by limiting access to formal education, then by not showing much enthusiasm for teaching them the language, then at times preferring to encourage Pidgin English, and finally by encouraging deviant features. Linguistic apartheid continues today through such institutions as the BBC, whose African Network Service openly promotes deviant African features through their jingles, the employment of African correspondents with deeply local English features, and the reading of unedited letters from listeners that contain substandard features. More subtle ways of promoting such apartheid include the negligible weight of the English language in school curricula.

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Sesanti, Simphiwe. "Pan-African Linguistic and Cultural Unity." Theoria 64, no. 153 (December 1, 2017): 10–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/th.2017.6415303.

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Abstract Contrary to the view that Africa is populated by many ethnic groups whose cultures and languages have no relation to one another, scientific research, as opposed to impressionistic arguments, points to the fact that African languages are connected, and by extension, demonstrate African cultural connectivity and unity. By making reference to both African and European scholars, this article demonstrates pan-African linguistic and cultural unity, and echoes pan-Africanist scholars’ call for African linguistic and cultural unity as a basis for pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance.

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Hallen, Barry. "Indeterminancy, Ethnophilosophy, Linguistic Philosophy, African Philosophy." Philosophy 70, no. 273 (July 1995): 377–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0031819100065578.

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This is a paper about philosophical methodology or, better, methodologies. Most of the material that has been published to date under the rubric of African philosophy has been methodological in character. One reason for this is the conflicts that sometimes arise when philosophers in Africa attempt to reconcile their relationships with both academic philosophy and so-called African '‘traditional’ systems of thought. A further complication is that the studies of traditional African thought systems that become involved in these conflicts are themselves products of academia– of disciplinary methodologies.

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Bodomo, Adams. "The African Trading Community in Guangzhou: An Emerging Bridge for Africa–China Relations." China Quarterly 203 (September 2010): 693–707. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305741010000664.

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AbstractThis article analyses an emerging African trading community in Guangzhou, China. It is argued that migrant communities such as this one act as linguistic, cultural and economic bridges between their source communities and their host communities, even in the midst of tensions created by incidents such as immigration restrictions and irregularities. Socio-linguistic and socio-cultural profiles of this community are built, through questionnaire surveys and interviews, to address issues such as why Africans go to Guangzhou, which African countries are represented, what languages are spoken there, how communication takes place between Africans and Chinese, what socio-economic contributions Africans in Guangzhou are making to the Chinese economy, and how the state reacts to this African presence. Following from the argument that this community acts as a bridge for Africa–China relations it is suggested that both the Chinese and the African governments should work towards eliminating the harassment of members in this community by many Guangzhou law enforcement officials and instead harness the contributions of this community to promote Africa–China socio-economic relations.

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Phillipson, R. "Linguistic imperialism: African perspectives." ELT Journal 50, no. 2 (April 1, 1996): 160–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/elt/50.2.160.

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POUWELS, RANDALL L. "EAST AFRICAN COASTAL HISTORY." Journal of African History 40, no. 2 (July 1999): 285–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853798007403.

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Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. By DEREK NURSE and THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH. Edited by THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH, with a special addendum by GERARD PHILIPPSON. (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 121). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1993. Pp. xxxii+780. $80 (ISBN 0-520-09775-0).Shanga. The Archaeology of a Muslim Trading Community on the Coast of East Africa. By MARK HORTON. (Memoirs of the British Institute of East Africa, 14). London: The British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1996. Pp. xvi+458. £75 (ISBN 1-872-56609-x).Nurse's and Hinnebusch's Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History is the most comprehensive study yet done of Swahili history through linguistic analysis. It is an encyclopedic work representing many years of research by the authors and other scholars, and it focuses particularly on the emergence and evolution of the Swahili language. The massive and diverse evidence they marshal is, of course, almost entirely linguistic: as such they discuss four basal parameters of language relationship and change, namely lexis, morphology, phonology and tone. (The last two are treated together, and G. Philippson reviews the latter.)

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Williams, Quentin E., and Christopher Stroud. "Linguistic citizenship." Language & Citizenship 14, no. 3 (August 17, 2015): 406–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jlp.14.3.05wil.

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A major challenge facing South Africa is that of reconstructing a meaningful and inclusive notion of citizenship in the aftermath of its apartheid past and in the face of narratives of divisiveness that reach back from this past and continue to reverberate in the present. Many of the problems confronting South African social transformation are similar to the rest of the postcolonial world that continues to wrestle with the inherited colonial divide between citizen and subject. In this article, we explore how engagement with diversity and marginalization is taking place across a range of non-institutional and informal political arenas. Here, we elaborate on an approach towards the linguistic practices of the political everyday in terms of a notion of linguistic citizenship and by way of conclusion argue that the contradictions and turmoils of contemporary South Africa require further serious deliberation around alternative notions of citizenship and their semiotics.

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Igboin, Benson Ohihon. "‘I Am an African’." Religions 12, no. 8 (August 23, 2021): 669. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel12080669.

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The question, who is an African? in the context of understanding African identity has biological, historical, cultural, religious, political, racial, linguistic, social, philosophical, and even geographical colourations. Scholars as well as commentators have continued to grapple with it as it has assumed a syncretistic or intersectional characterisation. The same applies to, “what is Africa?” because of the defined Western construct of its geography. This foray of concepts appears to be captured in ‘I am an African’, a treatise that exudes the telos of African past, present and the unwavering hope that the future of Africans and Africa is great in spite of the cynicism and loss of faith that the present seems to have foisted on the minds of many an African. Through a critical analysis, it is argued that African religion has a value that is capable of resolving the contentious identity crisis of an African.

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Fayemi, Ademola Kazeem. "African Sartorial Culture and the Question of Identity: Towards an African Philosophy of Dress." Uchenie zapiski Instituta Afriki RAN, no. 2 (June 30, 2021): 66–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.31132/2412-5717-2021-55-2-66-79.

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This paper is a critical interrogation of the apparel culture as a marker of African identity in traditional and contemporary Africa. The article philosophically discusses the sartorial culture of sub-Saharan Africans in the light of its defining elements, identity, and non-verbal communicative proclivities. Focusing on the Yoruba and the Ashanti people, the author argues that African dress expresses some symbolic, linguistic, and sometimes hidden, complex and immanent meaning(s) requiring extensive interpretations and meaning construction. With illustrative examples, he defends the position that the identity of some cultural regions in Africa can be grouped together based on the original, specific techniques and essence of dress that they commonly share. Against the present absence of an African philosophy of dress in the African sartorial culture and knowledge production, he argues the imperativeness of an African philosophy of dress, its subject matter, and connections to other cognate branches of African philosophy, and the prospects of such an ancillary African philosophy.

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Peirce, Bonny Norton, and Stanley G. M. Ridge. "Multilingualism in Southern Africa." Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 17 (March 1997): 170–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0267190500003330.

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In his keynote address to the 1994 conference of the Southern African Association of Applied Linguistics, Adegbija (1994a) identified three problems faced by applied linguists in the African multilingual context. First, apart from the vibrant work in South Africa, there is very little focus on applied linguistic research in Africa, and what there is tends to focus on the ex-colonial languages rather than the indigenous languages. Second, applied linguists in African countries other than South Africa tend to have very limited research facilities. In some cases, teachers struggle to acquire the most basic resources such as typewriters and stationery. Third, political, social, and economic instability in many parts of Africa seriously undermines the work of applied linguists: A program of work begun in one political era can be summarily cut off in another.

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Paasche, Karin Ilona. "Linguistic Recognitions of Identity: Germany’s Pre-WWI East African History." New Trends and Issues Proceedings on Humanities and Social Sciences 2, no. 9 (April 6, 2017): 32–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.18844/gjhss.v2i9.1083.

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Vigouroux, Cécile B. "The discursive pathway of two centuries of raciolinguistic stereotyping: ‘Africans as incapable of speaking French’." Language in Society 46, no. 1 (February 2017): 5–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404516000804.

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AbstractThis article is about the discursive pathway of grammatical structures such as y'a bon ‘there's good’, documenting how, in Hexagonal France, it has become an ‘enregistered emblem’ for indexing sub-Saharan Africans and, by extension, any African as allegedly incapable of speaking French competently. I argue that tracing pathways makes it possible to unveil the intricacy of the historicities of production, circulation, and interpretations of such racially based linguistic stereotypes. One of the central questions addressed in this article is: What are the sociohistorical conditions of the emergence and maintenance of these linguistic stereotypes? I show that these are grounded in long-standing linguistic ideologies of French as an exceptional language and of African languages and, therefore, their speakers, as primitive. I demonstrate how the rise of first age mass culture in the nineteenth century contributed to both the entextualization and the circulation of these stereotypical representations. (Stereotypes, mediatization, enregisterment, language ideology, France, Africa)*

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13

Prah,, Kwesi Kwaa. "The language of development and the development of language in contemporary Africa." Applied Linguistics Review 3, no. 2 (October 10, 2012): 295–313. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2012-0014.

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AbstractArguably, few issues so overwhelmingly obsess African governments and societies as the question of development. Many would claim that it is the leading existential rationale of African governments. This has certainly been the case since the commencement of the era of African self-rule. The lack of success in making headway in the development of African societies has kept interested parties close to the grindstone. What over the past few decades has become clear to many is the fact that culture in general and language and literacy in particular are crucial to the development endeavour. The questions that emerge from there are that, what are the relevant contextual linguistic realities of contemporary Africa? How do they affect the issues attendant on development? How do the dominant assumptions and epistemology in applied linguistics relate to the challenges that face Africa today? This article will address these issues.

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14

Reagan, Timothy. "The promotion of linguistic diversity in multilingual settings." Language Problems and Language Planning 25, no. 1 (August 16, 2001): 51–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lplp.25.1.04rea.

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The South African case raises a number of important issues of concern for those interested in language policy and language planning: issues of multilingualism, linguistic diversity, linguistic integration, linguistic equity, and language rights. South Africa is fascinating for those interested in matters of language because it is characterized by elements of both the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ worlds, and thus, to some extent, provides us with a microcosm of the broader international issues related to language. In the years since the 1994 election, South Africa has begun seriously and thoughtfully to address many of the challenges related to language and language policy that will face virtually all societies in the next century. Its experiences in this regard are both telling and significant, and have far broader implications for other societies. This article provides a brief discussion of the historical use of language policy and language planning in the South African context, and explores recent developments in South Africa with respect to language policy. Finally, it identifies and discusses possible lessons for efforts to promote linguistic diversity in multilingual settings.

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15

Alim, H. Samy. ":African American English: A Linguistic Introduction." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16, no. 1 (June 2006): 135–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2006.16.1.135.

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16

Green, Lisa. "African American English: A Linguistic Introduction." English World-Wide 25, no. 1 (May 12, 2004): 162–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.25.1.15gre.

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17

Harries, Jim. "African Pentecostalism in Intercultural Linguistic Context." Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association 33, no. 1 (April 2013): 91–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/jep.2013.33.1.008.

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18

Záhořík, Jan. "Languages in Sub-Saharan Africa in a broader socio-political perspective." Acta Orientalia Vilnensia 11, no. 2 (January 1, 2010): 77–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/aov.2010.3646.

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Charles University This study deals with language policies in Africa with a special focus on multi-ethnic and multi-lingual states including Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Democratic Republic of Congo. The study will thus examine relations between state and minorities, the status of major and marginalized languages, the roles of European languages in politics as well as theoretical frameworks. Sub-Saharan Africa has undergone a remarkable process from linguistic imperialism to linguistic pluralism and revivalism. Until the 1960s the superior position of the European languages (English, French, and Portuguese) was evident, but after the Africanization of politics and society in many African countries, a strong accent on linguistic emancipation was initiated. Nowadays, many African countries follow the principle of linguistic pluralism where several languages enjoy the same rights and space in the media, administrative, education, etc. This study will discuss some important case studies and their specific language policies.

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19

Haron, Muhammed. "The Arabic Script in Africa." American Journal of Islam and Society 27, no. 2 (April 1, 2010): 155–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v27i2.1344.

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The Arabic script’s flexible and adaptive nature has made it a significantcontributor to Africa’s rich and vibrant socio-linguistic landscape. This hasbeen noted by major scholars in the field, among them John Hunwick(director-general, Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa,Northwestern University, USA) and Helmi Sharawi (Centre for Arabo-African Studies, Egypt). Meikal Mumin, a young German-Somali scholarwho completed his M.A. at the University of Cologne’s Institute for AfricanStudies on the use of the Arabic script in Africa, solicited funds from theFritz Thyssen Stiftung, as well as the necessary moral support from theabove-mentioned institute, to host a workshop on this topic. Entitled “ArabicScript in Africa,” it was held at the University of Koln’s Institute for AfricanStudies during 6-7 April 2010. Mumin regarded this event as the first of itskind on German soil to dealt with the “linguistic aspects of the usage and diffusionof the Arabic script in Africa for the writing of African languages, aphenomenon also known as Ajami.” The assembled scholars investigated,among other concerns, linguistic, sociolinguistic, and historical processes aswell as applied language policy for certain African languages ...

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20

Woldemariam, Hirut, and Elizabeth Lanza. "Imagined community." Linguistic Landscape. An international journal 1, no. 1-2 (June 19, 2015): 172–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ll.1.1-2.10wol.

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In this article, we investigate how the linguistic landscape serves as an important strategy among a diaspora community not only to maintain a transnational identity but also to construct a unique identity in the recipient society. We examine the linguistic landscape in the Ethiopian diaspora of Washington DC, referred to as “Little Ethiopia”, which provides an interesting site to investigate the role of the linguistic landscape in constructing an imaginary community built on the myth of the old homeland, including a unique African identity in a new homeland with other Africans as well as African Americans. Serving as a rich source of data for investigating language, culture and identity, the linguistic landscape in “Little Ethiopia” encompasses many semiotic resources. This Ethiopian transnational community engages in (re)constructing socio-cultural and political ideologies through the linguistic landscape.

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Amorim, Rita, Raquel Baltazar, and Isabel Soares. "Linguistic legacies of British and Portuguese (de)colonization in Africa: (un)successful common bonds?" Ciências e Políticas Públicas / Public Sciences & Policies 6, no. 1 (June 2020): 13–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.33167/2184-0644.cpp2020.vvin1/pp.13-31.

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The United Kingdom and Portugal share a past of territorial expansion in multilingual Africa, a continent with great cultural and linguistic variety. The linguistic and educational policies implemented during colonization and decolonization prevail because of the economic and financial interdependence generated by the present global order. The Commonwealth and the CPLP are also, partly, responsible for sustaining distinctive relationships with former African colonies, which have led to the promotion of language as a form of soft power. This is a comparative study analyzing the Anglo- and Portuguese cultural and linguistic spheres in Africa. Conclusions reveal an undesirable gap between official policies and linguistic realities, which can only be understood through paradox, the best-defining characteristic of English and Portuguese linguistic legacies in Africa.

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22

Bwenge, Charles. "English in Tanzania: A linguistic cultural perspective." International Journal of Language, Translation and Intercultural Communication 1 (January 1, 2012): 167. http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/ijltic.18.

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Talking about ‘English in Tanzania’ or what Schneider (2007) has in general categorized as postcolonial English for that matter instantaneously evokes notions pertaining to language contact as well as the fi eld of contact linguistics. It was the British colonization of East African territories in the fi rst half of the 20th century that brought English into the region and consequently set off the contact process with indigenous local languages that would subsequently shape and defi ne the dynamics of linguistic culture as still observed today. Of particular interest is the contact and subsequent coexistence between English and Swahili especially in Tanzania. There is no any country in sub-Saharan Africa other than Tanzania that provides a perfect illustration of the dynamics of language contact in the 20th century and beyond between a European language and an indigenous African language in the African setting – to the extent that a story of ‘English in Tanzania’ would blatantly appear incomplete without bringing in a story of ‘Swahili in Tanzania’ and vice versa. This is exactly what this paper has assigned itself to do – examining a linguistic culture that has evolved in a particular time and space with English and Swahili occupying the center. Nevertheless, the literature on the topic abounds; only that its linguistic cultural dimension has not been privileged enough. Linguistic culture encompasses dynamics related to language contact phenomena such as lexical and grammatical borrowings, code-mixing, bilingualism, language shift, development of pidgins and creoles, attitudes toward languages, linguistic stereotypes and prejudices, and the like. Contact linguistics as an analytical tool pertaining to the structural aspects of bilingual language production is not marginalized in linguistic cultural approach but rather it is highlighted in order to provide concrete evidence on the cultural dimension. In this regard, ‘English in Tanzania’ is explored by contextualizing it within the parameters of the dynamics of Tanzanian linguistic cultural landscape. Specifi cally the paper outlines the dynamics of Tanzanian linguistic culture evolving around the English language, of course, alongside Swahili in terms of distinct political periods between the British colonial era and today’s era of globalization; second, it concentrates on actual language use and related public discourse as observed in public space; third, it demonstrates communicative creativity arising from the coexistence between English and Swahili and, fi nally, it concludes with recapitulation regarding the signifi cance of linguistic cultural approach to sociolinguistics explorations.

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23

Banda, Felix, and Lorato Mokwena. "Commodification of African languages in linguistic landscapes of rural Northern Cape Province, South Africa." International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2019, no. 260 (November 26, 2019): 177–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2019-2054.

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Abstract English has been portrayed in linguistic landscape literature as the definitive language of commodification. However, using linguistic landscape images from two rural communities in the Northern Cape, South Africa, this article shows how indigenous African languages and localised English are entangled as commodities – whether used independently or in hybridised form – for the sale of various goods and services. We show that the commodification of the languages and hybridised forms speaks to semiotic choices of local authorship of signage and to the influence of local communities’ languaging practices. We propose that commodity status of languages or their linguistic features is variable, since commodified languages or linguistic features as modes derive meanings from the assembled multimodal resources, whose design features as languages or translanguaged “blends”, and their statuses as being in and out of favour, depend on communicative purposes, the kinds of goods and services being marketed and the intended consumers. We conclude that languages, or their linguistic features as modes in signage, should be valued as mobile socio-culturally given and multimodally shaped semiotic resources deployed for communicative impact on consumers in local contexts of use.

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24

Ogene, Mbanefo S., Esther Chikaodi Anyanwu, and Ngini Josephine Ojiaku. "A Comparative Analysis of Racial Discrimination in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia Shall be Free." Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 8, no. 3 (May 24, 2017): 343–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.5901/mjss.2017.v8n3p343.

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Abstract One major problem confronting the definition of Comparative Literature is that of the involvement (on the one hand) of more than one literature under comparison and (on the other hand) that of the consideration of the multidimensional aspects of such literature, such as social, historical, linguistic, religious, economic and cultural aspects of divergent societies. This study is guided by the above factors in analyzing the concept of Racial Discrimination in Southern Africa and African American literatures in the sense that the former’s experiences were on African soil, while the latter’s were on the NewFound land (America). The paper observes that racial discrimination was much severe and oppressive without much resistance in America than in Southern Africa where Africans withstood and fought back against an unjust, wicked and oppressive system.

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Weldon, Tracey L. "African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (review)." Language 82, no. 4 (2006): 948. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.2006.0237.

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26

van Rooy, Bertus, and Marné Pienaar. "Trends in recent South African linguistic research." Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 24, no. 2 (June 2006): 191–216. http://dx.doi.org/10.2989/16073610609486417.

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27

Nye, Matthew. "Linguistic Crossings: African Essentialism inKing Solomon’s Mines." ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 29, no. 2 (April 2, 2016): 98–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0895769x.2016.1214066.

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VANSINA, JAN. "LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE AND HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION." Journal of African History 40, no. 3 (November 1999): 469–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853799007598.

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A Green Place, a Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the Fifteenth Century. By David Lee Schoenbrun. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann: Oxford: James Currey, 1998. Pp. xiv+301. £40 (ISBN 0-325-00041-7); £15.95, paperback (ISBN 0-325-00040-9).An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400. By Christopher Ehret. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia; Oxford: James Currey, 1998. Pp. xvii+354. £35 (ISBN 0-8139-1814-6).Recently several historical reconstructions based on linguistic evidence and dealing with ancient times have been published in African history. In 1998 alone there are the two books reviewed here as well as a major work by Gerda Rossel. Linguistic sources contribute much to the recovery of aspects of the past, which would otherwise remain out of reach, and the standard methodologies of historical linguistics are well known to readers of this journal. Yet in practice many historians remain all too often disconcerted by such studies because they have great difficulty in evaluating them: i.e. in linking assertions made to the evidence provided and so to establish the credibility of such statements. This is not just because many historians are unfamiliar with linguistic evidence but because all the evidence necessary for evaluation is usually not available in the work studied, and often enough authors do not clearly indicate where it can be found. Indeed sometimes it is not available at all. In such cases one has to take the statements made by the authors on faith: one believes the author or not. That is clearly unacceptable. For is it not a fundamental rule in history writing that assertions must be substantiated and hence evidence must be cited or provided? Any work without substantiation cannot be considered to be a work of history at all.

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Djité, Paulin G. "From liturgy to technology." Language Problems and Language Planning 32, no. 2 (June 6, 2008): 133–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lplp.32.2.03dji.

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Language is generally not perceived as playing a significant role in the causes of underdevelopment in Africa, and therefore not thought of or mentioned in trying to work out solutions to this situation. The absence of linguistic input in development planning in Africa is one of the key reasons why the majority of the African people are left “on the edge of road.” This paper argues for a language sensitive and linguistically informed approach to technology transfer and development problems. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can serve to promote African languages much better than religion ever did, and language policies and language-in-education policies in Africa need to be cognisant and take advantage of the opportunities the digital era offers the Continent. Whilst, according to Ferguson, “religion has been one of the most powerful forces leading to language change and language spread,” African languages have yet to overcome the linguistic barrier to participation in knowledge societies, and most of them have no interface with science and information technology (e.g. the Internet). Why can’t African languages be languages of technology? How can this be achieved?

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30

Harries, Jim. "'The Name of God in Africa' and Related Contemporary Theological, Development and Linguistic Concerns." Exchange 38, no. 3 (2009): 271–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157254309x449737.

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AbstractRecent discoveries in linguistics here summarised reveal problems in the choice of an African name for God, especially when theological debate is in English, as it results in the ignoring of important differences in how God is understood. Translating the Luo term 'Nyasaye' as 'God' ignores his Luo character as 'bestowing force'. Similarly translating 'God' by 'Nyasaye' falsely assumes a carrying over of native-English theological presuppositions. These differences are shown to be consequential and, if disregarded, serious. The use of African languages rooted in African culture in debate is found to be essential for the future health of Christianity, and socio-economic development in Africa.

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31

Hibbert, Liesel. "English in South Africa: parallels with African American vernacular English." English Today 18, no. 1 (January 2002): 31–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078402001037.

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A comparison between Black English usage in South Africa and the United StatesThere has been a long tradition of resistance in South African politics, as there has been for African-Americans in the United States. The historical links between African Americans and their counterparts on the African continent prompt one to draw a comparison between the groups in terms of linguistic and social status. This comparison demonstrates that Black South African English (BSAfE) is a distinctive form with its own stable conventions, as representative in its own context as African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is in the United States.

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Larbaoui, Meissa. "Exploring the Theme of Cultural Identity in the Poem “Song of Lawino”: The Use of Halliday’s Transitivity in Revealing Ideologies." Advances in Language and Literary Studies 10, no. 6 (December 31, 2019): 20. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.10n.6p.20.

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The individual’s identity is crucial in his/her life in countless fields, especially the social, political, and economic ones. It is constructed by different cultural elements: ethnicity, history, traditions, language, religion, literature, etc. In the colonial period, the elites tried to erase the cultural identity of the colonized nations and forced the assimilation of their own culture. This image was highly seen in Africa during colonialism. Consequently, in postcolonialism; different Africans were not aware of their real identity and chose to westernize their culture. Literature was one of the ways that myriad African writers used to revive the real cultural identity of black Africans. Okot p’Bitek wrote a song that tackled the differences between the culture of the Africans and that of the Western people. It was about a conflict between a married couple who divorced because the man was deeply affected by Western culture. This paper attempts to analyze the poem by using the linguistic framework of transitivity with a qualitative research method. Halliday introduced the framework in the theory of Systemic Functional Grammar. It is generally used as a strategy in the stylistic approach since it deals with the analysis of the lexical and grammatical structures to interpret the implicit meaning of discourse. The findings revealed that the African and Western people were different in several cultural elements: beauty care, religion, education, politics, dancing, and time value. In other words, the verbs, adjectives, and other linguistic choices that were extracted from the different process types of the transitivity system had distinct and contrasting functions. Thus, the results showed that transitivity facilitated the detection of the linguistic elements used by the writer to describe the cultural identity of the African and Western nations, which helped in getting through the writer’s inner thoughts, feelings, and ideologies. In the end, it was suggested to implement transitivity in the teaching of literature as a strategy to trigger students’ critical thinking and demystify the analysis of literary discourse.

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Scheinfeldt, Laura B., Sameer Soi, Charla Lambert, Wen-Ya Ko, Aoua Coulibaly, Alessia Ranciaro, Simon Thompson, et al. "Genomic evidence for shared common ancestry of East African hunting-gathering populations and insights into local adaptation." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 10 (February 19, 2019): 4166–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817678116.

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Anatomically modern humans arose in Africa ∼300,000 years ago, but the demographic and adaptive histories of African populations are not well-characterized. Here, we have generated a genome-wide dataset from 840 Africans, residing in western, eastern, southern, and northern Africa, belonging to 50 ethnicities, and speaking languages belonging to four language families. In addition to agriculturalists and pastoralists, our study includes 16 populations that practice, or until recently have practiced, a hunting-gathering (HG) lifestyle. We observe that genetic structure in Africa is broadly correlated not only with geography, but to a lesser extent, with linguistic affiliation and subsistence strategy. Four East African HG (EHG) populations that are geographically distant from each other show evidence of common ancestry: the Hadza and Sandawe in Tanzania, who speak languages with clicks classified as Khoisan; the Dahalo in Kenya, whose language has remnant clicks; and the Sabue in Ethiopia, who speak an unclassified language. Additionally, we observed common ancestry between central African rainforest HGs and southern African San, the latter of whom speak languages with clicks classified as Khoisan. With the exception of the EHG, central African rainforest HGs, and San, other HG groups in Africa appear genetically similar to neighboring agriculturalist or pastoralist populations. We additionally demonstrate that infectious disease, immune response, and diet have played important roles in the adaptive landscape of African history. However, while the broad biological processes involved in recent human adaptation in Africa are often consistent across populations, the specific loci affected by selective pressures more often vary across populations.

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Ajulo, Sunday Babalola. "Myth and reality of law, language and international organization in Africa: the case of African Economic Community." Journal of African Law 41, no. 1 (1997): 27–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021855300009967.

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The contemporary African international community is afflicted by a linguistic dilemma. On the one hand, the African elites are constrained to accept the imperative of adopting the inherited colonial languages in order to gain easy access to the global international community currently dominated by the linguistic condominium of the erstwhile imperial powers. On the other hand, these African elites, propelled by nationalistic sentiments, express in legal instruments a sanguine hope of promoting their indigenous tongues to the rank of official/working languages, not only on the national, but also on the continental scale. This would appear necessary in order to avoid cultural or linguistic suicide. However, in concept and practice, the whole idea seems to have remained in the realm of myth.

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Kwiecińska, Karolina. "Charakterystyka pojęć dotyczących Afryki zawartych we współczesnych słownikach języka polskiego." Adeptus, no. 1 (June 10, 2013): 71–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.11649/a.2012.005.

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Comparison of the linguistic image of Africa in a specific Polish dictionaryThis project constitutes the main part of my doctoral thesis carried out under the supervision of Prof. Zbigniew Greń at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In order to conduct comparative research and to analyze the differences between lexemes in Polish and Swahili, I have chosen methodology connected within a course of cognitive research, namely the linguistic image of the world. As part of the project I would like to look into and describe the linguistic image of Africa in specific Polish reportages. In addition, and in order to show the differences in the ways of conceptualisation of the reality by representatives of other cultures, I am planning to visit Tanzania to do more research. This article contains the linguistic image of Africa in a specific Polish dictionary. I have analysed the lexemes: Africa, African and Negro to show the dissimilarities.

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Harries, Jim. "The Glaring Gap, Anthropology, Religion, and Christianity in African Development." Exchange 42, no. 3 (2013): 232–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1572543x-12341273.

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Abstract Careful reading of studies on language of education in Africa reveals a gaping gap in comprehension. A careful study of the history and practice of anthropology reveals a covert concealing of large arenas of knowledge about African societies from view. The above gaps in understanding result in debate on African development frequently ignoring ‘religion’. African development seems not to be progressing on its own; great ideas on development rooted in western thinking typically collapse when handed over to African management. This article considers how the above ‘gaps’ in anthropology and linguistic studies have contributed to the dummification of academia that has in turn handicapped Africa. It considers a new engagement with ‘religion’, especially Christianity, as the way forward.

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Legere, Karsten. "Missionary Contributions to Bantu Languages in Tanzania: James Thomas Last (1850–1933) and the Vidunda language." Historiographia Linguistica International Journal for the History of the Language Sciences 36, no. 2-3 (2009): 393–406. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/hl.36.2-3.11leg.

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This paper deals with linguistic work by the lay missionary James Thomas Last (1850–1933), who was among the first Europeans to live up-country in what is now Tanzania. In the course of a seven-year stay he was exposed to African languages which have only partly been known outside Africa. Last collected linguistic data that culminated 1885 in the publication of the Polyglotta Africana Orientalis. This book is a collection of 210 lexical items and sentences elicited in or translated into 48 African languages, and supplemented by entries for some other languages. In order to demonstrate the relevance as well as the inconsistencies of this missionary’s contribution, special attention is paid to the book section on the Vidunda language currently spoken by approximately 10,000 people in Central Tanzania. It turns out that approximately 75 per cent of the Vidunda entries are still acceptable today. The data even provides insight into the grammatical set-up of Vidunda (e.g., the noun classes and constituents of the noun phrase). Less relevant are the verbal paradigms. In a nutshell, Last produced material which had for many years been the sole source of lexical and grammatical information about the Vidunda language.

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Legère, Karsten. "Missionary Contributions to Bantu Languages in Tanzania." Quot homines tot artes: New Studies in Missionary Linguistics 36, no. 2-3 (December 1, 2009): 393–406. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/hl.36.2.11leg.

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Summary This paper deals with linguistic work by the lay missionary James Thomas Last (1850–1933), who was among the first Europeans to live up-country in what is now Tanzania. In the course of a seven-year stay he was exposed to African languages which have only partly been known outside Africa. Last collected linguistic data that culminated 1885 in the publication of the Polyglotta Africana Orientalis. This book is a collection of 210 lexical items and sentences elicited in or translated into 48 African languages, and supplemented by entries for some other languages. In order to demonstrate the relevance as well as the inconsistencies of this missionary’s contribution, special attention is paid to the book section on the Vidunda language currently spoken by approximately 10,000 people in Central Tanzania. It turns out that approximately 75 per cent of the Vidunda entries are still acceptable today. The data even provides insight into the grammatical set-up of Vidunda (e.g., the noun classes and constituents of the noun phrase). Less relevant are the verbal paradigms. In a nutshell, Last produced material which had for many years been the sole source of lexical and grammatical information about the Vidunda language.

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Mũkonzi Mũsyoki, John. "Role of Kiswahili in Furthering an Afrocentric Ethos." Connections: A Journal of Language, Media and Culture 1, no. 1 (November 5, 2020): 12–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.29173/connections15.

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This paper examines how Kiswahili as a major African language promotes African agency. The theoretical framework of the inquiry situates language at the centre of the attempt to promote an Afrocentric ethos within the context of decolonization while speaking to the dominant national identity in Africa. The arguments that shape and propel this paper invite us to consider how linguistic reclamation can help us subvert the dominant perception of the position of the African within the growing discourse of globality.

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FRANCK, RAPHAËL, and ILIA RAINER. "Does the Leader's Ethnicity Matter? Ethnic Favoritism, Education, and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa." American Political Science Review 106, no. 2 (May 2012): 294–325. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0003055412000172.

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In this article we reassess the role of ethnic favoritism in sub-Saharan Africa. Using data from 18 African countries, we study how the primary education and infant mortality of ethnic groups were affected by changes in the ethnicity of the countries’ leaders during the last 50 years. Our results indicate that the effects of ethnic favoritism are large and widespread, thus providing support for ethnicity-based explanations of Africa's underdevelopment. We also conduct a cross-country analysis of ethnic favoritism in Africa. We find that ethnic favoritism is less prevalent in countries with one dominant religion. In addition, our evidence suggests that stronger fiscal capacity may have enabled African leaders to provide more ethnic favors in education but not in infant mortality. Finally, political factors, linguistic differences, and patterns of ethnic segregation are found to be poor predictors of ethnic favoritism.

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BOSTOEN, KOEN. "POTS, WORDS AND THE BANTU PROBLEM: ON LEXICAL RECONSTRUCTION AND EARLY AFRICAN HISTORY." Journal of African History 48, no. 2 (July 2007): 173–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002185370700254x.

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ABSTRACTHistorical-comparative linguistics has played a key role in the reconstruction of early history in Africa. Regarding the ‘Bantu Problem’ in particular, linguistic research, particularly language classification, has oriented historical study and been a guiding principle for both historians and archaeologists. Some historians have also embraced the comparison of cultural vocabularies as a core method for reconstructing African history. This paper evaluates the merits and limits of this latter methodology by analysing Bantu pottery vocabulary. Challenging earlier interpretations, it argues that speakers of Proto-Bantu inherited the craft of pot-making from their Benue-Congo-speaking ancestors who introduced this technology into the Grassfields region. This ‘Proto-Bantu ceramic tradition’ was the result of a long, local development, but spread quite rapidly into Atlantic Central Africa, and possibly as far as Southern Angola and northern Namibia. The people who brought Early Iron Age (EIA) ceramics to southwestern Africa were not the first Bantu-speakers in this area nor did they introduce the technology of pot-making.

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Miller, Ivor. "Cuban Abakuá Chants: Examining New Linguistic and Historical Evidence for the African Diaspora." African Studies Review 48, no. 1 (April 2005): 23–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/arw.2005.0030.

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Abstract:The Cuban Abakuá society—derived from the Èfik Ékpè and Ejagham Úgbè societies of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon—was founded in Havana in the 1830s by captured leaders of Cross River villages. This paper examines the process by which West African Ékpè members were able to understand contemporary Cuban Abakuá chants, and indicates how these texts may be used as historical documents. This methodology involves first recording and interpreting Abakuá chants with Cuban elders, and then interpreting these same chants with the aid of West African Èfik speakers. The correlation of data in these chants with those in documents created by Europeans and Africans from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries indicates a vocabulary that includes many geographic and ethnic names and an occasional historical figure. These examples may lead to a reevaluation of the extent to which African identity and culture were transmitted during the transAtlantic diaspora. Abakuá intellectuals have used commercial recordings to extol their history and ritual lineages. Evidence indicates that Cuban Abakuá identity is based on detailed knowledge of ritual lineages stemming from specific locations in their homelands, and not upon a vague notion of an African “national” or “ethnic” identity. The persistence of the Abakuá society contradicts the official construction of a Cuban national identity.

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Mabana, Kahiudi Claver. "Léopold S. Senghor, Birago Diop et Chinua Achebe: Maîtres de la parole." Matatu 33, no. 1 (June 1, 2006): 223–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-033001031.

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Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), Birago Diop (1906–1989) and Chinua Achebe (1931–) were among the first African intellectuals to make their fellow Africans aware of the riches of their oral literature and proud of their cultural treasures. The two francophone writers from Senegal were major figures of the Négritude movement, while the anglophone Nigerian became famous with , the best-known African novel of the last century. The aim of this essay is to show the importance of the impact of African orature in the creative writing of African authors despite the ostensible differences in their colonial linguistic backgrounds.

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Bender, M. Lionel, Christopher Ehret, and Merrick Posnansky. "The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History." Language 61, no. 3 (September 1985): 694. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/414395.

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Mchombo, Sam. "Linguistic Rights and Conceptual Incarceration in African Education." Alternation Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa 24, no. 2 (December 31, 2017): 191–214. http://dx.doi.org/10.29086/2519-5476/2017/v24n2a10.

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van Rooy, Bertus. "Corpus linguistic work on Black South African English." English Today 29, no. 1 (February 27, 2013): 10–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078412000466.

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Black South African English (henceforth BSAfE) has received more attention from corpus linguists than any other variety in the country. In the early 2000s, two corpus projects were initiated more or less simultaneously: the corpus of spoken Xhosa-English, compiled by Vivian de Klerk at Rhodes University, and the Tswana Learner English corpus that I compiled. A number of further corpora have also been compiled in the more recent past, many of which are available in the public domain for research purposes.

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Makoe, Pinky, and Carolyn McKinney. "Linguistic ideologies in multilingual South African suburban schools." Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 35, no. 7 (April 22, 2014): 658–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2014.908889.

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Hall, Martin, C. Ehret, and M. Posnansky. "The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History." South African Archaeological Bulletin 40, no. 142 (December 1985): 114. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3888462.

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Phillipson, David W., Christopher Ehret, and Merrick Posnansky. "The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History." Man 21, no. 3 (September 1986): 548. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2803113.

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Wade-Lewis, Margaret. "7. Mark Hanna Watkins: African American Linguistic Anthropologist." Histories of Anthropology Annual 1, no. 1 (2005): 181–218. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/haa.0.0001.

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Journal articles on the topic 'African Linguistic'

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