The Social and Political History of Southern Africa's Languages

Per Linguam, 2011

This is the latest volume in the Cambridge Africa Collection. It should also be seen in relation to four other volumes published by Cambridge, which focus on language in Britain, Canada, the USA and Australia, repectively.

2018

The production of this book has been generously sponsored by the Stichting Bibliographie Linguistique, Leiden. This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY-NC-ND License at the time of publication, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Cover illustration: the name of the Constitutional Court building (Johannesburg) written in eleven official languages of South Africa.

This article analyses post-2000 Zimbabwean black-and white-authored fictional narratives' depictions of land and identity against the backdrop of the socio-political and economic crises resulting from the post-2000 land occupations. The process and phase that provide the background to both fictional narratives and their criticism have been canonised as jambanja across the racial divide. Far removed in time and space, these Zimbabweanauthored fictional narratives form an essential socio-historical record of the post-2000 Zimbabwean land experiences. Critical attention appears to ignore the socio-cultural-historical contexts, issues that the selected fictional narratives partially address. The socio-economic and historical accounts of Zimbabwe's embittered land experiences have also been mainly racial and exclusionary. This article interrogates whether writers' trajectories suggest practicable systems, structures, approaches and practices that genuinely respect common humanity and the imperative to safeguard human dignity. Using Molefi Kete Asante's Afrocentric 'Location theory' to situate texts as well as their criticism within the context in which they are generated and developed, the article analyses writers' creativity-motifs, meaning, language, attitude, direction and vision-within the Zimbabwean socio-culturalhistorical experiences. This integrative approach is envisaged to establish common ground and humwe ('oneness/ togetherness') through literature so that Zimbabweans can hold constructive dialogues on the post-2000 land and identity issues.

African Studies Review

Tracing Language Movement in Africa, edited by Ericka Albaugh and Kathryn de Luna, presents an interdisciplinary perspective on language movement and change. Each chapter in this book discusses an aspect of language change in Africa and the African Diaspora based on various academic disciplines, including anthropology, literature, political science, linguistics, and historical linguistics. The editors identify four major themes found in the eighteen chapters: collection and significance of data; connection of language to people, as opposed to geography; recognition of the constant movement and change associated with languages; and how language represents authority, status, and responsibility. Each of the chapters attempts to reimagine African linguistic landscapes based on the disciplinary and regional interests of the authors. After the introduction, the remaining chapters are organized into four parts. The first section presents the classification of languages and how various branches of academia gather and use linguistic data. The second chapter, written by linguist Derek Nurse, begins with a historical look at the study of language. Yet the real significance of the chapter lies in how well Nurse explains the use of the historical linguistic method to recapture historical data. He offers step-by-step explanations of how the vocabulary of present languages can be used to reconstruct words and concepts from the past. The rest of the chapters in Part One examine such topics as how to classify languages, archeology and language, and a brief discussion of the Afrobarometer network, which collected linguistic surveys from thirty-six African countries over a sixteen-year period. Part Two looks at the transformations of languages, either through consolidation or expansion. In Chapter Six, for example, author Mohan Ennui uses sociolinguistic and anthropological linguistics to study language contact and conflict in North Africa. An interesting contradiction found in this chapter is that the author labels Berber or Amazigh as an Afro-Asiatic language but fails to also identify Arabic as belonging to the same language

Critical Arts, 2019

The paper offers a brief but hopefully clarificatory account of the three language families generally referred to by linguists as Southern African Khoisan, and outlines ongoing and unresolved linguistic debates concerning relationships between the three families. The need is emphasised for linguists to move away from pre-theoretical assumptions based on the colonial construct of “race”, and—in the context of investigating diachronic language change—to include consideration rather of the social status of different speaker communities in relation to one another.

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2000

This book reminds readers that the study of language is also the study of all things negotiated through language. The collection's editor and authors approach language as a total social fact (The Gift, Marcel Mauss, Norton, 1967), offering texts rich in information about the role of language in African conflicts, educational policies, governance, and political history. In every chapter, these domains contrast, overlap, and congeal to show how language mirrors politics. After the Nigerian civil war (1967-70), for instance, "eastern minority groups" who previously might have come "within the Igbo orbit and spoken Igbo as an inter-ethnic lingua franca" opted instead for Nigerian Pidgin or Hausa in reaction to Igbo attempts at secession (Simpson & Oyètádé, p. 185). But the book's chapters also show how language determines politics. One need only recall that "the event that ultimately led to the arrival of democracy" in South Africa "through the escalation of wider protest it inspired" was a linguistic one: the Soweto riots, which protested the teaching of "Afrikaans in Black schools" (Mesthrie, p. 322). Exploring links between African languages and nationalism offers insights into more than these two themes alone, which makes this collection compelling and useful in multiple ways. Editor Andrew Simpson's introduction orients the volume toward its main topics by offering a typology of four prevailing sorts of African national language situations in which (1) a single indigenous language such as Amharic, Somali, or Swahili dominates; (2) a single European language like English or French prevails; (3) national multilingualism is the rule, as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, South Africa, and Zambia; or (4) an African lingua franca with unofficial national status such as Bambara or Wolof serves as the predominant means of communication (Simpson, pp. 18-22). Simpson also highlights the book's coverage of African pidgins, creoles, and "non-standard, localized forms of English and French" which are "important, growing language forces in a number of African states" (p. 11). The book then surveys in 16 chapters the language situations of nineteen African countries from every region of the continent. The chapters take a wide range of approaches in exploring the book's two central themes. Some authors critically note that the "language-national identity link. .. and its constituent members (language and nation) are a matter of construction" (Suleiman, p. 26) or that "there is no one-to-one link between ethnicity and language" (Skattum, p. 104). Others take for granted such categories as ethnicity, nation, and language as matters of political and linguistic pragmatism. They define a "cultural group," for example, as "an autonomous speech community"

2020

Journal of Language Contact, 2011

Let us make it clear from the very beginning: this book is not-nor it claims to be-a handbook on language naming in Africa; certain areas and languages receive much a bigger coverage than others, and the articles themselves are very diff erent in scope and sheer number of pages. Cameroon alone takes the lion's share, with no less than fi ve articles. East Africa gets a single overview (by Xavier Barillot, p. 271-295), and Southern Africa nothing. Th ere are 13 articles in this book, preceded by a meaty introduction by the editor. Despite the bilingualism in the title, only two articles (Mufwene's on Kituba and Gottschligg's on Fula) are in English, all the others in French. A general criticism-actually the only one I have, and more a disappointment than a criticism-concerns the maps which accompany quite a few of the articles. Th e maps, in grey tones, are sometimes poorly printed, often too small, and in any case insuffi cient to grasp the complexity of the facts: we are talking about a book on the names of "peoples" and "languages" (note the scare quotes)-and many, many of them-after all! I am sure that many readers would be ready to pay a higher price (sold at 30 Euros, the book is not expensive) for having page full maps, maybe (a dream?) even glossy color ones. Th e map nerd who writes this review certainly would. Carole de Féral's Introduction (p. 9-17) sets the scene for what is to come, from the plurality of denominations for one and the same linguistic object, to the use of exonims against autonyms, to, crucially, the diff erent uses of the very word "language:" 'le signifi é de « langue » ne peut être le même pour les linguistes et les acteurs non linguistes d'une communauté donnée : les premiers recherchent des régularités qui permettent de poser un « système ». Pour les seconds, c'est la stigmatisation d'un groupe et de quelques-uns de ses usages qui va entraîner le sentiment de l'existence d'une « langue » autre' (p. 12). 1 Th e articles in the book are divided in three sections: "Ethnies et langues : des objets controversés"; "Langues européennes et africaines en contact"; "Perspectives historiques et état des lieux". Th e four articles which make up the fi rst section of the volume are united by their focus on the discovery and naming of linguistic and ethnic entities, and three of them concern Cameroon. Th e fi rst article is the most general and theoretical in scope: Th omas K. Schippers's 'Le fait ethnique, histoires d'une notion controversée' (p. 19-37) takes the reader through a fascinating journey through the concept of nation (from the Middle Ages) and ethnicity (from its 18th century "invention" in Göttingen) to their uses and misuses in modern times, and to the contemporary eff orts at "deconstructing ethnicity" (just while the "ethnic phenomenon" plays a more important role than ever in today's world). 1 Th e meaning of "language" cannot be the same for the linguists and the non-linguist members of any given community: the former look for regularities which will enable the construction of a "system." For the latter, it is the stigma attached to a group and some of its uses which gives rise to the sentiment of "diff erent" language' (translation mine).

2021

The objectives of this study were to (a) establish what the views of the residents of Itsoseng township in the North West province (henceforth 'North West') were regarding the state of Setswana there; and (b) analyze the non-standard lexical items prevalent in its residents' utterances. A qualitative approach (through face-to-face interviews and participant observation) was employed to gather data from twenty (20) residents who were randomly selected. Participants held positive attitudes towards the use of Setswana in Itsoseng and express their wish that the language needed to be preserved and promoted, a task that should be a responsibility of speakers supported by government. They acknowledged that 'multilingualism' was a reality in South Africa and that, in such an environment where speakers of different home languages come into contact, 'code-switching' and 'code-mixing' were inevitable. Data from participants showed that their utterances were characterized by embedding Tsotsitaal lexical items into their Setswana, and these lexical items were drawn from those published in the literature on Tsotsitaal and those unpublished. A list of both categories of lexical items was compiled and presented in two appendices. This study not only contributed to the growth of research on 'language use' among speakers of Black South African languages who reside at Black townships, it also added terms to Tsotsitaal lexicon.