The nexus between multilingualism and criminality in West Africa

European Review Of Applied Sociology

The aim of this article is to explore the dynamic of language choice and language use as well as to examine the effect of language policy on language attitudes in the Department of Correctional Services (DCS) with special reference to Pretoria Central Prison, now called Kgoši Mampuru Correctional facility where there is some resistance to the use of English as the only official language of business. A case study was conducted at this facility to find out the language attitudes of the participants towards English as the only official language of business. A questionnaire was used to evoke the participants’ attitudes and beliefs regarding the importance of the use of other official languages (indigenous languages which, like English, also have official status) in their daily lives. A total of 60 correctional services staff and 280 offenders took part in this research study. Interviews and observations were mainly carried out at the research site to triangulate the data. Only the findi...

Journal for Translation Studies in Africa, 2023

As a continent with over 2 000 indigenous languages, Africa is complex regarding linguistic diversity. Whereas fluency in a major language is vital for communication in most bureaucratic, legislative and governmental environments, this skill is sometimes lacking in certain sensitive areas in Africa, such as prison facilities and courts. The term prisoner interpreting refers to the facilitation of communication by an interpreter between a prisoner or detainee and another party who do not share a common language; however, research regarding prisoner interpreting is currently marked by a huge hiatus. The aim of this study was to describe what prisoner interpreting in Nigeria and South Africa may entail; it was undertaken due to the lack of research in this domain. The setting is contextualised by providing background on community interpreting for prisoners and the substandard prison environment, and the necessary communicative competence required of interpreters is investigated. It was found that cultural considerations and dialectal differences are prominent factors to keep in mind when interpreting for prisoners. Power dynamics are examined, the first finding being that language status is problematic if a major language-in this case, English-is privileged above others. Moreover, it was determined that there are often large power gaps between parties. Regarding responsibility and role, it was established that parties in the interaction often have conflicting goals and the interpreter is tasked with deciding whether to comply with norms, or to challenge them. It can be deduced that prisoner interpreting in both Nigeria and in South Africa constitute unique challenges and require the community interpreter to meet a significantly high standard of expectations.

This paper explores how Nigerian street children construct deviance in their discourse, which has been overlooked in previous research. Through participant observation and interviews with 104 street children and Critical linguistic qualitative analysis using the CDA approach, findings show that deviance was constructed as alignment with street abnormality and a struggle for survival. Employing strategies such as evocations of sympathy, commonality, trivialization, and overgeneralization, their constructions reflect street ideology and beliefs which highlight social inequality and class differences between streets and mainstream society. These beliefs shape street childrens cognitive models, value systems and influence their worldview.

2017

A careful insight into the human language reveals that the language people use 'mirrors' the surrounding reality, e.g., onomatopoeic words (meow or cling) or words like redskin 'Indian'. One of the areas that is reflected in the language are people themselves. Inquiry into the language people use to describe both themselves and others is valuable for several reasons. First, it tells us which linguistic means are used and to what extent they are used; this, in turn, is important in the study of productivity, e.g., why a compound is chosen over a word created, e.g., by backformation. Second, it offers us a window into the nature of human beings. Third, it gives us a possibility of 'spying on' people's lives through language. And fourth, it informs us on how language shapes people's beliefs, behaviours and how it affects the language used in return. Prison slang has not been studied extensively, given limited access to penitentiaries and the ban of using it outside (imposed by prisoners themselves). However, as prison slang is unique in being used for special purposes, even an apparently facile analysis may prove useful, as it may contain information on prisoners and facilities, which is not directly stated; nevertheless, once decoded may reveal a world that is turned upside down. For this reason, the current work focuses on the neglected area of linguistic research and offers insight into the metaphor-and metonymy-based language used by US prisoners to describe themselves and fellow inmates. Such a study is not only useful from a linguistic point of view but also beneficial to scholars of other disciplines, e.g., psychologists and sociologists.

European Review of Social Psychology, 2019

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Uncountable gangs operate in post-Apartheid South Africa, particularly in greater Cape Town, competing over turf and controlling the drug trade. Consequently, gang violence is rife in Western Cape and especially widespread in urban areas. In this paper young Capetonians' narratives of gang violence are analyzed. In the narratives of attacks on Black or White South Africans by Coloured gang members, the Coloured narrators make use of their victims' varieties of English, more precisely, of phonetic features. Hence, the aggressors do language crossing towards their targets when narrating their feats. Rampton (1995a:485) considers language crossing a 'code alternation by people who are not accepted members of the group associated with the second language that they are using (code switching into varieties that are not generally thought to belong to them)'. This switching involves a transgression of social or ethnic boundaries that allows the young gangsters to construct, negotiate, uphold and manage their social identities, as language still functions as an utterly important identity marker in post-Apartheid South Africa.

2020

The prison is a unique discourse community, often characterised by the use of a peculiar commonly shared communicative code. In a country such as Zimbabwe in which inmates generally come from different and diverse ethnolinguistic and sociolinguistic backgrounds, the need for a common communicative code amongst inmates cannot be overstated. Communication amongst inmates is often through ‘cant’, ‘argot’ or slang and these are usually prison specific since they are formulated within. The formulation of prison ‘cant’ is also often times necessitated by inmates’ need to create and own an alternative ‘safe’ interactive linguistic space that ‘evades’ prison authorities due to the ‘cat and mouse’ nature of prison life. Prison is thus here envisioned as a cultural and linguistic space and the linguistic codes used within prison walls can be considered as sociolects or language varieties – more precisely to be conceived of as slang/tsotsitaal. Prison life, thus, has its own value systems and ...

This books draws together the work of the three leading international figures in cultural criminology today. The book traces the history, current configuration, methodological innovations and future trajectories of cultural criminology, mapping its terrain for students and academics in this exciting field. Praise from Professor Zygmunt Bauman: "This is not just a book on the present state and possible prospects of our understanding of crime, criminals and our responses to both. However greatly the professional criminologists might benefit from the authors' illuminating insights and the new cognitive vistas their investigations have opened, the impact of this book may well stretch far beyond the realm of criminology proper and mark a watershed in the progress of social study as such. This book, after all, brings into the open the irremediable unclarity, endemic contentiousness and the resulting frailty of the line dividing deviance from the norm of social life - that line being simultaneously a weapon and the prime stake in the construction and servicing of social order."

It ought to be possible to accept that societies are also incontrovertibly different but still to include them within our intellectual universe. In stressing the differences rather than the similarities in people's arrangements, one would challenge that monstrous ethnocentrism that extends understanding only so far as the observer is prepared to recognize in the devices of others similarities and parallels to devices of his or her own (Strathern 1988:32-3).

2006