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Repertoires and Choices in African Languages
Main description: Africa is one of the hotspots of linguistic diversity, and most African languages are spoken by multilingual communities. The persistence of multilingualism and the linguistic creativity are striking, especially against the backdrop of "language death" and expanding monolingualism elsewhere in the world. This volume deals with multilingualism as a cultural technique, register variation and the multiplicity of language ideologies, and the dynamics of linguistic change in Africa's minority languages. It argues that that in terms of multilingualism and language survival, Africa can serve as a positive model.
The Oxford Guide to the Atlantic Languages of West Africa
This volume presents the first book-length overview of the Atlantic languages, a small family of languages spoken mainly on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. Languages in this area have been used in diverse multilingual societies with intense language contact for the whole of their known history, and their genealogical relatedness and the impact of language contact on their lexicon and grammar have been widely debated. The book is divided into four parts. The first provides an introduction to language ecologies in the area and includes two accounts of the genealogical classification of Atlantic languages. Chapters in the second part offer grammatical overviews of individual languages, inclu...
The Oxford Guide to the Atlantic Languages of West Africa
This volume is the first book-length overview of the Atlantic languages, a small family of languages spoken mainly on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. It is an essential tool for linguists interested in the languages of West Africa, language history and classification, and typology and language contact more broadly.
African Multilingualisms
Although multilingualism is the norm in the day-to-day lives of most sub-Saharan Africans, multilingualism in settings outside of cities has so far been under-explored. This gap is striking when considering that in many parts of Africa, individual multilingualism was widespread long before the colonial period and centuries before the continent experienced large-scale urbanization. The edited collection African Multilingualisms fills this gap by presenting results from recent and ongoing research based on fieldwork in rural African environments as well as environments characterized by contact between urban and rural communities of speakers. The contributors—mostly Africans themselves, including a number of emerging scholars—present findings that both complement and critique current scholarship on African multilingualism. In addition, new methods and tools are introduced for the study of multilingualism in rural settings, alongside illustrations of the kinds of results that they yield. African Multilingualisms reveals an impressive diversity in the features of local language ideologies, multilingual behaviors, and the relationship between language and identity.
Africa's Endangered Languages
This book examines the endangered languages of Africa from both documentary and theoretical perspectives, highlighting the threats of extinction many of them face and the challenges and implications each bring to bear on linguistic theory. It focuses on the symbiosis between documentary and theoretical methodologies, and its consequences for the preservation of endangered languages, both in the African context and more broadly.
Nurturing Language
This monograph introduces students and scholars in linguistics, anthropology, and intercultural communication to anthropological linguistics, with a special focus on Africa. Among the topics addressed are semantic fields such as kinship or colour terminology, spatial orientation, linguistic relativity and the link between language and cognition, onomastics, the ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, emotions, (im)politeness strategies, conversation analysis, and non-verbal communication.
Repertoires and Choices in African Languages
Most African languages are spoken by communities as one of several languages present on a daily basis. The persistence of multilingualism and the linguistic creativity manifest in the playful use of different languages are striking, especially against the backdrop of language death and expanding monolingualism elsewhere in the world. The effortless mastery of several languages is disturbing, however, for those who take essentialist perspectives that see it as a problem rather than a resource, and for the dominating, conflictual, sociolinguistic model of multilingualism. This volume investigates African minority languages in the context of changing patterns of multilingualism, and also assesses the status of African languages in terms of existing influential vitality scales. An important aspect of multilingual praxis is the speakers' agency in making choices, their repertoires of registers and the multiplicity of language ideology associated with different ways of speaking. The volume represents a new and original contribution to the ethnography of speaking of multilingual practices and the cultural ideas associated with them.
Fula spoken in the City of Maroua (Northern Cameroon)
Zusammenfassung This book investigates the speech of non-ethnic Fulfulde speakers in Maroua, Northern Cameroon, focussed on the Christian community, where the language is adopted as evangelistic instrument beside French. Three key reasons motivate our investigation. First: Context - Fulfulde is embedded in a multilingual contact situation with Indo-European languages (French, English) and many other local languages belonging to Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo phyla. Second: Fulfulde as lingua franca in the region. This status is unique compared to the situation in other countries such as Senegal, Chad or Sudan where it is mainly an intraethnic medium of communication. Third: In contrast to the common perception of Fulfulde as the language of a Muslim community - here we are targeting the Christian Fulfulde speakers who share the language as well as the Bible (translated into Fulfulde) as common goods for interethnic communication in their religious activities.
A Typology of Verbal Borrowings
The questions as to why most languages appear to have more trouble borrowing verbs than nouns, and as to the possible mechanisms and paths by which verbs can be borrowed or the obstacles for verb borrowing, have been a topic of interest since the late 19th century. However, no truly substantial typological research had been undertaken in this field before the present study. The present work is the first in-depth cross-linguistic study on loan verbs and the morphological, syntactic and sociolinguistic aspects of loan verb accommodation. It applies current methodologies on database management, quantitative analysis and typological conventions and it is based on a broad global sample of data from over 400 languages and the typological data from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS). One major result of the present study is the falsification, on empirical grounds, of long-standing claims that verbs generally are more difficult to borrow than other parts of speech, or that verbs could never be borrowed as verbs and always needed a re-verbalization in the borrowing language.
Muslims Beyond the Arab World
Muslims beyond the Arab World explores the vibrant tradition of writing African languages using the modified Arabic script ('Ajami) alongside the rise of the Muridiyya Sufi order in Senegal. The book demonstrates how the development of the 'Ajami literary tradition is entwined with the flourishing of the Muridiyya into one of sub-Saharan Africa's most powerful and dynamic Sufi organizations. It offers a close reading of the rich hagiographic and didactic written, recited, and chanted 'Ajami texts of the Muridiyya, works largely unknown to scholars. The texts describe the life and Sufi odyssey of the order's founder, Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke (1853-1927), his conflicts with local rulers and ...
