Linguistics In Sub Saharan Africa

Gender and Language in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tradition, Struggle and Change is the first book to bring together the topics of language and gender, African languages, and gender in African contexts, and it does so in a descriptive, explanatory and critical way. Including fascinating new work and new, often challenging data from Botswana, Chad, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this collection looks at some ‘traditional’ uses of language in relation to the gender of its speakers and the gendered nature of the languages themselves; it also identifies and explores social change in terms of both gender and sexuality, as reflected in and constructed by language and discourse. The contributions to this volume are accessibly written and will be of interest to students and established academics working on African sociolinguistics and discourse, as well as those whose interest is language, gender and sexuality.

Focusing on the problem of multilingualism in relation to national integration, communication, development and education in Eastern Africa, this study examines the processes of policy formulation. It discusses different types of language policies and practices in the context of the role of national and international agencies of language planning. Although the focus of the book is sub-Saharan Africa, comparisons with other parts of the world are made whenever necessary.

This edited collection provides unprecedented insight into the emerging field of multilingual education in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Multilingual education is claimed to have many benefits, amongst which are that it can improve both content and language learning, especially for learners who may have low ability in the medium of instruction and are consequently struggling to learn. The book represents a range of Sub-Saharan school contexts and describes how multilingual strategies have been developed and implemented within them to support the learning of content and language. It looks at multilingual learning from several points of view, including ‘translanguaging’, or the use of multiple languages – and especially African languages – for learning and language-supportive pedagogy, or the implementation of a distinct pedagogy to support learners working through the medium of a second language. The book puts forward strategies for creating materials, classroom environments and teacher education programmes which support the use of all of a student’s languages to improve language and content learning. The contexts which the book describes are challenging, including low school resourcing, poverty and low literacy in the home, and school policy which militates against the use of African languages in school. The volume also draws on multilingual education approaches which have been successfully carried out in higher resource countries and lend themselves to being adapted for use in SSA. It shows how multilingual learning can bring about transformation in education and provides inspiration for how these strategies might spread and be further developed to improve learning in schools in SSA and beyond. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com.

To assess the current state of linguistic activity in all fields and all countries.

"This book argues for the need to empower African indigenous languages for greater functions in national life. It makes an important and useful contribution to the understanding of the sociolinguistic and sociopolitical dimensions of language attitudes in the sub-Saharan African language context." "Overall, the book will interest all sociolinguists, language in education researchers and scholars, language policy makers in multilingual situations, and even politicians. Also, anyone interested in the complex African language context will find the book very informative, even stirring, while those involved with language issues in multilingual situations all over the world will find Language Attitudes in Sub-Saharan Africa interesting, stimulating, and valuable."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Language is a critical factor in nation-building, and in a continent such as Africa, where language groups do not necessarily correspond with national boundaries, it is potentially contentious as well. Ayo Bamgbose's new book focuses on the problem of language exclusion, whereby certain languages -- and groups -- are omitted from language policies, particularly in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Originally based on a series of lectures given in South Africa, the individual chapters largely preserve the original style of presentation. Consequently, the book is readable, and a valuable introduction to some of the more important issues in African sociolinguistics. The book makes special reference to the language situation in post-apartheid South Africa. The appendices provide access to some of the most important documents on language policies such as the Organization of African Unity's Language Plan of Action For Africa (1986), the language provisions in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of South Africa (1996), and the Barcelona Universal Declaration on Linguistics Rights.

This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism. The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms.