Subjected words: African linguistics and the colonial encounter

This monograph presents a detailed study on the language planning situation in Malawi. It explores the historical and political processes, as well as current practices of language planning in the country. The discussion further reconstructs and demonstrates how sociopolitical change has been perceived in Malawi and how this perception has translated into language planning in education, the media and the general patterns of language use. The role of prominent individuals, the language situation itself and the sociopolitical issues serve as bases from which language planning in Malawi should be understood. Taken together the resultant language planning practices (past and present) present an interesting case study of pervasive ad hoc and reactive language planning based more on self-interest and political whim than research.

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The Language Planning Situation in Malawi

Language documentation is prototypically characterized as the collection of records of a language which can form the basis of traditional descriptive products such as lexicons, grammars, and texts (see, e.g., Himmelmann 1998:168–171). This follows from an emphasis by linguists and speaker communities on the so-called “ancestral code”—that is, the variety that is taken to be most representative of a given community’s traditions (Woodbury 2011). By comparison, relatively little attention has been paid to understanding what kinds of documentary products are required to adequately capture sociolinguistic aspects of language use.

This paper reports on the results of a workshop exploring theoretical and applied aspects of sociolinguistic language documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). SSA is special in being characterized by high rates of multilingualism and numerous vital “small” languages, where sociolinguistically informed approaches are likely to yield useful results for academic and speaker communities. More than sixty workshop participants, from Africa and elsewhere, organized into five working groups covering the following topics: conversational data and sociolinguistic documentation, documentation of culturally significant events, how languages acquire “value” in multilingual environments, social mechanisms fostering multilingualism, and documenting the relationship between language and culture.

Among the conclusions of the working group discussions were: (i) the value of natural conversation as a way of documenting a language’s sociolinguistic setting and culture, (ii) the importance of documenting actual language use without distorting the data to make it better reflect notions of language purity (and other ideological positions), (iii) recommendations for expanded metadata collection about speakers and the recording context so that sociolinguistic configurations affecting data collection can be more adequately recorded, (iv) the necessity of establishing strong interdisciplinary partnerships when the goals of documentation go beyond structural aspects of grammar and basic lexical data, (v) that documentation including information on sociolinguistic context can usefully inform language planning decisions in ways that traditional documentation cannot, and (vi) the need for more flexible training opportunities than are presently available.

A more general conclusion of the workshop was the importance of seeing more reflexive scholarship on the goals and practices of language documentation. This is crucial if we want to ensure that commonly employed idealizations such as “speaker community” do not inappropriately lead to documentary projects focusing on selections of speech events that are not an accurate reflection of the actual practices of those individuals whose speech is being documented.

/pdf/beyond-the-ancestral-code-towards-a-model-for-7f79olp5c0.pdf

Beyond the ancestral code: Towards a model for sociolinguistic language documentation

This monograph focuses on the development of colonial and post-colonial language policies and practices in Zimbabwe, attributing changes to evolving philosophies and politics in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. In colonial Zimbabwe, we argue that the language policies had as one of their key objectives the development of a bilingual white colonial ruling class proficient in both English and at least one African language. Contrary to what some scholars might think, we will show that what was being imposed during the colonial era was not English on Africans but European variants of African languages on Europeans. The monograph also describes how, through linguistic description, Europeans appropriated African languages as a prelude to the imposition of European variants of African languages on Africans under the guise of the promotion of indigenous language. Despite the power and influence of the colonial regime, we demonstrate how Africans still retained a strong sense of agency during the colonial peri...

Zimbabwe Colonial and Post-Colonial Language Policy and Planning Practices

The paper describes how party politics has appropriated performances of popular art to create and entrench oppressive political culture in Malawi. Performances of popular culture were already used during the struggle for independence, and such practice was in wide use during the regime of Dr Banda, the first president of Malawi, and it has continued also after his resignation in the 1990s. The songs composed for praising the power, wisdom and excellency of the Malawi Congress Party, and particularly of its leader, Dr. Banda, were typically performed by female dancers, who used allegedly traditional modes of expression in communicating the political message. During the time of the multi-party government the practice seems to continue to be the same. The songs earlier sung in praise of Banda were later sung for Bakili Muluzi, his successor in power, and songs for mocking the previous president and his party were composed and performed during the political campaigns. However, instead of using forms of popular culture to support one party for the disadvantage of the others, there would be a need in Malawi to use such art forms for creating a 'common' political culture. (Ed.)

/pdf/dancing-towards-dictatorship-political-songs-and-popular-8x5c9j9wzz.pdf

Dancing towards Dictatorship: Political Songs and Popular Culture in Malawi

Introduction: language in a divided society Robert K. Herbert SECTION I: Language policy Language policies in Africa Bernd Heine Language policies in AFrica: the case for Chichewa in Malawi Enoch Timpunza Mvula Diagnostic and therapeutic aspects of sociolinguistics in pre-independent Namibia: the effects of first and second order observation Rajmund Ohly Language and social history in South Africa: a task still to be undertaken David Brown SECTION II: Language planning Sociolinguistics in Africa: Language planning Carol M.

Language and Society in Africa: The Theory and Practice of Sociolinguistics

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Language and Society in Africa: The Theory and Practice of Sociolinguistics