State Ideology and Language in Tanzania PDF Download

Author: Jan Blommaert
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748675833
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
This book is a thoroughly revised version of the 1999 edition, which was welcomed at the time as a classic. It now extends the period of coverage to 2012 and includes an entirely new chapter on current developments, making this updated edition an essentia

Author: Jan Blommaert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780748675807
Category : Ideology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Tanzania is often seen as an exceptional case of successful language planning in Africa, with Swahili being spread to all corners of the country. Yet, this objective success has always been accompanied by a culture of complaints proclaiming its utter failure. State Ideology and Language in Tanzania sets out to explore this paradox through a richly documented historical, sociolinguistic and anthropological approach covering the story of Swahili from the early days of independence until today. Focusing on the ways in which Swahili was swept up in the 'Ujamaa revolution' - the transition to socialism led by president Nyerere - Jan Blommaert demonstrates how the language became an emblem not just of the Tanzanian 'cultural' nation, but above all of the 'political' nation. Using Swahili meant the acceptance of socialism, and the spread of Swahili across the country should equal the spread of Ujamaa socialism. When this did not happen, the verdict of failure was proclaimed on Swahili, which did not prevent the language from becoming one of the most widely used and dynamic languages on the continent. This book is a thoroughly revised version of the 1999 edition, which was welcomed at the time as a classic. It now extends the period of coverage to 2012 and includes an entirely new chapter on current developments, making this updated edition an essential read for students and scholars in language, linguistics and African Studies.

Author: Jan Blommaert
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110163506
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Taking off from the apt epigram that "... language, after all, is a purely historical phenomenon", these sociolinguistic analyses present debates over how language ideologies are formed, articulated, and entextualized. The editor's opening and final essays entitled "the debate is open" and "the debate is closed" bookend ten debates relating to language, identity, and political power: French-into-Corsican translations, dialect in Switzerland, Catalan vs. Spanish in Barcelona since the 1992 Olympics, Canada's linguistic cultures, bilingual education in the US, Ebonics, Singapore's "Speak Mandarin' campaign, the revival status of Israeli Hebrew, and European tongues and literary genres in postcolonial Africa.

Author: Sabrina Billings
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 1783090774
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Through micro-analysis of language use, this book chronicles young women's pathways to becoming a Tanzanian beauty queen, offering an original perspective on the intersection of language with globalization, nationalism, and inequality in urban East Africa. This compelling linguistic ethnography considers the real-life effects, both on- and off-stage, of language policy, education, and gender dynamics for the women competing in the pageants. While highlighting many contestants' struggles for escape from poverty and patriarchy, the book also emphasizes their creative strategies – linguistic and otherwise – for bettering their lives and shows how people living in a global economic periphery take part in, and sometimes feel left out of, the wider world.

Author: Morgan J. Robinson
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821447815
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This intellectual history of Standard Swahili explores the long-term, intertwined processes of standard making and community creation in the historical, political, and cultural contexts of East Africa and beyond. Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. The book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard—a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes—negatively affected those whose language was suddenly deemed nonstandard. Before reconciling the consequences of codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili demonstrates how events, people, and ideas move rapidly and sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social, or temporal categories. Robinson conducted her research in Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, and the United Kingdom. Organized around periods of conversation, translation, and codification from 1864 to 1964, the book focuses on the intellectual history of Swahili’s standardization. The story begins in mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar, home of missionaries, formerly enslaved students, and a printing press, and concludes on the mainland in the mid-twentieth century, as nationalist movements added Standard Swahili to their anticolonial and nation-building toolkits. This outcome was not predetermined, however, and Robinson offers a new context for the strong emotions that the language continues to evoke in East Africa. The history of Standard Swahili is not one story, but rather the connected stories of multiple communities contributing to the production of knowledge. The book reflects this multiplicity by including the narratives of colonial officials and anticolonial nationalists; East African clerks, students, newspaper editors, editorialists, and their readers; and library patrons, academic linguists, formerly enslaved children, and missionary preachers. The book reconstructs these stories on their own terms and reintegrates them into a new composite that demonstrates the central place of language in the history of East Africa and beyond.

Author: Jürgen Jaspers
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027289166
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this seventh volume underlines the mutually constitutive relation between society and language use. It highlights a number of the most prominent approaches of this relation and it draws attention to a selected number of topics that the study of language in its social context has characteristically brought to bear. Despite their theoretical and methodological differences, each of the chapters in this book assumes that it is necessary to look at society and language use as interdependent phenomena, and that by attending to microscopic linguistic phenomena one is also keeping a finger on the pulse of broader, macroscopic social tendencies that at the same time facilitate and constrain language use. The introduction provides a sketch of the intellectual antecedents of the volume’s two ‘mother disciplines’, viz., linguistics and social theory before pointing at recent common ground in the rising attention for discourse and what has come to be called ‘late-modernity’.

Author: Neil Bermel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110197669
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
How does a country find itself 'at war' over spelling? This book focuses on a crucial juncture in the post-communist history of the Czech Republic, when an orthographic commission with a moderate reformist agenda found itself the focus of enormous public controversy. Delving back into history, Bermel explores the Czech nation's long tradition of intervention and its association with the purity of the language, and how in the twentieth century an ascendant linguistic school - Prague Functionalism - developed into a progressive but centralizing ideology whose power base was inextricably linked to the communist regime. Bermel looks closely at the reforms of the 1990s and the heated public reaction to them. On the part of language regulators, he examines the ideology that underlay the reforms and the tactics employed on all sides to gain linguistic authority, while in dissecting the public reaction, he looks both at conscious arguments marshaled in favor of and against reform and at the use, conscious and subconscious, of metaphors about language. Of interest to faculty and students working in the area of language, cultural studies, and history, especially that of transitional and post-communist states, this volume is also relevant for those with a more general interest in language planning and language reform. The book is awarded with the "The George Blazyca Prize in East European Studies 2008".

Author: Jan Blommaert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139487426
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Human language has changed in the age of globalization: no longer tied to stable and resident communities, it moves across the globe, and it changes in the process. The world has become a complex 'web' of villages, towns, neighbourhoods and settlements connected by material and symbolic ties in often unpredictable ways. This phenomenon requires us to revise our understanding of linguistic communication. In The Sociolinguistics of Globalization Jan Blommaert constructs a theory of changing language in a changing society, reconsidering locality, repertoires, competence, history and sociolinguistic inequality.

Author: Alessandro Duranti
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470997265
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology provides a series of in-depth explorations of key concepts and approaches by some of the scholars whose work constitutes the theoretical and methodological foundations of the contemporary study of language as culture. Provides a definitive overview of the field of linguistic anthropology, comprised of original contributions by leading scholars in the field Summarizes past and contemporary research across the field and is intended to spur students and scholars to pursue new paths in the coming decades Includes a comprehensive bibliography of over 2000 entries designed as a resource for anyone seeking a guide to the literature of linguistic anthropology

Author: Marlis Hellinger
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110198533
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 806

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Book Description
In line with the overall perspective of the Handbook series, the focus of Vol.9 is on language-related problems arising in the context of linguistic diversity and change, and the contributions Applied Linguistics can offer for solutions. Part I, “Language minorities and inequality,” presents situations of language contact and linguistic diversity as world-wide phenomena. The focus is on indigenous and immigrant linguistic minorities, their (lack of) access to linguistic rights through language policies and the impact on their linguistic future .Part II “Language planning and language change,” focuses on the impact of colonialism, imperialism, globalisation and economics as factors that language policies and planning measures must account for in responding to problems deriving from language contact and linguistic diversity. Part III, “Language variation and change in institutional contexts,” examines language-related problems in selected institutional areas of communication (education, the law, religion, science, the Internet) which will often derive from socioeconomic, cultural and other non-linguistic asymmetries. Part IV, “The discourse of linguistic diversity and language change,” analyses linguistic diversity, language change and language reform as issues of public debates which are informed by different ideological positions, values and attitudes (e.g. with reference to sexism, racism, and political correctness).The volume also contains extensive reference sections and index material.