Repertoires and Choices in African Languages (Language Contact and Bilingualism [lcb], 5)

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. Preface List of Tables, Maps and Figures List of Languages List of figures with cited and archived web pages Copyrights for reproduced photographs Abbreviations Introduction 1 What this book is about 2 Structure of the book 1 Multilingualism on the ground 1.1 Societal multilingualism in Senegal 1.2 Individual repertoires: six case studies 1.2.1 Localist identities for moving targets 1.2.2 Purposeful alienation: the ethnolinguistic chameleon 1.2.3 The rhetorical return to lost roots 1.2.4 A return to what roots? 1.2.5 I am what I speak? 1.2.6 Well, I’m not what I speak 1.3 Societal practices nurturing multilingualism 1.3.1 Exogynous marriage patterns and movement of daughters 1.3.2 Language acquisition in peer groups and age classes 1.3.3 Fostering 1.3.4 Professional, ritual and crisis mobility and migration 1.3.5 Joking relationships 1.4 Written languages and the interaction of written and spoken repertoires 1.4.1 The ecology of writing in Senegal 1.4.2 The making of guilty illiterates 1.4.3 African writing: what scope, which languages and scripts? 1.4.3.1 Grapho- and eurocentric ideologies and “restricted literacies” 1.4.3.2 Some literacies are more visible than others 1.4.3.3 Ajami literacies 1.4.3.4 The Ge’ez script 1.4.3.5 The Bamun syllabary 1.4.3.6 N’ko 1.4.3.7 The Tifinagh script 1.4.3.8 The Vai syllabary 1.5 For an integrated view of spoken and written multilingual and multiscriptal practices 2 Doing things with words 2.1 Some symbolic dimensions of language 2.2 A complete language 2.3 Speech registers 2.3.1 Play languages 2.3.2 Youth languages 2.3.3 Respect languages and other examples of paralexification 2.3.4 Special purpose languages 2.3.5 Avoidance languages 2.3.6 Ritual languages 2.3.7 Spirit languages 2.4 What we can learn from users of speech registers 3 Language and ideology 3.1 Language and power 3.1.1 Missionary activities and literacy development efforts 3.1.2 Power relationships 3.1.3 Conflicting language ideologies 3.2 Reducing diversity and creating standards 3.3 Constructing linguistic deficits and reacting to language obsolescence 3.3.1 Lack of words, abundance of sounds 3.3.2 The visible and the invisible 3.4 Remaining who we are: local theories and concepts of translation 3.4.1 Socio-historical background 3.4.2 Foreign text in women’s tales 3.4.3 Translating silence 3.5 Ways of making history 3.5.1 Eastern origins 3.5.2 Hone interpretations of Kisra traditions 3.5.3 Spirits of the past 3.5.4 Where people think (and don’t think) they come from 3.6 Ideologies, semiotics and multilingualism 4 Language and knowledge 4.1 Creation of knowledge 4.1.1 The invention of tradition 4.1.2 The view from within 4.1.3 Essentialization vs. inclusion 4.2 Invention of evolution: colonial encounters 4.2.1 Why collect, count and classify African languages? 4.2.2 Linguistics as science, and language as evolution 4.2.3 The origin of data 4.2.4 Borders based on typology: noun class ideologies 4.3 Epistemes and the expression of knowledge 4.3.1 Terminologies 4.3.2 Categories and the power of tradition 4.3.3 Emic and etic perspectives: Baïnounk noun classes 4.4 The language of knowledge 4.4.1 Evidentials and perception 4.4.2 When knowledge systems converge: Atlantic noun classes again 4.5 Endangered knowledge 5 Language dynamics 5.1 A glance at linguistic diversity 5.2 Africa in the context of global endangerment discourses 5.2.1 African languages as the marginalized among the marginalized 5.2.2 Inapplicable global endangerment criteria 5.2.3 Ignoring multilingualism and real language dynamics 5.3 Linguistic rhetoric surrounding endangered languages 5.3.1 The misleading equation of rare with small or endangered 5.3.2 Sociohistorical versus biologistic reasoning surrounding endangered languages 5.4 Where and why African languages are vital or “dying” 5.4.1 Language death in the literal sense 5.4.2 Languages and climate change 5.4.3 Languages and civil unrest 5.4.4 Urbanization 5.5 Africa-specific vitality and endangerment criteria 5.5.1 The existence of communities of practice and social networks for language socialization in a given language ecology 5.5.2 A “home base” providing the opportunities for maintaining and creating communities of practice and social networks in a given language ecology 5.5.3 Socioeconomic and political stability in the language ecology in question 5.5.4 Attitudes by speakers and non-speakers to the language ecology 5.5.5 The reification of languages in the ecology as “named languages” and their authentication as fully-fledged languages 5.6 Responses to language endangerment and marginalization in Africa 5.6.1 Overcoming colonial language policies? 5.6.2 Continuing imbalanced power relationships 5.6.3 The mimesis of mimesis: mimetic excess 5.6.4 Outsiders as the “owners” of African languages 5.6.5 Linguists as failing to inform discourses of endangerment 5.7 Language as a thing versus language as flexible social practice 5.8 Consequences for the relationships of documentation with “maintenance” and “revitalization” 5.9 Revitalization in the future 6 Not languages: repertoires as lived and living experience 6.1 Lessons from Africa 6.2 Changing our metaphors 6.3 The promise of a different approach 6.4 On the way, obstacles 6.4.1 Hegemonic northern discourses 6.4.2 The canon of descriptive linguistics: power relations in a small field 6.4.3 Researchers and communities as generic pawns on a competitive playing field 6.5 Finally, a vision 6.5.1 First of all: more time and freedom 6.5.2 Then: the notion of quality 6.5.3 The result: open-ended collaborative projects 6.6 Paradigms as they shift and shuffle 6.6.1 African languages as agency - awake or sleeping 6.6.2 The tangible realm of language References Language Index Subject Index Author Index "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."--Publisher's website 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