Sociolinguistics in African Contexts: Perspectives and Challenges PDF
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Multilingual Education Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue Ellen Hurst Editors Sociolinguistics in African Contexts Perspectives and Challenges Multilingual Education Volume 20 Series Editors Andy Kirkpatrick Department of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia Bob Adamson Chair Professor of Curriculum Reform Department of International Education & Lifelong Learning The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong SAR Editorial Board Jan Blommaert, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands Kingsley Bolton, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Feng Anwei, The University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China Ofelia Garcia, The Graduate Centre, City University of New York, USA Saran Kaur Gill, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia Mingyue (Michelle) Gu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin NT, Hong Kong SAR Gu Yueguo, The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Hartmut Haberland, Roskilde University, Denmark Li Chor Shing David, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, Hong Kong SAR Li Wei, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK Low Ee-Ling, National Institute of Education, Singapore Tony Liddicoat, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia Ricardo Nolasco, University of the Philippines at Diliman, Manila, The Philippines Merrill Swain, Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada Virginia Yip Choy Yin, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong SAR The book series Multilingual Education publishes top quality monographs and edited volumes containing empirical research on multilingual language acquisition, language contact and the respective roles of languages in contexts where the lan- guages are not cognate and where the scripts are often different, in order to be able to better understand the processes and issues involved and to inform governments and language policy makers. The volumes in this series are aimed primarily at researchers in education, especially multilingual education and other related fields, and those who are involved in the education of (language) teachers. Others who will be interested include key stakeholders and policy makers in the field of language policy and education. The editors welcome proposals and ideas for books that fit the series. For more information on how you can submit a proposal, please contact the publishing editor, Jolanda Voogd. E-mail: [email protected] More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8836 Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue • Ellen Hurst Editors Sociolinguistics in African Contexts Perspectives and Challenges Editors Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue Ellen Hurst Department of French Humanities Education Development Unit University of Buea University of Cape Town Buea, Cameroon Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa ISSN 2213-3208 ISSN 2213-3216 (electronic) Multilingual Education ISBN 978-3-319-49609-2 ISBN 978-3-319-49611-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49611-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938114 © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Contents Dynamic Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives on African Language, Ideologies and Practices ........................................... 1 Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue and Ellen Hurst Part I Ideologies La résistance du plurilinguisme à Abidjan ................................................... 13 Béatrice Akissi Boutin Linguistic Messianism: Multilingualism in Mozambique ........................... 35 Christopher Stroud and Manuel Guissemo Langues ethniques et problématique de la véhicularité/ véhicularisation au Cameroun ....................................................................... 53 Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue Usage des langues chez les locuteurs Nda’nda’ ............................................ 73 Guy Merlin Tchagoua Pratiques et transmission linguistiques dans les familles à Tokombéré: vers un étiolement des langues identitaires? ........................ 87 Zacharie Hatolong Boho “Without English There Is No Future”: The Case of Language Attitudes and Ideologies in Uganda......................................... 107 Medadi E. Ssentanda and Judith Nakayiza Les langues au Maghreb: Identité, Enseignement, Culture et Politique ......................................................................................... 127 Ali Alalou v vi Contents Ethnic Stereotypes and Lexical Semantics: The Emergence of the Rural/Urban Opposition in Moroccan Arabic ................................... 147 Ahmed Ech-charfi and Lamyae Azzouzi Représentations linguistiques: le tupuri dans les discours épilinguistiques en milieu scolaire à Maroua ................................ 171 Jean Paul Balga L’incomplétude des politiques de revalorisation des langues nationales en Afrique sub-saharienne ............................................. 191 Stéphanie Engola Part II Practices Rural/Urban Dichotomies and Youth Language .......................................... 209 Ellen Hurst The Sociolinguistic Profile and Functions of Luyaaye Within Its Community of Practice ................................................................ 225 Saudah Namyalo Kirundi Slang – Youth Identity and Linguistic Manipulations .................. 247 Nico Nassenstein The Ultimate Matthew Effect for Sheng ....................................................... 269 Philip W. Rudd Urban Youth Language Use in Social Media in Anglophone Cameroon: A Morpho- Syntactic Analysis of Camfranglais Among University of Buea Students.............................................................. 287 Comfort Beyang Oben Ojongnkpot Le créole de Guinée-Bissau: approche d’une synchronie dynamique ....................................................................................................... 301 Dame Ndao Dénominations des lieux de villes et rapports aux langues: Le cas des résidences estudiantines à Dschang ............................................. 315 Gaston François Kengue Language Crossing in Greater Cape Town: Narratives of Gang Assaults .............................................................................................. 333 Nadine Chariatte About the Editors Dr. Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue Department of French, University of Buea Augustin E. Ebongue is a senior lecturer of linguistics at the University of Buea, Cameroon. He obtained a PhD in Sociolinguistics from the University of Yaounde I. Apart from Sociolinguistics, his speciality, he teaches French linguistics, French as a foreign language and Discourse Analysis. His research interests cover mainly African Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis, African youth languages, Cameroon official bilingualism, linguistic insecurity, French as a foreign language, media and political discourse and the sociolinguistics of the French language. He is author of numerous articles and editor of four books. Dr.Augustin E. Ebongue has participated in many international conferences. He has organised an international conference on the linguistic insecurity in Anglophone and Francophone communi- ties in Cameroon. Dr. Ellen Hurst Humanities Education Development Unit, University of Cape Town Ellen Hurst has been an active researcher in the field of urban youth language since 2005. She has gained a reputation particularly for her research on the South African phenomenon ‘tsotsitaal’. From 2010 to 2013, she acted as project leader for the SANPAD-funded project ‘South African Informal Urban Varieties: the National Picture’, a research project investigating the use of ‘tsotsitaals’ in South Africa. She organised the first international conference on African Urban and Youth Language at Cape Town in July 2013 and held the start-up workshop for a collaboration with researchers from Ivory Coast, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Uganda, Cameroon, the Netherlands and the USA to set up a database for the study of urban youth language around the continent. She has previously published in international journals such as the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Language Matters and Globalisation, Societies and Education. She currently works in the Humanities Education Development Unit at the University of Cape Town. vii Dynamic Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives on African Language, Ideologies and Practices Augustin Emmanuel Ebongue and Ellen Hurst Language is dynamic and changes over time. Sociolinguistics historically was rather restricted in its ability to describe this dynamism, focusing instead on describ- ing particular (geographical) speech communities, but there have been some major developments in sociolinguistic theory in recent years. According to Blommaert (2014: 133), on the one hand, language has become reconceptualised as mobile, rather than tied to a particular speech community, and secondly, language is no longer seen as a fixed, unified thing – instead, the focus has shifted towards lan- guage practice and communities of practice and the language resources that people use in communication. These resources can be drawn from what we traditionally understand as languages, from different dialects and registers and from nonverbal communication – gesture, body language and so on – semiosis in the broader sense of the term. Communication therefore does not rely on a monolingual proficiency but on speakers drawing on a wide range of resources. The advantage of these new approaches is that they are able to describe dynamic language, language change and fluidity, whereas before the aim was to describe lan- guage as bounded homogenous units. This reframing of sociolinguistics has led to an increasing number of studies looking at style, linguistic repertoire, communi- ties of practice and so on. Eckert (2012) describes what she terms the ‘third wave’ of varia- tion studies, tracing the development from the first wave in which correla- tions were made between linguistic variables and categories such as class, sex, eth- nicity, etc. to the second wave in which ethnographic methods explored these categorisations. In the third wave, she argues that variation is viewed as an essential feature of language, A.E. Ebongue (*) Department of French, University of Buea, Buea, Cameroon e-mail: [email protected] E. Hurst (*) Humanities Education Development Unit, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 1 A.E. Ebongue, E. Hurst (eds.), Sociolinguistics in African Contexts, Multilingual Education 20, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49611-5_1 2 A.E. Ebongue and E. Hurst which constructs social meaning and social space, and is a force in social change. This has led to an emphasis on stylistic practice (Eckert 2012: 94). An additional result of this shift in sociolinguistics has been the surfacing of ideologies and attitudes as central to language change, in that a community’s social concerns manifest in their attitudes and ideologies around language. For this reason, whilst we can still name and talk about different ‘languages’, they manifest as prac- tices, tied to ideologies. This book intends to consider these two aspects of current sociolinguistic the- ory – ideology and practice – by providing case studies from the African continent. In this book, we ask the questions: • How are ideologies and practices changing in Africa? • In what ways is language dynamic? We believe that African contexts have something to add to current theory – that the rapid changes taking place on the continent over the past decades, and the devel- opment of sociolinguistics within Africa which seeks to engage with African lan- guages and speakers rather than focusing on the colonial European languages, can extend current theoretical perspectives. The authors in this volume have all in some way responded to the new theoretical paradigm, by drawing on authors such as Eckert and Rampton, or the expanding literature on language ideologies and atti- tudes, to explain their research contexts. 1 Origin of the Problem It is not our intention to take an area study approach. Rather, we want to combine two approaches: sociolinguistics ‘in Africa’ and sociolinguistics ‘of Africa’. The first supposes a general, universal sociolinguistics, which could be applied within and across contexts, to all the countries of the world; some of the chapters within this volume utilise theory which has been developed in other contexts and reap- plies them in the African context in fruitful ways. On the other hand, a sociolin- guistics ‘of Africa’, on its part, could be conceptualised as sociolinguistics being developed from contexts arising in the African context, which can extend socio- lin- guistic theory and can then be applied in other contexts. Again, a number of chap- ters in this volume attempt to explain sociolinguistic phenomena by develop- ing new theoretical approaches. By adopting both of these approaches therefore, we hope to accommodate perceptions of sociolinguistic realities both in Africa and of Africa, in order to take a view which is at the same time internal and external. The theme of sociolinguistic perspectives on African languages does not in any way mean the exclusion of European or Arabic languages from this volume. A soci- olinguistics be it ‘of Africa’, which claims to exclude languages with which African languages are in contact such as French, English, Portuguese, Arabic, etc., would be impossible when considering contemporary language dynamics in Africa. A crucial question is in fact what is African language, when European languages, or Arabic,
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