Researching and Documenting the Languages of Tanzania (original) (raw)

Tanzania and Kenya: Appraisal of Continued Richness in Languages

Journal of Linguistics and Language in Education, 2022

The article is a plea for sustaining the indigenous languages of Tanzania and Kenya. These languages display an impressive richness in diversity which is diminishing currently. It is important to appreciate the value of the current linguistic diversity and that of multilingualism. The article is based on a presentation at a conference of the Languages of Tanzania project and hence is biased towards the Tanzanian situation. I argue that the success of the language policy of promoting Kiswahili now opens the ways to support the local languages that pose no threat to national unity. Given that this article is a plea and one making ample use of my personal experiences of linguistic research in Tanzania and Kenya the style is more personal and lacks the usual detachment of academic papers.

Developing Bantu Language Descriptions in Swahili

Tanzania's 1997 language and culture policy makes it possible to use minority languages, potentially even in education. A necessary step for producing educational material in these languages is their linguistic description. So far, such descriptions have been written using European languages, thus making them inaccessible to most Tanzanians. Previous research has shown, however, that "one of the most important considerations in the success or failure of bilingual programmes is the extent to which marginal language communities participate in the design and implementation of their own language provisions" (Stroud 2001:339). In this paper, a project will be introduced which aims at developing linguistic descriptions of Tanzanian languages in Swahili, thus both laying the foundation for education in minority languages and strengthening Swahili as language of academic research. Achievements so far include a template covering the main grammatical features, the teaching of this template to and data elicitation by speakers of ten Tanzanian languages (April 2004), and draft write-ups of the data (until March 2005). In particular, the paper will discuss problems of transferring linguistic terminology into Swahili, of introducing the template into the workshop setting, and of integrating the elicited data into a publication. The paper concludes with an outlook on future activities.

Language Policy and Planning – the Tanzania Experience

The Tanzanian experience is a typical case that illustrates how language policy and planning is a site of struggle - for cultural influence, economic dominance, and political control. The similarities with other African countries in this struggle are so obvious as to require little restating - a conflictual triglossic environment, with the ex-colonial language, viz. English, at the top of the hierarchy, a regional lingua franca, viz. Swahili, in the middle, and multiple local ethnic community languages at the bottom of the heap. Yet some of the battles lost or won and the methods employed are worth examining particularly because the Tanzanian case has been so often erroneously cited as a success story.

Language policies and practices in Tanzania and South Africa: problems and challenges

International Journal of Educational Development, 2004

The authors of the present article are engaged in a research project funded by the Norwegian Research Council. In this project the language policies of Tanzania and South Africa, as well as the practices of these policies in the classroom are analyzed. The article gives some preliminary results from the project. While the language policies of Tanzania are described as confusing, contradictory, and ambiguous, the language policies of South Africa seem clearer and more progressive. In Tanzania, Kiswahili is seen as the national language, while both Kiswahili and English are official languages. The issue of language has, however, disappeared from the constitution in Tanzania. In the constitution of South Africa, 11 languages are official and seen as equal. But when it comes to practice in the classroom in both countries, the majority of the learners struggle to learn academic content because of the foreign medium that is used as the language of instruction from secondary school onwards in Tanzania and already from the fourth grade in primary school in South Africa. The research reported here shows that whatever the official policies may be the teachers in the classrooms will use whatever language they and their students feel most comfortable with. Examples are given here of the coping strategies teachers and learners use in both countries like translations, code-mixing and code-switching. At the end of the day the learners have to write their exams in English however. The language in education policy in most African countries lead many African pupils to fall even further behind. What seems to be a learning problem or a matter of bad grade, drop out and repetition is really a language problem.

Swahilization" of Ethnic Languages in Tanzania: The Case of Matengo

African Study Monographs, 2010

The "Swahilization" of ethnic languages, rather than a clear "language shift," is taking place in Tanzania. This paper reports on the effects Swahilization has had on the Matengo language through examples of Swahili loanwords. The infl uence of Swahili can be seen in areas such as grammar and phonology in Matengo, one of the middle-sized ethnic languages of Tanzania. The most remarkable infl uence is in the lexicon. There are many Swahili words in today's Matengo, especially that spoken by the young people. Some Swahili words are used as a result of unconscious code-mixing, but so far used as new vocabulary loaned from Swahili. This trend points to a language shift that will certainly grow stronger, given the overall impact of Swahili, the national language of Tanzania.

State Ideology and language in Tanzania (TPCS draft 2013)

this, the assumption of ideally monolingual societies and so on -the chapters in this book will engage at length with these language-ideological assumptions. These assumptions obscured several critical processes in the reality of sociolinguistic life: that not 'language' but 'register' is the 'stuff', so to speak, of language in society; that language is only to a certain extend 'makeable', that as soon as a language is distributed throughout a large number of users it will tend to explode into numerous new sub-varieties, and so forth. Above all, the language-ideological fundamentals of language planning tend to obscure the duty of researchers to actually see and interpret what goes on -how real language is used by real people in real social environments.