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This volume comprises a collection of sixteen articleswhich were originally published in "Language and Style: AnInternational Journal", which focuses on all aspects of style and alltraditions of literature and linguistics. The sixteen articles dealwith the language structures and narrative conventions of sub-SaharanAfrican authors writing in English. The nature and characteristics ofthe literature of these African writers are described in detail. Thetext provides a sophisticated linguistic and cultural analysis oftheir works, while noting the rich influence of indigenous Africanlanguages on these African writers in English. ... Read more

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Tackling the contentious question of African languages versus European languages, this study argues that the dominance of the incoming languages is due to two factors: originally the societies were not expansionist enough, and later the peoples of Africa failed to be nationalist enough. ALI A. MAZRUI is Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Senior Scholar in African Studies at Cornell University North America: Chicago U Press; Uganda: Fountain Publishers; Kenya: EAEP ... Read more

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This title forms part of the revised and highly innovative Little Library Literacy Kit. ... Read more

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For the thirty third consecutive year, the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) has provided the major forum for the discussion of linguistic data geared towards understanding how African languages are constituted, acquired, and used.

This volume represents a selection of 25 peer-reviewed papers from the 33rd ACAL held in March 2002 at Ohio University in Athens.The papers cover language acquisition, syntax, phonetics, phonology, morphology, historical linguistics, as well as language use and function in Africa making proposals concerning the proper analysis and representation of linguistic information. ... Read more

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Originally published in 1970, this is a descriptive linguistic analysis of the grammar of modern Igbo. The analysis, based primarily on material gathered from two native speakers, one from Owerri Province and the other from Umuahia Province, is presented in the framework of the transformational model developed by Noam Chomsky. The grammar is a practical attempt to apply some of the advances in theoretical linguistics to a little-known language. There is no other grammar of Igbo in existence which presents a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the underlying and surface systems of the syntax and phonology of the language. The book will be useful for linguists as an example of the application of the transformational model to an exotic language. It will be of interest to specialists in African studies for the insights gained and the data presented from an important African language. ... Read more

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When compared to the European standard of one nation, one language, Africa's 2,000 indigenous languages--not to mention its languages of colonial provenance, Arabic and numerous locally developed pidgins and creoles--would seem to pose insuperable problems of economic and political organization. The contributors to this volume, both African and European, examine the political consequences of multilingual societies which choose to develop certain languages over others.

Working from the perspectives of anthropology and language planning, the contributors argue that the terms of the language development debate are biased because they borrow from inappropriate European models of nationhood. In their exploration of such issues as government language planning and the effects of planning on communities, the contributors offer an insightful, interdisciplinary examination of the African language experience. ... Read more

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The book represents the results of a synchronic and diachronic cross-African survey of quotative indexes. These are linguistic expressions that signal in the ongoing discourse the presence of a quote (often called ""direct reported speech""). For this purpose, 39 African languages were selected to represent the genealogical and geographical diversity of the continent. The study is based primarily on this language sample, in particular on the analysis of quotative indexes and related expressions from a text corpus of each sample language, but also includes a wide range of data from the published literature on other African as well as non- African languages. It is the first typological investigation of direct reported discourse of this magnitude in a large group of languages. The book may thus serve as a starting point of similar studies in other geographical areas or even with a global scope, as well as stimulate more detailed investigations of particular languages. The results of the African survey challenge several prevailing cross-linguistic generalizations regarding quotative indexes and reported discourse constructions as a whole, of which two are of particular interest. In the syntactic domain, where reported discourse has mostly been dealt with under so- called sentential complementation, the study supports the minority view that direct reported discourse and also a large portion of indirect reported discourse show hardly any evidence for the claim that the reported clause is a syntactic object complement of some matrix verb. With respect to grammaticalization, the work concludes that speech verbs are, against common belief, not a frequent source of quotatives, complementizers, and other related markers. Far more frequent sources are markers of similarity and manner; generic verbs of equation, inchoativity, and action; and pronominals referring to the quote or the speaker. Another more general conclusion of the study is that especially direct reported discourse can be fruitfully analyzed as part of a larger linguistic domain called ""mimesis"". This comprises expressions which represent a state of affairs by means of enactment/ performance rather than with the help of ""canonical"" linguistic signs and includes, besides reported discourse, world-referring bodily gestures, ideophone-like signs, and non-linguistic sound. ... Read more

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This book offers a comparative perspective on language education policy and practice in Africa. Contributors to the volume draw from their teaching and research experiences in Botswana, Burundi, Tanzania, Zaire and Zimbabwe. Among the issues discussed are: language policies in Africa and how they affect classroom practice; the importance of taking into account the social, economic and political contexts that underpin language policy in education when discussing language problems in African education; the need to develop an interdisciplinary approach to both teaching and research; and the need for a critical perspective on teaching and researching language in Africa. ... Read more

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This title forms part of the revised and highly innovative Little Library Literacy Kit. ... Read more