Language Matters : Studies in the Languages of Southern Africa - latest Issue

A salient feature of this eleventh special issue on “Language Politics in Africa” is that most of the contributions deal with language political issues beyond southern Africa. We trust that this will inspire even more authors to help us establish Language Matters as an expert forum where we reflect on topical sociolinguistic issues on the African continent. The value of the contributions in the current issue is that they reflect on organised language politics, an aspect that has been somewhat neglected in previous special issues.

This article uses a case study to interrogate the politics of French in Africa. It examines French involvement in the Rwandan Civil War (1990–1994), and argues that by conceptualising institutions such as La Francophonie as “cultural” bodies, we risk obscuring their properly political functions. Through a consideration of the history of language in French colonial thought, and the translation of that history into the post-colonial idea of francophonie, the article foregrounds the political and economic benefits that France has received as a result of the spread of its language and culture. The article also provides an account of the role played by language and culture in France’s decision to support the Habyarimana government in a war that culminated in genocide. Ultimately, it argues for the importance of recognising linguistic organisations as political entities.

In 2018 there were demands for the creation of new regional states in Ethiopia by ethno-linguistic groups seeking greater self-determination. Two examples of this were the Sidama and Wolaita, with some members of the latter advocating for the creation of an “Omotic Peoples” regional state. The idea of Omotic unification is not new to southern Ethiopia. When the amalgamated language of Wogagoda was introduced in the 1990s, the peoples of the region rallied in opposition against government. This article explores the intersection of language, politics and power during that period, which resulted in the withdrawal of a language policy and the creation of new, disintegrated administrative structures. Drawing upon historical experiences, this article reflects on the role of ethno-linguistic identities and their implications for contemporary decision making about languages of instruction and administrative boundaries. The results provide insight into situational contexts that may enable or constrain bottom-up and top-down language policy processes.

This article investigates the motivation behind the Tonga people’s initiation of the language revitalisation process. It is based on research conducted in the Binga District, which was the epicentre of the Tonga language revitalisation project in the Zambezi Valley. The participants in the study were purposively sampled from various stakeholders in the project, inter alia, traditional chiefs, officials from the education sector, former and serving employees of NGOs, members of the Tonga Language and Culture Committee (TOLACCO) and Chairpersons of the Zimbabwe Indigenous Languages Promotion Association (ZILPA). The article identifies a number of socio-cultural and religious factors that motivated and propelled the Tonga people to embark on a project of language revitalisation. Within the theoretical framework of Human Needs Theory, the article critically analyses how these factors motivated the Tonga community to embark upon their language revitalisation initiative.

This article reviews published research on South African learner corpora, focussing on available corpora and a synthesis of research themes and findings. Previous corpora for English amount to 4.2 million words of undergraduate writing and 1.85 million words for Afrikaans. Research yielded findings on cohesion, coherence, metadiscourse, grammatical features, vocabulary, spelling errors, and learner errors. Cross-cutting trends indicate the overuse of high frequency functional categories and high frequency lexical resources, and similarities between student writing and spoken conversation. Overall, this article documents the sizable body of research that has been conducted to date.

Following a highly successful International Association of Forensic Linguists (IAFL) Conference held in 2018 on the theme of this book, this first publication on the niche area of forensic linguistics in Africa and beyond is long overdue. This publication is of much importance in that it not only advances new themes intersecting multiple disciplines on language and the law, but it showcases original research from Africa as well as from other areas such as the Caribbean and Australia. The field of forensic linguistics is virtually unknown in Africa, yet it is already a widely studied subject area in countries such as the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Australia. In this regard, this contribution is innovative, as it not only represents already established interdisciplinary frameworks, but goes beyond these topics to include novel African contributions made on criminal justice, law enforcement and criminology.