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Sociolinguistic Research in Africa*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2014
Extract
Sociolinguistics is a recently developed subject of interdisciplinary study in the social sciences. Joseph H. Greenberg has indicated the scope of this field and its relevance to African studies in general in his contribution to Robert A. Lystad's The African World: A Survey of Social Research (New York, Praeger, 1965; p. 427). He includes in sociolinguistics such topics as “the relation of language differences to social class; the differential social roles of different languages co-existing in the same society; the development and spread of lingua francas as auxiliary languages in multilingual situations; the factors involved in the differential prestige ratings of languages; the role of language as a sign of ethnic identification; language in relation to nationalism; and problems of language policy, e.g., in education.” Africa, with its emerging nations, is an ideal area for such research, since the development of new nations entails problems which sociolinguistic studies are particularly fit to solve. Much of the linguistic work done in the colonial era and even in more recent years is inadequate, because of lack of reference to the relevant social context. With regard to this situation, the Committee on Sociolinguistic Research in Africa of the ARC considered it advisable to include in the January conference some topics which are usually handled under the headings of ethnolinguistics and psycholinguistics, e.g., the changes induced in one language by contact with another in the context of the general culture-contact situation, including its nonlinguistic aspects, and the problems of attitudes and behavior toward language.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1966
Footnotes
page 1 note *
Report of the conference sponsored by the African Research Committee and held January 27-28, 1966, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, Calif. The co-chairmen of the conference were Jack Berry and Joseph H. Greenberg.
References
page 3 note * For example, Ferguson, C. F., “The Language Factor in National Development,” in Rice, Frank A., ed., Study of the Role of Second Languages in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Washington, 1962), pp. 8–14 Google Scholar; W. A. Stewart, “An Outline of Linguistic Typology for Describing Multilingualism,” ibid., pp. 15-25; Fishman, Joshua A., “Varieties of Ethnicity and Varities of Language Consciousness,” in Georgetown University Monograph No. 18, Languages and Linguistics (Washington, 1965), pp. 69–79 Google Scholar; Kloss, Heinz, Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen von 1800 bis 1950 (Munich, 1952)Google Scholar.
page 4 note * By repertoire we mean the languages and language varieties employed by speakers and their situational distribution. For further details concerning this concept see Gumperz, John J., “Linguistic and Social Interaction in Two Communities,” American Anthropologist, LXVI, No. 6, Part 2 (12 1964), 137–153 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
page 5 note * The term “tribe” is no more a simple phenomenon for definitional purposes than is the term “dialect.” Both may be defined in terms of certain external criteria that vary along a contrastive developmental progression (tribe to nation, dialect to language), or they may be defined from within, in a folk taxonomie sense. Both of these progressions are discussed in Gumperz, John J., “Types of Linguistic Communities,” Anthropological Linguistics, IV, No. 1 (01 1962), 28–36 Google Scholar, and in Fishman, , “Varieties of Ethnicity and Varieties of Language Consciousness,” pp. 69–79 Google Scholar.
page 5 note ** “Register” is here used to designate a socially differentiated variety of language as distinct from a more basically regional variety or “dialect.” Dialects, too, may come to be registers (and, indeed, most dialects are) as their speakers are reacted to not only as regionally different but as refined or uncouth, learned or ignorant, affluent or impoverished on the basis of their speech.
page 6 note * Of similar importance are such (probably temporary) withdrawals from the pursuit of life on a larger social scale as nativism. Do revitalization movements inevitably lead to the glorification of classical linguistic repertoires, or is a full-fledged return to linguistic origins as impossible as it is in connection with other aspects of the original sociocultural fabric?