Language in Africa Volume 3, Number 1 (2022)

AFRICAN LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPES: FOCUS ON ENGLISH Abstract: English is the official or co-official language in 21 African nations. Out of these the linguistic landscape analysis here focuses on two countries, that is Namibia and Tanzania. In the latter case, the national language Swahili enjoys de facto the same status as English which, however, for the number of competent speakers is a minority language in this East African country, Namibia and elsewhere in Africa. The paper deals mainly with the English use in various domains, as evidenced in billboard texts, shop signs, on murals, buildings and more. It describes the top-down (originating from central institutions) or bottom-up (grassroots) approach to shaping the linguistic landscape in public. From this perspective the paper demonstrates the high prestige of English. ________________________________________ THE KAKABE DIALECTAL CONTINUUM: A LEXICOSTATISTICAL STUDY Abstract: Kakabe, an understudied language in Guinea (Mokole < Western Mande < Mande < Niger-Congo), is spoken by several ethnic groups, mainly of inferior social status, most of which are bilingual in Pular. There are four dialects of Kakabe: Northern (the Kankalabe area), Central (villages to the north-west, east and south-east of Timbo), Kuru-Maninka and Wure-Kaba Maninka. The Northern and Central dialects are close to each other linguistically, their speakers refer to themselves as “Kakabe, and these dialects can be regarded as comprising “nuclear Kakabe; meanwhile, the speakers of Kuru-Maninka and Wure-Kaba Maninka reject being identified as “Kakabe, and their varieties have far fewer loans from Pular. A lexicostatistical study based on the Swadesh 100-item wordlist has been carried out. It confirmed the preliminary hypothesis of a particular affinity between the “core dialects and showed that the other two dialects are further removed from them, but not as distant as the Mogofin (Mixifore) language spoken to the south of Boke (extreme NW part of the Republic of Guinea). Therefore, from a linguistic viewpoint, the Wure-Kaba Maninka and Kuru-Maninka varieties can be regarded as Kakabe dialects despite the fact that their speakers do not consider themselves Kakabe. ________________________________________ THE NOMINAL SYSTEM OF KIRUNDI (BANTU, JD62) AND KISWAHILI (BANTU, G42): A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS Abstract: The objective of this article is to compare the noun systems of Kirundi and Standard Kiswahili in order to help bilingual users of Kirundi and Kiswahili to understand the internal organization and functioning of the noun in the two languages. A comparative approach based on contrastive analysis led to two main results. On the one hand, at the level of similarities, nominal prefixes are the means of expression of nominal classes, nominal genders, the mechanism of the augmentative/diminutive and serve to control grammatical agreement. On the other hand, at the level of the remarkable differences, these have been highlighted: the system of nominal genders in Kiswahili is simplified compared to that of Kirundi because Kirundi has more retentions of Proto-Bantu than does Kiswahili, the morphosyntactic agreement is of mechanical type in Kirundi while it combines semantically motivated and mechanical models in Kiswahili. The expression of the augmentative/diminutive is done differently in Kirundi and Kiswahili in second-degree if we take into account the singular/plural pairing pattern in the two languages. IDEOPHONES IN THE KRU LANGUAGE FAMILY Abstract: In many grammatical descriptions, ideophones are often ignored. In this paper, I attempt to do a preliminary study of ideophones in the Kru language family (Niger-Congo). Though data is limited, I give an overview of various phonological, morphophonological, syntactic and semantic features of this word class, as well as make some initial observations of ideophone use in discourse. Primarily a descriptive study, I try to interact with some major claims in the literature (Blench 2010a; 2010b; Bodomo 2006; Childs 1996; 2001; 2003; 2019; Dingemanse 2012; 2019; Welmers 1973), especially in regard to African languages.