Discusses the historical perspective relating to current problems facing mother tongue instruction in Sierra Leone and examines post-independence policies to highlight the institutional bases of mother tongue education and to consider causes of inertia and negative attitudes towards it since independence. (Author/VWL)

In describing the different types of codeswitching used in Dakar, this paper questions the frequent assumption that the use of two languages within a single conversation violates a norm. In Dakar there is a fluid and unmarked switching between Wolof and French, "Urban Wolof," that has become the most common mode of speech among urban…

We report four experiments designed to determine whether visual information affects judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events as well as speech events (the "McGurk effect"). Previous findings have shown only weak McGurk effects for nonspeech stimuli, whereas strong effects are found for consonants. We used click sounds that…

This monograph describes the language planning situation in Nigeria, one of the most multilingual countries in Africa. It is divided into four sections. The first section presents the language profile of Nigeria and provides a background of the general language situation in the country. The second section discusses language spread and use. It…

The status of the current standard African languages has been seriously undermined by factors such as the association of the standardisation process with colonial and neo-colonial structures, the lack of function of the standards and the rise of high status non-standard urban varieties. This paper describes the process leading to and some…

The paper analyses selected aspects of the codeswitching behaviour in a spoken corpus of the English of 326 people, all of them mother-tongue speakers of Xhosa (a local African language in South Africa), and all of whom would see themselves as Xhosa/English bilinguals. The corpus comprises approximately 550,000 transcribed words of spontaneous,…

This report provides data on standard and non-standard African language varieties occurring in urban areas of South Africa, drawn from nine smaller reports. It illustrates the language use patterns in black urban communities and describes the language varieties spoken in them. It was found that the impact of non-standard varieties on the use of…

This collection of eight papers and six "data squibs" (short research findings) are based on topics and languages under study by students and staff of the linguistics program of the University of North Dakota. The papers are: (1) "Dakota Sioux Objects" (Thomas M. Pinson); (2) "The Tapir: A Yanomami Text" (Irma…

A study investigated four issues in language usage in the Republic of Congo: (1) the extent of intergenerational language shift; (2) patterns in language repertoire; (3) patterns of language usage among four generations, four topics of conversation, and four different locations; and (4) language usage differences in age groups. The languages…

Three articles concerning the development of the rural press in Africa as a means of communicating and promoting literacy are included in this collection of reprints. "The Rural Press, Effective Rural Communication Medium" by Robert H. Sam-Kpakra describes this medium of communication by and for people living in areas with little or no…

A prefatory section discusses the background of Cameroonian pidgin English and presents the pidgin sound and alphabet. Fifteen lessons cover: greetings and leave-taking expressions; present, future, immediate future, unspecified past, simple past, conditional, and compound tenses; subject, possessive, emphatic, object, and relative pronouns;…

These lessons in Chichewa, the official language of Malawi, aim to enable the student to achieve working competency in the language in the shortest time possible. The "A" lessons in the book present basic grammatical patterns through explicit discussions of the patterns involved. The "B" lessons present language in use. They…

This handbook is a collection of readings intended to acquaint Peace Corps volunteers with the geography of Botswana, and the culture and daily living customs of the people. The introduction provides techniques to help students use the readings to improve their speaking skills. The first section of the text, the "OXFAM Section," contains…

A fair number of empirical, scholarly studies of West African languages have been published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the study of West African languages was in these years overtaken and nearly overwhelmed by a racist reaction. In the 1930's linguistics began to assume its substantially modern form and scholars…

This book sets out the sound systems of twelve Nigerian languages and English (both British and American) in order to give teachers a better understanding of why students who are speakers of these languages have difficulty in certain areas of English pronunciation. The Nigerian languages are: Efik, Etsako, Fula, Hausa, Ibgo, Ijo, Isoko, Itsekiri,…