Cascadilla Proceedings Project: Paper 1292


Home page

List of proceedings

Enter a document #:
Enter search terms:




Info for readers

Info for authors

Info for editors

Info for libraries



Order form

Shopping cart

Selected Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on African Linguistics: African Languages and Linguistics in Broad Perspectives
edited by John Mugane, John P. Hutchison, and Dee A. Worman

ISBN 1-57473-410-5 library binding
v + 283 pages
publication date: 2006
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA

Table of contents



Abstract

John Mugane
Necrolinguistics: The Linguistically Stranded
10-21 (complete pdf)

As with all natural life, languages either evolve or die. The decimation of language does not always mean that its people cease to exist; rather, these people may carry on with a language appropriated from ecologies hostile to the tongues of their origin. This leaves a situation where one is 'monolingual' yet speaks a language that is not one's own (Jacques Derrida, l989). In Eastern Africa (especially in Tanzania and Kenya) we nowadays can ask what it means to be a Chaga person who is a Swahili monolingual. This paper discusses the linguistic estrangement of East Africans (and by extension, sub-Sahara Africans) as an epiphenomenon of language shift.


Copyright © 2005 Cascadilla Proceedings Project. All rights reserved. To request permission to copy any elements from our pages, or to send comments or questions about our pages, please write to webmaster@cascadilla.com and make sure to provide the URL of the particular page. This page last updated 16 December 2005.