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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. |