Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / This ethnographic study is intended to give voice to the feeling of those who value and depend on indigenous medicine and to examine how it has worked for the Luo. In this thesis we investigate how one acquired the skills of becoming a medicine man or woman. We examine how the medicine man or woman uses art to carry out the healing practices. We also look at how the qualification was manifested on the part of the practitioner. Special emphasis is made on language as an art, used by the patient and the doctor. Such components of art and language as myths, legends, folk tales, metaphors and songs of the Luo are looked into especially with a view to evaluating their contribution towards causes of illness and healing.

This study mainly investigates whether language variation due to sociolinguistic stratification in Western urban speech communities is similar to that in rural African communities, using as a case study the multilingual Chasu of Same district in Kilimanjaro Tanzania. Primarily, the study addresses the question of language use and variation in a multilingual context in which an analysis of the frequency of occurrence of lexical borrowings and code-switching from Swahili and English is undertaken. The study firstly investigates whether the key sociolinguistic variables of social class, gender, style, age and educational levels have as much bearing in explaining the occurrence of code-switching and lexical borrowings in multilingual Chasu. Secondly, the study examines whether social stratification correlates with the phonological variables (s) and (z) in Chasu, along lines established in Western variationist sociolinguistics. In order to obtain a valuable representative sample of data, the 'Labovian' model of the sociolinguistic interview incorporating narratives of personal experience was used. Other complementary techniques such as participatory observation and rapid surveys with wordlists and questionnaires are employed as well. In the context of language contact, the analysis demonstrates that highly educated, young and middle-class speakers are the ones who borrow words and code-switch from word to sentence levels from Swahili and sometimes from English. Through VARBRUL and Rbrul analysis of phonological variation this study reveals further that, while in Western urban communities social factors particularly social class - have significant impact on language variation and change, in Chasu society internal structural factors are the ones that are more influential. Education attainment is a prime external factor in regulating the use of standard variants [z] and [s] against non-standard variants [ð] and [θ] respectively. However, such external social factors are significant only when associated with syllable position, vowels following the variables or the status of the lexical item-i.e. whether a word is borrowed from Swahili or native Chasu words.

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Bibliography: leaves 90-92. / The body of this thesis contains two main parts. The first (section 3) is a critical linguistic analysis of a selection of political speeches (which I have called 'policy narratives') delivered by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the period February 2002 - October 2003. I have sought, with reference to Aristotle and other writers on persuasion, to delineate the rhetorical devices employed by Sharon and his speechwriters, and to demonstrate that one of their most important functions is to contribute to and enhance the overall climate of fear among the Israeli people, for the furtherance of Sharon's own political goals. I focus primarily on the speeches surrounding and leading up to the March 2002 announcement of 'Operation Defensive Shield', which was described by Palestinians and international aid workers as the harshest military assault on the WBGS since the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. After examining the policy narratives I provide another representation of the 'reality on the ground' experienced by the Palestinian population at the receiving end of Sharon's 'operations'. The second (section 4) is a linguistic analysis of the 'narrative of personal experience' of a civilian reservist - Moshe Nissim - who was recruited in April 2002, at the height of 'Defensive Shield', to drive a D-9 bulldozer through the West Bank's Jenin refugee camp. Nissim, who seems motivated by his own personal fears and failures, apparently sees in Jenin the long-awaited opportunity to redeem himself. Although he does not appear to have been inspired by the arguments and themes of Sharon's narratives, the overall atmosphere of fear and hatred that is legitimised and given weight by Sharon in his speeches, sets the stage for Nissim to act on his darkest urges and later to be considered by himself and others as a hero for having done so. I contend that Israeli right wing hegemony both feeds and is fed by fear.

This dissertation investigates the social meanings of Afrikaans rhotic variation in a town in the South Cape region of the Western Cape Province in South Africa. The study combines approaches to 'place as location' (traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics) and 'place as meaning' (ethnography and linguistic anthropology) to explore the relationship between geographical place, local social meanings and linguistic variation. Theoretically, I make use of the concept of indexicality, following Silverstein's (2003) indexical orders and Eckert's (2008) indexical fields. To date, there is no previous study that explores Afrikaans variation from these perspectives. The study therefore contributes to the development of Afrikaans linguistics. The participants are residents of Houtiniquadorp, which was a mission station in South Africa's colonial era and declared a Coloured residential area during apartheid. In South Africa, place has been politicised due to colonialism and apartheid. I argue that the racialisation of places contributes to Houtiniquadorpers' sense of locality and belonging. The linguistic form I focus on is Afrikaans /r/. Afrikaans phonetics texts describe alveolar-r [r] as standard, and uvular-r ([ʀ] or [ʁ]; bry-r) as a non-standard, regional feature. In Houtiniquadorp, [ʀ] and [r] variants of the (r) variable are used. My data collection methods were semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. The linguistic variants were quantified from the interview data and description tasks. The qualitative data analysis focused on the participants' narratives about places, lived experiences, and meta-linguistic commentary. I discuss three different sets of results, all of which investigate how people in Houtiniquadorp use Afrikaans /r/ to index locality, belonging, and other forms of social meanings, particularly in the context of social and geographic mobility. I analyse metalinguistic comments, the frequency use of rhotic variants, and the use of variants in interaction. Uvularr forms part of many Houtiniquadorpers' repertoires, and the participants show varying degrees of awareness of the sound as locally, and socially, meaningful. The results show that while uvular-r is an emplaced sound (i.e. a regional stereotype or dialect feature), the sound has various other non-place meanings that index macro-social categories such as residential status, gender and age. Finally, by looking at participants who use both variants, I argue that they use variation to index meaningful moments during the interview interactions.

This PhD thesis describes and compares the grammars of Cisukwa, Cindali and Cilambya (SuNdaLa) - three closely related varieties spoken in the northern region of Malawi. The analysis of the language data collected in this research project focuses on the phonological and morpho-syntactic systems of the SuNdaLa varieties by examining variation among them and by identifying the shared linguistic features. Within this research project, the linguistic distance among the three varieties has been analysed and suggestions have been made as to whether the SuNdaLa varieties should be considered as being three dialects of one language or as constituting three distinct languages. The study also places the SuNdaLa cluster into a wider context of the Bantu languages spoken in the region and more generally. Quantitative and qualitative language data was collected in the field from "native" speakers of all three varieties. The SuNdaLa survey included the collection of a comparative word list by using a questionnaire that was designed based on existing wordlists, such as „Swadesh 100 word list‟ (Swadesh 1955) as well as the SIL Comparative African Wordlist (Snider and Roberts 2006). Language data on the morpho-sytax and phonology was collected in elicitation sessions as well as by recording natural conversations among the key language consultants as well as their conversations with other community members.

This study investigates the grammar and semantics of verbs that describe separation events in Asante Twi (Akan), a Kwa (Niger-Congo) language spoken in Ghana. It adopts a constructionist approach combined with a 'monosemic bias' perspective in the analysis. It theoretical starting point is that contextual interpretations are derived from the interaction of the prototypical meanings of verbs and their arguments. A multi-method approach was used in data gathering: (i) compilation of verbs that code separation as well as sentences in which they are used from literary texts (bibles, and novels) and dictionaries. (ii) Descriptions of separation activities elicited using video-stimuli Bohnemeyer et al. (2001), 61 video clips depicting cutting and breaking events (fieldmanuals.mpi.nl) supplemented by 82 clips created by the author involving culturally appropriate objects (Agyepong 2015). (iii) Spontaneous narratives, and procedural discourses about cultural events/practices involving separation e.g. cooking, palm-wine tapping. (iv) Introspection based on the author's native speaker intuitions. The main findings of the thesis are that there are two central verbs in the separation domain in Akan: twá 'to cut' and bú 'to break'. There are, in addition, more specialized verbs for specific types of object separation, e.g. nú 'harvest palm fruit by poking with a bladed instrument' or pòrò 'to pluck fruit'. The choice of a particular verb in context is determined by the following parameters: instrument involvement, manner of separation, physical properties of entities as well as the end-state result of the situation. Crucially, the thesis further addresses the challenge of how to account for the interpretation of the typical as well as atypical argument realization patterns associated with the separation verbs. It shows how constructional meanings contribute to the interpretation of collocations of the verbs. Other principles such as coercion, addition and suppression of components in the lexical semantics of both the verbs and its arguments as well as cultural implicatures are invoked in the compositional process of calculating the contextual interpretations.

Includes bibliographical references. / This study is based on interviews and recorded word-lists from 44 young (under 25) black South Africans who have been educated in the former white school system, studying at the University of Cape Town. It considers their life experiences, particularly as regards their schooling. It also investigates their attitudes to language, both English and their ‘home languages’, as well as analysing their accents, and attempts to find correlations between accents and attitudes. It first provides an overview of how this demographic is represented in the literature and the media, and then examines the history of black education in the country in order to explain why a ‘white school’ background and accent have become desirable now that they are attainable. Thus it shows how black education was for decades made deliberately inferior to white, so that the ‘opening’ of schools to all races in the early 1990s meant that those black parents who could afford it sent their children to the former white schools.

This thesis makes a contribution to the study of cultural and language maintenance and shift among minority communities in South Africa. It explores the contact situation and implications thereof of the Zanzibari speech community in the post-apartheid Rainbow Nation South Africa. It discusses identity, language, culture and religion of the community against the backdrop of the Simunye (We are one) rhetoric. This thesis also contributes to the documentation of the history and creates an awareness of existence of the Makhuwa and Emakhuwa as a minority language in South Africa. The data was collected using the triangulation method to effectively capture the relevant information and to establish whether language shift is taking place within the community and to what extent. A household survey was used to ascertain whether the home or heritage language was passed down from generation to generation in this intimate, family domain. While the Makhuwa believe that a child learns the home language through the mother’s breastmilk, the survey revealed that the socialisation and continuation of the language was limited. It also looked at whether children were passive recipients in the acquisition of the spoken language/s in the household or whether they played a role in the negotiation of the language chosen in the household. The findings revealed that in the pre-1994 period, the community and parents determined the language of choice in the community and the household. The children had to follow the rules decided by their parents and the Elders in the community. However, there was a shift in the period after 1994 with the children playing a role in the language choice of the household. Interviews were used to capture the historical background of the community and provide a “backdrop” for the research and discussion on maintenance and shift in the community. The interview method was used to provide a better understanding of why the case of the Makhuwa community in Durban is unique and adds to the discussion on minority immigrant communities and their situation in terms of cultural and language maintenance. The research found that the process of language shift had taken place over a long period of time in the community. The gradual shift that had taken place was part of the result of the contact situation between Emakhuwa and both minority and majority languages in the KwaZulu Natal region. However, language shift had been more rapid in the last decade, causing alarm amongst the Elders in the community. The research looked at both cultural and language maintenance or shift in the Zanzibari community of Durban. The findings revealed that while language shift is taking place in the community, and even thought the English language is used more often in the household and cultural domain, the Makhuwa culture is maintained.

Bibliography: p. 335-366. / Following the general model outlined in Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968), this study is a contribution to the historiography of Afrikaans from a variationist perspective, investigating the patterns of linguistic variability in the context of the early standardisation of Afrikaans. The work is based on a newly collected historical corpus of private documents which includes letters and diaries from 136 individuals (written between 1880 and 1922), and can be said to represent acrolectal and mesolectal usage. Several morphosyntactic, morpholexical and syntactic variables were investigated: loss of person and number distinctions in the present tense paradigm, loss of the infinitive, regularisation of the past participle, loss of the preterite, loss of gender, the emergence of a new system of adjective inflection and of a new pronoun system, the so-called 'double' negation, infinitive clauses, the use of objective vir, and the periphrastic possessive with se. The quantitative analysis of these variables makes use of a variety of methods: descriptive techniques such as distribution analysis, implicational scaling, cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling and principal components analysis, as well as inferential statistics such as the chi-square test. Variation is furthermore described from a code-switching perspective. As a study in historical sociolinguistics this dissertation is also concerned with the epistemological aspects of socio-historical research, in particular the role of speaker agency in historical explanations, the 'measurement' of the extralinguistic variables in sociolinguistic research, the nature of the relationship between sociolinguistic and social theory, and in general the ontological status of our explanatory and descriptive concepts and taxonomies. While traditionally historiographers of Afrikaans have argued that there existed a sharp linguistic and functional distinction between Afrikaans and Dutch from the mid 18th century, the patterns of variability described for the corpus indicate the existence of a complex dialect continuum (rather than diglossia) until the early 20th century. The results of the quantitative analysis suggest furthermore that the process of linguistic change was slower than hitherto assumed, and variation patterns described for the late 18th century were still found to exist in the corpus. Such continuities challenge the conventional dating of the emergence of Afrikaans as a new language or dialect (characterised by almost complete morphological regularisation and a cluster of innovative syntactic features) to around 1800. As regards the standardisation of Afrikaans the study shows that from the 1850s a relatively uniform model of what constituted the 'vernacular' (or ‘Afrikaans, as it came to be known) existed as a well-defined entity in the popular consciousness, while the actual language use of many speakers remained rather more variable. Increasingly, linguistic practices which were not in line with the propagated model of 'Afrikaans' were identified by the contemporary metalinguistic discourse (which was strongly marked by 19th century cultural nationalism) as unauthentic and thus undesirable. The diffusion of the new standard is shown to have followed the path typical for modern standard languages, i.e. via the socially (and geographically) mobile professional class or intelligentsia. After about 1914 the new standard was widely diffused, and had replaced other Netherlandic varieties in many private documents.