In a paper which appeared two years ago, I outlined some of the main features of the contemporary taarab world in Zanzibar, which is undergoing great changes due to economic, social and cultural factors (Aiello Traoré 2004a). A recent development that I highlighted is the vanishing of women\''s taarab clubs. The greater participation of women within the groups of taarab asilia has strated, in my view, an interesting confrontation between the tendency of conversation of the codes which are identified as \"traditional\" and the innovations proposed by female members in music and performance, as well as in the production of lyrics, an area where many women are now regularly involved. I will concentrate my analysis on the taarab lyrics being composed by Zanzibari women, which are of great interest because of the variety of cultural and social backgrounds, themes, techniques and poetical sensitivities.

In contrast to the \''classical Islamic tendi\'' where the action as well as the setting is commonly detached from the environmental context of the Swahili coast, the Liyongo poems show an abundance of detailed descriptions and enumerative reviews of material items crucial and characteristic of the particular East African shares of Swahili culture. Frequently reference is also made to the natural environment as plants and their fruits play a prominent role as requisits of both the Swahili natural and cultural setting. Apart from being exploited as central requisite and being referred to as material source in the poems, plants are also extensively used for similes. The Liyongo poems are full of culturally metaphors which are context-dependent and sometimes render the text rather obscure. Without denying that there is, of course, also contemporary poetry employing plants as subject matter or metaphors, in this article I focus on two thematically close poems which we vaguely have to classify as \"old\" while not being able to give exact dates. Although the article suggests to be a thematic view on Swahili poetry, it is primarily a text edition of two poems, the \"Song of the Mjemje\" and the \"Shairi la Mtambuu\", which are both presented together with a critical apparatus.

Children''s literature affects the child''s socialisation process, including the shaping the gender roles. But despite this, up to now children have featured less in gender scholarship. Against this backround, this paper seeks to critically interrogate the physical, social, economic and political manifestations of masculinities in selected Kiswahili children\''s books from Kenya. By analysing these works, we hope to demonstrate that power and ideological aspects of masculinites are rooted at childhood. Since special attention will be paid to the ideological and power basis of the masculinities, the analysis of the selected works is done in the encompassing prism of Critical Discourse Analysis revealing hegemonic masculinities.

Swahili has been moulded in a long process by many factors over many centuries (Chiraghdin & Mnyampala 1977, Khalid 1977, Nurse & Spear 1985, Shariff 1973, Whiteley 1969). One of the latest chapters in its history is the standardisation and implementation as national and official language in Tanzania after independence.The National Swahili Council was given the task of further developing as well as guarding the standard form in textbooks for schools, in literature, in music texts, and in radio and television broadcasting. However, while Standard Swahili was taught in schools and writtenin books and newspapers, people in town quarters where Swahili was spoken developed and used a colloquial style of speech by enriching the standard form with “slang” expressions and lexemes.Recently, many people in Tanzania speak of “lugha za mitaani” (‘languages of the town quarters’, or ‘street languages’), using the plural to point to the fact that there exists a whole range of varieties of non-standard language, depending on local and social factors. The more recent development of lugha za mitaani reflects very much the social, economic, and political liberalisation in Tanzania, which started in the late 1980s. Little research has been done on the complex of these locally coloured colloquial Swahili variants, and we hope that our work will prepare the ground for further, more detailed studies. Since we acknowledge the existence of variants, we will use Lugha ya Mitaani (henceforth abbreviated LyM) to denote the phenomenon as such, whereas we will apply the term Lugha za Mitaani (henceforth abbreviated LzM) when we speak of the complex of variants.The primary characteristic of lugha za mitaani in general is that they deviate from Standard Kiswahili by their special lexicon which is in a constant process of rapid renovation. This is done by way of deliberate manipulation of existing lexical items, as an expression of an attitude of jocular and provocative violation of linguistic norms.Looking into the linguistic makeup, it is quite clear that Lugha ya Mitaani is not an independent language, but a sociolect or register of Kiswahili. The geographical centre of the ongoing creation and recreation of linguistic elements is Dar es Salaam. From there the linguistic items spread very quickly into the interior and reach even remote places such as Nachingwea (Lindi region) and Kurio (Dodoma region), where we conducted our research. The remarkably high mobility of the youth in Tanzania plays a crucial role in this process, but also the media, especially music, radio, video, and the yellow press contribute a lot to the rapid diffusion of Lugha ya Mitaani-terms. This article is based on research conducted in Tanzania between 2000 and 2006 and approaches the phenomenon of Lugha ya Mitaani from different angles. A substantial part of the field research was lexicographic in nature, complemented by ethnographic methods (see chapter two). The analysis focuses on form, function, mediation and general comparative sociolinguistic issues of Lugha ya Mitaani.:1. Introduction: Lugha ya Mitaani 1 1.1 History of colloquial non-standard Swahili speech forms 1 1.2 Special forms of Lugha ya Mitaani 4 1.2.1 Campus Swahili 5 1.2.2 Secret codes derived from Swahili 5 1.2.3 Lugha ya vijana wa vijiweni 6 1.2.4 The language of daladalas 8 1.3 Overview of the article 9 2. Methodology 10 2.1 Field research 10 2. 2 Acknowledgements 12 2. 3 The making of the dictionary 12 3. Sociolinguistics of Lugha ya Mitaani 13 3.1 Lugha ya Mitaani as youth language 13 3.2 Knowledge, use and attitudes 14 3.3 Diachronic aspects of Lugha ya Mitaani 17 4. Lexical elaboration 18 4.1 Humans and social relations 20 4.1.1 Humans 20 4.1.2 Women 21 4.1.3 Men 23 4.1.4 Homosexuals 23 UTA REUSTER-JAHN & ROLAND KIEßLING 4.1.5 Social relationship 24 4.1.6 Social status 24 4.2 Communication 24 4.3 Body & Appearance 25 4.4 Economy, Money & Occupation 26 4.5 Sex 27 4.6 Drugs & Alcohol 28 4.7 Movement & Vehicles 28 4.8 Evaluative terms 29 4.9 Experience 30 4.10 Trouble & Violence 30 4.11 Crime & Police 30 4.12 Food 31 4.13 Disease 31 4.14 Geography & Place 32 4.15 Education 32 4.16 Sports 33 4.17 Weapons 33 4.18 Cultural innovation 33 4.19 Time 33 5. The poetic making of Lugha ya Mitaani 34 5.1 Hyperbole and dysphemism 35 5.2 Humoristic effects 37 5.3 Metaphors 39 LUGHA YA MITAANI IN TANZANIA 5.4 Cognitive motivation 41 5.5 Onomastic synecdoche 43 5.6 Multiple semantic extensions 44 5.7 Folk etymologies 45 5.8 Phraseologisms 46 5.9 Manipulations of form 50 5.10 Donor languages 52 6. The construction of youth identities in discourse practice 53 7. Lugha ya Mitaani and the media 60 8. Lugha ya Mitaani in a historical perspective 66 8.1 Lugha ya Mitaani in contrast to other phenomena of language birth 67 8.1.1 Pidginisation and creolisation 67 8.1.2 Codeswitching 67 8.1.3 Lugha ya Mitaani and Sheng 70 8.2 Semantic change 75 8.3 Sociosymbolic change 76 9. Conclusion 78 Abbreviations 79 Bibliography 80 Appendix 1: Lugha ya Mitaani texts written by John Degera 88 Appendix 2: Diachronic change in the campus lexicon at Teacher Training College Nachingwea 90 Appendix 3: Dictionary of Lugha ya Mitaani 93

This paper examines issues that emerge in the attempts that have been made to develop the national language terminology in kenya by committees, Kiswahili enthusiasts and Kiswahili scholars. Attention is drawn to the fact that the problematic national language policy that emerges from the national language`s social history is an important backround to the issues that are discussed. The issues emerging in these attempts are examined in the prism of an encompassing terminology development framework that is synthesised from terminology development literature from different areas of the world. This framework views terminology development as a process that entails: formation of a language institute, setting up of goals, the actual engineering of the terms, the mode of dissemination and evaluation. The case of Kenya demonstrates that the attempts have so far consisted of isolated steps of terminology development rather than the whole set of required action.

Book review: In 2004 the long awaited second edition of the Standard Swahili - Swahili Dictionary, edited by the Insitute of Kiswahili Research (TUKI) at the University of Dar es Salaam, appeared. With this publication TUKI has once again confirmed its leading role in the field of Swahili lexicography in East Africa. it is up to date, containing new words and phrases which are in use in East Africa in order to cope with the development in science and technology, society, economics and globalization.

Researchers in the field of Swahili studies have noted the need for a comprehensive, detailed catalogue of the Swahili manuscripts at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London). They have had occasion to make this recommendation in print (see, for example, Omar and Frankl 1994 and Frankl 1999) and - presumably many more times, and to no specified audience - in life, as they pored over unitemised or inaccurately labelled files of eminent scholars in the field. It is precisely this need for a comprehensive, widely accessible catalogue that the Swahili Manuscripts Project at SOAS was established, in October 2001, to address. In this article, the present authors undertake to describe the catalogue being created and to discuss problems they have encountered and observations they have had opportunity to make in the course of their work.

Le titre de notre article est une formulation métaphorique de la problématique qui est discutée, partant du principe qu´un des fondements d´une vie de couple harmonieuse est une bonne enente entre les partenaires.

The aim of this article is to analyse allegories in the first four novels of the Swahili-writing author Euphrase Kezilahabi who is one of the most renowned authors in contemporary Tanzania. This analysis will be based on allegory as it is defined in literary studies. What is aimed at with this study is a hermeneutical interpretative approach to the allegories found in Kezilahabi`s early novels which shall be based on as much contexts as available: text-context, intertextual context, cultural context, historical context, only to mention the most important (cf. Mohlig 1994: 257). The text-context or co-text, however, is considered as the most reliable basis of such a study.

Although it has spread mainly as a lingua franca, Kiswahili, Kenya`s national language, is increasingly becoming the language of intercultural communication. Most interestingly, Kiswahili is catching up as the medium of intra-group conversation in many rural up-country areas in Kenya. Not only do most Kenyan women wear lesos and kangas bearing Kiswahili proverbial sayings but the youth form different language communication almost invariably converse and interact through the medium of share or just Kiswahili. This brief paper sets out to speculate on the nature of Swahili lexical diffusion in up-country Kenya. Observation is made of the plorification of common Swahili names in both urban and rural areas far from the Swahili speaking coast. The paper argues that given the ever-growing tendency for non-Swahili speaking Kenyan up-country communities to adopt and use Swahili names represents a forum of intercultural communication. There seems to be a deliberate socio-cultural and political preference for Swahili names not just to denote borrowed Swahili concepts in the up-country communities but to forge a `nationalistic`culture as opposed to a localized and ethnic culture.