Several studies have described emotional expressions used by speakers from different linguistic and cultural areas all around the world. It has been demonstrated that there are universal cognitive bases for the metaphorical expressions that speakers use to describe their emotional status. There are indeed significant differences concerning the use of emotional expressions, not only across languages but also language-internally. Quite a number of studies focus on the language of emotions in several European languages and languages of West Africa, whereas not enough research has been done on this regard on Eastern African languages

In this paper, I invoke a sociolinguistic approach to complement the historical record in order to examine the use of the word utumwa itself as it has changed to reveal distinct class and gender connotations especially in northem Swahili communities. To explore utumwa is difficult. There is no consensus with regard to what the word and its derivatives mean that applies consistently, yet it is clear that there has been a meaning shift since the nineteenth century. This paper examines the construction and transformation of a non-Westem-molded form of service in Africa. Oral traditions and terminological variation will be brought to bear on an analysis of utumwa `slavery, service` as an important concept of social change in East Africa and, in particular, on the northern Kenya coast What this term, its derivatives, and other terms associated with it have come to mean to Swahili speakers and culture bearers will be seen to mirror aspects of the history of Swahili-speaking people fi-om the 1Oth-11th century to the present.

Swahili has a larger inventory of (more or less \"basic\") colour terms than most Bantu languages. The aim of this article is to present this colour terminology and to point out semantic, syntactic and morphological divergences. We also look at the etymology of the various colour terms and try to establish a chronology of the growth (and decline?) of Swahili colour terminology.

The political and economic problems of language policy in modern Africa have continued to remind us of the unforgettable historical fact of European colonialism. Today there are two major regions of Africa known as Anglo-phone and Franco-phone Africa. Much as many African leaders would have wished to discard the language of the former colonial power and substitute an indigenous language, this was problematic because in many cases there was not a single widely-spoken local language In some cases any attempt to raise the status of one indigenous language into a national language might have provoked wasteful inter-ethnic conflict.

Book Review: Mirza, Sarah & Margaret Strobel (ed.) 1989. Three Swahili Women. Life Histories from Mombasa. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. and Mirza, Sarah & Margaret Strobel (ed.) 1989. Wanawake watatu wa Kiswahili hadithi za maisha kutoka Mombasa, Kenya. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

It is heartening to note that the number of contemporary Swahili scholars whose work is receiving attention in books and university theses is steadily on the increase. This volume adds Abdilatif Abdalla to the list containing, so far as I know, the names of Muhammed Said Abdulla, Ebrahim Hussein and Euphrase Kezilahabi It is a volume on the poetry of Abdalla which Nyaigotti-Chacha writes with wrumth, understanding and a desire to place in perspective the poet`s works, in particular, Utenzi wa maisha ya Adamu na Hawaa (1971) and Sauti ya dhiki (1973) For this reason, perhaps, it tends to be less critical and more informative Nyaigotti--Chacha divides his work into four chapters. The first chapter introduces the reader to the author`s reasons for undertaking to Wiite it, originally his M A thesis at the University of Nairobi (1980) A bdefbut useful biography of Abdilatif Abdalla (ppJ-9), and a theoretical orientation to the author`s analysis of the works (pp 9--11) - socialistic in the Marxian mould - furnishes the reader with the background required fm a better understanding of what follows in the next two chapters which examine Utenzi and Sauti .. respectively The final chapter investigates the skills of Abdalla as a poet

The paper describes a computer system for testing the coherence and adequacy of dictionaries. The system suits also well for retiieving lexical material in context from computerized text archives Results are presented from a series of tests made with Kamusi ya Kiswahlli Sanifu (KKS), a monolingual Swahili dictionary.. The test of the intemal coherence of KKS shows that the text itself contains several hundreds of such words, for which there is no entry in the dictionary. Examples and frequency numbers of the most often occurring words are given The adequacy of KKS was also tested with a corpus of nearly one million words, and it was found out that 1.32% of words in book texts were not recognized by KKS, and with newspaper texts the amount was 2.24% The higher number in newspaper texts is partly due to numerous names occurring in news articles Some statistical results are given on frequencies of wordforms not recognized by KKS The tests shows that although KKS covers the modern vocabulary quite well, there are several ru·eas where the dictionary should be improved The internal coherence is far from satisfactory, and there are more than a thousand such rather common words in prose text which rue not included into KKS The system described in this article is au effective tool for `detecting problems and for retrieving lexical data in context for missing words.

Book Review of: Johannes Fabian (ed.), History from below. The vocabulary of Elisabethville. By Andre Yav. Text, Translations and interpretive essay (Creole Language Library, Vol.7). Edited, translated and commented by Johannes Fabian with assistance from Kalundi Mango. With linguistic notes by W. Schicho. Amsterdam- Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990. 236 pp. Review of Noel-Jacques Gueunier (ed.), La chroniques Swahilie du Cad/Umari de Mayotte. Edition critique. (Recherches et Documents, 2).(Madagascar\''): Etablissement d\''Enseignement Superieur des Lettres (CEDRATOM),1989.

As with other women`s garments, the kanga has always been closely linked with the perceptions and attitudes that the society has about women themselves. These perceptions and attitudes continue to shape and determine the place of women in their socio-cultural context. Just as women`s clothes are often taken to define, if partially, the beings that occupy them, similarly, in characteristically wearing certain garments and not others, women then assign to those garments what is perceived to be their `feminineness`. In Tanzania, the kanga indexes this `femininity` in a strong way, in spite of the fact that men also wear it.

Communicating the concepts and practices of development by way of translation across languages and cultures is always intertwined with linguistic and conceptual tensions which blur meaning, distort communicative intention and nurture conceptual ambiguity in target paradigms. In order to create linguistically viable and functional cross-cultural communication, translation has to rely on myriad strategies entailing mediating meaning, that is, rendering cross-cultural communications in ways that make intended meaning accessible and usable. Meanings of concepts and their practices are subtly nuanced and understood in different languages and cultures. Meaning nuances as such denote tensions between incongruent linguistic and cultural interests and in situations of such tensions, translation provides a forte for mediating both linguistic and cultural differences of the interacting languages. This paper seeks to argue that translations of specialized terminologies in any field of human activity do not always result in explicit meaning equivalences, but rather in meanings that are contextually situated and culturally nuanced. Translating in such situations requires that we identify and account for how people and language communities make meaning of concepts on the basis of their own circumstances, worldviews and in their local languages. Thus, lack of linguistic equivalencies and the presence of meaning indeterminacy in translation is not a reflection of translational failure but rather, a calling to attention of the differences in the perceptions and interpretations of concepts across languages, which in subtle ways represent modes of thinking and communicating (Hoppers 2002). Successful and functional translation of specialized terminologies must be underpinned by the realization that conceptual meanings are always situated in cultural, contextual and temporal terms. Their transmission through translation into ‘new’ contexts can never be straightforward but rather mediated.