This paper discusses the problems caused by the linguistic features used by speakers as the basis of determining their social identity. The concept of identity is broad and closely related with socio-cultural and eco-spheres environment of the speakers. The speaker’s identity is determined by employing both social and linguistic features in the overall analysis. The linguistic features include the whole range of language use, from phonetic features to lexical units, syntactic structures and family names. This paper therefore argues that the speaker’s linguistic features pose some problems in determining the speaker’s identity. The first problem concerns the concepts of language and dialect which are defined differently by different scholars. The second problem refers to multilingual speakers with diversified linguistic competence, and lastly, it has been noted with concern that some speakers use artificial family names which are not from their ethnic origin, hence complicating the process of determining the identity of the speakers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:bsz:15-qucosa-90552 |
| Date | 16 August 2012 |
| Creators | Msanjila, Yohana P. |
| Contributors | University of Dar es Salaam, Institute of Swahili Studies, Universität Mainz, Institut für Ethnologie und Afriastudien |
| Publisher | Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:article |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Swahili Forum 18 (2011), S. 87-96 |
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