The language situation in Tanzania has changed greatly since the overwhelming spread of Swahili, the national language and one of the official languages of Tanzania. Previous studies have reported that Swahili has encroached on the domains of ethnic community languages (Legère 1992, Meka- cha 1993, Yoneda 1996), and its linguistic influence can easily be recognized throughout the ethnic community languages of Tanzania, even in remote areas. This situation has been described as ‘Swahilization’ of ethnic community languages (Yoneda 2010) or ‘language drift’ (Brenzinger & Marten 2016), as opposed to a clear language shift. This study describes the influence of Swahili on Tanzanian ethnic community languages, presenting specific examples to substantiate the previous studies (e.g. Yoneda 2010, Marten & Petzell 2016, Rosendal & Mapunda 2017, among others). It shows that the language shift that Batibo (1992) expected has not taken place. Instead, people have kept their ethnic community languages, developing a new type of language use to enable meaning-making for the community in this changing world. The ongoing process in an ethnic community consists of Swahilization of their language, rather than its disappearance through a complete shift away from its use. In addition, the influence of language contact between Swahili and ethnic community languages is not a one-way effect; Swahili is also affected by the various ethnic community languages. As a result, each language is forced to undergo ‘-ization’ by the other and their differences are, not only sociolinguistically but also structurally and lexically convergent.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:70968 |
| Date | 15 June 2020 |
| Creators | Kutsukake, Sayaka, Yoneda, Nobuko |
| Contributors | Universität Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | 1614-2373, urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-709585, qucosa:70958 |
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