Bilingual writers and the syntactic elaboration of Swahili

Abstract

Summary The above discussion has examined one of the many mechanisms involved in the large‐scale process of the syntactic elaboration of Swahili. The facilitators of this mechanism are bilingual writers, particularly journalists, competent in both Swahili and English and obliged to cope linguistically with the cognitive demands of a rapidly changing society. They are maximizing the syntactic potential of the relative clause pattern most akin, in its constituent structure, to English relative clauses. This pattern itself developed via a grammaticalization process originating at least as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, and probably much earlier. The role of bilingual writers can be seen as part of a socio‐culturally motivated acceleration of ongoing processes of linguistic and stylistic change in the Swahili language.