Language In Zimbabwe Research Articles

Language Raising, Empowerment and Development: The Case of Shona Language at Great Zimbabwe University

Many academic papers have been written by African scholars calling for the greater use of African languages in all facets of communication in Africa. Politicians in many African countries have called for a greater role for African languages in developmental programmes in Africa. This research attempts to move away from the usual moaning that has characterised many conferences on African linguistics where a lot of time is spent on lambasting the lack of political will in implementing language policies that promote African languages. This study argues that the best way to promote indigenous languages is not to spend too much time “talking about promotion of indigenous languages” but to provide tangible products that enable the speakers of these languages to transmit traditional as well as modern knowledge in these languages. Such products include dictionaries, glossaries, electronic corpora and other reference works. This paper looks at one of these developments that have significantly contributed to the promotion and development of indigenous languages in Zimbabwe. It discusses the efforts by one institution that has played a major role in the promotion of indigenous languages in Zimbabwe, that is, the Great Zimbabwe University in Masvingo, Zimbabwe. The main focus is on the challenges faced by this institution and the strategies being employed in the efforts to develop terminologies that equip the indigenous languages with the abstractive powers that are needed for people to be able to teach all Shona courses at tertiary level in the medium of Shona. The article argues that the use of these languages at tertiary level will result in them playing a much bigger role at national level.

The politics of the English language in Zimbabwe

This article explores the politics of the English language in Zimbabwe, as reflected in the country's language policy, language practices and language scholarship. English is the country's sole official language. The majority of Zimbabweans who speak it learn it as an additional language. Those who are incompetent in it are disadvantaged because the language is the main medium of instruction throughout the education system, a measure of educational achievement and an important qualification for higher education and employment. With notable exceptions, mainstream language planning scholarship regards English as the medium of oppression and a killer language as far as indigenous languages are concerned, subsequently pushing for the status elevation and development of the latter as the only possible solution to the country's language problems. The authors suggest that a multilingual language policy will also need to devise strategies of directly addressing problems associated with English, in addition to promoting indigenous languages as alternatives.

A critical analysis of the historical and contemporary status of minority languages in Zimbabwe

Although a voluminous amount of literature addresses language-in-education policy in Africa, one area in which the literature remains sparse is the role of minority languages in education. This article presents an overview of complex issues regarding the hegemony claims of different minority language groups in Zimbabwe. Given the relatively small research base dealing explicitly with controversies in the promotion of minority languages as the media of instruction, this article uses archival and historical literature to trace intricate controversies about language in education within minority African languages groups. This article argues that the interrelationships between the dynamics of the state, ethnic composition, and history vary considerably and impact the success of minority language policies.

Mother tongue education in the official minority languages in Zimbabwe

The government of Zimbabwe officially declared that with effect from January 2002, it was to implement the use and teaching of the official minority languages, namely Venda, Tonga, Nambya, Kalanga, Sotho and Shangani, as the media of instruction and subjects in primary schools in areas where they are spoken. The Ministry stated that these languages would be introduced to a grade per year, increasing until they could be taught at grade seven by 2005. However, the reality at ground level reveals otherwise. After this welcomed move, there has been little commitment or urgency to implement this policy. Is it a question of the purpose for the encouragement and support by official policy of mother tongue education in the official minority languages? Is it a question of cost-benefit analysis? Is this not a violation of linguistic human rights in education, particularly the right to mother tongue education? This article seeks to address the above questions in view of mother tongue education in the official minority languages in Zimbabwe as well as to assess the impact of this delay in the implementation of the policy on the learners' learning experience.

Lexicographical practice and lexicological research: the case of Shangani in Zimbabwe

The article outlines the contribution of ALRI towards the development of the minor-ity languages in Zimbabwe, with special reference to Shangani. After a description of the status of Shangani, a brief summary of the Zimbabwean language use policy is given. The challenges for the development of lexicographical practice and lexicological research are discussed with regard to a minority language that has been marginalized for a long time. After the consideration of the kind of dictionary planned for Shangani in accordance with the user profile, the role of a dictionary in codifying and harmonizing a language is stressed. Except for contributing to the orthographic development of a language, lexicography also forms the basis for the furtherance of literacy in a community. Keywords: alri, minority languages, marginalized languages, lexico-graphical practice, lexicological research, dictionary, target users, shangani

Zimbabwean English: A sociophonological exploration

The worldwide emergence of new Englishes and their subtypes known as African Englishes has been a subject of considerable theoretical and descriptive discussion. Although the variety of English that is spoken in Zimbabwe has distinct linguistic features and displays the key properties of new Englishes, it has not received significant attention from both theoretical and applied linguists. This study addresses this issue by presenting a sociophonological exploration of the hypothesis that the variety of English that is spoken in Zimbabwe is a type of new Englishes. This article starts by examining the sociolinguistic status and ‘ownership’ (Widdowson, 1994: 384; Chisanga & Kamwangamalu, 1997: 90) of the English language in Zimbabwe. This is followed by an exploration of the phonological processes that are operative in the spoken English of L1 Shona speakers such as substitution and underdifferentiation of monophthongal vowel phonemes and monophthongization of diphthongs and triphthongs through glide epenthesis and glide formation. The results reveal that these processes reduce the 25 English vowels to five monophthongs [i, e, a, o, u]. These processes are part of the hallmarks of African Englishes, which have not yet been comprehensively studied. This study fits well within the context of increasing interest in the description of African Englishes.

Target Users' Expectations versus the Actual Compilation of a Shona Children's Dictionary

Abstract: The article discusses the challenges that confronted the team of compilers working on the monolingual Shona Children's Dictionary (henceforth SCD). It looks at the active involvement of the target users in shaping the project and discusses the considerations for the implementation of their recommenda-tions. Matters of concern include issues of headword selection, especially problems of dialect representation in the dictionary. The article also discusses the inclusion of grammatical information such as tone marking. The SCD is one of the many efforts to promote and raise the functions of the indigenous languages in Zim-babwe. Of special interest in this article is therefore the discussion on the inclusion of international words like those denoting weight, distance and mathematical and scientific concepts. The article also considers the treatment of taboo words in the SCD, which takes into account that society has to open up culturally to be able to unequivocally view some of the aspects of life with which present-day children are confronted. The article lastly discusses how a balance was reached for accommodating the target users' proposal for the inclusion of an elaborate back matter in view of the limited available scope and space of the SCD.

'Our languages are equally important': struggles for the revitalisation of the minority languages in Zimbabwe

The revitalisation of endangered minority languages is a subject that has recently caught the attention of a cross-section of people concerned with the sociology of language. This article focuses on the efforts regarding the revitalisation of minority languages in Zimbabwe. The article discusses the initiatives of civil society organisations, which, together with grassroots organisations formed by speakers of the endoglossic minority languages, have established collaborative networks to collectively mobilise for the revitalisation of the minority languages in Zimbabwe. Drawing on the analytic framework for language revitalisation efforts advanced by Fishman (1991, 2001), this article argues that in the prevailing political and economic environment, the minority language revitalisation efforts in Zimbabwe, which targeted the education and media domains, have met with a significant measure of success. This article discusses the strategies for language revitalisation employed by these organisations and suggests that such strategies may be useful for similar efforts in other contexts.

The Conundrums of Language Policy and Politics in South Africa and Zimbabwe

This article reflects on and reinterprets South Africa's documented human rights-inspired language policy and Zimbabwe's assimilation–tolerance approach to language use. The overall intention is to expose and discuss the intolerant, undemocratic and homogenizing ideologies underpinning language policy in the two neighbouring southern African countries. The article spotlights the ceremonial ‘official language’ status of South Africa's nine African languages and the ‘national language’ status of the Ndebele language in Zimbabwe. It is argued that contrary to rosy policy enunciations, actual patterns of language use and discursive practices of ruling political elites confer higher functional status to English and Afrikaans in South Africa and English and Shona in Zimbabwe. Therefore, as well as being firmly located and resident in political statements of the ruling elites, language policy ideologies are also hidden in the fissures and faultlines of official documents. The article concludes that the documented language policies of South Africa and Zimbabwe epitomize lofty ideals that are not consonant with actual patterns of language use mediated and legitimized by hegemonic discourses of ruling politicians.

Promoting the use and teaching of African languages in Zimbabwe

This paper is a discussion of the work that has been done by the Zimbabwe Government and This The African Languages Research Institute in trying to promote the use and teaching of African languages in the coubtry. It briefly discusses the colonial and post-colonial language policies that resulted in the marginalisation of African languages. The discussion also focuses on the challenges and constraints that have been encountered in trying to use an African language as a language of wider communication and medium of instruction. The paper finally gives some practical suggestions on how Zimbabwe and other African countries can promote indigenous languages.Zimbabwe Journal of Educational Research Vol. 17 (1) March 2005: pp. 54-68

Sociolinguistics

07–139Leki, Ilona (U Tennessee, USA), Negotiating socioacademic relations: English learners’ reception by and reaction to college faculty. Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Elsevier) 5.2 (2006), 136–152.07–140Ndhlovu, Finex (Monash U, Melbourne, Australia), Gramsci, Doke and the marginalisation of the Ndebele language in Zimbabwe. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Multilingual Matters) 27.4 (2006), 305–318.07–141Sunderland, Jane (Lancaster U, UK; j.sunderland@lancs.ac.uk), ‘Parenting’ or ‘mothering’? The case of modern childcare magazines. Discourse & Society (Sage) 17.4 (2006), 503–528.

The Shona Symptom Questionnaire: the development of an indigenous measure of common mental disorders in Harare.

The objective of this study was to develop an indigenous measure of common mental disorders (CMD) in the Shona language in Zimbabwe. Ethnographic and qualitative studies elicited idioms of distress of mental disorder leading to the preliminary Shona Symptom Questionnaire (SSQ), and items from the Self-Report Questionnaire (SRQ) were added to it. The 56-item Preliminary Shona Symptom Questionnaire (PSSQ) was administered to 302 randomly selected primary care attenders, of whom 100 were classified as cases on the basis of agreement between care provider assessment and a psychiatric interview. Discriminant analysis identified 14 items that were the strongest predictors of mental disorder. The 14-item SSQ has a high level of internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.85). The items are a mixture of emic and etic phenomena. The total score correlates strongly with patients' self-assessment of the emotional nature of their illness. Satisfactory specificity and sensitivity occurred at a cut-off point of 7/8. The SSQ is the first indigenous measure of mental disorder developed in sub-Saharan Africa to have included idioms or distress of primary care attenders and involved patients consulting traditional medical practitioners. It promises to be a useful instrument for epidemiological and clinical research. The methodology used is an innovative way of combining etic and emic methods in the evaluation of CMD.