LANGUAGE IN AFRICA

The article presents an overview of the Kiarabu written tradition in the Swahili language in Arabic graphics, which has long been an important component of the Muslim Swahili civilization of the East African coast and the adjacent islands of the Indian Ocean, which united since the Middle Ages a number of port cities-sultanates located over a long stretch from the south of modern Somalia to the north Mozambique. During the colonial period, this type of literacy was gradually ousted from the culture due to the transition to the Latin alphabet within the framework of the project standardization of Swahili and its transition to the status of an official language in the British East Africa. Nevertheless, in recent history, there are cases when traditionalist poets, in order to manifest their Swahili identity, continue to record their compositions with the help of new author’s modifications of kiarabu.

This study examines interpersonal symbolic communication in the traditional Igbo society, which entails culturally-learned, often nuanced, socially shared system of communication between individuals by the use of instruments as symbols, in which the relation between the symbol and the signified concept is arbitrary. Data for the study were drawn from oral interviews and participant observation as primary sources, while secondary sources were library materials and the internet. Findings indicate that there exists yet another form of non-verbal communication that is symbolic (involves symbols) and is exclusively interpersonal in “the various Igbo culture areas” (Onwuejeogwu 1975). The examples are sub classified based on what they communicate. The study concludes that interpersonal symbolic communicative practices could be used as tools in interesting and complex ways for the description and reproduction of varied sociocultural world of the Igbo.

Koyraboro Senni (KS), a Malian language of Songhay family, has a system of TAM markers that distinguish two aspectual categories – the perfective and the imperfective and three series – the “weak” series used in neutral declarative clauses and clauses with a non-subject focus, the subject-focus series, and the “strong” series, which is used for predicate-centered focus. The paper studies the use of the strong in-focus forms in a corpus of narrative texts and shows that the strong perfectives in most cases are used to describe real events, while strong imperfectives are irrealis-oriented. Contrary to implications of our current knowledge of polyfunctionality of in-focus forms the strong imperfective is not used for present progressive and is relatively frequent in narrative texts. I also argue that while the perfective part of the system is better understood as the result of development of typical intrinsically-focused reading – the perfect, its imperfective part is better explained in line with Tatevosov’s (2005) proposal of direct development of the habitual to the prospective.

The study examined animal-based metaphors in Igbo with a focus on their cultural and contextual meanings and interpretations. It adopted the pragmatic methodological approach involving interviews with 20 participants drawn from various Igbo culture areas to collect animal-based metaphors as well as their meanings and interpretations. Introspection also featured in data collection as the authors are native speakers of Igbo. The study revealed that animal-based metaphors are used to describe human personality, conduct or behavior. This is essentially by the process of associating some features or attributes of the animals with human conduct and personality. The study further identified that some metaphors could be used in dual metaphorical sense, i.e., derogatory/negative, and commendatory/ positive, and these depend on the cultural connotations as well as contextual meanings and interpretations of the referents. The study concludes that animalbased metaphors in the Igbo language and culture reflect and represent the description of a person, conduct or behavior, as well as beliefs and realities among the Igbo.