Pluricentric Languages in Africa and in Other Regions of the World

This study deals with the central role of Tamazight in shaping ‘Amazighness’, i.e., the translocal Amazigh group identity, influenced by social, political, and historical factors and fostered by linguistic ‘pluricentricity’. Despite the prevalence of functionally dominant languages in daily interactions, discussions about Amazigh identity primarily revolve around Tamazight, highlighting its significant ethnic importance. However, there has been a recent shift in the portrayal of Tamazight, influenced by the evolving perception of Darija as part of Tamazight heritage and interactional repertoire. This shift is driven by governmental instrumentalisation of Tamazight, especially since its official recognition in Morocco and Algeria, alongside ongoing institutional Arabization efforts. Despite these efforts, Arabization has failed to replace Tamazight and Darija with Standard Arabic as intended, leading to a phenomenon termed ‘Darijation’. The study also emphasizes language’s role in shaping culture, serving as a crucial aspect of both traditional and contemporary cultural practices. It shows that language not only acts as a conduit for cultural expression, but actively shapes culture itself through ‘conventionalized heteroglossia’.

The prevailing status of European languages as official languages in post-colonial Africa has been a matter of controversy. For some, the maintenance of European languages in a post-colonial situation can lead to elitism and alienation of the most disadvantaged populations. For others, European languages guarantee inter-ethnic and worldwide communication; moreover, these languages undergo a process of transformation, caused by their adaptation to the new socio-cultural contexts of the countries where they are preserved, giving rise to non-native varieties. The paper builds on these assumptions and analyzes the implantation and resulting nativization of Portuguese in Mozambique. It is argued that Portuguese in Mozambique has its own identity, and it is an imperative and requires social commitment to provide the Mozambican variety of Portuguese with appropriate regulatory instruments that normalize its use in all spheres of social life. These instruments will be highlighted.

The aim of this chapter is to identify and analyse sociolinguistic aspects of the (de)hegemonisation of Mungaka as the lingua franca of the Western Grassfields in multilingual Cameroon. Methodologically, a semi-structured questionnaire and recorded interviews on the vitality and inertia of Mungaka are administered to Mungaka speakers across cohorts of four generations in real and virtual spaces. The recordings are transcribed and analysed with the aid of consultants and computer tools along quantitative and qualitative analyses. Findings (95%) prove that the dominance of Mungaka has diminished over time, mainly across the younger generations, eliciting several aspects of interlanguage. Albeit the inertia, it is more developed than most Grassfields languages, and remains the default language of the Hallelujah Choir of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon (PCC) around the world. In conclusion, the hegemony of Mungaka has been diluted by the sociolinguistics of language contact, resulting to the dehegemonisation of Mungaka as the lingua franca of the Western Grassfields in contemporary multilingual Cameroon.

This paper explores the Oromo language, Afaan Oromoo (endonym), otherwise referred to as Oromic. Oromic is a pluricentric language, with a variety that can be identified as a non-dominant variety, as initiated by Michael Clyne and subsequent extensions (WGNDV Website). The Oromo language is spoken by around 42 million Oromos (amongst others) in Ethiopia, distributed over a vast area from the Sudanese border in the West and across the Somali border in the East, from the Tigray area in northern Ethiopia to the south, across the Kenyan border to the Indian Ocean (Janko 207:89-90; Heine 1981, Map 2, Appendix I). As such, it is spoken mainly in Ethiopia, with a considerable amount of native speakers located in Kenya and Somalia. There is a significant Oromo immigrant population in neighbouring countries such as the Middle East, North America, Europe, and the South Pacific (Jalata, 2011).

This research analyses the variation in the use of definite articles before people’s names, also called anthroponyms, in the Portuguese spoken in Luanda, the capital of Angola. The aim is to understand what motivates this variation in use. The study was based on the theoretical methodological premises of Labov’s Variationist Sociolinguistics (1972), and it was developed based on the hypothesis that the occurrence of the phenomenon would be favoured in a more recent colonization context, such as the case of Angola. Ten sociolinguistic interviews were selected for this sample, recorded in the urban area of the capital of Angola between 2008 and 2013. The results allow us to identify the most relevant factors for using the article, as well as comparing Angolan Portuguese aspects to the same aspects of other varieties, especially those which were formed in contact with African languages.

This paper explores language attitudes toward German and English in Namibia in relation to nationality. With approximately 25,000 German speakers, Namibian German is considered a minority language exhibiting strong language contact, with influences mostly coming from English and Afrikaans. Despite being one of Namibia’s 13 national languages, English is the sole official language. The study delves into the historical context of Namibia’s colonial period under German rule and subsequent language policy shifts, leading to German regaining national language status in 1990. The research focuses on the language attitudes towards German and English, employing a questionnaire to explore the affective attitudes and feelings of belonging within the German-speaking community. The analysis is conducted according to the “Attitudes Towards Languages” (AToL) Scale, revealing how the German language serves as an identifying factor within the complex linguistic landscape of Namibia, shaped by historical, sociolinguistic, and cultural factors, as well as its link with belonging.

This paper focuses on the experiences of African students and their instructors at the French Department of the University of Szeged in Hungary, from a linguistic anthropological perspective. The study is based on twelve semi-structured interviews, six with African students and six with their instructors. The findings suggest a general tolerance towards non-standard varieties of French at the level of pronunciation, while, on the other hand, a rather normative attitude can be observed when assessing written production. While the students seem to recognize the importance of European standard French (français hexagonal) in an academic context, they embrace their own non-dominant variety in everyday situations, and believe that the concept of French should not be limited to a single, high variety. These opinions reinforce the trends reported in international research, underlining the gap between official regulations and everyday reality.

The Dative shift is observed in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), Mozambican Portuguese (MP), and São Tomean Portuguese (STP). It comprises the alternation between a prepositional dative construction (PDC) and a double object construction (DOC) as complements of a ditransitive verb. DOCs are not detected in the Portuguese spoken in Portugal; however, we brought evidence of their presence in Old Portuguese, a prefigured feature of the Contemporary varieties of Portuguese. The data showed that BP, MP, and STP converge by presenting the same structural possibilities of expressing the recipient. DOCs are detected among university speakers in different regional varieties of BP, so they can’t be attributed to the contact, due to slavery, with Bantu languages, whose grammars contain DOC. Since BP is also characterized as a dominant variety of pluricentric Portuguese, we argue that specific linguistic features are not enough to establish the degree of submission to the original linguistic norms.

This work analyses the behaviour of native Hebrew speakers based on two sociolinguistic variables: ayn and het. Gafter (2016) notes that the realisation of these variables is conditioned by the ethnic group to which speakers belong to, and by the social context in which speakers are taking part. Speakers of three distinct ethnic groups (Ashkenazi, non-Yemenite Mizrahi, Yemenite Mizrahi) read two texts containing occurrences of the variables: a blessing and a newspaper report. Results showed that only Yemenite Mizrahis produced pharyngeals in reading both texts, but in an inverse distribution: this group realised a much higher percentage of pharyngeals in reading the blessing than in reading the newspaper report. These results suggest that ethnic origin and stylistic variation play an important role for the realisation of pharyngeal variants for both variables.

This exploratory study examines language variation in restaurant menus in the Acadian city of Dieppe, New Brunswick (Canada), with a focus on French varieties and language planning. The research investigates the presence of both North American French1 and Standard French terms within Dieppe’s Acadian sociolinguistic context, which is influenced by historical and demographic factors. The corpus consists of 31 bilingual menus, categorized into two groups: local establishments and national/international establishments. The findings highlight errors, anglicisms, and the prevalence of North American French terms. The discussion underscores the impact of ownership diversity on linguistic practices. In conclusion, the menus in Dieppe predominantly reflect a North American French influence, demonstrating the intricate interplay of linguistic factors shaped by regional preferences and culinary practices.

This paper attempts to explore how the standardized structure of sequence organization in job interviews as a form of institutional interaction exhibits social hierarchy between the institutional representatives and the non-affiliated participants. The study is based on cinematic representations of job interviews in three Bengali films: ‘Pratidwandi’ (‘The Adversary’, directed by Satyajit Ray, 1970), ‘Jana Aranya’ (‘The Middleman’, directed by Satyajit Ray, 1975), and ‘Interview’ (directed by Mrinal Sen, 1971). The filmed sequences have been regarded as social-realist representations, interspersed with creative accentuations that serve to foreground possibilities of divergence from the institutionally enforced standard. Additionally, cases of norm-abidance and divergence have been analysed in order to investigate and breakdown the role of the institutionally restricted interactional order in the establishment, the sustenance and any potential contestation of the asymmetrical relation between the interviewer and the interviewee.

The article analyses the measures and goals of language planning and language policies taken by the Russian Empire and subsequently by the Soviet Union concerning the language spoken in the Republic of Moldova, which lasted almost two centuries. Special emphasis is given to the naming of the language spoken in Moldova. As can be shown in many other cases, the naming of a language is an important tool of language planning and language policy. In the wake of the political developments at the end of the 20th century, and the independence of the Republic of Moldova in 1991, these language planning and language policy measures finally came to an end. Due to the resilience of the Moldovan language, the experiment of creating/the attempt to create a language separate from Romanian must be considered a failure.

The influence of NS ideology on the German language has a long history yet has only recently been discussed in more major venues. (Hutton, 1999). The continuing preoccupation with this topic is another sign of the will of the German society to continue to deal with and clarify its National Socialist past in a sustained and critical manner, not only in the historical and social spheres, but also in the linguistic sphere. This article will discuss and interpret the problem of National Socialist influences in the German language and possible solutions using the example of the reform of the official spelling table according to the official German DIN standard in 2022. It shows to what extent still today – consciously or unconsciously – expressions and symbols of an inhumane ideology such as National Socialism can influence our choice of words or way of thinking and the efforts of a confrontation with and solution of this problem. Furthermore, there is also the question and to what extent this negative influence should be taken into account when teaching German as a pluricentric foreign language (DaF: Deutsch als Fremdsprache / German as a Foreign Language) in third countries such as South Korea, for example, in order to avoid unintentional linguistic and cultural misunderstandings, actions or misinterpretations in the target countries by their users.