Course Description
In addition to a long history of contact between African languages, the introduction of colonial languages has played a significant role in the linguistic reality of many African communities. More recently, in rapidly changing postcolonial societies, the spread of education, urbanization, and access to technology has further intensified the presence of the European languages, offering ample opportunities for the study of the mechanisms and outcomes of language contact. In this course, we will survey a wide variety of contact phenomena and examine case studies in the context of the African continent. Topics to be discussed include code switching, lexical borrowing, structural convergence, the emergence of new contact varieties, and language shift. Special focus will be on the interaction between diglossia and bilingualism in North Africa, the emergence of pidgins and creoles in West Africa, and urban vernaculars in East and South Africa.
Area Tags: Sociolinguistics, Variation, Dialects, Language Contact, Creoles
(Session 1) Monday/Thursday 3:00pm – 4:20pm
Location: ILC S413
Instructors: Lotfi Sayahi & John Victor Singler
Lotfi Sayahi is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His research focuses on language variation and change in situations of bilingualism and language contact. He is the author of Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa (Cambridge University Press). He has published more than 30 articles and book chapters that appear in Journal of Sociolinguistics, Journal of Language Contact, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Journal of Language Sciences, among others.
John Victor Singler is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at NYU. He holds an M.A. in African Area Studies from SOAS (London) and a Ph.D. in linguistics from UCLA. His areas of specialization include contact linguistics—especially creole studies—and variationist sociolinguistics. He published An Introduction to Liberian English and co-edited A Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies (with Silvia Kouwenberg) and a special issue of International Journal of Bilingualism devoted to ‘Codeswitching in West Africa’ (with Evershed Amuzu).
