Anne Storch

Alexandra Aikhenvald

Every language has a way of talking about seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. This can be done through lexical means, and through grammatical evidentials. The studies presented here focus on the experssions of perception and cognition in languages of Africa, Oceania, and South America.

Perception and Cognition in Language and Culture

Angelika Mietzner

This book explores the relationship between imperial formations and individual encounters at African tourist sites – spaces of leisure, healing and work. It examines how encounters between tourists and hosts tend to be constructed along colonial thought lines and considers how players in the hospitality industry do not interact as coeval participants, but are racialised, scripted and positioned according to colonially-established order. The authors focus on the language of these encounters, not only speech, performance and response, but also silence, resonance, emptiness, noise – objectified, materialised, evasive and confusing. Through its exploration of language in these encounters, the volume shows that ruination is the one feature that is omnipresent in the multiple and diverse tourist settings of the postcolonial world. This book is open access under a CC BY ND licence.

A Ruinous System

The Impact of Tourism in East Africa

Nick Shepherd

Ana Deumert

This wide-ranging volume offers a detailed exploration of coloniality in the discipline of linguistics, with case studies drawn from Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. Colonial meanings and legacies have returned to the forefront of many academic fields in recent years and linguistics, like several other disciplines, has had an ambivalent relationship with its own histories of practice in colonial and postcolonial worlds. The implications of these histories are still felt today, as colonial paradigms of knowledge production continue to shape both academic linguistic practices and non-specialist discussion of language and culture. The chapters in this volume adopt a range of different conceptual frameworks - including postcolonial theory, southern theory, and decolonial thinking - to provide a nuanced account of the coloniality of linguistics at the level of knowledge and disciplinary practice; crucially, the contributors also expand their investigations beyond this ambivalent inheritance to imagine a decolonial linguistics. The volume will be of interest to all linguists looking to critically assess their own practices and to engage with debates at the cutting-edge of their discipline, particularly in the areas of sociolinguistics, field linguistics, typology, and linguistic anthropology, as well as to those outside the discipline engaging with questions of coloniality.

Knowledges and Epistemes

Colonial and Decolonial Linguistics

This book is a description of Luwo, a Western Nilotic language of South Sudan. Luwo is used by multilingual, dynamic communities of practice as one language among others that form individual and flexible repertoires. It is a language that serves as a means of expressing the Self, as a medium of art and self-actualization, and sometimes as a medium of writing. It is spoken in the home and in public spaces, by fairly large numbers of people who identify themselves as Luwo and as members of all kinds of other groups. In order to provide insights into these dynamic and diverse realities of Luwo, this book contains both a concise description and analysis of the linguistic features and structures of Luwo, and an approach to the anthropological linguistics of this language. The latter is presented in the form of separate chapters on possession, number, experiencer constructions, spatial orientation, perception and cognition. In all sections of this study, sociolinguistic information is provided wherever this is useful and possible, detailed information on the semantics of grammatical features and constructions is given, and discussions of theory-oriented approaches to various linguistic features of Luwo are presented.

An anthropological approach

A Grammar of Luwo

Secret Manipulations is the first comprehensive study of African register variation, polylectality, and derived languages. Focusing on a specific form of language change-deliberate manipulations of a language by its speakers-it provides a new approach to local language ideologies and concepts of grammar and metalinguistic knowledge. Anne Storch concentrates on case studies from Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan, the African diaspora, and 16th century Europe. In these cases, language manipulation varies with social and cultural contexts, and is almost always done in secret. At the same time, this manipulation can be an act of subversion and an expression of power, and it is often central to the construction of social norms, as it constructs oppositions and gives marginalized people a chance to articulate themselves. This volume illustrates how manipulated languages are constructed, how they are used, and how they wield power.

Language and Context in Africa

Secret Manipulations

Secret Manipulations is the first comprehensive study of African register variation, polylectality, and derived languages. It provides a new approach to local language ideologies and concepts of grammar and metalinguistic knowledge.

Al-Amin Abu-Manga

Leoma G. Gilley

Proceedings of the 9th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, Institute of African and Asian Studies, University of Khartoum, 16-19 February 2004

Insights Into Nilo-Saharan Language, History and Culture

This volume offers a detailed exploration of coloniality in the discipline of linguistics, with case studies drawn from across the world. The chapters provide a nuanced account of the coloniality of linguistics at the level of knowledge and disciplinary practice, and expand their discussion to imagine a decolonial linguistics.

Nico Nassenstein

This study focuses on the language around sexuality and discourses about sex, labeled by the authors as metasex, from a broad crosslinguistic perspective. Unlike many existing studies on sexting that predominantly take into account the linguistic practices of teenagers often located in the Global North, this book offers a more holistic approach by discussing Southern concepts of body parts, their conceptualization and mediatization (“dick pics”), the interconnectedness of food and sex and its sensualization (“foodporn”) as well as processes of social cohesion around sex, sociability and conviviality (“bonding”). Based on an anthropological linguistic perspective, the authors analyze metasex practices from Nigeria, DR Congo, Uganda, the Mediterranean, and numerous other contexts. Africanist Agnes Brühwiler’s afterword on sex (talk) in Tanzania rounds off the various fresh insights this study offers.

Metasex – The Discourse of Intimacy and Transgression

Gerrit J. Dimmendaal

This book is the outcome of several decades of research experience, with contributions by leading scholars based on long-term field research. It combines approaches from descriptive linguistics, anthropological linguistics, socio-historical studies, areal linguistics, and social anthropology. The key concern of this ground-breaking volume is to investigate the linguistic means of expressing number and countable amounts, which differ greatly in the world’s languages. It provides insights into common number-marking devices and their not-so-common usages, but also into phenomena such as the absence of plurals, or transnumeral forms. The different contributions to the volume show that number is of considerable semantic complexity in many languages worldwide, expressing all kinds of extendedness, multiplicity, salience, size, and so on. This raises a number of challenging questions regarding what exactly is described under the slightly monolithic label of ‘number’ in most descriptive approaches to the languages of the world.

Case studies from Africa, Amazonia, India and Oceania

Number  Constructions and Semantics

While most of the more recent influential work on swearing has concentrated on English and other languages from the Global North, looking at forms and functions of swear words, this contribution redirects the necessary focus onto a sociolinguistics of swearing that puts transgressive practices in non-Western languages into the focus. The transdisciplinary volume contains innovative case studies that address swearing and cursing in parts of the world characterized by consequences of colonialism and increasingly debated inequalities. Turning away from more conventional and established methodologies and theoretical approaches, the book envisages to address transgressive linguistic practices, performances and contexts in Africa, Asia, America and Europe –including individuals' creativity, subversive power and agency. Due to its interdisciplinary and non-mainstream focus, this volume is an essential addition to the field of studies.

Anne Storch

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