Experiences and attitudes of Setswana speaking teachers in using an indigenous African language on an online assessment platform

Education in the 21st century must have a vision that will support and empower teachers to face the demands of the digital age. The use of information communication technology (ICT) in education can serve this end but ensuring access to digital resources will not address the digital disparity. Culture and language play an equally important role in exacerbating and maintaining the digital disparity as the traditional factor of access. In the study reported on here we investigated the experiences and attitudes of Setswana-speaking teachers in 3 primary schools in the North West province, South Africa, as they were exposed to online software in Setswana, an indigenous African language. Purposive sampling was used to select 7 teachers for the study. Two research questions were answered using systematic self-observation (SSO) instruments, the participant observation (PO) instrument and the in-depth interview (IDI) instrument to determine the experiences and attitudes of the teachers. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the interview data. It was found that accuracy of translation was key for adopting and using software in an African language. The teachers felt that English was the language of ICT and that African languages were not intellectual languages and did not have the capacity to be used in ICT. It is, therefore, recommended that more must be done to translate software into African languages and an effort must be made to raise the status of African languages in academic and technical fields.

The concept of family in Hausa

The paper attempts to define the notion of family in Hausa, an African language which is very distant, both geographically and culturally, from the European context. With reference to the universal features of the notion family, the culture-specific concept of family is discussed, focusing on traditional model of the Hausa family and relations between family members. The main features of the concept are identified through the analysis of the lexicon, phraseology, and structural features. The discussion includes some specific profiles of the concept of family in Hausa, manifested in religious discourse and in the language of popular culture.

Cash Crops, Print Technologies, and the Politicization of Ethnicity in Africa

What are the origins of the ethnic landscapes in contemporary states? Drawing on a preregistered research design, we test the influence of dual socioeconomic revolutions that spread throughout Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—export agriculture and print technologies. We argue these changes transformed ethnicity via their effects on politicization and boundary-making. Print technologies strengthened imagined communities, leading to more salient—yet porous—ethnic identities. Cash crop endowments increased groups’ mobilizational potential but with more exclusionary boundaries to control agricultural rents. Using historical data on cash crops and African language publications, we find that groups exposed to these historical forces are more likely to be politically relevant in the postindependence period, and their members report more salient ethnic identities. We observe heterogenous effects on boundary-making as measured by interethnic marriage; relative to cash crops, printing fostered greater openness to assimilate linguistically related outsiders. Our findings illuminate not only the historical sources of ethnic politicization but also mechanisms shaping boundary formation.

The onomastic possibility of renaming the Sepedi and Sesotho sa Leboa (Northern Sotho) language names to restore peace, dignity and solidarity

The study embraced the onomastic possibility of renaming the Sepedi and Sesotho sa Leboa (Northern Sotho) language names that have caused and are still causing onomastic confusion to the first language (L1) speakers of the language under scrutiny, and also to the speakers of other languages. The study was conducted in 2019 at five selected South African universities – University of Johannesburg, University of South Africa, University of Limpopo, University of Venda and Tshwane University of Technology – which offered the language under investigation as an L1 module. In addition, language experts (practitioners) at the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) and its sub-structures and the National Department of Arts and Culture, including Limpopo and Gauteng Department of Sport, Arts, Culture and Recreation, were also involved in the study. Quota sampling was used to select all the 267 participants in the study. The study found that both Sepedi and Sesotho sa Leboa (Northern Sotho) language names are rejected by onomastic principles of naming an official language. An overwhelming majority of the participants opined that this language should be renamed, with the anticipation that the new name will bring peace, unity and solidarity to the L1 speakers of Sepedi.

Online Processing of Temporal Agreement in a Grammatical Tone Language: An ERP Study

Previous electrophysiological studies that have examined temporal agreement violations in (Indo-European) languages that use grammatical affixes to mark time reference, have found a Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) and/or P600 ERP components, reflecting morpho-syntactic and syntactic processing, respectively. The current study investigates the electrophysiological processing of temporal relations in an African language (Akan) that uses grammatical tone, rather than morphological inflection, for time reference. Twenty-four native speakers of Akan listened to sentences with time reference violations. Our results demonstrate that a violation of a present context by a past verb yields a P600 time-locked to the verb. There was no such effect when a past context was violated by a present verb. In conclusion, while there are similarities in both Akan and Indo-European languages, as far as the modulation of the P600 effect is concerned, the nature of this effect seems to be different for these languages.

Non-culmination in two Bantu languages

This paper describes an exploratory approach to two related aspectual phenomena, non-culminating accomplishments and non-culminating construals of implied-result verbs, in the Bantu languages Xhosa and Nyakyusa. While documented for a diverse array of languages, leading to the identification of some cross-linguistic commonalities and axes of variation, these phenomena have so far not been studied for any continental African language. Both Xhosa and Nyakyusa license non-culminating accomplishments but differ regarding the felicity of such construals with different sub-types of accomplishments in relation to event progress, a decisive factor being that Nyakyusa possesses verbal partitive morphology. Concerning the non-culmination of implied-result verbs, both languages show such readings and support prior cross-linguistic findings that zero change readings are more readily available with agentive subjects. The data further point to the potential role of causative morphology as a parameter of variation to be considered in further comparative research on these verbs.