Show simple item record

dc.contributor.authorRobinson, Morgan J.
dc.date.accessioned2023-12-13T05:32:47Z
dc.date.available2023-12-13T05:32:47Z
dc.date.issued2024
dc.identifier.urihttps://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/86094
dc.description.abstractThis intellectual history of Standard Swahili explores the long-term, intertwined processes of standard making and community creation in the historical, political, and cultural contexts of East Africa and beyond. Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. The book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard—a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes—negatively affected those whose language was suddenly deemed nonstandard. Before reconciling the consequences of codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili demonstrates how events, people, and ideas move rapidly and sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social, or temporal categories.Robinson conducted her research in Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, and the United Kingdom. Organized around periods of conversation, translation, and codification from 1864 to 1964, the book focuses on the intellectual history of Swahili’s standardization. The story begins in mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar, home of missionaries, formerly enslaved students, and a printing press, and concludes on the mainland in the mid-twentieth century, as nationalist movements added Standard Swahili to their anticolonial and nation-building toolkits. This outcome was not predetermined, however, and Robinson offers a new context for the strong emotions that the language continues to evoke in East Africa. The history of Standard Swahili is not one story, but rather the connected stories of multiple communities contributing to the production of knowledge. The book reflects this multiplicity by including the narratives of colonial officials and anticolonial nationalists; East African clerks, students, newspaper editors, editorialists, and their readers; and library patrons, academic linguists, formerly enslaved children, and missionary preachers. The book reconstructs these stories on their own terms and reintegrates them into a new composite that demonstrates the central place of language in the history of East Africa and beyond.
dc.languageEnglish
dc.subject.otherForeign Language Study
dc.subject.otherSwahili
dc.subject.otherHistory
dc.subject.otherSocial History
dc.subject.otherSocial Science
dc.subject.otherAnthropology
dc.subject.otherCultural & Social
dc.titleA Language for the World
dc.title.alternativeThe Standardization of Swahili
dc.typebook
oapen.relation.isPublishedBy907a4342-54b7-4bcc-9208-2d58505573d3
oapen.relation.isFundedByb818ba9d-2dd9-4fd7-a364-7f305aef7ee9
oapen.relation.isbn9780821424957
oapen.relation.isbn9780821424940
oapen.collectionKnowledge Unlatched (KU)
oapen.imprintOhio University Press
oapen.identifierhttps://openresearchlibrary.org/viewer/7b63b03d-e2ca-46a3-b889-1a5907d6ab49


Files in this item

Thumbnail

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record