Tanzania
The project
Tanzania is a multilingual society in which English competes with an officially established African language, Swahili, in the top layer of a macro-ecology that comprises more than 120 languages in total. Our project seeks to understand how Tanzanians navigate their languages in everyday practice with a particular focus on the role of English, its forms and the way both are shaped by local ethnolinguistic constellations beneath the surface of Swahili. In order to overcome the current research bias towards language use of the urban elites, we will rather focus on a variety of ethnolinguistically diverse settings at the rural Tanzanian grassroot level.
The team
Roland Kießling is Professor of African Linguistics at the Faculty of Asien-Afrika-Wissenschaften of the University of Hamburg and PI of the subproject "English in the multilingual ecologies of Tanzania". His main interests include the documentation and analysis of African languages, with a focus on morphosemantics and phonetics. For more information, please refer to: https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/afrika/personen/kiessling.html
Kapingu Mpologo is a PhD student at the University of Hamburg. In his PhD project, he looks at the dominant language constellations in the micro-ecologies of areas that are dominated by SUKUMA language. He looks at the position of English in those DLC to understand how the increased role of English in the world has altered attitudes of speakers towards.
Prof. Amani Lusekelo is a Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Dar es Salaam. His research interests and scholarly work focus on ethnolinguistics, expression of information structure, issues of language contact, linguistic landscapes, morphosyntax, onomastics, and sociolinguistics and language policy. For more information, please refer to: https://duce.ac.tz/duce/user/303