Author: H.Chimhundu, W. Magwa, A. Chebanne (eds.)
ISBN No: 978-1-920447-49-6
Cost: 170.00
The Harmonization of Shona-Nyai Varieties is a very welcome update of what is known about this language cluster. Linguists interested in the classification of African languages in general, and language planners and other language practitioners in Zimbabwe, Botswana and Mozambique in particular, will doubtlessly find the book invaluable.
Lazarus M. Miti, Language Rights Fellow
Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA)
The book is a welcome contribution towards efforts to develop and promote writing systems that defy colonial borders. Current orthographies created with the best intentions have tended to ‘chop up’ Africans into autonomous ‘tribes’, regions or nations, each with its own tongue(s); hence reducing the potential number of speakers and in turn making it uneconomical to produce materials in the languages for mass literacy campaigns that Africa needs to engender socio-economic development. This is a must read for sociolinguistics, terminologists, lexicographers, and scholars in African linguistics, language planning and policy.
Felix Banda, Linguistics Department,
University of the Western Cape, South Africa
This book is part of a developing corpus of publications dealing with issues relating to African languages. The series seeks to theoretically explore the nature of orthographic problems confronting African languages. Unlike other theoretical approaches, the authors propose and demonstrate how the different orthographies relating to Shona might be harmonized and aligned. I'm confident that because of both the theoretical and practical rigor of the orthographic alignment project inspired by the book, it will be a success.
Sinfree Makoni, The College of Liberal Arts,
Pennsylvania State University, State College
ISBN No: 978-1-920447-49-6
Cost: 170.00
The Harmonization of Shona-Nyai Varieties is a very welcome update of what is known about this language cluster. Linguists interested in the classification of African languages in general, and language planners and other language practitioners in Zimbabwe, Botswana and Mozambique in particular, will doubtlessly find the book invaluable.
Lazarus M. Miti, Language Rights Fellow
Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA)
The book is a welcome contribution towards efforts to develop and promote writing systems that defy colonial borders. Current orthographies created with the best intentions have tended to ‘chop up’ Africans into autonomous ‘tribes’, regions or nations, each with its own tongue(s); hence reducing the potential number of speakers and in turn making it uneconomical to produce materials in the languages for mass literacy campaigns that Africa needs to engender socio-economic development. This is a must read for sociolinguistics, terminologists, lexicographers, and scholars in African linguistics, language planning and policy.
Felix Banda, Linguistics Department,
University of the Western Cape, South Africa
This book is part of a developing corpus of publications dealing with issues relating to African languages. The series seeks to theoretically explore the nature of orthographic problems confronting African languages. Unlike other theoretical approaches, the authors propose and demonstrate how the different orthographies relating to Shona might be harmonized and aligned. I'm confident that because of both the theoretical and practical rigor of the orthographic alignment project inspired by the book, it will be a success.
Sinfree Makoni, The College of Liberal Arts,
Pennsylvania State University, State College
