Author: Kwesi Kwaa Prah and Lazarus Musazitame Miti (Eds.)
ISBN No: 978-1-920294-12-0
Cost: 300.00
... increasingly there are concerned African academics who want to see movement in the direction of utilising African languages for education and development. Linguists need to scrutinise and deconstruct the myth of an African Tower of Babel: the idea that there is a globally incomparable profusion of African languages. This myth has been haunting African linguistics since the early beginnings of the systematic study of African languages. This argument is frequently deployed as stock reasoning by those who suggest that because of this supposed overwhelming diversity of speech-forms, Africans cannot practically use their languages as languages of social, scientific and educational development.The book brings together a number of case studies, insights into different countries, and an examination of identified clusters of cognate and related languages which illustrate the inordinate levels of inconsistent labelling and identification of languages; and how such labelling contributes to the view of profusion. ...
ISBN No: 978-1-920294-12-0
Cost: 300.00
... increasingly there are concerned African academics who want to see movement in the direction of utilising African languages for education and development. Linguists need to scrutinise and deconstruct the myth of an African Tower of Babel: the idea that there is a globally incomparable profusion of African languages. This myth has been haunting African linguistics since the early beginnings of the systematic study of African languages. This argument is frequently deployed as stock reasoning by those who suggest that because of this supposed overwhelming diversity of speech-forms, Africans cannot practically use their languages as languages of social, scientific and educational development.The book brings together a number of case studies, insights into different countries, and an examination of identified clusters of cognate and related languages which illustrate the inordinate levels of inconsistent labelling and identification of languages; and how such labelling contributes to the view of profusion. ...
