Today most linguists agree that language and culture are tightly connected. It is also argued that in order to communicate successfully, we need to achieve a level of socio-cultural competence along with an ability to use the grammar and the lexicon of a particular language. There are many kinds of cultural norms and values that one has to obey, as there may be fundamental communication and discourse differences between one language and another. This paper is primarily concerned with some issues of discourse strategies and pragmatics of African languages. While the study focuses on greeting practices among the Swahili, it also investigates how learners acquire the pragmatics of Swahili greetings in a foreign language context, and how Swahili, as a language of wider communication, is influenced by cultural norms and values of its speakers, for whom Swahili is not a primary language.
Swahili dictionaries have been on the market for over a century. New publications often take into account works that have been already published and base the list of headwords on older dictionaries. While this is widely accepted practice, nowadays also new, computer-based activities may no longer be ignored. Analysis presented in this paper aims at detecting the differences and similarities among Swahili bilingual published dictionaries on the macrostructural level, and at identifying possible trends in Swahili dictionary compilation. It also takes into account corpus-based methodology and points to its superiority over intuition-based methods in dictionary compilation.
The present article investigates several elements of the microstructural level of Swahili bilingual dictionaries. The main emphasis is on the grammatical information, its content and presentation in the various dictionaries chosen for analysis. The other components of a dictionary entry analysed include the headword, its citation form, and additionally the pronunciation, usage labels and etymological information not found in every dictionary. We investigate the many ways in which information can be presented to the user, influencing the user-friendliness of a given dictionary.
After the rule of apartheid ended in 1994, the new government of the Republic of South Africa made a substantial change in language policy by giving an official status to eleven languages spoken in the country. Besides English and Afrikaans, nine more indigenous African Bantu languages were officially recognised. Such an extensive multilingual policy is unique in the world and although very progressive, presents a serious challenge to the system of education. The article touches upon the linguistic situation in the Republic of South Africa, the distribution and popularity of various languages and the topic of how the new policy has been implemented in the sector of education.
The article discusses greetings and farewells of a typical conversation in two Bantu languages: Swahili and Zulu. The conversation usually comprises the greeting followed by the enquiry about each other’s well-being, the actual conversation, and then the parting farewell. The article outlines the importance of nonverbal, sociolinguistic, and situational factors of the salutation. The objectives of the paper are to explore the feasibility of considering the salutation in Bantu languages as being uniform, to determine some common trends in the salutation, and to discuss the aspects that may have an impact on the form of the salutation, in languages in general and in Swahili and Zulu in particular.
The interest in Swahili lexicography at the University of Warsaw has a long tradition and was initiated by the first lecturer of Swahili – prof. Rajmund Ohly. He was not only an observer but his name has been indelibly written into the history of Swahili lexicography. His passion inspired the next generation and some projects aiming at creating Swahili dictionaries have been undertaken in the Department. That resulted in a state-financed grant on Swahili-Polish dictionary that is to be delivered at the end of 2012.
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