33volume 23 (2012) back-to-africa’, ‘double consciousness’ and the african diaspora: confronting the myth and the reality in ghanaian fiction mawuli adjei1 what is africa to me: copper sun or scarlet sea, jungle star or jungle track, strong bronzed men, or regal black women from whose loins i sprang one three centuries removed from the scenes his father loved, spicy grove, cinnamon tree, what is africa to me? countee cullen, “heritage” abstract one of the most persistent debates about black consciousness and pan-africanism has been on the attitudes of diasporans to africa and of africans to (returning) diasporans. this article critically examines the issue of the eternal connections between the continent of africa and people of african descent in three ghanaian works of fiction—kofi awoonor’s comes the voyager at last, david oddoye’s the return and ayi kwei armah’s osiris rising—and comes to the conclusion that the (re)connection between continental africa and the african diaspora is beset and mediated by formidable geo-political, cultural and historical barriers and, therefore, still in a state of flux. 1mawuli adjei is a senior lecturer in the department of english, university of ghana. adjei 34 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) introduction the rhetorical questions posed by the african-american poet, countee cullen, in the epigraph above in 1925, echoes of which resonate loudly in the works of phylis wheatley, w.e. b. dubois, langston hughes, richard wright, ralph elison, james baldwin, alex hailey, alice walker, maya angelou and others, are as relevant today as they were at the time. these sentiments are encapsulated in dubois’ theory of “double consciousness”— “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (du bois 1903:45). how this operates, whether as theory, concept or practice, is what is explored in the fictive universe of the three ghanaian texts under scrutiny. according to berry and blassingame (1982:398), very early in the history of slavery, black americans retained a strong sentimental and historical nostalgia for africa. even while black americans took pride in the accomplishments of the ancient egyptians and ethiopians and insisted they were black, they recognized that the vast majority of afro-americans had been transported from the west africa coast. they exulted in the black kingdoms of songhay, mali, and ghana, which developed in the sudan, and those of benin and zimbabwe… although one can identify traces of african languages, religious activities, arts and crafts and kinship attitudes in black-american communities, that is less important than the recreation of african ties. the early twentieth century saw the emergence of men like the ghanaian chief alfred sam, the jamaican marcus moziah garvey and w.e.b. du bois who stoked renewed interest in africa. in the case of du bois, apart from his numerous writings on black culture and politics, his actual relocation to ghana in 1960 marked a watershed in the debate about the place of africa in the consciousness of the african diaspora. in the last quarter of the twentieth century, inspiration was drawn from civil rights activists such as malcolm x, elijah mohammed and martin luther king 35volume 23 (2012) jr., as well as from works including cheik anta diop’s the african origin of civilization: myth or reality? (1974), alex hailey’s roots: the saga of an american family (1976) and molefi kete asante’s afrocentricity: the theory of social change (1980). a major destination for the african diaspora is ghana, due to the concentration on its coastline of the slave forts and castles which were the points of departure for millions of slaves into the new world and other parts of the world (dantzig 1999). the cape coast and elmina castles, in particular, have become grottos, archives and museums where hundreds of africans from the diaspora converge every year to confront their history. added to this is the annual pan african historical theatre festival (panafest), a cultural and historical event which since its inception in 1992 has been drawing to ghana people of african descent across the world. conceptualizing the african diaspora the term diaspora was traditionally associated with the jewish dispersal, but is now used in cultural theory to cover a wide range of territorial displacements through force such as indenture or slavery, or voluntary emigration. according to michael payne (1988:144), recent formulations have stressed not only the complex ties of memory, nostalgia and politics that bind the exile to an original homeland, but also sought to illuminate the lateral axes that link diasporic communities across national boundaries with the multiple other communities of the dispersed population. the african diaspora is best defined in the above context because it has taken multiple directions over the last three to four hundred years, configuring into a mutating, fluid and complex historical, political, economic and social process cutting across time, space, geography, race, class and gender. as di miao (2000:368) points out, the history of the african diaspora is quite different from the history of any other diasporan formation; it “does not consist of merely one people, but of several peoples coming from many geographical areas, speaking a variety of languages, adjei 36 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) praying to different gods, and belonging to diverse cultures.” his views are shared by hamilton (1982:394) who notes that as a social formation the african diaspora is conceptualized as “a global aggregate of actors and subpopulations differentiated in social and geographical space, yet exhibiting a commonality based on shared historical experiences conditioned by and within the world ordering system.” characteristics identified by hamilton include the historical dialectic between geographical mobility and the establishment of “roots”; resistance and political assertion which translate into what he terms “creative actions of psychocultural and ideological transformations; social networks and institutional dynamics.” in paul gilroy’s the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness (1993), the african diaspora, referred to as the “black atlantic,” is an imaginary geography of widely dispersed communities with shared histories of crossing, migration, exile, travel and exploration spawning hybrid cultures. this translates into a new spectrum of displacements, revivals and reconfiguration of identities and traditions that characterize the contemporary global cultural landscape. comes the voyager at last : ancestral faces when comes the voyager at last opens, the central character, macandrews, who later renames himself sheik lumumba mandela after converting to islam, talks about going “home” to africa and being with “my people” and “touching the motherland” (7) because he seems to be tired of: the impotent myths of my land of sojourn, the legends of negrohood, of my flamboyant ancestors who worked the land, tall african giants of unremembered savannas not aware of pain or degradation, men whose only claim to humanity seemed to have been...their signal endurance record under the whip, of men who took refuge in the good book and actually believed that they too, as god’s children, will be given brightly colored robes to cover their nakedness on that glorious judgment day (80). 37volume 23 (2012) he recounts his family history, a history that cuts broad swathes into the general history of african-americans, so that the story of lumumba mandela becomes the story of africa in america. it is a story that encapsulates the struggles of a race which wants, sometimes, to ‘escape’ to the motherland, africa. lumumba mandela’s story begins from the time his ancestors set foot in the new world, through the civil war in which two of his ancestors fought, via emancipation and reconstruction to freedom. it is a story of a people discriminated against, used, disused, abused and consigned to poverty, disease and unfulfilled dreams. that is why he is irked by the clergyman who constantly reminds them of their duties to christ and the church that kept their ancestors alive in a strange land. looking back at the history of africa-americans in america, he wonders where the christian god was when his people “tottered on the collective verge of annihilation [...] condemned to an eternity of suffering in other people’s vineyard?” (18). lumumba’s pan-africanist credentials are not in doubt either. he has been involved in the struggles of african-americans in america. not only was he present when the black civil rights activist, malcolm x, was assassinated on february 21, 1965 in harlem, but also he was one of the members of the original nation of islam who split from the group to go along with malcolm x and the organization of african-american unity. his consciousness of africa certainly has its genesis in the political career of malcolm x, a major pan-africanist icon: after his famous trip to africa following the split, malcolm used to speak about africa as the true home of all black people, the land of our ancestors which was rising up again. he spoke of how africans looked like us, how we in america have been “brainwashed by centuries of slavery and the feeling of inferiority” (81). no wonder edgar wright (1996:171) describes him as “a rather unconvincing, inauthentic rendition of the 1950s black american experience—a pot-pourri of richard wright, malcolm x and james baldwin.” adjei 38 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) once lumumba sets foot in africa to fulfil his dreams, we follow him every inch of the way; we listen to the pulses of his inner self and go through the motions of his spiritual reintegration within the african cosmos. it begins with a complementary education on pan-africanism from his african hosts. he is given a lecture on fanonism by one of his ghanaian friends, a seemingly overzealous scholar whose whole life is consumed by the spirit of franz fanon and the african revolution. lumumba’s real initiation into africa, however, comes in the form of a spiritual and psychic induction. in a night club, the red rose, the third narrator, a flimsy disguise for the author, meets lumumba, who in a brawl stabs several people. to flee from the surging crowd and the law, the narrator takes him to his home village. it is here that the spiritual dimension of the novel unfolds through the enactment of a series of rituals of re-engagement with the past, although the circumstances under which this spiritual reunion happens are a little farcical and initially unconvincing. obi maduakor (1994-92) describes the scenarios as magical realism, noting that “awoonor reconnects lumumba to his slave past by means of dream and flashback and he uses magic and fantasy to telescope this dance of cosmic harmony,” a claim contested by petro deandrea (2002:27) on the grounds that: the magic of awoonor’s novel is too oneiric, mediated and personal to be grouped under such a category. sheik, for instance, has a recurrent dream about a funeral procession changing into a chain gang, an obvious hint at the unnamed narrator’s captive experience [which] occurred centuries earlier. the parallelism is strengthened by some events that they both witness, but there is nothing more to suggest a conspicuous presence of the supernatural next to the real. deandrea agrees that the novel “attempts to evoke the collective unconscious of a whole race through its lyrical dimension,” but considers the afa priest’s recognition of lumumba unconvincing. he describes it as an “over-exploited stereotype”, perhaps, with reference to alex hailey’s roots or maya angelou’s all god’s children need traveling shoes (where some market women mistake maya for someone sold into slavery in keta long, long ago). what deandrea fails to appreciate is that the architect of the spiritual reconnection of lumumba, the narrator’s uncle, is an afa priest. as afa priest, he is situated between the mortal and 39 adjeivolume 23 (2012) the immortal, between the divine and the temporal, between the tangible and the intangible, between the here-before, the here-and-now and the hereafter. as custodian of the supernatural, he straddles the esoteric realms as visionary, prophet, sage and teacher. in his interaction with mortals, human communication and experience beyond the mundane and secular becomes a synthesis of the real and the magical. it is with this extra-sensory authority that he operates as an afa priest. only he and his kind have the trained eyes to see what ordinary mortals cannot see (bascom 1969; idowu 1973). in this context, it is not surprising that he sees lumumba and immediately recognizes him as “one of those people who left us long ago” (112). by virtue of the sacred knowledge only he possesses, he explains the inexplicable through recourse to the parable of the ants in motion: you see those ants there? you see how they walk in a file, their rank closely knit? but anything can break their ordered march, smash the discipline and the progress of the march. and when that happens, there is chaos, confusion, destruction and death… but another time, one day, the ants will return to the rank, to the discipline of the tribe and the orderliness of the march. that becomes more important than the chaos and the disorder of the earlier times. (112-13). this parable serves as a prelude to the proclamation of kinship connection between the diviner and lumumba. with his gaze probingly set of lumumba, he says: “look at those hands. look at those eyes. if he had been just a shade darker, i would have told you who he is. and if i meet him in a strange town i’ll call his name, nay the name of his grandfather because he comes from our house.” (p. 113). at any rate, one must not easily dismiss this “over-exploited stereotype.” anyidoho (1989:39) tells the story of an african-american woman who, armed with her ancestral family name of kwei nortey, managed to trace her roots to ningo, near accra, and recalls how when she walked into that original house in ningo, “she had the uncanny experience of walking into a house full of several dead relatives from the other family back in the united states”, for the faces “bore the unmistakable identity of relatives back in the states.” going by lumumba’s experience, we could argue 40 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) that awoonor combines the real with the fantastic by creating a mythical and epical framework in which the diasporan returnee is filtered through a process of exile, conflict, liminality, consciousness, return, rediscovery and reconnection. in the context of that framework, not only are the relics of ancestry or belonging and the scars of separation reconfigured in physical identity, but also they are engraved in the collective unconsciousness. in this realm, trance, dream and fantasy become (sur)real channels for rebirth and reconnection. thus, lumumba’s experience at the end of the novel combines the physical with the spiritual dimensions of reconnection. as an ardent witness to the ritual performance of the afa diviner, the throb of the medicine drums, the songs of women and the accompanying dances celebrating and commemorating his ‘return’, and as one chosen by a young maid for a husband, he becomes one of them in spirit. it is in this village of people close to nature, steeped in folklore and myths, that lumumba discovers the real africa and his kinship and connection to it. the spiritual undercurrent of lumumba’s african experience in a remote village looms large when placed against his other more mundane encounters during his one-year sojourn in ghana. apart from telling his life story and a bit of african-american history, it is not clear what exactly he did for the year. yet his experience in ghana is enough to redefine his whole being and his sense of place and belonging. this is what he confesses to at the end of his visit: a year in africa. and tonight i am going back to america. there is no feeling like the home going feeling that i hear grips people who stray away from their homelands. it doesn’t feel like i am going home. just like returning to a place you used to know very well. or not very well either. but a place you carry in your memory, a place built into an edifice of joy and sorrow […] a place where you walked in your own footsteps hearing the footfalls of folks before you, where you ate and drank your meager fares and bitter waters because you had no other choice (7-8). however, comes the voyager ends inconclusively; lumumba does not indicate whether he wishes to return to ghana or not, let alone relocate there. 41 adjeivolume 23 (2012) the return: a tarzan mentality the return tells the story of prince nii kojo dadensroja who was separated from his future wife, queen ensinaa, when he was sold into slavery by his younger brother and shipped to america in the c18th, at the height of the glory of the azanta kingdom, a fictional name for the former asante kingdom. this story is told over and over again as part of folk memory in the family of the goldsmiths, an affirmation of the idea that african oral traditions are central to understanding african-american cultural traditions and black culture (niane 1982). the protagonist, jason goldsmith, is a successful businessman whose company, goldsmith industries, specializes in aerospace engineering and computer networking security systems, with subsidiaries in the us, canada, europe, southeast asia and australia. on a trip to the ivory coast in a bid to expand his business to africa, his private jet crashes on a wooded mountain somewhere in the forest regions of west africa. the site of the crash happens, by some coincidence, to be the heart of the age-old azanta kingdom which jason goldsmith has heard so much about. he and his crew are rescued by the local militia and sent to the court of the king of azanta. it is here that jason goldsmith receives the shock of his life: he is recognized as the old prince dadensroja—a replay of deandrea’s “over-exploited stereotype”. however, unlike awoonor’s lumumba, it does not take a diviner’s eyes to recognize jason as someone from the old stock. a look at his chest reveals the royal sign of azanta—a revelation that sends princess ensinaa, eponymous descendant of queen ensinaa, screaming. consequently, the guards rushed to ensinaa’s side. she pointed in shock at jason’s chest and they went over to look. there, perfectly etched on his chest was the ancient royal sign of azanta, two threes hovering above each other like a figure of eight lying on its side, called “gye nyame” in the akan language. the guards stood thunderstruck and then as if pushed down by a powerful force, they fell on their faces as one man and prostrated themselves before jason who had now sat up in consternation (122). the story is that before queen ensinaa died, “she prophesied that prince dadensroja would come from the skies to reclaim the throne of azanta” 42 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) (128). incidentally, jason possesses the “majesty,” “height” and “physique” (122) of the prophesied messiah. by convention and logic, “as the direct descendant of prince dadensroja, and having the birthmark of the royal house of azanta, jason automatically inherits the golden stool of azanta and is the rightful king of azanta” (127). it also means the end of the rule of the priests who seized power and ruled with an iron fist fearing that prince dadensroja would one day put them out of power. this puts jason on a collision course with the present ruling class. it is a government marked by brutality and blood-letting; a government in which the chief priest would sacrifice anyone who challenges or poses a threat to his authority. in its depiction of autocratic rule, as well as in terms of its (time and place) setting, the narrative alludes to jerry rawlings’ pndc military dictatorship, and generally, the many other military governments on the african continent. in this sense, the text’s postmodern and postcolonial inflexions become obvious. presumably, jason’s messianic calling entails the overthrow of the old oligarchy. oddoye’s jason goldsmith falls outside the orbit of the africa-diaspora reunion schema. firstly, he is not the typical african-american who, like sheik lumumba mandela, feels hemmed in by the stranglehold of the american socio-politico-economic system and who wants to escape that bind, if only temporarily. he is a wealthy businessman and part of the american aristocracy, effectively cushioned against the economic travails of his african-american counterparts. secondly, he finds himself in azanta purely by chance. thirdly, in spite of all his initial pretensions jason, is an expatriate fascinated by the ‘otherness’ of the azanta jungle and society, as is his brother jesse and their white companions who appear to be ‘tourists’. as already stated, he set off for africa as a businessman looking for new spheres and spaces to expand his business empire and not as a political messiah. he had visited abidjan several times on business trips but had never developed any connection with this country beyond observing its semblances of an american city with well-appointed bazaars and boulevards. he demonstrates the ignorance of a first-time visitor to africa and is obsessed with pedestrian euro-western perceptions and myths about africa. put another way, jason and his crew come to africa with 43 adjeivolume 23 (2012) a tarzan mentality. their greatest fascination is not with the people and their culture and social organization, but with lizards, worms, monkeys, snakes, crocodiles and lions and the african jungle, defining features etched indelibly in the western mind. jason does not feel any sense of belonging because he is not in africa to reconnect in the first place. the only time he professes his belonging is when he finds himself in danger of being killed, when he says: this is my ancestral home! […] my great, great great grandfather, prince nii kojo dadensroja, was unjustly sold as a slave to america. today, my brother jesse and i, his descendants, and our friends through our unfortunate accident, have found ourselves in beautiful azanta, a place we never believed existed [my emphasis]. shall we be treated as aliens and put to death because we are the unfortunate victims of unfortunate circumstances? the blood of azanta, your blood, runs through our veins. you must right the wrong done to prince dadensroja so long ago by letting us go as free men! (140) when he talks of azanta blood running through their veins, the hollowness and insincerity of this claim reverberate across africa to america: he seems to be merely engaged in a parody of what has been said of his azanta ancestry. he is not interested in the new royal status conferred on him. all he wants is the freedom to go back to america (as an american citizen) where he rightly belongs. this is confirmed when he and his friends finally make their escape to the ivory coast: “slowly, they made their way to the united states embassy. they had never been happier to see the emblazoned crest of the embassy [my emphasis]” (1856); “happier,” not because of their escape, but for having touched the soil of america, symbolized by the embassy. it is only when, upon their arrival back in america, jason and jesse recount their ordeal to their family, that there is a reorientation regarding the full import of their experience in azanta. jason and his family decide to return to africa, to azanta, to re-enact the spiritual and historical bonds that bind the goldsmith family to this kingdom, and also to bridge the gap between the fairy-tale azanta and the ‘real’ twentieth-century azanta. but it must be borne in mind that they return as fugitives, aliens 44 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) and pretenders whose claims to a blood relationship must of necessity be proved beyond every reasonable doubt. in this case, jason must prove his citizenship through a contest with the chief priest in adowa, kpashimo and agbadza, three well-known traditional ghanaian dances. the importance of this dance contest is that it signifies some education in and induction into traditional african culture. the three dance forms mentioned are significant not merely as the shuffling of feet to sounds and drums, but as total expressions of cultural literacy. thus, after much tutoring, jason “began to know the joy of being in total control of the dance, to be able to express his history, his present, his future and his very being in the totality of the african dance and ... inspire his people with it” (222). eventually, he masters the dance and wins the contest against lord ason. it is only at this point that he is accepted as a citizen and an overlord of azanta; only then does he feel one with them. his acceptance speech amplifies this new orientation and status: chiefs and elders of the people of azanta [..] my family and i have been deeply touched by the warmth and love shown to us here in azanta. for us, it is a renewal of life, a straightening out of the tangled but never forgotten web of our ancestry. it is an enduring affirmation of the greatness of our people, and an enriching of the dynamic root of our common heritage. as king of azanta, i shall do all in my power to protect our cultural and traditional institutions as well as promote the economic progress of our people. because of my global business interest however, my family and i will not be able to conduct any necessary business that may directly need the king’s attention. i have therefore, on the advice of the council of chiefs, appointed lord otu…to act as regent during my absences from azanta (227). if the recognition of lumumba mandela as an umpteenth generation slave by the old afa priest in comes the voyager seems intriguing and implausible and makes sense only because of the interplay of ‘magic’ and realism, the recognition of jason goldsmith as the reincarnated prince dadensroja of the azanta kingdom is even more intriguing, given the fortuitous circumstances surrounding it. in both cases, the recognition and reintegration weigh more on the side of ceremony than substance. jason’s eventual crowning as the substantive king of azanta looks more 45 adjeivolume 23 (2012) like the crowning of an nkosuohene (akan) or ngogbeyifia (ewe)— honorary or ceremonial chiefships which have been conferred on a number of diasporans for their charity work in ghana, including singers isaac hayes and rita marley. there are a number of thematic and artistic dissimilarities one can draw between the return and comes the voyager. the most notable is that, whereas in the return there is an initial hostility towards jason, in comes the voyager, lumumba is embraced without hesitation. in terms of narrative, the return lacks the deep philosophical and psychological texture of comes the voyager. in the latter, the prose-poem interludes by a faceless and disembodied narrative voice which acts as a psychic and mnemonic backcloth to the text gives it a certain lyricism which also connects the past to the present. as sackey (2000: 367) rightly observes, the narrative structure of comes the voyager is modelled on awoonor’s first novel, this earth, my brother..., which is a “medley of forms and intense, tight sequences of poetic prose alternating with more open stretches of realistic narrative” now and again broken by “shots of running commentary, all moving sometimes forward in time, sometimes backwards or in circles, and, at yet other times, operating outside our accustomed historical time-scale.” besides, awoonor himself is situated in the narrative for he “has never believed in the idea of an author as a recluse”, and therefore, his “prominent presence in the novel...suggests the intimacy between the artist and his community” (sackey, 2000:369). the return, on the other hand, is modelled on a hollywood, highbrow, pulp fiction tradition targeted at a western readership with copious footnotes and explanatory glosses. a major problem with the text is the pre-historic, dreadful, and barbaric picture oddoye paints of the twenty-first century azanta kingdom. it is a state-within-a-state (modern ghana) located deep within an impenetrable jungle, a totally claustrophobic and xenophobic island barricaded against and untouched by modern civilization, almost frozen in time. oddoye’s azanta is a law unto itself with the state apparatus being fuelled and driven by institutional bloodlust. it is a typical tarzan setting. on first encounter, any visitor from the west, even if he has african blood flowing through him, would regard the people as ‘noble savages’. 46 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) thus, the return reads more like an expatriate colonial novel set in africa, in the manner of rider haggard’s king solomon’s mines, joseph conrad’s heart of darkness or saul bellow’s henderson the rain king, where a ‘civilized’ western figure ventures into the infernal african ‘darkness’ and is either crushed under the pressure of africa’s unaccommodating environment, coupled with the people’s ‘savagery’, or survives due to some western ingenuity. jason is, indeed, a replica of bellow’s henderson who, after all the trouble he goes through in the ethiopian jungle among ‘savages’, eventually gets crowned king and flies back triumphantly into the glare and glitter of western civilization. osiris rising: africa betrayed, dreams deferred osiris rising, parts of which echo or draw liberally on asante’s “afrocentricity,” is the synthesis of ayi kwei armah’s quest for african identity which he introduced in two thousand seasons as “the way.” the linkage between two thousand seasons and osiris rising is immediately striking. both are based on african myths; the former on the akan myth of anoa (sekyi-otu 1987; wright 1989), the latter on the ancient egyptian myth of isis and osiris (mensah 1998; jackson 2000). osiris rising is the saga of a young african-american woman who embarks on a journey to africa to learn first-hand the relevance of ancient egypt to contemporary africa and the african diaspora. this quest is epitomized in the ‘ankh’ (ancient egyptian symbol of the life force). the odyssey of the protagonist, ast, begins when she tries to find out from her grandmother the name, import and origin of the ‘ankh’ symbol. this interchange opens a whole chapter on the slave trade which is linked up with the story of a book, journey to the source. it is a book which, apart from ast’s incisive probes into the history of the slave trade and the history of africa in america, becomes the main motivating factor for ast’s desire to go to africa, to seek hidden truths about her african origins and what she considers to be the authentic story of africa. ast holds a first degree in world history; for her second degree she “shifted closer home” to egyptology and for her doctorate she focused on kemt (ancient egypt). with her comprehensive grounding in afro-centric scholarship, by graduation time, “her search for knowledge of self, within 47 adjeivolume 23 (2012) the universe, had led her through a flow of changes… the search had accelerated her decision: return” (8). like lumumba, and unlike jason, ast imposes on herself a messianic mission to move to africa, and once in africa, with the help of kindred intellectuals, to transform africa into a continent of visionary people committed to casting away their veil of inferiority. but in her own ‘journey to the source,’ ast, in terms of her motivations, ideological impulses and desires, is like thousands of other seekers of ‘truth’ from america. however, the ‘african reality’ confronts any adventurer in search of history, knowledge, emancipation, fulfilment and release from the frustrations of america. the ‘african reality’ becomes the litmus test for all these seekers, including ast. the ‘african reality’ is aptly described by netta, a ghanaian teacher in the novel: foreigners are more vulnerable than people born here. they can be miserable without jobs. some are elated when offered villas and monthly allowances. a few african-american visitors, i’m afraid, got trapped that way. i know two who came burning to revolutionize the world and start the rule of justice. the security fellows watched them until they got broke. then they hit them with money...they came wanting so much to escape slavery in america. they ended up joining the slave dealers here. (68) it remains to be seen if ast’s dreams will collapse against the full force of this reality. according to her, “i want to work in a society i belong to, with friends moving in directions i can live with” (69), and as far as she is concerned, “it would have to be africa, because of who we are, who i am.” the reason is that, in america, “i feel like a passenger earnestly walking homeward at five kilometers an hour. it didn’t make sense” (70). ast’s dream gets the initial jolt when she soon discovers that her vision of africa is rather idealistic and out of touch with the reality, especially with regard to the african elite, the “friends moving in direction.” these friends include those like seth who are interested in money and power and the trappings that come with both: “the magic ability to fly above famine, inflation, civil war. the charmed life while the continent burns. money. politics. the bureaucratic trip. local directorship in multinational corporations [...] whatever” (77). first, there is ras jomo cinque equaino, a character cloned from his historical namesake, joseph cinque 48 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) (of the ‘amistad affair’ fame), from whose portrait we get the ‘cinque syndrome.’ a fraudster, he typifies the diasporan characters whose return to africa is a mere pan-africanist charade and populist showmanship, subordinated to private gratification. such characters first of all need a camouflage and the first thing they do is to carve out their african identity by assembling flamboyant, pompous titles and accolades from a constellation of a supposedly pan-african nomenclature. they must also stay close to the corridors of power and privilege as allies of the new african ruling elite who perpetuate the old master-slave relationship in africa. in the case of jomo cinque, he manages to work himself into the bosom of the tyrannical president christian ahmed utombo. according to netta, when cinque first came to africa, he did not seem certain what he wanted to do. he looked lost. then the security people picked him up—he soon got a car, regular money and a retreat on the beach where he set up an orientation centre for americans seeking african roots. his “africult” is a mixture of rasta, islam and christianity laced with negritude (80). paradoxically, as a young undergraduate in america, cinque’s life was “a nomadic search for clones to white power” drawing “plenty from an enthusiast’s faith in the american myth of equality shimmying on scaffoldings of inequality” (89). at that time, he was known as sheldon tubman. his delusion shattered, exposing the debris of his artificial universe created from an illusion of the real america, he disappeared. rumor said he had entered a trappist monastery in canada. some reported having seen him at a baha’i seminar in bhutan. he became a muslim for a spell. then he joined an authentic yoruba village founded on the principles of negritude and based in the mississippi delta (95). then there is prince woosen. this fake ethiopian character and aide-decamp of cinque is a big-time mafia-type drug dealer in new york who relocates to africa to save his skin after his cartel is busted by the police. like cinque, he needs a smokescreen to be able to appear pan-africanist and to hide his real sordid identity. schooled in some flimsy strands of ethiopianism and rastafarianism, he lays false claims to ethiopian royal blood and arrogates to himself due majesty which he flaunts by making 49 adjeivolume 23 (2012) people believe he is an ethiopian prince. he dresses the part in order to draw the desired attention to his person: “scarlet robe so long its hem swept the tiling every time he took a step...rasta tresses of a rusty brown like his complexion...tight wooden beret of yellow, green, red and black bands” and in his hand “a horsetail fly whisk which at frequent intervals he flicked with studied solemnity” (127). clearly, he comes to africa only to cool off. asked how he finds life away from america, he says: “it’s quiet in this country...you might as well be in eskimo country” (127). on the extreme side of the axis, there are other kinds of characters. these are the committed type, “a few who really dream of changing things” but who find out “this is no country but a mess, and it blows their mind” (my emphasis, 134). they come to stay but they do not come with cinque’s ‘brotherhood’ stuff. yet they come up against formidable obstacles. ast belongs to this category. ast, together with asar and other progressives at the university of manda, initiate a revolution in afro-centric scholarship by proposing the following: one, making africa the center of our studies. two, shifting from eurocentric orientations to universalist approaches as far as the rest of the world is concerned. three, giving our work a serious backing in african history…placing a deliberate, planned and sustained emphasis on the study of egyptian and nubian history as matrices of african history… (104). ast is by all standards a committed person who wants to be involved in real change and stands solidly by her lover asar even as the state apparatus plots his death. she has come to stay. yet given the general field of connectors, some doubt her intentions and she is forced to be constantly on the defensive. others have seen the shortcomings in her enthusiasm and idealism. even her lover, asar, fears that her search for roots and connection is inauthentic. ast wants to flaunt her zeal and commitment before the africans, but according to asar, “functioning roots can’t bear exposure. what they need is to go on quietly distilling lifestuff from the earth. in the dark […] i’ve seen americans search around hoping to dig them up for exhibition. it’s one more way to keep rehearsing our murder” (243). one problem with ast is that in her enthusiasm she fails to factor in the 50 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) indigenous african social and political terrain. she is in part ignorant, unaware that in africa “educated people use their intelligence to avoid risk, to accumulate power, money, privilege” (p.71). she should have realized these barriers at the point of entry–the airport–when a security official detained her for carrying what he said was subversive material and subsequently subjected her a harrowing session of state-of-the-art electronic interrogation. her refusal to tap into this ominous prevarication places her, right from the beginning, on a course of self-delusion. her other problem has to do with her association with asar, the affable but reclusive intellectual who joins the circle of armah’s lonesome fringe characters who include baako in fragments and modin in why are we so blest? these characters are idealistic, scrupulous to a fault, fail to weigh rationally the enormity of the social burdens they impose on themselves and end up being destroyed by the social order which they set out to change. asar is antithetical to seth. these two characters are the symbolic and allegorical figures whose diametrically opposed ideological positions, vocations, moral timbre and conduct reflect the osiris and isis myth on which the novel is constructed. they represent the revolutionary and the reactionary elements in africa and may to some extent explain, as wright (1996:263) remarks, why there is “the tendency of the characters to polarize into principles rather than intensify into individuals.” in the context of the osirian myth, asar, the revolutionary intellectual, represents the enlightened pharaoh, osiris, whose reign transformed ancient egypt into a paradise. seth represents the destructive set, brother of osiris, who placed osiris in a coffin alive and threw him into the nile. the blowing up of asar into fourteen pieces by the deputy director of security, seth, on trumped-up treason charges, an action which effectively ends asar’s revolutionary initiatives in concert with the other progressive persons, is an ingenious simulation of the osiris myth, specifically the discovery of osiris’ body and its dismemberment into fourteen pieces by set after it had been retrieved by isis, their sister. this episode is reenacted in armah’s novel when the hail of bullets struck asar, and “ast saw asar totter upright in a flash…then he exploded silently into fourteen starry fragments, and the pieces plunged into the peaceful water” (305). 51 adjeivolume 23 (2012) by her relationship with asar, not only on a professional level but also in an amorous, conjugal union, ast becomes the mythical isis who was pregnant by osiris at the time of his destruction. by carrying asar’s baby at the time he is destroyed, ast, like isis, is a symbol of regeneration. for now, ast’s dreams may be shattered, but through the child she is carrying she remains bonded to africa and functions as a vital link between the continent and its diaspora. her situation more than sums up the dynamics of the reverse crossing of the middle passage: such an undertaking is not a one-stop enterprise. we can only conclude that ast may be a committed returnee bent on helping forge a new direction for africa and its diaspora, but due to her ignorance, idealism and naivete, she, like other diasporans, is not yet prepared for the task. neither are africans. this goal remains to be accomplished at some future time. this is what set, the embodiment of destruction, seems to be saying at the end of it all when he whispers a single message to ast: “when you’re ready, come” (305). conclusion in the context of “the return”, all three texts operate at four main levels: (a) as double consciousness in a conceptual sense; (b) as motion—in a mimetic sense—involving the reverse crossing; (c) as rupture—motion hampered and disrupted by irreconcilable cultural and geo-political differences; and (d) as myth—lodged within a cross-genealogical historical and collective unconscious. the fourth dimension in particular—myth— 52 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) deserves some commentary. the importance of myth in african literature has been stressed by soyinka (1976), angmor (1999), sutherland-addy (1999) and other african heritage scholars. the filtering of all three texts through african myths is an aesthetic device that makes the narratives ‘authentically’ african, situated between history and fiction. it must, however, be emphasized that as a work of popular fiction oddoye’s the return does not belong with the two other texts. its inclusion is intended only to indicate that the phenomenon is captured in both highbrow and popular ghanaian fiction. in effect, it is obvious in the three texts that the “back-to-africa” consciousness is part of an emerging pan-african nationalist culture still in a state of flux—what patterson and kelly (2000) refer to as “unfinished migrations.” this consciousness may not crystallize into any distinct configuration so long as the boundaries of the emerging nation(alism) accommodate everything and reject any centre, and so long as it hangs between the juncture of the symbolic and the concrete. it cannot be located on any one side of the atlantic in spite of the present criss-crossings. elliot skinner (1982:17) puts all these contradictions and the lack of closure in their proper perspective in his observation that: relations between peoples in diasporas and their ancestral homelands are complex and full of dialectical contradictions. first, there is anger, bitterness and remorse among the exiles – and often among the people at home – over the weaknesses that permitted the dispersion to occur. second, there is conflict when the dominant hosts attempt to justify the subordinate status of the exiles…third, there is often an acrimonious debate among the exiles themselves, and between them and their host and ancestral communities, as to whether the exiles should return to their homelands. 53 adjeivolume 23 (2012) references angelou, maya. 1986. all god’s children need traveling shoes. new york: random house. angmor, charles. 1999. “myth as aesthetic perspective in the african novel.” perspectives on myth ed. esi sutherland-addy. accra: woeli publishing services, 60-70. anyidoho, kofi. 1989. the pan african ideal in literatures of the black world. accra: ghana universities press. armah, ayi kwei. 1969. fragments. london: heinemann. armah, ayi kwei. 1973. two thousand seasons. nairobi: east african publishing. armah, ayi kwei. 1974. why are we so blest? london: heinemann. armah, ayi kwei.1995. osiris rising. popenguine, senegal: per ankh. asante, molefi kete. 1980. afrocentricity: the theory of social change. buffalo: amulefi publishing company. awoonor, kofi. 1992. comes the voyager at last. trenton, nj: africa world press. bascom, william. 1969. ifa divination communication. bloomington: indiana university press. bellow, saul. 1959. henderson the rain king. new york: viking press. berry, mary f. & blassingame, john w. 1982. long memory: the black experience in america. new york/oxford: oxford university press. conrad, joseph. 1999. heart of darkness & selections from the congo diary. new york: random house. dantzig, van albert. 1999. forts and castles of ghana. accra: sedco publishing limited. 54 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) deandrea, pietro. 2002. fertile crossings: metamorphoses of genre in anglophone west african literature. amsterdam/new york: editions rodopi. diop, cheik anta. 1974. the african origin of civilization: myth or reality? ed. and trans. mercer cook. westport: lawrence hill & company. du bois, w.e.b. 1903. the souls of black folk. chicago: a.c. mcclurg & co. gilroy, paul. 1993. the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press. haggard, rider. 1885. king solomon’s mines. oxford: oxford university press. harris, joseph e. (ed.) 1982. global dimensions of the african diaspora. washington dc: howard university press. idowu, bolaji. 1973. african traditional religion, a definition. maryknoll, newyork: orbis books. jackson, rashida. 2000. “osiris rising: ancient egyptian mythology and post-colonial africa,” multiculturalism & hybridity in african literatures, ed. hal wylie & bernth lindfors. trenton: africa world press. maduakor, obi. 1994. “novel (west africa) – magical realism,” e. benson &l.w. connolly (eds.), encyclopedia of colonial literatures in english, london/new york: routeledge. mazrui, ali. 1992. “will the circle be unbroken? historical perspectives on the african diaspora.” paper presented at the national museum of american history, washington dc, february 6-8, 1992. mensah, a.n. 1998. “ayi kwei armah’s osiris risisng,” african literature today 21, 130-34. 55 adjeivolume 23 (2012) niane, david t. 1982. “african oral traditions and afro-american cultural traditions as a means of understanding black culture.” global dimensions of the african diaspora, ed. joseph e. harris. washington dc: howard university press, 106-111. oddoye, david. 1999. the return. huntington, west virginia: university editions, inc. patterson, tiffany r. & robin kelly. 2000. “unfinished migrations: reflections on the african diaspora and the making of the modern world,” african studies review 43: 11-46. payne, michael (ed). 1988. a dictionary of cultural and critical theory. mass/oxford: blackwell publishers ltd. sackey, edward. 2000. ‘review of kofi awoonor’s comes the voyager at last.’ in fontomfrom: contemporary ghanaian literature, theatre and film, ed. kofi anyidoho & james gibbs. amsterdam/ atlanta: editions rodopi b.v. sekyi-otu, ato. 1987. “toward anoa…not back to anoa: the grammar of revolutionary homecoming”. research in african literatures 18:192-214. soyinka, wole. 1976. myth, literature and the african world. cambridge: cambridge university press. sutherland-addy, esi. 1999. “what is myth?” in perspectives on mythology. ed. e sutherland-addy. accra: woeli publishing services, 13-26. wright, derek. 1989. ayi kwei armah’s africa: the sources of his fiction. london: hans zell publishers. wright, edgar. 1996. “the ghanaian novel in the nineties,” journal of modern african studies 34:179-92. imaging a president: rawlings in the ghanaian chronicle kweku osam* abstract the post-independence political hist01y of ghana is replete with failed civilian and military governments. at the close of the 1970s and the beginning of the i 980s, a young air force officer, flt. lt. jerry john rawlings, burst onto the political scene through a coup. after a return to civilian rule in i 99 2, with him as head of state, he was to finally step down in 2000. for a greater part of his rule, press freedom was curtailed. but with the advent of civilian rule backed by a constitution that guarantees press freedom, the country experienced a phenomenal increase in privately-owned media. one of these is the ghanaian chronicle, the most popular private newspaper in the last years of rawlings' time in office. this study, under the influence of critical discourse analysis,· examines "letters to the editor" published in the ghanaian chronicle that focused on rawlings. through manipulating various discourse structures, writers of these letters project an antirwalings ideology as a means of resisting what they see as political dominance reflected in rawlings rule. 1. introduction critical studies of media discourse have revealed that media texts are not free from ideological biases. throughout the world, it has been observed that various discourse types in the media, for example, editorials, opinion, and letters provide conduits for the expression of ideologies. in ghana, many of the studies carried out on the contents of the media have tended to be done through the traditional approach of content analysis. from the viewpoint of critical discourse analysis (cda), the media texts in ghana offer a very fertile area for research. this is so because the media, both print and electronic, have gone through various stages of development. throughout the post independent years, there has always been, until the advent of the 4'h republic, the state control of the media. even though in previous times private newspapers have existed, it is nothing compared to the current situation. *prof. kweku osam is an associate professor in the department of linguistics, university of ghana, legon 109 the state of the media is even more interesting when we confine our observation to the period of the rule of flt. lt. jerry john rawlings. over the period of his time in power, the country went through a tectonic shift in the character of the media. from the period of strict state control and state-allowed-only newspapers in the 1980s, we move into the early 1990s when privately owned and operated newspapers started appearing. the advent of the 1992 republican constitution brought with it an explosion in the proliferation of private newspapers and radio stations. this happened because the constitution guarantees the freedom and independence of the media article 162 (1) and (3) of the fourth republic of ghana constitution made provision for the establishment of the private press (article 162 (3): freedom and independence of the media are hereby guaranteed.(article 162(1)) there shall be no impediments to the establishment of private press or media; and in particular, there shall be no law requiring any person to obtain a licence as a prerequisite to the establishment or operation of a newspaper, journal or other media for mass communication or information. (article 162 (3)) in the context of ideological contestation, it is very much an understatement to indicate the obviousthat the media are very critical in any political struggle. in the history of ghana, we have seen the media used as a tool in the political struggle. for example, in the 1970s when there was not as much press freedom as there is now, the catholic standard and the legan observer provided avenues for those who fought against the military rule of that period. so the media have always been used for the struggle for political power. much as the media are used as instruments of political domination, as do they provide avenues for victims of political dominance to express their resistance to the forces of domination. as a result of the growth of the private media in ghana since the coming into being of the 1992 constitution, those who made up the political other in relation to the government of rawlings found in various newspapers and radio stations avenues to express their resistance to that government. 110 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) with the preceding as the background, the goal of this study is to examine the political resistance to the rule of rawlings as expressed in letters to the editor in the leading private newspaper in ghana in the twilight years of rawlings' rule as head of statethe ghanaian chronicle. during the 1990s, this newspaper was considered as one of the media outlets for opposition to the rule ofrawlings. 2. political context to situate this study in its proper context, an over of ghana's political history and the role of rawlings in that history are very crucial. in this section, therefore, my goal is to provide a broad over of the historicopolitical context necessary for the appreciation of the texts being analysed. 2.1 overview of ghana's political history the documentation on ghana's political history is immense and well articulated. what i offer in this section, therefore, should be seen as a microcosm of an extensive intellectual domain expertly articulated by those whose professional skills are better suited for that purpose. some of the relevant works in this regard are: chazan (1983), ocquaye (1980, 2004), boahen (1989), and nugent (1995). after a period of struggle between the nationalists and the colonial authorities, the gold coast won it's independence to become ghana in 1957. the first civilian national government was led by kwame nkrumah, the architect of ghana's independence. in 1964, nkrumah declared ghana a one-party state, thus ruling out every opposition to his government. in 1966, the country experienced its first military take-over. the military government of the national liberation council ruled till 1969 when, through elections, the country went back to civilian rule. the new government, under prime minister k. a. busia, was also overthrown in the second military coup in january 1972. the second military government was headed by general i. k. acheampong with a ruling council that went by the name national redemption council (nrc). the nrc was made up of seven army officers, the inspector general of police, and the attorney general. in the early years of the nrc, there was popular support for the government. this was mainly because the government took certain measures which kweku osam 111 the mass of ghanaians felt were in their interest. for example, gen. acheampong decided not to honour any of ghana's foreign debt obligations. he also introduced an agricultural policy, 'operation feed yourself, which ensured sufficient food supply in the early years of his rule. by 1975, however, various factors had combined to create a crisis of confidence for his government. these factors included the oil crisis of 1973 which unexpectedly increased the country's import bill; a drop in cocoa production-the country's dominant export; a general decline in the economic fortunes of the country; shortage of goods, including food items, leading to very high prices. in addition to these, there was also a very high level of corruption in official circles. as shillington (1992:22) points out, "the acheampong government, widely recognised as disastrous for the country, is most vividly remembered for its institution of corruption on a massive scale ... " these factors started to cause disaffection for the government. opposition to the government came from all directions. to forestall any loss of credibility for the army, there was a reengineering of the ruling council initiated by top level officers of the armed forces. in october 1975, the nrc was replaced by the supreme military council (smc). the new council was still headed by general acheampong; the other members were the chief of defence staff, the inspector general of police, the army, navy and air force commanders and the boarder guards commander. the change in the ruling council, however, did nothing to reverse the deterioration in the economic fortunes of the country. by the second half of the seventies, the national economy was in serious trouble and the corruption among government officials was becoming more and more obvious. as shillington ( 1992:22) observes: the incompetence and mi.smanagement of the early years was coming home to roost and it was soon clear that the government had lost control of the economy. as the economy fell apart, those military officers in positions of power began to help themselves to the country's dwindling coffers. senior military officers, now in charge of ministries and state corporations, 112 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) used their positions to look after their own interests. the scope for their nefarious activities was almost infinite. it ranged from diverting state funds and selling import licenses, to using army labour and equipment to build private houses for themselves. at the same time those military officers who headed state corporations left themselves open to exploitation by corrupt civilian businessmen who manipulated contracts and deals to make illegal fortunes for themselves. as support for the government was eroding, agitations at the national level was rising. to try and prop up his hold on power and partly in response to a growing call for the military to hand over power to a constitutional government, acheampong mooted an idea for a nonpartisan form of constitutional rule in what was popularly referred to as uni gov (union government). however, critics of the government saw in this a ploy by acheampong to perpetuate his hold on power. opposition to the government came from various powerful groups-the national union of ghana students (nugs), the association of recognised professional bodies (an umbrella organisation for university lecturers, lawyers, doctors and other professionals), the christian council of ghana, and the catholic church. there were persistent students' demonstrations and workers' strikes. almost invariably, these were met with police and military brutalities. in 1978, concerned about a national explosion, some officers of the military dislodged acheampong as chairman of the smc and head of state in a palace coup. he was replaced by lt. gen. akuffo and the ruling council came to be commonly referred to as supreme military council ii (smc ii). with the coming into power of smc ii, nothing much changed. the corruption that had characterised the nrc and smc i continued. a remarkable change, though, was that the ban on party political activities was lifted at the beginning of 1979 in preparation for a return to civilian rule. 2.2 political rawlings the overview of the ghanaian socio-economic and political scene briefly outlined above formed the background that brought rawlings on to the political landscape. on may 15, 1979, there was mutiny in the kweku osam j13 army led by fl. lt. rawlings. with the mutiny unsuccessful, rawlings and those who joined in it were put before a court martial. however, on june 4, 1979, while the trial was still in progress some young officers staged a coup and overthrew the existing military government, released fl. lt. rawlings from custody, and formed the armed forces revolutionary council (afrc) under the chairmanship of rawlings. when the afrc came to power, elections had already been planned. these elections were allowed to proceed and on september 24, 1979, the afrc under rawlings, handed over power to the newly elected civilian government. the elections were won by the people's national party headed by dr. hilla limann. not long after rawlings handed over power, he led another coup on december 31, 1981, that overthrew the civilian administration of dr. hilla limann and formed the provisional national defence council (pndc). the pndc under rawlings ruled till 1992 when elections were held under a new constitution. rawlings led the national democratic congress to win those elections and thus became a civilian head of state. in 1996, he stood a second time and won to serve a second tern1 of four years as head of state. under the 1992 republican constitution, he could not stand again for election after having served two terms as head of state. the year 2000, therefore, marked raw lings' last year in office as president of ghana. i-laving held power for over three months in 1979 and from december 1981 to december 2000, rawlings holds the record as the longest serving head of state of ghana. after holding power for that length of time, it is legitimate to find out how sections of the population evaluated his term in office. this is the reason that informs this study. in studying the les in the ghanaian chronicle, one would be contributing to the analytical studies of a genre that offers an outlet for mass participation in the democratic process (pounds 2006). 3. theoretical framework 3.1 critical discourse analysis: overview the study is situated in the context of the framework of critical discourse analysis (cda) as represented in works such as: wodak et al. 114 legon journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) (1999), fowler ( 1991, 1996a), kress (1993), van leeuwen (1993) wodak (2001, 2004, 2006), fairclough (1995), fairclough and wodak (1997), vandijk(1993, 1995, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c,2001a,2001b,2002, 2006), bhatia (2006). critical discourse analysis studies the way in which power abuse as reflected in dominance and inequality, and resistance to these in the social context is manifested in discourse. wodak et al. (1999:8) indicate that: "the aim of critical discourse analysis is to unmask ideologically permeated and often obscured structures of power, political control, and dominance, as well as strategies of discriminatory inclusion and exclusion in language use." the focus of cda is, therefore, on the link between power and discourse structures; that is, how linguistic resources are used to manifest social and political power differentiations. this orientation of cda is based on the assumption that language is not a neutral tool for communication. as van dijk ( 1996: 84) points out: one of the crucial tasks of critical discourse analysis (cda) is to account for the relationship between discourse and social power. more specifically, such an analysis should describe and explain how power abuse is enacted, reproduced or legitimised by the text and talk of dominant groups or institutions. this point is also articulated by (1996b:40): "linguistic codes do not reflect reality neutrally; they interpret, organize, and classify the subjects of discourse. they embody theories of how the world is arranged; worldviews or ideologies." furthermore, cda is concerned with how power abuse is resisted and challenged. predominantly, mainstream research in cda has tended to concentrate on how social power abuse is discursively constructed. even though cda practitioners recognise the relevance of counter-power and resistance, studying the discursive strategies of resistance has not been on the mainstream agenda. this is borne out by the following view from vandijk (1993:250): " . . . . we pay more attention to 'top-down' relations of dominance than to 'bottom-up' relations of resistance .... kweku osam 115 exploitation. the letters in this study were analysed along the following parameters: schematic structure, thematic organization, sentential semantics, lexicalization, and rhetorical strategies. 5.1 schematic structure the schematic structure or schema of a text refers to the overall architecture or form of the text (van dijk 1988). previous studies on les (for example, hoey 1983 and ghadessy 1983) have generally concluded that such discourse types have a problem-solution structure. this means that in terms of the overall pattern, les tend to identify a problem and propose a solution. morrison and love (1996) found a similar pattern, but with a variation. in comparing the .structural model established by hoey (1983) with what their study shows, this is what they say: typically, a letter opens with a statement that introduces and elaborates on a problem. this is followed by reference to some form of offered solution, which then receives negative evaluation. in hoey's model, the structure then becomes recursive, profering alternative solutions until positive evaluation is achieved. in the case of many of the parade and moto les, the negative evaluation is followed by an intensifying restatement of the problem and then by a series of moves which build up to a challenge to the government to act to provide a solution. (morrison and love 1996:50) departing from the problem-solution pattern generally associated with les, the data in our study reveal an argument structure pattern. in other words, most of these letters tend to have a proposition-evidence structure or some variation of it. so a writer states their view of rawlings, followed by the evidence (or reason) in support of the view. of course, there are few cases where the letters follow the problem-solution structure. in the corpus analysed, then, a letter typically has the following categories constituting its architecture: • headline • viewpoint • justification • conclusion 118 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) these categories are illustrated with the text in ( 1 ): it's the same old rawlings the recent speech by president jerry rawlings marking the seventh anniversary of the fourth republic was the president at his dubious best. 2. so now he is calling on all of us to see ourselves first as ghanaians before thinking ofourselves as members ofpoliticalparties. 3. since when didhe realise this in the 20 years of his partisan misrnle? 4. here is a leader who has presided over the most divisive administration this country has ever known. 5. ls this not the same person who goes to other constituencies in the country to insult the intelligence of people for voting for members of the opposition? 6. remember the president's speech last year at tamale regarding the minority leader, mr. j. h. mensah! 7. is this not the same person who called the opposition thieves, vampires, nation wreckers, dzimakpfas, etc? 8. did we not hear the first lady recently tell people at ablekuma north and bon wire that if they do not vote for the ndc, they would not see any development in their areas, as if the money generated by the good people of ghana comes from her private bank account? 9. the president stated in his speech that as a nation, "we need to rediscover our national sense of purpose and direction." 10. fine words, indeed! 11. he should start by explaining to us the rationale in buying a $20 million presidential plane when education is in tatters and health service for the majority of people is practically nonexistent and unaffordable. 12. he still hasn't said a word about this dubious deal, and come to think of it, neither has his group of dribbling sycophants who a.re always so quick in preaching his infallibility! 13. he should explain to the people of ghana the sense in procuring armoured personnel carriers and riot control equipment at astronomical prices when the police do not have the basic facilities to tackle even daylight robberies. 14. we are all witnesses to the spate of unsolved murders going on in the country under the very noses of a force that cannot solve these robberies, but quick to jump on innocent students and civilians expressing their constitutional rights. 15. at the moment, it is too late in the day to listen to words of wisdom that have no meaning even to the preacher himself. 16. why preach it if you don't believe it? 17. november 2000 cannot come soon enough! (sarah kukuaamensah, january 24-25, 2000). kweku osam 119 in this text, as in all others, there is a headline: it's the same old rawlings. in newspaper discourse, headlines are very important. as van dijk (1987: 188) has pointed out, "headlines are particularly important because both in production and in the reception of news reports, they subjectively define the most prominent or most relevant information of the news items." the headlines of the various letters, to a large degree, confirm their argumentative structure. the following are samples: (2) • open advice to president rawlings • why i oppose rawlings • i'll demand my justices from rawlings • politics of lies, who is more guilty? • is rawlings a joker? • anassessmentofrawlings' rule • we are students of rawlings in the sample text, sentences 1-3 constitute what i call the viewpoint. in these sentences, the writer states her view of rawlings. in some cases; writers would make reference to specific incidents and these would provide the background against which they state their viewpoint. in the text, for example, the writer makes reference to an occasion during which rawlings makes a speech, and this becomes the point of departure for the writer. after stating the viewpoint the writers of these letters would then go on to offer a justification for their opinion. in text 1, the writer's justification covers sentence 4 to 14. as would be discussed in detail later, justifications tend to be based on historical cases. in other letters, the justification may be based on the writer's interpretation of an event. most of the letters end with what could be referred to as the conclusion. for many of the les, this is where the writers' ask for behaviour change from rawlings. the following are sample conclusions: (3) we have forgiven you all these failures, but we plead with you to put us back on course before you go: the minimum wage of$4.00 120 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) in limann's time, the rate of the cedi to the dollar before you came. after all, if you couldn't mend our economy, why should you destroy it, if that was why you appeared on the scene. (kobina atta,august23-24, 2000) (4) i call on president rawlings not to crack such jokes. rather, he should sincerely forget about the issue of corruption since he has completely deceived ghanaians into thinking that he could have halted corruption. he killed others for no tangible and apparent reason. (nanabanyin ninsin-imbeah, march 15-16, 2000) 5.2 thematic organisation the thematic organisation of a text refers to what the text is about at a general level. this means that in any text, the theme is the most central, or the most important information; what we can call the aboutness of the text. the themes in these les can be organised into two broad categories, all revolving around the person of rawlings. one category deals with the character of rawlings, and the other covers his rule as head of state. in most of these letters, the tendency is to characterise him in negative terms. one of his character traits is that he is disrespectful: (5) was it not in the regime of rawlings' (p)ndc that for the first time in the history of ghana a young president assaulted !tis old vice president? (mohammed adam, january 11, 2000) (6) as for jerry rawlings, his vulgarity, arrogance, lack of decorum and abusive character can be understood from his poor social background. (obeng k waku, january 14-16, 2000) another feature of his character is that he is a liar: (7) the whole problem about this man is that ghanaians do not seem to accept the fact that this man came to power on a pack of lies . .. if this man rawlings was speaking the truth, why can't he mention or substantiate his accusations? (muntari awini, june 16-18, 2000) kweku osam 121 (8) it is obvious that president rawlings lied to his guests when he told them the chronicle had called vice-president mills a dog. (kofi fofie,april 10-11, 2000) he is also portrayed as a dictator: (9) because president rawlings wants to have more powers as he had during the so-called revolutionary era, he, in connivance with people like dr. obed asamoah and some "yea yea" members of parliament, are t1ying to impose on us a constitutional dictatorship. this must be resisted .... after all these, rawlings is not satisfied and he still wants more power twelve months to the end of his almost two decades on the throne. (kwaku obeng, january 12-13, 2000) (10) the 1980s and 1990s saw the disengagement of the masses from the process of state and development in order to escape the excessive appropriation of the ruthless dictatorship of rawlings. (daniel djann, november 3-6, 2000) as head of state, most of the les see him as having run a failed government. some of the specific sub-themes are that he was in charge of a corrupt government; that his government undertook many wrongful actions; that his style ofleadership encouraged sycophancy; that his term in office brought suffering to ghanaians: (11) if loans, foreign aids and taxes squeezed from long suffering ghanaians for . developmental purposes were used properly, ghana should have been a paradise by now. rawlings has supervised the most corrupt government in the history of this land of our death and has not prosecuted even one of his government officials for misappropriation of state funds, even though there is a lot of them around. . . through corruption, mismanagement and misplacement of priorities, rawlings has ruined the nation's economy and has impoverished almost all ghanaians apart from those around him . .. i am sure as rawlings is leaving the presidency, his heart and mind are not at ease, because he is leaving a divided, poorer and wretched country and people than he came to meet in 1981. (kofi piesie, april 12-13,2000) 122 legan journal of the hulvianities volume 19 (2008) (12) poverty is not new anew thing in ghana but what is new and heart breaking is the unprecedented scale of pauperisation. the gap between the have-something and have-nothing appeared to become uncrossable once rawlings and his parasites entrenched their power base. (daniel djann november 3-6, 2000) in relation to the theme of rawlings' character profile, there is regularly a call on him to change his behaviour. some writers who believe that he has committed wrongs would usually ask him to apologise. as a result, the theme of apology is strongly articulated in some of the texts. (13) let me conclude with a piece of free advice for jerrymiah rawlings: submit to the authority of god, apologise for all the caustic remarks. "i don't fear god .... even god is not democratic,'' etc. and talk less. (evangelist k wame poku, april 79, 2000) ( 14) therefore, as the time for him to leave gets closer, he should learn to practise what he preaches and leave ghanaians alone. we have tolerated him enough. (yaw dankyi, 18-20, 2000) (15) after overthrowing a legally-constituted government, ostensibly to right perceived wrongs in the society, we still have evils of old staring us in the face. this alone calls for deep-seated apology to ghanaians, particularly victims of the revolution, whether innocent or villain. (anthony adjapong, march 1-2, 2000) 5.3 sentential semantics 5.3.1 semantic roles one parameter of analysis in discourse studies is sentence level meaning. an aspect of this level of meaning is semantic roles. depending on one's theory, various roles can be recognised: agent, patient/theme, benefactive, and recipient. in political discourse, these roles can be manipulated for ideological ends. evidence from the corpus for this study suggests that generally, when rawlings is offered theagent role, the verbs associated with this role usually have negative values, as the following examples show. kweku osam 123 (16) was it not in the regime of rawlings' (p)ndc that for the first time in the history of ghana a young president assaulted his old vice president? (mohammed adam, january 11, 2000) (17) rawlings and his people have cheated us for far too long. (stephenayivi, june14-15, 2000) (18) permit me to use your medium to demand an immediate and unconditional apology from the president, mr. jerry john rawlings (junior jesus) for the insult and pain he inflicted on the people of tamale and, for that matter, northerners. (joseph ewumtomah, january 4-5, 2000) in these examples, rawlings is associated with negative verbs such as assault, cheat, and inflict. even though the agent role is hierarchically the most prominent, when an entity is the agent of negatively valued verbs, the semantic prominence of the agentive role is neutralized. concomitantly, in such juxtaposition, the discourse producer succeeds in accentuating the negative characteristics of the entity so placed. 5.3.2 modality related to the theme of behavioural change some writers require of rawlings is the corresponding use of modals in the texts. modality, as pointed out by fowler ( 1996b: 166-168), can be mobilised for expressing ideological point of view. one, therefore, finds in some of the les the use of deontic modals-forms expressing desirability, obligation, and necessity. (19) my advice to you is that you must be very tactful with them [soldiers] and learn how to talk nicely to them so as to ease their tensed nerves, since there is a limit to human endurance. (obeng k wak:li, january 14-16, 2000), (20) therefore, as the time for him to leave gets closer, he should learn to practise what he preaches and leave ghanaians alone. we have tolerated him enough. (yaw dankyi, february 18-20, 2000) . in examining the use of these modals, we find that rawlings is being 124 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) obliged to move in directions that, in the opinion of the writers, would result in a positive behaviour change. the ideological dimension of the employment of deontic modals in these letters is that rawlings is presented by the writers as someone who must or should reform his behaviour. by implication, therefore, these modals portray him negatively. 5.4 lexicalisation lexicalisation in discourse refers to the choice of words. the lexical options that a discourse producer settles for tend to reflect their ideology. this is more so in the context of various political texts, such as the corpus for this study. lexicalisation as the pivot of ideological expressions has been firmly established, as the following quotations indicate: traditionally best known in studies of ideology and . language is the analysis of lexical items. words may be chosen that generally or contextually express values or norms, and that therefore are used to express a value judgement. (van dijk 1997 :31) although we focus on specific discursive semantics, it should be emphasised that probably the major dimension of discourse meaning controlled by ideology is the selection of word meaning through lexicalisation. (van dijk 1995 :259) in most of the texts, there is an endemic presence of lexical items (the term is used here to mean single words as well as phrases) that strongly projects an anti-rawlings ideology. the choice reflects the thematic orientation of these texts, that is, the concentration on rawlings' character and an evaluation of his term in office. the ideological representation. of rawlings in these les .is ac;centµated. by. ,n~gative words used to describe his behaviour, personality~ arid his government, as shown in the following excerpts: (21) as for jerry rawlings, his vulgarity, arrogance, lack of decorum and abusive character, can be understood from his poor social background. (obeng kwaku, january 14-16, 2000) kweku osam 125 (22) the 1980s and 1990s saw the disengagement of the masses from the process of state and development in order to escape the excessive appropriations of the ruthless dictatorship of rawlings. (daniel djann, november 3-6, 2000) (23) throughout his nearly 20 years rule, his disrespect, pride, arrogance intimidatory, bullish and insulting behaviour has turned ghana into a country of almost 20 million cowards. majority of ghanaians actually fear rawlings because of his violent nature. (kofi piesie, july 3-4, 2000) (24) rawlings has supervised the most corrupt government in the history of this land of our death and has not prosecuted even one of his government officials for misappropriation of state funds, even though there is [sic] a lot of them around. (kofi piesie april 12-13,2000) 5.5 rhetorical strategies in any discourse, the text producer may resort to various forms of rhetorical devices in the articulation of their message. rhetorical devices would include metaphors, similes, euphemisms, repetition, hyperbole, rhetorical questions and many others. as articulated by van dijk (1998a:273): "the main function of such rhetorical structures and strategies is to manage the comprehension processes of the recipient, and hence, indirectly the structures of mental models." the corpus from the ghanaian chronicle reveals that writers make use of a variety of rhetorical strategies to different effects. the strategies considered relevant here arc questions, examples, metaphor, hyperbole, and numbers. 5.5.1 questions throughout the corpus, the most rhetorical device exploited for ·representing the ideological image of rawlings is rhetorical question. the rhetorical questions in the corpus have the function of reinforcing the ideologically mediated ideas and values expressed by the writers. in (25) below, the writer states the view that there is something different about the rawlings regime, something negative. in other words, by various indicators that have happened, the rawlings regime stands apart from other regimes ghana has had. the writer uses the strategy of rhetorical questions to list what could be considered his evidence. 126 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) (25) from this, one would judge rawlings right when he claims that the (p)ndc is different from all other regimes. was it not in the regime of rawlings' (p)ndc that for the first time in the history of ghana a young president assaulted his old vice president? was it not under the same regime that ghana had the highest social and economic unrest? was it not in the administration of rawlings' (p)ndc that poverty alleviation programmes were set up, yet the people got poorer and poorer? was it not under rawlings that education was made the preserve of the rich? was it not in the rawiings regime that we have been compelled to believe that the country has had the highest development, yet the people themselves are under-developed? (mohammed adam, january 11, 2000) the use of questions in the les serves as a strategy to enhance the ideologically negative representation of rawlings through questioning his integrity, commitment to principles such as justice, freedom, the fight against corruption and the overall effectiveness of his administration. 5.5.2 examples another rhetorical strategy adopted consistently through the corpus is the use of examples or cases to buttress the writers' views. this takes the form of reference to some past incidents for which the writers consider rawlings largely responsible. for example, some writers frequently refer to the murder of three high court judges and a retired army officer in 1982 (see yidana (2002) for a detailed coverage of this case); the execution of the former heads of state in 1979; the overthrow of a constitutional government by rawlings in 1981; that fact that his children had been sent abroad to school; the serial killing of women; the altercation between rawlings and his vice-president, mr. arkaah, in which rawlings was reported to have physically manhandled him; the purchase of a jaguar xjs by rawlings; the accident on the kwame nkrumah motorway involving the presidential motorcade. the utilization of such cases helps the writers to anchor their arguments and opinions as a result of the interpretation they give to such events. when writers of the les cite such specific cases, readers are reminded of rawlings' "offences" thereby stirring up outrage against him and deepening his negative ideological representation. kweku osam 127 5.5.3 metaphor the point has been made in the critical discourse analysis literature that one of the rhetorical means by which discursive construction ofideology is effected is through the use of metaphors. this is especially so in the work of van dijk. the use of metaphor in political discourse has also engaged the attention of various researchers (see, for example, chilton and ilyin (1993) and zinken (2003), among others). in the corpus for this study, the predominantly negative representation of rawlings is reinforced through various metaphors. as discussed in section 5.2, corruption is one of the thematic strands in these les. in various letters, writers use imagery that captures their view of the extent of corruption associated with raw lings and his government. (26) let us vote out this government and replace it with one with clean hands .. the stench of corruption in this country is worse than the stench ji·om the korie lagoon. the president of ghana has openly admitted that corruption has indeed become more sophisticated. (k wasi boni, december 13-14, 2000) (27) eighteen years on, it is common knowledge that the rich-poor dichotomy in this country is unprecedented, with corruption ingrained in the national psyche. there is more dirt, indeed, in the house now than before. (anthony adjapong, march 1-2, 2000) in (26), corruption is compared with dirty hands and so the writer calls for a new government with clean hands. corruption is presented as something dirty. the writer reinforces the metaphor of corruption as dirt by indicating that it is unpleasant to the olfactory sense; that it emits bad smell, a stench. to emphasise the idea of corruption as dirt, he compares the smell emitted by the state of corruption in the country with the stench that comes from the korie lagoon. this is a lagoon located in the south-western part of the capital, accra. the lagoon has been polluted so badly over the years that in its environs, the smell from it is incredibly overpowering. by this comparison, the writer succeeds in getting his readers to concretise in their sense of smell the 128 legan journal of the humanities volume i 9 (2008) extent of corruption in the country under rawlings' administration. example (27) also deals with the predominant presence of corruption in the country, still using the corruption as dirt metaphor. in his opinion, there is more corruption now than before. the metaphor of the country as a house is in consonance with dirt since it is much easier for the intended readers to visualise a dirty house, especially because that is closer to people's lived experience. this writer moves fnm the corruption as dirt metaphor to corruption as a mental property: "with corruption ingrained in the national psyche." in effect corruption has been so pervasive that now it is etched in:o the national mentality. 5.5.4 hyperbole this is the use of exaggerated forms oflanguage as a means of projecting om's values. in the context of ideologically mediated discourse, the ter.dency is to overstate the opponent's weaknesses. the examples below illustrate some instances of the adoption of semantic amplification in chiracterising rawlings' perceived weaknesses. (28) here is a leader who has presided over the most divisive administration this country has ever known. is this not the same person who goes to other constituencies in the country to insult the intelligence of people for voting for members of the opposition? (sarah kukuaa mensah, january 24-25 2000) (29) the 1980s and 1990s saw the disengagement of the masses from the process of state and development in order to escape the excessive appropriation of the ruthless dictatorship of rawlings. poverty is not a new thing in ghana but what is new and heart breaking is the unprecedented scale of pauperisation. the gap between the have-something and havenothing appeared to become uncrossable once rawlings and his parasites entrenched their power base. whatever else has appeared in ghana seems little more than stagnati01i gone beyond recall. indeed, concentrated and unadulterated poverty has become life. (daniel djann, november 3-6, 2000) kweku osam 129 in example (28), the writer refers to rawlings' administration as "the most divisive this country has ever k11own." the use of the superlative 'most' and the adjective 'divisive' conveys to us an administration that is incomparable in the history of ghana in terms of subverting national unity. the writer also says that rawlings insults the i11telligence of those who vote for the opposition parties during elections. this projects him as having no regard for those who do not share his political opinion. example (29) offers a strong case of the hyperbolised representation cf the effect of rawlings' rule on ghanaians. in the view of the writer, rawlings' regime is dictatorial; more than that, it is dictatorship that :s ruthless. the outcome, then, is that the masses have had no option oth~r than to escape from this dictatorship. the writer also presents rawlings as the ruler under whom ghanaians have experienced the most extreme form of poverty-unprecedented scale of pauperisation. indeed, the writer is of the opinion that this poverty has been caused by rawlings. the evidence for this is use of the word pauperisation. the stro:ng language chosen by the writer to depict rawlings and his rule is further revealed through the following: stagnation gone beyond recd.i; concentrated and unadulterated poverty. 6. conclusion the goal of this paper was to examine the images of rawlings, a forrrer head of state of ghana, as represented in "letters to the editor" published in the ghanaian chronicle in 2000, the last year of his rub. analysis of the corpus has shown that the writers of these lette~s manipulate various discourse structures to portray rawlings in a negative representation. in terms of schematic structuring, most of tte letters follow an argument structure pattern where a view of rawlings js presented followed by the evidence supporting that view. thematically, the les deal with his character and performance as head of state. overall he is presented as an individual with greatly flawed character traits who superintended over a failed political administration. these themes are strongly projected in the les through resorting to the use o] discourse strategies such as lexicalization, modalizing, and a number of rhetorical strategies. considering that in 2000, the ghanaian chronicle as a newspaper generally tended to take an anti-rawlings stance in its overall coverage, 130 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) it provided an outlet for those who stood across the political divide to articulate their anti-rawlings ideology. this is an example of bottom-up resistance of domination-a phenomenon that mainstream cda needs to pay more attention to. kweku osam 131 references bhatia, adi ti. 2006. critical discourse analysis of political press conferences. discourse & society, 17(2), 173-203. boahen, albert adu. 1989. the ghanaian sphinx: reflections on the contemporary history of ghana 1972-1987. accra: ghana academy of arts and sciences. chazan, naomi. 1983. an anatomy of ghanaian politics: managing political recession, 1969-1982. boulder: westview. chilton, paul and ilyin, m. v. 1993. metaphor in political discourse. 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approaches in cda. discourse studies, 8(1), 179-190. wodak, ruth, de cillia, rudolf, martin reisig! and karen liebhart. 1999. the discursive construction of national identity. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. yidana, jacob j. 2002. who killed the judges? ghana in retrospect. accra: bismi enterprise. zinken, jorg. 2003. ideological imagination: intertextual and correlational metaphors in political discourse. discourse & society, 14(4), 507-523. 134 legon journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) 1 adika marking transgressive spaces and bodies: a review of contemporary ghanaian poetry prince k. adika1 abstract this paper reviews contemporary ghanaian poetry in the light of emerging scholarly discourses about transnational cultural traffic, especially as they relate to africa and its post-slavery diasporas in the western world. the paper argues that while most studies of ghanaian poetry have been framed by narrowly conceived nationalist viewpoints related to the limiting and inherited mandates of european colonialism, contemporary ghanaian poetry actually embraces a wider conception of nation that invokes spaces and bodies in both the ghanaian/african homeland and the diaspora. the paper argues that nation-language, for ghanaian poets as much as it was for kamau brathwaite and others in the african diaspora, rests on a foundation of multiple memories and historical experiences drawn from the spaces of both the african continent and its diasporas, and that is precisely why the imagination of nation in ghanaian poetry paradoxically transgresses the borders of ghana and logically leads to transnational transactions.1 1.0 introduction one of the remarkable things about attitudes to african literary productions of the past century or so is how closely many of those works have been identified with all kinds of national projects and narratives. over and over again, both african creative writers and their readers have gauged the value of “authentic” african literary works in terms of how useful they are to the socio-cultural and political unit of the nation and its ambitions. that tendency has been even more pronounced with regard to ghana. for instance, kwaku larbi korang’s (2003: 2) assertion that joseph casely hayford’s pioneering work, ethiopia unbound (1911) is a “pathfinding…national allegory…a representative work of early middle class nationalism” succinctly captures an earlier, colonial era version of 1 prince k. adika is a lecturer in the department of english, university of ghana. 2 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) the close affinity between literature and the national project in ghanaian literature. korang’s reading of ethiopia unbound and the broader tradition of nationalist literature it inaugurates is one that is shared by relatively recent works of scholarship on the subject, including priebe (1988), angmor (1996 and 2004) and anyidoho and gibbs (2000). for instance, in the introduction to fontomfrom: contemporary ghanaian literature, theatre and film (2000), anyidoho does not only agree with the existence of a link between the nationalist project and the production of imaginative literature in ghana, but also goes on to identify specific “defining metaphors” that ghanaian writers invoke to champion that nationalist agenda. it is fair to say that this affinity between the creation of literature and the process of imagining the nation can be found in all the genres of anglophone ghanaian literature, whether we look for it in the poetry of early writers like raphael armattoe, in the more overtly political life writing of kwame nkrumah in the mid-century, amidst the varied works of the cultural nationalists of the 1950s and beyond, or even in more contemporary, 21st century works.2 given such a background of close links between literature and the national project in ghana and elsewhere in africa, there has been a tendency among scholars to overlook an equally important—some would say related—dynamic in ghanaian literature: its tendency to collapse and even subvert the very national boundaries it has so often been identified with. the present paper is an attempt to analyse some samples of contemporary ghanaian poetry that do not confine themselves to the old notion of the bounded nation and the essentialisms and invented traditionalisms it often seems to fetishize, but instead attempt to perform identities that may best be described as transnational because the scope of their references—spatial, bodily, or otherwise— straddle multiple national boundaries. these works, as i argue, show a keen awareness of the limitations of the narrowly conceived postcolonial nation as a marker of belonging and identity, and re-focus our attention on transnational imaginaries of identity that, while not totally ignoring the old national boundaries, remind us once again of the relevance of frantz fanon’s famous assertion that the proper pursuance of national consciousness would ultimately have international or transnational implications.3 3 adika transnationalism and african literary imaginations: a brief literature review it is worth pointing out right from the outset that in broad terms, the concept of transnationalism with which i intend to frame this discussion is not altogether new; neither is it a peculiarly ghanaian or african phenomenon. it is also worth pointing out that we can not talk about the transnational in a conceptual vacuum; it is defined from/against early conceptions of the nation such as benedict anderson’s famous “imagined communities” or even ernest renan’s more historicized declaration that the nation is “based on the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories…and presentday consent” (1990: 19). yet since marshall mcluhan came up with his notion of “the global village” to describe the highly interactive nature of the modern world, diverse scholars have pointed to the diminishing relevance of the nation as the dominant socially imagined space of our times. for example, mary louise pratt, in her seminal essay, “arts of the contact zone”, refers to the growing importance of transnational contact zones and defines them as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived in different parts of the world today” (1991: 530). like louise pratt, anzaldua (1987) posits the emergence and increasing eminence of border personalities whose lives, linguistic heritages and legacies of memories are on the thresholds of the nation and challenge old notions of pure, centered national identities while stressing the in-between spaces where old notions of the nation are most susceptible to challenge. in addition, appadurai (1996), sassen (1998), maalouf (2001), ngaboh-smart (2004), manuh (2006), and jeyifo (2009) have all stressed the ascendance of the transnation and transnational identities into prominence against the enabling background of what benedict anderson (1983: 5) had earlier referred to as the inherent limitations of national narratives of imagined communities in conceptualizing both time and place. from the works of these scholars and others, we can summarize the transnation as being a fluid, translocal, contact-based, ethno-social formation that is situated on the interstitial faultlines of nation. the transnational can be marked on spaces in and outside of the nation because those spaces have some historical or contemporary experiences in common; it can 4 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) also be marked on bodies that live those historical or contemporary experiences and therefore organize cultural reflexes in response to those experiences. in sum, the outlines of the transnation come into proper focus on the foundations of the old nation and its essential narratives, but the chief distinguishing mark of transnational spaces or bodies is that they transcend those essential narratives of national purity and instead thrive on the impurities that the nation has always sought to eliminate by championing essentialist discourses. while it is generally assumed that the turn to the transnational in recent times is largely driven by the postnational impulse of global capital’s movements, a close reading of the emerging scholarship also strongly suggests that much of what drives contemporary transnationalism especially in postcolonial spaces has its roots in the historical anomaly of the postcolonial national imaginary which, many critics argue, extends anachronistic colonial-era cartographies beyond their expiry dates while perpetuating the truncation or even erasure of most of the nation’s contending multiple memories. the postcolonial nation and the way it is imagined, in this regard, does not account for all of the memories that members of the postcolonial nation have of kinship and relational associations. nor does it attempt to come to terms with evolving realities that members of the nation-state have to constantly contend with. colonial boundaries, arbitrary as they were, tended to disregard real social formations of colonized peoples, or rather worked consciously to distort them. one can point to multiple examples of this phenomenon in various colonized spaces such us the british raj or even the erstwhile francophone maghreb. but perhaps the most obvious instance of this colonial balkanization can be found in sub-saharan africa where colonial policies such as the british “divide and rule” were actively employed to distort social cohesion while arbitrary borders, mostly drawn in european capitals, were imposed against the wills of native peoples. furthermore, even before the advent of formal colonialism, the institution of chattel slavery had done much to create a network of organized dismemberments which, as ngugi (2009), armah (2010), and others have shown, the postcolonial/neocolonial nation-state neither accounts for nor recognizes as a matter that needs to be redressed. ngugi, armah 5 adika and others rightly argue that to simply embrace a rhetoric of nation that legitimizes boundaries inherited from colonial times is to consciously participate in the process of one’s own continued dismemberment, especially since those boundaries were imagined and willed into being by the powerful elites from the west for whom the practice of colonialism was also the practice of dismemberment of the other. in further extending the critique of that insular model of the national imaginary inherited from the colonizing west, one is also reminded of partha chatterjee’s (2005: 406) biting criticism of postcolonial national constructs that are throwbacks to an era of european colonialist imposition: if nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by europe and the americas, what do they have left to imagine? history, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall be perpetual consumers of modernity. europe and the americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolonial misery. "even our imaginations must forever remain colonized" (my emphasis). as i intend to show later in this paper, much of the driving force behind ghanaian poets of the transnationalist bent derives from the need to overcome or transcend this tendency in some circles to indulge “imaginations that must forever remain colonized”. it is driven by a determination to balance existing national narratives with their transnational extensions and, to paraphrase kofi anyidoho’s words, connect with aspects of the ghanaian/african self that present constructions of the nation do not account for. with that background in mind, i go on to analyze the poetry of kofi anyidoho, abena busia and others as samples of ghanaian poetry that encode the transnational logic that, as i argue, is prominent in much of contemporary ghanaian literature.4 6 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 2.0 kofi anyidoho to many critics, the work of kofi anyidoho as a poet points to an artist with multiple personae. to some, he is the author of sentimental juvenilia in the pages of ellen sangster geer’s talent for tomorrow series. robert fraser argues that his more adult work is stronger on the level of musical style because it complements leopold sedar senghor’s “syncopating syllabic strands” and also “showcases a strong, individual voice over communal concerns” (fraser 1986: 311-318). kofi awoonor notes that anyidoho’s poetry tackles “the eternal situation of the african condition” (qtd in priebe 1988: 162) while charles angmor sees anyidoho as “the poet of the ghanaian revolution” whose artistry “bespeaks fundamental influences…from his native ewe culture…and the national cultural renaissance that has been prevalent since ghana’s independence” (angmor 1996: 186). finally, a.n. mensah stresses how anyidoho adapts traditional conventions for his love poems (qtd in anyidoho and gibbs 2000: 217-226). these critical views summarize critics’ responses to anyidoho’s poetry over the past thirty years or so and are useful for our understanding of aspects of his work, especially the earlier work. but they do not account for the expanding notions of the self and the world that anyidoho’s more recent works have engaged with. for instance, his 1993 collection, ancestrallogic and caribbeanblues opens with a poetic passage he calls the “introblues.” there the poet explains to us how: in the last decade or so i have journeyed into various spaces of the world. and everywhere i must confront dimensions of myself that i did not know were there. i discover new purposes i did not know i could make my own. there is something of my story carved into every tombstone in all the graveyards of the world, something of my history enshrined in every monument and in every anthem ever erected in honour of the spirit of endurance (1993:2). two dominant images jump out at us immediately from this passage. first, there is the image of journeying or travelling that occupies the persona; then there is the image of wide-flung multi-national spaces captured by the reference to “the various spaces of the world”. we are 7 adika also made aware that the persona is not a stranger on a joyride in foreign spaces. rather, what he is really doing is embracing visions of himself for which the postcolonial nation—in this case, ghana— and its narrowly conceived narratives cannot account. he is confronting “dimensions of myself that i did not know were there” as a result of the limiting impact of his old limiting worldview and sense of belonging (anyidoho, 1993: xi). the above text is thus a passage about fluid motion across global(ized) spaces, but it also acquires more power if we pay attention to the persona’s claim that his story—and by implication, the stories of many ghanaians and africans like him—transcends the borders of the nation since in pursuance of a more rounded understanding of himself, he must ultimately embrace the transnational dimensions of his being. all of ancestrallogic and caribbeanblues is shaped by a keen awareness of an african history which in its worst moments is “a living wound under the patchwork of scars” and at other times is no more than the maimed offshoot of the multiple dismembering practices of centuriesold encounters with europe.5 but the collection is also a response to the contemporary transnational ramifications of the asymmetrical northsouth contact phenomenon. the very title of the collection attests to these related driving forces, and so does its introductory poem, “introblues”. in subsequent poems, we see a soulful, bluesy persona covering miles across spaces in the black atlantic and engaging with caribbean history, not with the detached eye of a foreign observer, but rather with the involved psyche of a man who reads himself as being part of all the tortured subworlds he portrays. written in part as a manifesto against those who “tell us our salvation lies in the repudiation of our history of pain and endless fragmentation” (anyidoho, 1993: xi), and in part as vigorous interrogation of the “the intimidating splendour of this young history of lies” (anyidoho, 1993: 3) that enables amnesia across the fragmented african world, ancestrallogic also connects both the african and the african diasporan experience in a network of inevitable mutuality and encourages dialogic engagements between african-heritage peoples scattered across various national boundaries both within and without africa. 8 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) it would seem on the evidence of much of the poems in anyidoho’s recent works that he is a poet who is very much concerned with the exploration of transnational spaces. and we could read the poet’s poignant references to a “history of pain and endless fragmentation” and “the young history of lies” above in a number of fruitful ways that bring that engagement with transnational space to the fore. for instance, in subsequent poems like “republica dominicana,” the dual processes of fragmentation and dispersal across multiple spaces and the lies that prevent their reversal are illustrated thus: “dispossessed of your ancestry/your blackness/ dissolves into vague regions/of the indios myth” (anyidoho, 1993: 8). the subjects of this poem are not only stripped of connections to their original african memories but also have to contend with palimpsests or grafted myths that are used to supplant those old memories. as we read through successive pieces in the collection, we are increasingly made aware that the structures (and strictures) of the slave, colonial and even postcolonial societies contribute a great deal to this fragmentation and amnesia. consequently, when the poet envisages a new, emancipatory poetics of remembering as a solution to the dismemberment that he finds all around him, he organizes that process in defiance of various national boundaries. as he had found out by personal experience, one must start the process of psychic healing by traversing dismembering borders of all sorts, and crossing the atlantic, challenging the indios myth, invoking african memories in its place, among other things, are all part of this process. that anyidoho calls for transnational journeys of reconnection across spaces in ancestrallogic is obvious enough, but he is also particular about the routes of those journeys and the final destination. the poet or the personae that speak for him are keen on making the journeys into the diaspora and engaging with diasporans, but he is equally keen for diasporans to cross over; so keen that sometimes one gets the feeling that he is even more in favour of the journey of diaspora back to homeland than he is of that of homeland to diaspora. certainly, this vision of journeys back to homeland in anyidoho’s poetry is not always to be read literally, but we cannot discount the literal dimensions either. on several occasions in the collection, the poet points out that, short of the journeys back into the space of primal beginnings, the efforts of various black peoples at self-cognition are futile and misdirected, insisting in the process that, 9 adika …all our journeys must always take us away from destinations into dislocations until one day, tired at last from endless trailings of lost purpose and lost vision we mark the only straight route from ghana to havana to guyana and on and on to savannah in georgia of the deep deep south. with africanaairways, we can re-navigate the middle passage clear the old debris and freshen the waters with iodine and soul-chlorine (1993:12) in other words, the poet insists that current efforts to progressively advance the cause of the black peoples across the world and heal abscesses from their historical wounds are failing and leading to “dislocations” precisely because those efforts often do not engage the critically important subject of transnational, cross-continental pan-africanist dialogue in all its historical complexity. part of this complex engagement involves africans like anyidoho journeying into various diasporan spaces to engage with them, but its critical counterpart involves the return journey back to africa instead of away from it, and anyidoho insists that making that return is possible only through the pan-africanist medium of what he calls “africanaairways.” even more to the point, he castigates those who do not count the relevance of re-navigating the middle passage as a central part of this process but subscribe to the dominant tendency to allow “the old debris” of historical amnesia and lack of dialogic engagement between the african diasporas and homelands to worsen the suppuration of the wounds on both sides. it is a broad canvass of re-engagement that the poet paints, but we also have to remember, especially in the context of this paper’s thesis, that the ultimate consummation of the kind of remembering that the poet advocates can be made possible only through transnational engagements. the poet implies that one flouts commitments to one’s ghanaianness to engage with caribbeans or african americans as members of a more comprehensively imagined sense of identity, but these infringements are necessary stepping stones for coming to terms with the dimensions of the african self in all its implications and extensions. ancestrallogic, then, is set up partly as a rebuke of those who are unwilling to make journeys across national boundaries to engage in productive transnational engagement, but it also champions transnational 10 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) adventurers who seek to renew kinship across the atlantic. for instance, “lolita jones,” which is partly dedicated to maya angelou and her time in africa in the 1960s, is spoken in the voice of a female african diasporan returnee to africa who engages in dialogue with africans about subjects as diverse as her name, the atlantic slave trade, contemporary african politics and her claims to a place in the contemporary african world. lolita also points out that she had made a conscious decision to “fly over and find ma space” in the post-independence african era simply because she thought the dawn of new hope “gave her back her soul” for reconnection with african kinsfolk (1993: 28). more importantly though, lolita had also concluded that her coming to african space would enable “ma people” and “your people” to dialogue over the lingering questions of how “long ago your people sold ma people” and consequently, how the atlantic storms of the middle passage “took away our voice/then it took away our name/and it stripped us of our soul” (1993: 27). at the end of the poem the persona makes it clear that she is aware of the transgressions that are implied in her laying claims to “ma space” in africa since “you didn’t even invite me here at all” (1993: 29). in other words, the fact that new narratives of the postcolonial nation do not account for the histories that produced the lolita joneses of this world is being questioned here, and the poet obviously encourages the tendency towards transgressing those postcolonial narratives through transnational engagements. taken as a whole, ancestrallogic is a strident invitation to kinship carnivals in defiance of old, colonially circumscribed national boundaries. and it is directed at both africans in the diaspora and those in the homeland. but ancestrallogic is not the only collection that showcases the efforts by anyidoho to come to terms with the transnational dimensions of the black self. in the more recent praisesong for the land (2002) which, significantly, is dedicated to “all the people i call my people”, the theme of transnational journeys over spaces informed by history dominates once more. in the opening poem, “memory and vision”—itself part of a section called “journeys into time”—the persona finds it necessary to remind his readers about the oddysean journeys of africans over the past half millennium: 11 adika for five hundred years—and more— we have journeyed from africa through the virgin islands into santo domingo from havana in cuba to savanna in georgia from vodou shores of haiti to montego bay in jamaica from ghana to guyana from the shanty-towns of johannesburg to the favelas in rio de janeiro from bukom to harlem to brixton from hamburg to moscow to kyoto— (2002: 28) given the fact that praisesong for the land is something of a eulogy to the land/space of belonging, the global journeys suggested by this and other similar poems in the collection call our attention once again to anyidoho’s growing concern with a vision of the national polity that, paradoxically, is driven by a poetics of the transnation. “memory and vision,” like much of anyidoho’s poetry, evokes a pathos that must be familiar to those who know something about the ewe dirge form or the song of sorrow. that acute ear for the sorrowful cadence has been transported into the written medium to serve anyidoho’s latest engagements with the travails of black people around and across the world. like langston hughes’ famous poem, “the negro speaks of rivers,” “memory and vision” follows the historical journeys of africans across the world. anyidoho attempts to historicize the global sprawl of the african diaspora in the lines above. but through that process of historicism, he also tries to excavate the reasons that led to those journeys of diaspora-creation in the first place. though he does not say so explicitly, there is the heavy implication in the lines above that the “journeys” by black people from africa to these various slums around the world that he refers to are anything but voluntary, especially since their genesis coincides with the beginning of the trans-atlantic slave trade five hundred years ago. this criss-crossing of global spaces in an attempt to engage versions of the black world in those spaces is a common theme in praisesong and elsewhere in anyidoho’s work. but with specific reference to “memory and vision”, he points out how these journeys help him only to consistently 12 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) discover “a dispossessed and battered (african) people still kneeling in a sea of blood lying deep in the path of hurricanes” (2002: 28). to anyidoho, a critical part of the answer to resolving the crisis of african peoples, whether they live in hamburg or kyoto or harlem or bukom, lies in an unwavering transversal of those ghettoized, cut-off spaces, followed by a new commitment to transnational kinship traffic which begins with a return to the historical space and time of first beginnings. to put that insight in perspective, he invokes memories of space that are meant to encourage african peoples across the world to reengage with the african homeland and with the history that led to the break between the african homeland and the diaspora. rather than encourage what he considers the fashion for amnesia or conspiratorial hiding from the history of pain and fragmentation that created the dire situations he sees around him, he asserts that any attempt to solve the contemporary problems of africans around the world has to reckon with the history of the past five hundred years. he points out, no matter how far away we try to hide away from ourselves we will have to come back home and find out where and how and why we lost the light in our eyes. how and why we have become eternal orphans living on crumbs and leftovers (2002: 29) returning home, to the persona, is essential for communal healing and renewal. above the limited conception of home as african space, the stress in these poems by anyidoho, it seems to me, is on traversing national boundaries and engaging in kinship dialogues with other africanheritage peoples. these journeys, as i have tried to show, challenge the essential foundational thesis of the postcolonial nation in various ways. but to us as readers, the larger point that needs to be kept in mind is that the poet seems to have no problems with transgressing the boundaries of the postcolonial nation of ghana and embracing transnational kinship precisely because he sees those transnational journeys and engagements as key to a new era of healing and even social progress. 13 adika the point about the exploration of transnational space in anyidoho’s work is further supported by evidence from his latest collection, the place we call home (2011). although the collection is anchored by a title poem which asserts that there is a lot to be said for the nostalgic memories and familiar scents of the “place we call home” because it “defines our sense of self of time of place” and holds “primal memories” (31-35), the poet is also concerned about the complacent tendency on the part of some to consign themselves only to that space. even by naming that space “the place we call home,” he is calling our attention not to an absolute, essential place that marks being and identity, but rather to a strategic adoption of space; a local address that would serve as a staging ground for further explorations of our “backwards-forwards dance” into the various transnational spaces where kinsfolk now dwell as spirits or as living humans. that is the more reason why the place we call home is filled with “crossroads” and “crossways” and journeys across “space and time” to come to terms with “our constant act of dismembering/our sacrificial egg/laid at the shrines of alien gods”, as the poet puts it in his homage to kamau brathwaite in “atigbon legba” (2011: 29-30). the point being made about transnational engagements of the panafricanist variety in the place we call home is noted by femi osofisan who, in his preface to the collection, points to how “kofi displays an impressive intimacy with the geography and genealogy of black dispersal throughout the world, from the entire north and south america to the caribbean and then to the eastern hemisphere” (anyidoho 2011: xxiiixxiv). that statement is particularly true of the “first movement” of the place we call home which, as i have tried to show with examples above, constitutes nothing but movements into diaspora and back to african space in a series of kinship rituals meant to challenge the history of dismemberment. “ancestral roll-call” which is a libationinvocation of personas of various nationalities from across the black world, appropriately sums up his transnational cum pan-africanist bent in this latest collection; a fact which in turn reasserts the continuing relevance of transnational visions and hopes in the poetry of anyidoho and increasingly, of other ghanaian writers. 14 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 3.0 abena busia the dominant imagery of journeying across transnational spaces in search of the scattered remnants of self that characterises much of anyidoho’s recent poetry is echoed in abena busia’s poetry. yet apart from traversing transnational spaces, busia’s poetry is also significant for focusing our attention on transnational bodies of black people straddling and being straddled by various spaces within the black atlantic. it is in this regard that busia extends anyidoho’s engagements with spaces of transnational transaction. unlike anyidoho, however, busia’s critique of the nation has a more radically subversive tone, as she sometimes appears to be calling for the total abolition of the postcolonial nation and all its claims to being the place of first belonging. in addition, she at the same time lionizes a perpetual exilic state of being and consciousness as the model for the postnational/transnational persona. this reading is in keeping with her major collection so far, the aptly titled testimonies of exile (1990). in testimonies, busia begins by recreating series of images that conform to pratt’s contact zone concept of bodies of the colonized and the colonizer in contact. the opening poem from that collection—and perhaps busia’s most anthologized— is called “caliban.” “caliban” primarily revises our understanding of the shakespearean character of the same name. busia’s caliban starts off as a native who finds himself locked up in a scenario of asymmetrical relations of power with a master. as a result, s/he is left with bondage, dispossession and the dubious consolation of speaking “this dispossession in the language of the master.” but being caliban, for busia, has other implications. for instance, it paves the way for the now enslaved native’s body to receive the mark of doom, so to speak, and to be “ravished and naked/chanting the words of a little girl lost/…a black man’s child/stranded on the shores of saxon seas” (1990: 5). the contact experience, in this scheme of affairs, logically leads to an eternal exilic existence for all caliban-like natives and that experience becomes the ur-text for all of busia’s subsequent portrayals of the world and for selfcognition in testimonies. from what must have been sure-footed beginnings of pre-encounter native self-knowledge and self-possession, what we notice in poems such as “and anyway i can’t go home” is an overwhelming sense of alienation 15 adika and a perennial wandering in search of a new identity forged in the crucible of encounter. like the palestinian poet, mahmoud darwish’s visions of exile from the self, busia’s personas are exiled bodies branded by markers of a foreign power that insists on keeping them in zones that straddle being and non-being.6 and from that externally imposed atrophy of self-hood, they must create a new language of being. from the caves of calibanesque transmogrification, they “have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: home” (busia, 1990: 7). yet this search—or searches—are doomed to failure because they learn soon enough that they cannot go home. we are thus made aware of the consequent tragic inevitability of their odyssean fate; the never-ending wanderlust that must drive them on perennial transnational journeys across boundaries and frontiers of old nations in search of psychic purgation and kinship renewal without the consolation, however far removed or mythical in a saffranesque sense, of a return home at some future date. in “migrations” she re-emphasizes that exilic, nomadic reality thus: we have lived that moment of the scattering of the people— immigrant, migrant, emigrant, exile,…that in other nations, other lives, other places has become: the gathering of last warriors on lost frontiers/the gathering of lost refugees on lasting border-camps,/ the gathering of the indentured on the side-walks of strange cities… in the half-life, half-light of alien tongues,/in the uncanny fluency of the other’s language…all my friends are exiles,/born in one place, we live in another/ and with true sophistication,/rendezvous in most surprising places—/where you would never expect to find us/with the globe at our command, we have everywhere to go, but home. (1990: 8-9) driven by exigencies of both history and contemporary global pressures, the “we” of “migrations” are also marked by another quality: their resistance to national boundaries and the nation’s narrowly conceived and yet totalizing narratives, especially in the light of the dispossessing effect of the master’s power on them. in fact, by taking up labels such as “immigrant, migrant, emigrant, exile” and so on, they hold themselves up as warriors whose spaces of operation the nation cannot control precisely because they live on the margins of the nation while at the same time 16 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) transcending it. one reads a certain ennui generated by loss dominating the lives of these scattered migrants of the new world order, but it is also obvious that these are people determined to transform the loss of home into a new syllabary of identity that challenges the dispossessing discourses of the old nation. this desire not to be confined by the limiting definitions of the nation is stressed even more loudly in another poem, “petitions” where we are made aware that these same renegades of national space have defiantly, …asked for courage not to belong, not to identify, not to regret. not to confine the spaces of our souls to the places of our first heart beat not to let withering umbilical cords keep us parched (1990: 19) perhaps what busia calls “petitions” in this poem might sound odd to those of us who are used to belonging to and identifying with various standard social formations and communities, especially the particular kind circumscribed by the borders of the postcolonial nation-state. significantly, this abjuration of belonging is loudly in defiance of birthplace and homeland; the same places that anyidoho’s poetry has strongly pointed to as the destiny of all those who want to undo the effects of colonial dismemberment. even more importantly, she seems to strongly suggest that the fetishization of return-to-homeland narratives can only have retrogressive consequences for those who pursue them (“confine the spaces of our souls”/ “keep us parched”). but her wishes/prayers/requests/demands make sense if we understand them not as absolute abjurations of all sense of belonging and identification but rather as references to the untenable nature of keeping allegiances to essences and dehydrating monologic narratives at the base of the postcolonial nation and its alter-egos in centers of colonial power. in the portion of “petitions” quoted above, and elsewhere in busia’s poetry, 17 adika what we see is the subversion of birth-place fetishism, the unquestioned and unchallenged glorification of the place of the first heartbeat and the burial ground of the metaphorical umbilical cord—in the face of multiple sojourns across multiple spaces forced on us by the realities of history and every day life. in other words, busia is telling us that fixed identities, especially those derived from and limited to the nation, are not tenable in the face of the multiple transnational sojourns and contacts that various people have as a result of history and contemporary developments. in fact, in what seems to be an extension of her radical diversion from anyidoho, she seems to be discarding the very idea of nation as the basis of identity, and consequently advocating the acknowledgement of the new being founded on the very ruins of allegiance to the nation. in other words, in busia’s work one transcends the nation, not to extend it, but rather to abolish it so that other realities suppressed by the nation might flourish. this reading is supported most eloquently by perhaps the most powerful and emotionally effective poem in testimonies, “at last rites.” in it, busia creates a poetic vision very similar to that of anyidoho as discussed earlier, by reminding her readers of the multiple dimensions of herself that lie scattered in multiple spaces across continents and how these multiple dimensions came to be in those many places. she, too, explains why she (or bodies like hers) must wander over various transnational spaces through her lifetime to come to terms with herself. yet, that is where the comparison with anyidoho ends. “at last rites” is a defiant poke at those who want to re-collect and return; to go “home to that place where otherwise i will not go”. busia seems more interested in expanding the pace of her “furious wanderings” and the “passion of disharmonies” that overwhelm her body now. she also asserts her determination to stay that way till death, effectively sounding the clarion for a lifetime of activist rejection of the notion of exclusive belonging to nations or even larger formations such as continents. as she succinctly puts it: i i am a passion of disharmonies axing my dismembering self splitting my body among continents at my death re/collect me. 18 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) steady me into a casket and take me home to that place where otherwise i will not go ii. let’s not twist down or re le ve o ver my r-oving ra ging bones. a four step hesitation will pace this rage an economy of movement to contain the grief for furious wanderings the grace of a-do-wa will mark my fi-nal time so pray it can stay the course of severed histories; hold still, to give me rest, the portion of earth which gave me birth by the adoption of a succession of –ing verbs in “axing” and “dismembering” and “splitting” she also signals her active embrace of those on-going, dismembering processes. it is important that we do not lose sight of the context of these statements: in embracing dismemberment this way, busia is obviously acknowledging histories of dismemberment that african-heritage peoples have experienced over the years. but she is also embracing those histories not as regrettable cataclysms that need to be undone but rather as staging grounds for new transnational identities. and even more to the point of our argument, she is acknowledging transnational movements as the natural consequence of severed histories and calling for a progressive appropriation of those histories. in sum, we may say that busia’s struggle to come to terms with identity involves reckoning with dimensions of herself split among continents and nations in the course of “furious wanderings.” for her, the simple— and simplistic—answer of the national birth-place cannot explain the complex histories that have marked her and her “passionate” wanderings 19 adika over the years. her whole life as represented by testimonies is summed up by a quest to reckon with severed histories that have also dismembered the self. her body itself is marked as an index of those wanderings and migrations and dispersals and scatterings across national boundaries. but rather than putting shattered pieces of dismemberment together, she is more interested in defiantly “staying the course of severed histories”. whichever way we look at that decision, we also must understand her or the multiple voices that speak in testimonies as transnational sojourners whose very bodies and the passion of disharmonies that occupy them become the symbolic sites of an important version of the transnational agon in contemporary ghanaian literature. 5.0 other ghanaian poets and the transnational impulse while this discussion has focused largely on anyidoho and busia as eloquent spokespersons for two major manifestations of the transnational instinct in contemporary ghanaian poetic expression, we could isolate a generous amount of poetic works from other ghanaian writers that speak to the same tendency. for instance, works such as kobena eyi acquah’s music for a dream dance (1989) and kofi awoonor’s latin american and caribbean notebook (1992) are organized around the motif of panafricanist transnational travels in quest of identity and self-knowledge. in fact, acquah’s dream dance is nothing but a subversion of national borders in order to embrace the dream dance of trans-atlantic pan-africa, just as awoonor’s notebook is a record of cross-ocean connections beyond the old, frozen nation-space. a number of awoonor’s personae in notebook are particularly sensitive to cross-atlantic relationships and defy the borders of the postcolonial nation-state to embrace them. for instance, the persona in “of niggerhood”, after making long journeys across the atlantic, uses the mechanism of historical memory to establish kinship with the caribbean space and the bodies in it thus: memory told me i’d been here before once upon an age now lost in ocean water companied by flying fish across a briefer ocean (awoonor, 1992: 37) 20 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) awoonor’s poem is built around a transnational conception of niggerhood that appropriates the negative historical baggage of the n-word while engaging its potentially progressive uses. consequently, he invokes the kind of solidarity which only the wretched of the earth are capable of, but in order to make it operational, he reminds his audience about how the oceans and flying fish that once straddled the transatlantic slave trade routes are also the best bridges to that new solidarity of niggerhood. and one gets to understand this point, the poet suggests, by engaging what lies on both sides of the ocean water(s). along the same lines of a new spirit of transnational engagement, the persona of ama ata aidoo’s “in memoriam: the ghana drama studio” (2004), when asked whether she feels at home in ghana, calls attention to a marked shift in the way home is defined, with a new, transnational definition now in vogue: i wondered how an old campaigner like you could have asked the question…and the forever pain around my heart/ jumped, roaring for attention/because comrade/(holy places and their desecrations aside/and not to mention the sacred duty to feel at home anywhere in africa,/ and love every bit of this battered and bartered continent which i still, perhaps naively, call my own,)/i thought folks like you n’me had stopped defining home from way back and have calmly assumed that home can also be anyplace where someone or other is not trying to fry your mind, roast your arse, or waste you and yours altogether (2004: 27). home, as we can see in aidoo’s vision of it above, challenges the old myth making processes of the nation and emphasizes a new strategic, transnational solidarity of african individuals seeking restoration from centuries of colonial battering and bartering. and these seeking individuals, as we have seen in other cases discussed above, are also marked by the fact that they seek that restoration beyond the limits of the nation. 6.0 conclusion the key sentiment that runs through the works i have referred to is the tendency to identify with a conception of identity and self-realization that is willing to revise the postcolonial nation-state and its essential, 21 adika monologic narratives as the defining markers. at various points and in the opinions of various critics, the poets on whose works this paper has focused produced works that were seen as worthy of enriching our national narratives. those readings may still be applicable, but in order to make that possible, we would have to go back and interrogate the very meaning of the nation itself in ghanaian literature. as commentators like larbi korang have noted, as early as 1911 when j.e. casely hayford’s ethiopia unbound was published, the connection between literature and the nationalist consciousness was already in vogue. that trend, it would seem, has continued into contemporary times. but it is also important to note, as this paper has tried to do, that nationalist consciousness in ghanaian literature and in literatures elsewhere in subaltern spaces of the postcolonial world does not necessarily coincide with mandates inherited from colonial cartographies of the nation. to perceive these literatures in such limited and limiting terms, as chatterjee suggests, would be to risk our memories and imaginations being colonized all over again especially in times and spaces that we often insist on calling post-colonial. luckily for us, the creative writers of contemporary africa have led efforts to transcend those old stultifying notions of the nation. consequently, much of the creative work by ghanaian writers that is read as part of imagining the nation as conceptualized in anderson’s imagined communities is also really a process of subverting old understandings of the nation and engaging the transnational dimensions of postcolonial identities. at least, that is the kind of argument that this paper has attempted to make. and although the works of kofi anyidoho, abena busia, kofi awoonor, ama ata aidoo and others have been used to illustrate the point, a larger body of work including those in the genres of prose and drama such as ayi kwei armah’s osiris rising, amma darko’s beyond the horizon, or benjamin kwakye’s the other crucifix, to mention a few, could easily be used to illustrate the same idea. while it may still be useful to read these works as pieces in the national literature of ghana, their concentration on various transnational spaces and bodies raises legitimate questions about the limits and extensions of the nation and ultimately, the same works call upon us to do the hard work of re-examining the provenance and teleogy of what we call ghanaian literature. 22 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) notes ___________________ 1 kamau brathwaite’s concept of nation language which was first elaborated upon in his seminal history of the voice: the development of nation language in anglophone caribbean poetry (1984) stresses how anglophone caribbean identities, informed by multiple memories of “ashanti, congo, yoruba, all that mighty coast of western africa” cannot be easily subsumed under the easy rubric of the postcolonial univocal anglophone nation, but have to be studied with that broader multi-national historical background in mind. braithwaite also points out how this “very complex…is now beginning to surface in our literature” (5-8). while brathwaite’s focus is very much on the language of caribbean nationhood and its interactions with history, it is still very applicable to this study. 2 the connection between national consciousness, a national culture, and literature far predates the 1950s and the title of j.e. casely hayford’s ethiopia unbound clearly epitomizes an early version of the desire for a unifying cultural and political imaginary amongst proto-ghanaians of the turn of the century. but as charles angmor points out in contemporary literature in ghana 1911-1978 (1996), a more marked “desire to cultivate the literary tradition…became a national concern” from the 1950s onwards. this movement, popularly known as the cultural nationalist movement, was led by stalwarts like efua sutherland and had farreaching effects on the careers of most ghanaian writers of the second half of the twenty century. 3 see frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth (1967: 199). 4 kwadwo opoku agyemang’s “a crisis of balance: the (mis)representation of colonial history and the slave experience as themes in modern african literature” presents perhaps the most strident call so far in african scholarship for an engagement with the history of the trans-atlantic slave trade and its contemporary ramifications. my own argument here, framed by a recognition of ghanaian poets who engage with the post-slavery african diasporan spaces and bodies in a transnational cultural traffic, is an extension to that call for the need for balance beyond the confining legacy of the (post)colonial national imaginary. 5 see opoku agyemang, “introduction,” cape coast castle: a collection of poems. 6 abena busia herself has admitted to the influence of darwish’s work on the diasporic consciousness on her own work although she at her work from a decidedly african perspective. see for instance, testimonies of exile (9). 23 adika references acquah, kobena eyi. 1989. music for a dream dance. accra: asempa publishers. aidoo, ama ata. 2004. “in memoriam: the ghana dance studio.” in an anthology of contemporary ghanaian poems. eds. woeli dekutsey and john sackey. accra: woeli publishing. 26-28. anderson, benedict r.o. (1983) 1991. imagined communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. london; n.y.: verso. angmor, charles. 2010. literature, life and present day ghana, 19782003. accra: ghana universities press. angmor, charles. 1996. contemporary literature in ghana, 1911-1978: a critical evaluation. accra: woeli publishing services. anyidoho, kofi and james gibbs. 2000. fontomfrom: contemporary ghanaian literature, theatre and film. atlanta; amsterdam: rodopi. anyidoho, kofi. 2011. the place we call home and other poems. oxfordshire: ayerbia clarke publishing limited. anyidoho, kofi. 2002. praisesong for the land: poems of hope and love and care. accra: subsaharan publishers. anyidoho, kofi. 1993. ancestrallogic and caribbeanblues. trenton, n.j.: africa world press. appadurai, arjun.1996. modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. armah, ayi kwei. 2010. remembering the dismembered continent: seedtime essays. popenguine: per ankh. 24 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) awoonor, kofi. 1992. latin american and caribbean notebook. trenton, n.j.: africa world press. brathwaite, kamau. 1984. history of the voice: the development of nation language in anglophone caribbean poetry. london: new beacon books. busia, abena. 1990. testimonies of exile. trenton, n.j.: africa world press. chatterjee, partha. 2005. “whose imagined community?,” internationalizing cultural studies: an anthology. eds, ackbar abbas and john nguyen erni. malden, ma: blackwell. 406-412. fanon, frantz. 1967. the wretched of the earth. harmondsworth: penguin. 199. fraser, robert. 1986. west african poetry: a critical introduction. n.y.: cambridge university press. jeyifo, biodun. 2009. “for chinua achebe: the resilience and predicament of obierika,” things fall apart: a norton critical edition. 454-491. larbi-korang, kwaku. 2004. writing ghana, imagining africa: nation and african modernity. rochester, n.y.: university of rochester press. louise pratt, mary. (1990) 1996. “arts of the contact zone,” ways of reading. eds. david bartholomae and anthony petrosky. boston: bedford books. 528-546. manuh, takyiwaa. 2006. an 11th region of ghana?: ghanaians abroad. accra: ghana academy of arts and sciences. maloouf, amin. 2001. in the name of identity: violence and the need to belong. n.y.: arcade. mensah, a.n. 2000. “counting the ways: the love poetry of kofi anyidoho,” fontomfrom: contemporary ghanaian literature, theatre 25 adika and film. eds. kofi anyidoho and james gibbs. atlanta; amsterdam: rodopi. 217-226. ngaboh-smart. 2004. beyond empire and nation: postnational arguments in the fiction of nuruddin farah and b. kojo laing. amsterdam, n.y.: rodopi, 2004. ngugi, wa thiong’o. 2009. something torn and new: an african renaissance. n.y.: basic civitas books. opoku-agyemang, kwadwo. 1996. “introduction,” cape coast castle: a collection of poems. accra: afram publications ltd. 1-10. priebe, richard. 1988. ghanaian literatures. n.y.: greenwood press. renan, ernest. 1990. “what is a nation?” nation and narration. ed. homi bhabha. london and n.y.: routledge. 8-22. sassen, saskia. 1998. globalization and its discontents. n.y.: new press. 71akande, okanlawon and akinwale attitudes of educated yoruba bilinguals to codeswitching a.t. akande, o.b. okanlawon and o.t. akinwale1 abstract this paper investigates the attitudes of some university and tertiary institution students to codeswitching. respondents were drawn from four tertiary institutions located in the southwestern part of nigeria. a structured questionnaire was administered to the informants whose ages ranged between sixteen and fifty-five years. the social variables tested included qualifications/programmes and schools. the study revealed that the overall attitude of nigerian students to codeswitching is largely positive. it also showed, among other things, that students on degree programmes are more positively inclined to use codeswitching than those on other programmes. key words: codeswitching, attitudes, multilingual setting, bilinguals and nigerian languages 1.0 introduction this paper investigates the attitudes of some educated nigerians to codeswitching. nigeria is a multilingual country where there are more than 400 languages (bamgbose 1971; heine and nurse 2000) with well over 200 ethnic groups. some of these languages have dialects. for example, yoruba which is spoken in the southwestern part of the country has more than seven dialects. of the indigenous languages in nigeria, yoruba, hausa and igbo, each of which is spoken natively by over 20 million people (central intelligence agency 2011), are considered as major languages. each major language corresponds to a major ethnic group in the country. the minor languages have few native speakers and they have a limited geographical spread (see emenanjo 1995). another language which is spoken widely by nigerians irrespective of diverse ethnic affinities or levels of education is nigerian pidgin english. this is 1 a.t. akande is a senior lecturer, bidemi okanlawon an associate professor and o.t. akinwale a member of staff in the department of english, obafemi awolowo university, ile-ife. akande is currently humboldt fellow in the department of english, albert-ludwigs university, freiburg, germany. 72 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) a language that does not belong to any particular region and is spoken by people from different walks of life. in addition to this linguistic scenario, there is english: a language which serves in different capacities as the official language and a medium of instruction in nigerian schools. in a multilingual setting like nigeria, people are bound to codeswitch from one language to another to perform certain sociolinguistic functions. although scholars have carried out studies on codeswitching from different perspectives in nigeria (akande 2010; akere 1980; amuda 1994; goke-pariola 1983; ogunpitan 2007), only a few studies have been done on the attitudes of nigerians to codeswitching (akere 1982; amuda 1989). it is to this scanty scholarship that the present work intends to contribute. in pursuing this goal, the present study seeks to answer the following questions: a. what is the general attitude of educated nigerians to codeswitching? b. is there a significant difference among the schools in their attitudes to codeswitching? c. can academic qualifications/programmes cause a significant difference in the attitudes of nigerian tertiary institution students to codes witching? although the title of this paper suggests that the subjects are all yoruba bilinguals, we would like to state that 89% of the informants are yoruba while 11% are informants from other ethnic groups (table 2). however, this study is not interested in ethnic related differences in the subjects’ attitude to code switching, and therefore the high representation of yoruba bilinguals does not detract us from our main focus. 2.0 codeswitching: a brief overview codeswitching, the alternate use of two or more languages in the same utterance, conversation or writing has been extensively researched by notable scholars (e.g., debose 1992; myers-scotton 1993, 2002, 2006; lipski 1982). codeswitching (henceforth cs) could be seen as an essential feature of ‘true’ or ‘balanced’ bilinguals (myers-scotton 1988; poplack 1980). it is thus a natural occurrence in a bilingual or multilingual setting 73akande, okanlawon and akinwale as people tend to shift from one code to the other depending on several social factors, including the need to accommodate or exclude other people in a discourse and to express a group’s identity (auer 2005; gumperz 1982; tabouret-keller 1998). gumperz (1982: 61) claimed that speakers “build on their own and their audience’s abstract understanding of situational norms to communicate metaphoric information about how they intend their words to be understood.” amuda (1994) argues that cs can be used to encode social meanings while other scholars believe that the motivation for the use of cs is mainly stylistic (akere 1980; edwards 1985). gokepariola’s (1983) study seeks to answer four major questions regarding (1) the frequency of cs in the speech of yoruba-english bilinguals, (2) the word classes that are likely to occur in the embedded language (i.e. english), (3) whether one of the languages involved in the cs consistently serves as the matrix language, and (4) whether what is observed in their speech is actually language mixing or linguistic borrowing. the study shows that instances of codemixing could involve nominal groups, verbal groups, adjectival groups or adverbial groups and they can occur at the subject, complement or adjunct position. it is noted that there is a high degree of codemixing in the speech of yoruba-english bilinguals. akande (2010) carried out his research on the patterns of cs between standard english and nigerian pidgin english (npe). he used as his subjects thirty male university graduates selected from three universities in nigeria. although the focus of the study was the grammar of the verb phrase, it revealed that in spontaneous conversations, university graduates in nigeria switch freely from english to npe and sometimes to their indigenous languages, even in formal settings. the study also indicated that the use of npe and indigenous languages are indexical of the subjects’ identities. babalola and taiwo (2009) presented a report on the use of cs in the music of five nigerian hip hop artists. they noted that one of the ways through which these artists identify with their roots is by codeswitching to either their mother tongue or to pidgin english. the study found out that cs to yoruba is more prominent than cs to other languages. they concluded by claiming that by engaging in cs, nigerian hip hop artists “are establishing unique identities for themselves and their music” (babalola and taiwo 2009: 21). 74 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) myers-scotton (1993) proposed a theoretical framework for the analysis of codeswitching in her book, social motivations for codeswitching. she proposed the markedness model which describes language users as rational beings who from time to time choose a particular language that marks their rights and obligations as against the rights and obligations of other speakers. this means that in any multilingual setting, each language is connected with certain social roles and it is the understanding of these roles that determines what language a speaker has to choose. the languages involved in cs may be negotiated or may modulate with the topic of conversation. myers-scotton (2006) emphasized this point in her work. when two or more languages coexist, the majority language is normally considered more prestigious— a language associated with political, cultural and economic power— while the minority language is seen as less prestigious, lacking in power and geographical spread. concerning the position of the minority language, hickey (2000) remarked that a significant increase in cs is indicative of the fact that a minority language is coming under pressure from a majority language. li (2000) remarked that in a bilingual or multilingual setting, one language provides the grammatical framework, with the other providing certain items to fit into the framework. 3.0 studies on language attitudes as hinted above, the focus of this paper is the attitudes of some higher institution students in nigeria towards cs. language attitudes refer to the feelings and perceptions of people towards their own language or towards a language that does not belong to them (crystal 1992). according to baker (1992: 10), attitude is “a hypothetical construct used to explain the direction and persistence of human behaviour.” however, since human beings do change their views and perceptions, language attitudes are dynamic and subject to change based on several factors (giles and powesland 1975; ryan and giles 1982). gardner (1985) claims that the kind of motive one has for learning a particular language may affect the attitude one may have towards it. edwards (1982) opines that language attitudes can be cognitive, affective or behavioural. language attitudes are said to be cognitive in that they consist in beliefs about the world, affective because they deal with feelings and opinions of people about 75akande, okanlawon and akinwale a particular language and behavioural in that they could compel people to act in certain ways (garrett, coupland, and williams 2003: 3). as an example, a person who applies for a job which requires that s/he speaks and understands french may be forced not only to learn french but to have a positive attitude toward it, especially if the job is lucrative. in his study, akere (1982) examined attitudes towards dialect selection in ikorodu, a prominent yoruba community in lagos state. using responses to the questionnaire he administered on his respondents and also the tape-recorded interviews, he used the informants’ self-reports and their opinions on their language use to determine their attitudes to their language as well as the dialects of the language. akere (1982) concluded as follows: the conclusion to be drawn from this study is that language attitudes, especially in multilingual and/or bidialectal situations in many indigenous african communities, are very much tied up with the acceptable norms of behavior in the sociocultural setting. loyalty to the mother tongue is a function of the degree of identification with the folk culture. but where socioeconomic considerations and political aspirations warrant significantly modifying one’s life style and behavioral patterns, such modifications are inevitably carried over to the linguistic behavior of members of the community, and their attitudes towards the linguistic codes in use will be a reflection of their positive or negative evaluation of the relevant components of the sociocultural setting (akere, 1982: 359). akande and salami (2010) also investigated the pattern of the use and attitudes of some university students in nigeria to nigerian pidgin english (npe). the subjects whose responses were used were 100 students selected through a purposive random sampling from university of lagos (unilag) and university of benin (uniben), which are located in culturally diverse cities. the instrument used was mainly a questionnaire which contained 15 items focusing on the use, the attitudes and the perceptions of the students to nigerian pidgin english. the results indicated that the use of npe is more common among uniben students than among unilag students. the study’s conclusion is in a way similar to akere’s claim above, that speakers tend to be loyal and have positive 76 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) attitudes to a language they consider their mother tongue. akande and salami (2010: 81) conclude: we can thus say that npe has more vitality among uniben students than among unilag students. this may have resulted from the fact that uniben is situated in benin, and npe in benin has grown from a mere contact language to a native language for many people the paper further showed that there is a gradual acceptance of npe among undergraduate students as they have some positive attitudes towards its use. 4.0 methodology the informants who provided data for this study were mainly college of education and university students whose ages ranged between sixteen and fifty five. the majority of these subjects are yoruba and this is because all the four settings involved in the research are in the south-western part of nigeria where yoruba is predominantly spoken. while the majority of the subjects are bilingual in the native language and english, some of them could also speak nigerian pidgin english and/or another major language apart from their native language. the four schools where the questionnaires were administered are listed below (table 1). out of 300 questionnaires given to participants, 245 were returned. these schools are different in one major respect. while all participants in obafemi awolowo university (oau), ile-ife and university of ado ekiti (unad), ado ekiti are students pursuing degrees, in adeyemi college of education (ace), ondo, and lagos state college of education (lasce), noforija, epe, some students are studying for degrees while others are pursuing nce diplomas. while 84.9% degree students participated in the study, only 15.1% nce students did. the school where the highest number of informants participated is oau and this might be connected to the fact that all the three researchers for this work are based in this university. 77akande, okanlawon and akinwale table 1: distribution of informants by schools schools frequency % programme frequency % ace 69 28.2 degree 208 84.9 oau 125 51.0 lasce 20 8.2 nce 37 15.1 unad 31 12.7 total 245 100 total 245 100 the instrument used in the collection of data was a questionnaire comprising three sections: sections a, b and c. section a comprises information on the biodata of the subjects. the subjects were required to provide information about their nationality, mother tongue, school, age group as well as gender. section b consists of 20 items which are related to the attitudes of the informants to cs. section c is made up of eight items which further probe why people codeswitch, where they codeswitch and how often they codeswitch. table 2 shows the distribution of the informants who participated in the study. table 2: distribution of subjects by mother tongue mother tongue no of informant yoruba 218 (89.0%) igbo 16 (6.5%) hausa 4 (1.6%) others 7 (2.9%) total 245 78 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) out of the 245 respondents, 89% were yoruba, 6.5% were igbo while hausa accounted for 1.6%. the rest, who were not from any of these three major languages, comprised 2.9%. that the yoruba respondents constituted almost 90% of the overall respondents is expected as the four research settings are all in the south-western part of nigeria which is populated mainly by the yoruba. 5.0 data analysis and discussions perhaps it is better to start by examining the languages our informants indicated that they codeswitched to before we examine their attitudes to codeswitching. the languages that the subjects codeswitched to are seven as indicated below (table 3). the instances of cs are mainly from english to yoruba or vice-versa, with 35.8% and 34.1% recorded for yoruba and english respectively. these high percentages for english and yoruba can be connected with the fact that most of the respondents are yoruba/ english bilinguals (table 2). table 3: languages to which respondents codeswitch language frequency percentage yoruba 207 35.8% english 197 34.1% pidgin english 70 12.1% igbo 39 6.8% hausa 34 5.9% french 19 3.3% arabic 11 1.9% total 577 100 cs to pidgin english (pe) constitutes 12.1% . that pe is higher in percentage than igbo, hausa and other languages apart from english and yoruba is understandable. pe is not region-bound and can be spoken by any of the subjects. so, those subjects who do not speak other languages apart from english can switch to it. least in this table is arabic, a 79akande, okanlawon and akinwale language associated with islam, which people do not often codeswitch to as regularly as they would to other languages like yoruba, pe or hausa. the majority of the subjects, who are christians, cannot switch to arabic, and there are even some muslims who do not speak arabic fluently and may not switch to it. hence, its lowest percentage. in table 4, we present the item-by-item responses of the subjects to the questionnaire we administered to survey their attitudes to codeswitching. table 4: attitudes of the respondents to cs st ro ng ly d is ag re e d is ag re e a gr ee st ro ng ly a gr ee n o r es po ns e attitude codeswitching is inevitable among bilingual nigerian speakers. 22 (9.1%) 23 (9.5%) 108 (44.8%) 88 (36.5%) 4 instances of codeswitching should be corrected. 19 (7.9%) 87 (36.3%) 90 (37.5%) 44 (18.3%) 5 codeswitching is a source of irritation in any interaction. 35 (14.6%) 57 (23.8%) 101 (42.3%) 46 (19.2%) 6 it is acceptable to initiate interaction with codeswitching. 23 (9.8%) 80 (34.2%) 107 (45.7%) 24 (10.3%) 11 80 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) it is acceptable to codeswitch when people around you do so. 24 (10.0%) 71 (29.7%) 122 (51.1%) 2 2 (9.2%) 6 codeswitching is prevalent among educated nigerians. 21 (8.8%) 62 (25.9%) 121 (50.6%) 35 (14.6%) 6 codeswitching is appropriate in nigerian home made videos. 20 (8.2%) 74 (30.5%) 105 (43.2%) 44 (18.1%) 2 codeswitching is a marker of high proficiency among bilinguals. 39 (16.5%) 80 (33.8%) 91 (38.4%) 27 (11.4%) 8 codeswitching is a stigma among nigerians. 21(8.8%) 88 (36.4%) 84 (34.7%) 49 (20.2%) 3 implication codeswitching enhances effective communication. 32 (13.4%) 63 (26.5%) 105 (44.1%) 38 (16.0%) 7 codeswitching impairs effective communication. 30 (13.1%) 84 (36.7%) 84 (36.7%) 31 (13.5%) 16 codeswitching hinders proper acquisition of english. 47 (19.5%) 102 (42.3%) 70 (29.0%) 22 (9.1%) 4 81akande, okanlawon and akinwale codeswitching can affect proper usage of one’s mother tongue. 26 (10.7%) 53 (21.8%) 108 (44.4%) 56 (23.1%) 2 function codeswitching is an interactional strategy. 21 (8.8%) 40 (16.5%) 141 (58.3%) 40 (16.5%) 3 codeswitching helps to establish intimacy. 25 (10.5%) 49 (20.5%) 137 (57.3%) 28 (11.7%) 6 codeswitching is a means of alienating other people from conversations. 46 (19.0%) 91 (37.6%) 85 (35.1%) 20 (8.3%) 3 codeswitching can be used to express ethnic identities. 20 (8.4%) 48 (20.2%) 128 (53.8%) 42 (17.6%) 7 codeswitching arises from an inability to find appropriate terms in one language. 18 (7.5%) 70 (29.2%) 101 (42.1%) 51 (21.3%) 5 codeswitching is an index of language incompetence. 40 (16.7%) 76 (31.7%) 94 (39.2%) 30 (12.5%) 5 codeswitching is indicative of mental laziness 10 (4.1%) 40 (16.5%) 106 (43.8%) 86 (35.5%) 3 82 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) the table above, especially the section on attitude, generally suggests that the attitudes of most of the respondents to most of these items are positive. for instance, 81.3% believe that most nigerian bilinguals cannot do without codeswitching. since these respondents are educated, this high percentage seems to suggest that to most educated nigerians, switching from one language to another is “normal”. this is especially so when we consider the fact that 44.2% of them hold the view that instances of cs should not be corrected. 56% believe that interaction can start with cs while 60.3% think that we can codeswitch when people around us do so. similarly, 65.2% claim that cs is a common phenomenon among educated nigerians. the majority of the subjects (61.3%) believe that cs is appropriate in nigerian home videos. however, 54.9% believe that cs is a stigma while 61.5% think that it is a source of irritation in any interaction. in order to have an overview of the likert scale used, we then sum up the attitudinal values which give us a mean score of 52.1%. out of the 245 respondents who participated, 54.7% (i.e., 134 respondents) scored over 52.1% while 45.3% (i.e., 111 respondents) scored below 52.1%. this, in a way, implies that the majority of our subjects had a favourable attitude towards cs. a. is there a significant difference among the schools in their attitudes to codeswitching? in order to show whether or not there is a significant difference among the four institutions which participated in this research, the data are subjected to an anova test as shown below (table 5). table 5: attitudes of respondents by school school no mean std dev f value p value decision reason ace 69 50.28 8.623 3.725 0.012 significant p<0.05 oau 125 53.73 7.309 lasce 20 50.90 7.333 unad 31 50.58 7.201 total 245 52.13 7.819 83akande, okanlawon and akinwale the mean scores as well as their standard deviations are as stated above. after the anova test, the f value is 3.725 while the p value is 0.012 which is less than 0.05. this means that there is a significant difference among the schools. however, since this anova cannot state the relationships among the schools in terms of the significant difference, we then carried out a post hoc test to show which of the schools are significantly related to each other (table 6). table 6: post-hoc test showing attitudes of respondents by schools (i) school (j) schools mean difference (i-j) std error sig 95% confidence interval lower bound upper bound ace oau lasce unad -3.453* -625 -305 1.154 1.953 1.663 .003 .749 .855 -5.72 -4.47 -3.58 -1.18 3.22 2.97 oau ace lasce unad 3.453* 2.828 3.147* 1.154 1.852 1.543 .003 .128 .043 1.18 -82 -11 5.72 6.48 6.19 lasce ace oau unad 625 -2.828 319 1.953 1.852 2.206 .749 .128 .885 -3.22 -6.48 -4.03 4.47 .82 4.66 unad ace oau lasce .305 1.663 .885 -2.97 3.58 -3.147* 1.543 .043 -6.19 -.11 -.319 2.206 .885 -4.66 4.03 *the mean difference is significant at the .05 level 84 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) table 6 shows that when ace is held constant against other schools, it is significantly related to oau, as the p value is .003, but it is not significantly related to either lasce or unad. when oau is held constant, it is significantly related to both ace at .003 and unad at .043 but not to lasce. similarly, when unad is held constant it is significantly related to oau at .043 p value. however, when lasce is held constant against other schools, it is not significantly related to any of the schools. this then means that although there is a significant difference among the schools, the difference is caused by the relationship between ace and oau, oau and ace, ace and oau, oau and unad and unad and oau. b. can programme cause a significant difference in the attitudes of nigerian tertiary institution students to codeswitching? presented here (table 7) is the analysis of the attitudes of the subjects of this study based on their qualification: table 7: attitudes of respondents by programme d total degree nce attitudes favourable count % within attitudes % within d 116 86.6% 55.8% 18 13.4% 48.6% 134 100.0% 54.7% attitudes not favourable count % within attitudes % within d 92 82.9% 44.2% 19 17.1% 51.4% 111 100.0% 45.3% count % within attitudes total % within d 208 84.9% 100.0% 37 15.1% 100.0% 245 100.0% 100.0% 85akande, okanlawon and akinwale out of 245 subjects who participated in this study, 54.7% had a favourable attitude to cs while 45.3% did not. 55.8% of the students pursuing degrees had a favourable attitude to cs while 44.2% had an unfavourable attitude to it. whereas 48.6% of nce students had a favourable attitude to cs, 51.4% had an unfavourable attitude to it. this means that undergraduate students are more positively inclined to use cs than nce students. on the whole, more students are favourably disposed to the use of cs. however, this table has not shown whether or not the difference between the attitudes of nce and undergraduate students is significant, neither has it shown whether or not there is a significant difference between favourable and unfavourable attitudes. hence, a t-test is conducted, as shown below. table 8: attitudes of respondents by programme ii qualification no mean std dev f value p value decision reason degree 208 52.63 7.656 1.313 .253 ns p>0.05 nce 37 49.27 8.218 the mean scores for the undergraduate students and nce students are 52.63 and 49.27 respectively. the standard deviation for the undergraduate students is 7.656 while that of the nce students is 8.218. the p value is .253, which is greater than .05. this means that the programmes of study of the subjects did not result in any significant difference in their attitudes to codeswitching. table 9 below presents the summary of the chi-square test which shows the responses of the respondents by institution. 86 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) table 9: attitudes of respondents by institution ace oau schools lasce unad total attitudes favourable count % within attitudes % within schools 30 22.4% 43.5% 80 59.7% 64.0% 9 6.7% 45.0% 15 11.2% 48.4% 134 100.0% 54.7% attitudes not favourable count % within attitudes % within schools 39 35.1% 56.5% 45 40.5% 36.0% 11 9.9% 55.0% 16 14.4% 51.6% 111 100.0% 45.3% total count % within attitudes % within schools 69 28.2% 100.0% 125 51.0% 100.0% 20 8.2% 100.0% 31 12.7% 100.0% 245 100.0% 100.0% chi-square tests value df asymp. sig pearson chisquare 9.127a 3 .028 likelihood ratio 9.180 3 .027 87akande, okanlawon and akinwale linearbylinear association .068 1 .795 no. of valid cases 245 from ace, 43.5% of the subjects had favourable attitudes to cs while 56.5% did not. at oau, 64% were favourably disposed to the use of cs and 36% were not. 45% and 55% were recorded in lasce as having favourable and unfavourable attitudes respectively, while in unad, 48.4% had favourable attitudes and 51.6% had unfavourable attitudes to cs. of all the schools, it was in oau that we recorded the highest percentage of favourable attitudes. a chi-square test was used to show if there is a significant difference between favourable and unfavourable attitudes among the schools. the result indicated that the p-value is 0.028, which is less than 5%. this then implies that the difference among the schools is significant. 6.0 conclusion the major goal of this paper has been to examine the attitudes of some educated nigerians to codeswitching. the study set out to achieve this aim by finding out whether social factors like schools attended, ethnicity and the types of programme being pursued can affect one’s attitudes to cs. generally speaking, the overall patterns of the respondents’ attitudes to cs indicate that more than half of the respondents are favourably inclined to use and engage in cs. this means that there is a gradual acceptance of the use of cs among educated nigerians. this study confirms akande’s (2010) study in which university graduates of different disciplines codeswitch freely between english and nigerian pidgin english. the study has revealed that schools differ in their attitudes to cs as it has been shown that a significant difference can exist due to the relationship between one school and the other. although students on 88 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) degree programmes are more favourably disposed to the use of cs than students on nce programmes, the programmes of students do not result in a significant difference in their attitudes. 89akande, okanlawon and akinwale references akande, a. t. 2010. the verb in standard nigerian english and nigerian pidgin english: a sociolinguistic approach. saarbrucken: vdm verlag. akande, a. t. & salami, l. o. 2010. use and attitudes towards nigerian pidgin english among nigerian university students. in r. millar (ed..), 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interaction of declarative & procedural memory in the process of creolization: the case of sierra leone krio. 1 malcolm awadajin finney abstract this paper is an exposition of learning models of declarative and procedural memory and its application in the fields of first and second language acquisition and by extension creole genesis. it provides detailed information on the declarative/procedural (dp) model of memory and how the model can be used to account for the process of creolization. both declarative and procedural memories,sometimes associated with explicit/conscious or implicit/unconscious learning respectively, are proposed to play a significant role in daily human learning experiences, including the acquisition of languages. thedevelopment and utilization of first and subsequent languages are proposed to be governed to a large extent by the declarative and procedural memory systems, which interact in complex ways to generate words, phrases, and sentences during verbal (and to some extent written) communication. the paper adopts the substrate view of creolization as a process of second language acquisition and highlights how shared linguistic memory (declarative and procedural), cultural backgrounds, and 1 malcolm awadajin finney teaches in the department of linguistics, califormia state university, long beach, usa. experience in pre-enslavement west african communities helped develop and reshape the primary medium of communication (creole languages) among slaves and their descendants during and after the period of enslavement. the process of creolization is discussed at length to underscore parallels with the process of second language acquisition, and in effect, to demonstrate how the process of creolization and the linguistic properties of emerging creoles can be accounted for as an interaction of declarative and procedural memory. i. introduction this paper explores the view of creolization as a process of second language acquisition and attempts to explain the notion of creole genesis within the framework of models of declarative and procedural memory. the substrate account of creolization argues for significant influence of african substrate languages (particularly those belonging to the kwa language subgroup from which a majority of enslaved west africans were argued to have been obtained) in the shaping and reshaping of the grammar of creole languages (particularly the atlantic varieties). enslaved africans transported to the americas had limited or no proficiency in english and, in their attempts to communicate in english, consciously and subconsciously transferred linguistic properties from their native (west african) languages into emerging creole languages, which later became their primary medium of communication. that is, the enslaved africans and their descendants utilized declarative and procedural linguistic memory acquired through their native languages in the construction and reconstruction of a new language.native languages in the construction and reconstruction of a new language. finney | 84special edition , 2012 | 83legon journal of the humanities ii. cognitive models of memory & the nature of second language acquisition declarative/procedural memory model and language development, processing and use the declarative/procedural (dp) model proposes the existence of two largely independent but interactive brain memory systems or capacities that play crucial roles in language development, processing and use. this model further predicts dissociation between a memorized mental lexicon (i.e. vocabulary system), which is generated by declarative memory, and a computational mental grammar (i.e. grammatical system), which is generated by procedural memory. the declarative memory system is proposed to be specialised for learning and storing ‘arbitrarily related information’ (ullman 2001: 37) and governs memorized lexical items, the recall of past events and factual knowledge. according to ullman (2005), this memory system underlies the learning representation and use of semantic and episodic memory, including a memorized mental lexicon (i.e. the vocabulary system in the brain). memorized forms (for which the relationship between form and meaning is arbitrary, as in the meanings of lexical items) are hypothesised to be generated by declarative memory. as such, declarative memory is sometimes referred to as explicit or conscious knowledge and is proposed to be acquired consciously. the procedural memory system is proposed to be activated in the gradual acquisition and control of new and existing cognitive skills through practice and experience. according to litman & reber (2005: 440), this form of memory ‘exists in a tacit form, influencing thought and behaviour while itself remaining mostly concealed from conscious awareness.’ procedural memory is thus sometimes referred to as implicit memory and is proposed to involve the efficient and automated processing of information (anderson 1980; gupta & dell 1999; litman & reber 2005; ullman 2001, 2004, 2005; wood bowden et al. 2005). the procedural memory system is thus proposed to be activated in the learning and control of new and existing cognitive skills, including linguistic memory, and, according to ullman (2001:38), ‘subserves syntactic as well as morphological (and possibly also phonological) computations.’ that is, the procedural memory system specializes in the acquisition and processing of productive, rule-governed and systematic aspects of language. this includes the application of grammatical rules and constraints that generate morphological transformations, complex words, phrases and sentences in a language. 2.1. the dp model, cross-linguistic influence & the process of second language acquisition 2.1.1. declarative/procedural memory & the process of second language acquisition cognitive models have been used in second language (l2) acquisition research to articulate the role of memory in the acquisition of knowledge. the information processing model (mclaughlin 1987; mclaughlin & heredia 1996) propagates the view of learning in general as a cognitive process and l2 learning as acquisition of complex cognitive skills. central to this concept are the notions of control, restructuring, and automaticity. cognitive skills (including linguistic knowledge) are initially developed through controlled memory processes. that is, acquisition of new linguistic knowledge is conscious and finney | 86special edition , 2012 | 85legon journal of the humanities deliberate and involves conscious thought processes (i.e. declarative memory) during the early stages of l2 acquisition. new linguistic information is constantly integrated into the learner’s current and developing l2 knowledge, which is constantly restructured and reorganized during which changes are made to its internal representation. the knowledge later becomes routinized or automated with practice and experience. mclaughlin & heredia (1996: 218) draw a parallel between controlled/automatic processing an declarative/procedural memory. they state: procedural knowledge is thought to be acquired through extensive practice and feedback and, once learned, is more easily activated in memory than declarative knowledge. this approach is in many respects similar to [the] distinction between controlled and automatic processing in that both account for the progression from a more cognitively demanding to an autonomous state of learning. 2.1.2. declarative/procedural memory & transfer of first language (l1) memory in adult second language acquisition l2 acquisition research indicates difficulty experienced by adult l2 learners in developing knowledge of some grammatical structures in l2, resulting in persistent grammatical errors in spite of increasing l2 competence. this may stem from difficulty by l2 learners to produce and comprehend appropriate structures that reflect word order patterns in the l2 that are different from those in their native or first language (l1). one proposal stipulates that the development of native-like ability in l2 is impossible or extremely unlikely after pubertybecause of age-related changes in the way the brain processes language. this results in a decline in, or loss of, ability by post-puberty learners to produce and comprehend accurate l2 structures that are assembled differently in l1 and l2. that is, processing linguistic information may be less automatic in l2 than in l1 because of maturational constraints that may become active after a biological period and may make it extremely unlikely for l2 speakers to utilize the same processing mechanisms available to l1 speakers. clahsen & felser (2006: 568) also propose that differences in l1 and l2 processing may persist, particularly ‘in the domain of complex syntax, even in highly proficient l2 speakers’ (564). they further maintain that ‘a high degree of proficiency in the l2 does not necessarily lead to native-like processing … [and that] experience and practice might not be enough to develop native-like grammatical processing skills in the l2’. memory in one’s native language (l1) and in adult l2 learning is proposed to be procedural and declarative respectively (anderson 1980, 1983; wood bowden et al. 2005; ullman 2001, 2005). children acquire l1 implicitly and in effect develop implicit (procedural) memory of l1 rules and constraints. according to ullman (2001, 2005) and bowden wood et al. (2005), the processes of l1 and l2 development are fundamentally different depending on the age of l2 exposure with a shift in learning strategy from implicit acquisition in l2 to explicit memorization in l2. older l2 learners depend upon declarative memory in processing l2 grammatical forms. they compute l2 grammatical forms consciously using l1 procedural memory. this is due to the fact that the acquisition of procedural (grammatical) memory becomes much more challenging than the acquisition of declarative (lexical) memory in l2 with increasing age. the procedural memory system becomes less efficient in abstracting l2 rules while the declarative memory system b e c o m e s e n h a n c e d . t h i s r e s u l t s i n t h e s u c c e s s f u l finney | 88special edition , 2012 | 87legon journal of the humanities memorization of idiosyncratic lexical items and some l2 grammatical forms though these forms are not internalized. paradis (2009) corroborates the notion of procedural acquisition of l1 and explicit learning of l2 by adults. less availability of procedural memory to l2 learners, paradis claims, makes them more dependent on declarative memory and some consciously learned rules in l2. the gap in the implicit linguistic competence (the rule system) of adult l2 learners is compensated by a reliance on their explicit memory of l2 – that is, conscious application of an l2 rule. in short, l2 speakers do not use implicit linguistic competence (procedural memory) in l2 but rather ‘controlled meta-linguistic knowledge (paradis 2009: 30), which is declarative memory. the difficulty in developing procedural memory in l2 may condition adult learners to become more reliant on l1 procedural memory especially in computing complex l2 lexical items and structures. this is acknowledged by anderson (1980) who proposes that l1 cognitive knowledge is likely to influence l2 cognitive knowledge negatively when these forms of knowledge are directly incompatible. he states that this negative transfer of cognitive skills ‘can be quite significant when a skill is placed in direct conflict with a well-engraved old skill’ (1980: 247). in a similar vein, paradis (2009) proposes that repeated and consistent use of l1 results in its ongoing entrenchment, which may have detrimental effects particularly on the development of l2grammatical properties and less so on vocabulary development. as a result, ‘a small system of artificial grammar rules may be syntactically instantiated by the adult speaker in a way that strongly resembles native-like sentence processing (paradis 2009: 134). paradis concludes that ‘maintenance of l1 interferes with appropriating l2; the continued experience with l1 is entrenched; [and] proactive interference from l1 affects appropriation of l2’ (2009: 134). the implication then is that l2 development primarily involves the utilization of declarative memory, and l2 learners either consciously memorize and apply the linguistic properties or consciously apply their procedural memory of l1 (i.e. the g r a m m a t i c a l r u l e s a n d c o n s t r a i n t s i n l 1 ) i n t h e i r computation of the grammatical rules and constraints of l2. that is, cognitive skills implicitly developed in l1 (including grammatical rules and constraints) as procedural memory may be incompatible with l2 grammatical rules and constraints resulting in the negative transfer of l1 grammatical rules and constraints in the computation of l2 grammatical properties. iii. a second language acquisition approach to pidginization & creolization 3.1 pidgin & creole languages a pidgin is a language that emerges as a result of contact (generally through trade, enslavement, or colonization) between two or more groups that are socially distant from each other and speak mutually unintelligible languages with little or no desire to learn the language of the other. one group is numerically smaller but socially and politically powerful and dominant, and its language is considered prestigious. the other group is numerically larger but is considered socially and politically inferior. the pidgin vocabulary is mainly derived from the prestigious (lexifier) language and other aspects of grammar may be incorporated from local languages. in spite of borrowings, pidgins develop a linguistic system that is distinct from the languages that finney | 90special edition , 2012 | 89legon journal of the humanities contributed towards its existence. over time, a pidgin may become the primary medium of communication in a multilingual setting. it may become the predominant language incrosslinguistic relationships and is acquired as a native language and used as the primary means of communication by the next generation in the community. the pidgin has now evolved into a creole. as the predominant language, the creole is used in all aspects of communication, and it becomes expanded and more elaborate to accommodate the complex and intricate linguistic structures required to express a wide range of issues. this expansion and elaboration involves creation of new words and grammar rules as well as borrowing and modification of existing forms and grammars from multiple languages. 3.2. pidginization & creolization as processes of second language acquisition (sla) neuman-holzschuh and schneider (2000: 3) outline crucial issues that researchers need to address in order to provide a comprehensive account of the origins, development, and restructuring of creole grammar. included among these issues are the roles of bilingualism and second language acquisition. most of the enslaved africans transported to the americas were adult native speakers of west african languages that primarily belonged to the kwa language subgroup used predominantly in west africa. such languages, including yoruba, igbo, akan, twi, nupe and ewe (among others), are generally referred to as west african substrate languages in creole studies. newly arrived slaves had minimal or no grammatical competence in english. they were additionally placed in groups that were linguistically diverse and were further prohibited from using their primary west african languages in an effort to quell conspiracies to rebel or escape. according to myers-scotton (2002: 272), substrate influence was necessitated by the following linguistic and social conditions under which creole languages emerged: i) speakers of different languages, mostly not mutually intelligible, were brought together in a plantation setting. ii) with an obvious need for some communication with each other, they need a lingua franca. iii) in almost every case, no l1 from among the slaves/workers had numerous enough or powerful enough advocates to make it a choice for this role. iv) another language, whatever variety the overseers/owners spoke, was another candidate; just because it was their language and therefore had a utilitarian value in the setting, it had the measure of prestige to make it an attractive candidate. v) at the same time, the slaves/workers did not necessarily spend much time in earshot of these overseers/owners; therefore they had few opportunities to acquire this language. the notion of creolization as a process of adult l2 acquisition is best articulated by siegel (1999: 2) who states that: … in the early stages of language contact, individuals attempt to speak a common second language (l2), either the superstrate language itself or a newly emerging contact variety using its lexicon, and doing so, transfer features from their first languages (l1), the substrate languages, onto forms of the l2. these l2 forms with some l1 properties join the pool of variants which are available as potential models when social conditions are right for the stabilization of a new contact variety, such as a pidgin or a creole.’ finney | 92special edition , 2012 | 91legon journal of the humanities siegel (1999) further identifies situational factors that generally trigger transfer. some of these are evident in both l2 acquisition and creolization. they include the proposal that transfer is more likely to occur in naturalistic, unfocused and untutored settings, especially during the early stages of exposure when learners are under pressure to communicate using complex constructions but with little knowledge of l2. learners thus fall back on l1 rules in l2 use. support for the substrate proposal is generally drawn from evidence of systematic parallels not only between linguistic structures of substrate and lexifier languages (such as english) but also between the social contexts of creolization and adult l2 acquisition. according to the substrate account, slaves and their descendants in the american south east plantations developed a pidgin, which later became a creole, in attempts to communicate with plantation owners and other slaves from different linguistic backgrounds in english. they were compelled to borrow phonological, lexical, and grammatical properties from their primary (substrate) languages, which were incorporated into the pidgin and emergent creole. thus, though the creole vocabulary was derived primarily from english, its structure, pronunciation (including intonation),and idiomatic expressions were significantly influenced by linguistic properties of substrate languages transferred into the creole by the enslaved africans. development and restructuring of the creole grammar continued to be influenced by substrate languages with continued transportation of enslaved people from west africa to the americas. as a result, the underlying creole grammar exhibited forms and structural properties whose functions parallel those of similar properties in substrate languages (arends 1993; degraff 2001; holm 1988; lefebvre 1993; lumsden 1999; mather 2006; myers-scotton 2002; siegel 1999). advocates maintain that adult non-native speakers were the predominant users of emergent creoles and features of substrate languages were incorporated into creoles through l1 transfer, a very common process in second language acquisition (sla), over multiple generations. after a period of time, some substrate features were adopted while others were eliminated. however, the transfer of substrate morpho-syntactic features was proposed to be a transfer of the functions (functional transfer) and not necessarily the forms. arends (1993: 374) draws linguistic support for this position from data from multiple studies involving a number of pidgins and creoles including tayo, solomon island pidgin, krio, nigerian pidgin, cameroonian pidgin, and sranan to make the claim that ‘creolization is largely a matter of sla by adults, since only then can there be any conflict at all between first and second language. on the basis of an exhaustive study of sranan, arends (1993: 376) later concludes that ‘the creolization of sranan must have been largely a process of sla by adult speakers which extended over several generations, say, between one hundred and two hundred years.’ this view of creolization, according to arends, provides a natural explanation for most of the west african substrate features that are still present in a number of atlantic creoles. these are relics of features of substrate languages used by adult slaves and transferred into the creoles used by slaves over multiple generations. finney | 94special edition , 2012 | 93legon journal of the humanities 3.3. the transfer of l1 memory in the processes of pidginization/creolization and l2 acquisition the processes of pidginization/creolization and language (l1 and l2) acquisition are similar in a number of ways. these processes initially start with limited input and limited output, which generally involves the simplification of input received from the target language. that is, a pidginized grammar is initially developed primarily from declarative memory of properties of the target language (i.e. english). this simplified input is inadequate to serve the communicative needs of its users. expansion and elaboration of this initial grammar is triggered by the linguistic resources available to the speakers. for children in l1 acquisition, additional linguistic resources become more available with continued exposure to and input from the target language. for l2 and pidgin/creole speakers, besides the target language, additional linguistic resources become available through knowledge or memories of previously learned languages. that is, linguistic memory from l1 or substrate languages is transferred and utilized in attempts to become more expressive in the target language. in this respect, the process of creolization is subjected to cross-linguistic influence or transfer. enslaved africans and their descendants fall back on declarative and procedural memory of substrate languages in attempts to communicate in and approximate properties of english, a language in which they demonstrated minimal or no competence. this resulted in conscious transfer of the concepts of substrate lexical items and subconscious transfer of substrate grammatical properties which were superimposed on english lexical items. that is, they utilized both declarative (conscious) and procedural (subconscious) memory of their primary languages in the creation and expansion of the creole that later became their lingua franca and that of their descendants. iv. origin of substrate influence: the case of sierra leone krio there are two major proposals advanced to account for the origins of krio, a creole of english origin used as the lingua franca in sierra leone. the more popular account argues for the emergence of krio from creoles of the americas (i.e. atlantic creole varieties), with which krio shares some linguistic similarities. according to opala (1987), enslaved people from west africa and their descendants worked in plantations in the american south east and developed a pidgin, which later became gullah creole – a mixture of english and west african languages. though its vocabulary was derived primarily from english, its structure, pronunciation (including intonation), and idiomatic expressions were heavily influenced by the west african languages that the enslaved people used as primary languages. huber (1999: 59-65, 2000: 276-277) proposes that krio emerged from varieties of creoles used primarily by groups of mostly freed slaves, who were resettled in the sierra leone peninsula, including freetown, between 1787 and 1850. one significant group (in terms of linguistic contributions) arrived in sierra leone in two separate shipments: the nova scotians (freed slaves relocated in nova scotia, canada) in 1787 and the jamaican maroon settlers in 1796. creoles from the west indies, particularly the variety brought by the jamaican maroon settlers, are proposed (huber 1999) to have had significant input into what has now evolved into present-day krio. another group – the liberated africans (or recaptives) – were mainly recaptured would-be slaves from intercepted slave ships by the british fleet finney | 96special edition , 2012 | 95legon journal of the humanities patrolling the west african coast that were released and resettled in the sierra leone peninsula. these were by far the largest group and were resettled over a period that stretched from 1808 (when sierra leone was declared a crown colony) to 1863. they brought along a variety of west african languages, with yoruba being the most influential. the linguistic contributions of west african languages to krio are well documented. the language and traditions of the yoruba settlers have had a strong influence on the language, social life and customs of krio speakers in freetown. yoruba is second only to english as the largest contributor to the krio lexicon (bradshaw 1966, fyle 1994, fyle & jones 1980, jones 1971). v. substrate influence and the role of declarative memory in creolization: declarative memory and the transfer of substrate lexical properties in exocentric compounds: the case of krio a pidgin, as mentioned earlier, eventually develops a distinct linguistic system that includes borrowed lexical items from its lexifier language. when the pidgin was acquired as a primary language by the next generation and evolved into a creole (krio), it increasingly became the primary medium of communication and the predominant language in cross-linguistic relationships. the need thus arose for the emerging creole to become more complex and elaborate lexically to accommodate the wide and expanding variety of linguistic functions in the community. adult pidgin users partially remedied this situation by consciously transferring lexical concepts from their primary languages (i.e. substrate languages) into the lexifier language (i.e. english), using existing english lexical items. the new lexical items were thus integrated into the mental lexicon of the creole acquired by subsequent generations of creole speakers. krio has a rich system of idiomatic expressions in the form of compounding, which have parallels in some west african languages from which they were likely derived. in this situation, the lexical concepts developed in l1 (substrate languages), not the linguistic forms, were transferred into krio using words of english origin. for example: igbo: anya uku (eye + big) ‘greed’ krio: big yay (big + eye) ‘greed’ yoruba: ehnu didu (mouth + sweet) ‘persuasiveness’ ga: na mo (sweet + mouth) ‘flattery’ twi: ano yehdeh (mouth + sweet) ‘flattery’ krio: swit mot (sweet + mouth) ‘persuasiveness’ krio: swit yay (sweet + eye) ‘womanizing’ krio: swit pis(sweet + urine) ‘diabetes’ kikongo: kanga ntima (tie + heart) ‘adamant’ krio: tranga at (strong + heart) ‘adamant’ krio: big-at (big + heart) ‘proud’, ‘stubborn’ krio: bad at (bad + heart) ‘envy’, ‘jealousy’ vi. substrate influence and the role of procedural memory in creolization: procedural memory and the transfer of substrate morpho-syntactic properties in creoles substrate proponents argued that the development and restructuring of creole grammar were significantly influenced by substrate languages, and that the underlying grammar of current creoles (atlantic varieties) exhibits structural properties resembling those of substrate languages. the linguistic system of the original pidgin also initially consisted primarily of grammatical rules of english. its evolution into a creole and its new status as the predominant language and primary medium of communication resulted in an increasing need for it to become finney | 98special edition , 2012 | 97legon journal of the humanities more structurally complex and elaborate to accommodate the intricate linguistic structures required in this new capacity. the difficulty, however, in developing procedural memory in l2 (anderson 1980; paradis 2009) made it extremely difficult for adult pidgin users to acquire and interna increasingly reliant on l1 procedural memory. as native speakers of substrate languages, and because of minimal grammatical competence in english, they were compelled to borrow grammatical structures from their primary (substrate) languages into which they superimposed lexical items derived from english, in attempts to communicate in english. this resulted in the subconscious transfer of morphosyntactic properties of substrate languages, which formed part of the l1 procedural knowledge of the slaves, into the emergent creoles. influence of such substrate morpho-syntactic properties is evident in a number of atlantic creoles, including the following structural properties. 6.1. focused (cleft) constructions in focused constructions, a segment of the sentence is fronted (i.e. appears at the beginning of the sentence) for emphasis and introduced by a cleft marker. the functions of such constructions in creoles arguably originated from substrate languages and were transferred into creoles during early creolization. the focus marker in creoles (/na/ or /a/) is identical or similar in form and function to those in a number of substrate languages (/na/ or /ni/). such constructions are present in english, where they emphasize nominal phrases. in creoles and substrate languages, however, focused constructions additionally emphasize wh-interrogatives and verbal/adjectival predicates. 6.1.1. nominal clefting nominal clefting in creoles, as with english, involves the fronting of a nominal phrase. however, the use of a wh-element or complementizer, which is optional in english, is prohibited in creoles and substrate languages. for example: english 2. it was john (whom/that) we saw 3. it was to john (that) i spoke creoles krio 4. na j? n wi bin si it-is john we past see ‘it was john (whom/that) we saw 5. *na j? n we wi bin si it-is john comp we past see ‘it was john (whom/that) we saw’ sranan (alleyne 1980) 6. a so a pisi tori kom kaba it-is so the piece of story come finish ‘so the story ends’ jamacian creole (alleyne 1980) 7. a big im big it-is big he’s big ‘he’s really big’ finney | 100special edition , 2012 | 99legon journal of the humanities substrate languages twi (alleyne 1980) 8. kwadwo na ? baa ha kwadwo it was came here ‘it was kwadwo who came here’ yoruba (holm 1988) 9. aso ni mo ra cloth it was i bought ‘it was cloth that i bought’ wolof (allsopp 1976) 10. ragal la ragal rek fear it is fear only ‘he is/they are really frightened’ 6.1.2. wh-interrogative clefting in wh-interrogative clefting, a focused wh-interrogative phrase is introduced by the focus marker and, as in nominal clefting, the use of an overt complementizer is prohibited. whinterrogative clefting is productive in atlantic creoles and substrate languages but is not allowed in english: creoles krio 11. na udat bin kam it-is who past come ‘who was here?’ 12. na wetin den de du it-is what they prog do what are they really doing?’ jamaican creole (alleyne 1980) 13. mi no nuo a we im go i don’t know (it is) it is where he has gone’ guyanese creole (alleyne 1980) 14. a wisaid dem da lib naw it-s which-side they prog live now ‘where do they live now’ substrate languages twi (alleyne 1980) 15. hae na o huu o whom it-is he saw him ‘whom did he see? yoruba (alleyne 1980) 16. ti taa ni for who it-is ‘whose…? 6.1.3. predicate clefting the focused constituent in predicate clefting is a verbal or adjectival predicate, which is also introduced by the focus marker. as with other cleft constructions, the use of an overt complementizer is prohibited. however, unlike other cleft constructions, the focused constituent is both fronted and copied in its original position in the sentence. this type of clefting is productive in creoles and substrate languages but is not allowed in english: creoles krio 17. na waka n=m= wi bin de waka it-is walk only we past prog waka ‘we were only walking around’ finney | 102special edition , 2012 | 101legon journal of the humanities 18. na gladi d`n gladi it-is happy they happy ‘they are really happy’ jamaican creole (alleyne 1980) 19. a wan ple mi bin ple it-is one play i past play ‘i really played’ sranan (alleyne 1980) 20. a soso pley mi ben pley it-is mere play i past play ‘i merely played’ substrate languages yoruba (alleyne 1980) 21. mi mu ni won mu mi me take it-is they took me ‘they actually arrested me’ twi (alleyne 1980) 22. hwe na kwasi hwe ase fall it-is kwasi fell down ‘kwasi actually fell’ yoruba (williams 1976) 23. ak`we ni nw=n kpa a killing it is they kill him ‘they actually killed him’ nupe (allsopp 1976) 24. wuwu a wu wun o kill-kill they kil + emphatic terminal ‘he was definitely killed’ 6.2. verb serialization this is one of the most distinguishing features of atlantic creoles differentiating them from english. such constructions generally contain one syntactic subject and a series of lexical verbs that are not linked by an overt conjunction (subordinate or coordinate) or complementizer. a lexical subject is prohibited from appearing in front of subsequent verbs in the series. in addition, one verb does not serve as an auxiliary or infinitival complement to other verbs in the series. this construction type is common in creoles and substrate languages. for example: creoles krio 25. di uman kuk r`s s`l the woman cook rice sell ‘the woman cooked some rice which she sold’ 26. i bai klos gi in pikin he buy clothes give his child ‘he bought some clothes which he gave to his child’ 27. a tek n`f k`t di bred i take knife cut the bread ‘i cut the bread with a knife’ jamaican creole (alleyne 1980) 28. im tak naïf kot me he took knife cut me ‘he cut me with a knife. jamaican creole (alleyne 1980) 29. kya di buk dom gi me ‘bring the book for me’ saramaccan (alleyne 1980) 30. de suti en kii they shot him killed ‘the shot him to death’ finney | 104special edition , 2012 | 103legon journal of the humanities substrate languages yoruba (george 1975) 31. ajao ra epa je ajao bought peanuts ate ‘ajao bought some peanuts and ate them’ twi (lord 1993) 32. ? y? adwuma ma me he does-work give me ‘he works for me’ nupe (george 1976) 33. tsoda gi je afunin tsoda ate food full ‘tsoda ate and he is full’ akan (schachter 1974) 34. kofi y?? adwuma wiee kofi did work finished ‘kofi finished working’ yoruba (awobuluyi 1973) 35. olu rin ti olu walked fail ‘olu was unable to walk’ ewe (lord 1973) 36. e no tsi ku he drank water died ‘he drowned’ all of the above examples contain only one syntactic subject and two verbs without any conjoining marker or complementizer. in some of the above examples, the two verbs in the constructions are lexically transitive but only one internal argument noun is phonetically realized, which is shared by both verbs. in other examples, the second verb meaning ‘give’ – a dyadic verb – has one argument phonetically realized but shares its other argument with the first verb. these constructions are not present in standard english and may be used marginally in some non-standard english dialects, especially with the verbs ‘come’ and ‘go’. they are however much more productive in creoles and substrate languages. 6.3. complementation involving the sentential complementizer /se/ these construction types are present in a number of pidgin and creole languages, including ghanaian and nigerian pidgin, gullah creole, jamaican creole and saramaccan (byrne 1987; matthews & yip 2005; veenstra & den besten 1995). accounts of the functions of /se/are perhaps the most controversial of syntactic properties in creoles arguably borrowed from substrate languages. it is homophonous with the lexical verb meaning say though it also functions as a sentential complementizer in a number of atlantic creoles and substrate languages. thus, there has been continued debate on the extent to which its lexical, functional, and syntactic properties are influenced by substrate languages. the form of /se/ and its functions as a verb in a number of atlantic creoles are very similar to its equivalent say in english. however, /se/ additionally functions as a finney | 106special edition , 2012 | 105legon journal of the humanities complementizer in such creoles in ways different from the way the english complementizer that functions. admittedly, the form say is used marginally as a sentential complementizer in restricted contexts in a few non-standard english dialects. nevertheless, there are fundamental differences between the creole /se/ and the english that-complementizer in terms of their functions and the complementizer that could be optionally deleted in english, as in (37), (38) and (39), though it is required to be obligatorily overt in creoles, including jamaican creole and saramaccan (byrne 1987; veenstra & den besten 1995). for example: english 37 . john told me (that) fred had broken his leg 38. i thought (that) they won the lottery 39. it’s likely (that) my friend won the lottery creoles krio 40. a t`l am se yu d=n go na os i tell him that you perf go loc house ‘i told him (that) you’ve gone home’ 41. *a t`l am yu d=n go na os i tell him you perf go loc house ‘i told him you’ve gone home’ 42. a m`mba se d=m bin win loto i think say/that they past win lottery ‘i thought (that) they won th e lottery’ 43. *a m?mba d?m bin win loto i think they past win lottery ‘i thought they won the lottery’ 44. i laikli se mi padi win loto it-is likely that my friend win lottery ‘it’s likely that my friend won the lottery’ 45. *i laikli mi padi win loto it-is likely my friend win lottery ‘it’s likely my friend won the lottery’ jamaican creole (alleyne 1980) 46. i fieba s` … ‘it seems that …’ 47. a how s= yu no nuo im? ‘how (is it) that you don’t know him?’ 1 bislama 48. peter i talem long mi se hem i gat sam vatu ‘peter told me that he had some money’ 49. hem i promis se tumora ‘she promised that it will be tomorrow’ substrate languages twi (lord 1993) 50. =y` nokware s= w= yare it-be fact that they be-ill ‘it is a fact that they are ill’ finney | 108special edition , 2012 | 107legon journal of the humanities ewe (alleyne 1980) 51. kofi wo susu be ye a yi ape kofi made up his mind say/that he go home ga (lord 1993) 52. tete le ake aye tsu nii le tete know say ayi work thing the ‘tete knows that ayi did the work’’ 53. efik (lord 1973) enye ete keetie ime nte imokut he say say it-seemed-to him like he-see-i ‘he said that it seemed to him that he say it’ yoruba (lord 1976) 54. o s` kpe ade l` he say (say) ade go ‘he said that ade went’ an additional difference between creole /se/ and the english that-complementizer is that the former but not the latter can be stranded when a verbal or adjective complement is questioned, even though complementizer-stranding is generally not allowed in a number of languages including english. for example: krio 55. wetin yu m?mba se what you think that ‘what did you think?’ 56. wetin i laikli se what it-is likely that ‘what is likely?’ 2 jamaican creole 57. a we yu plan se? ‘what kind of planning is that?’ 58. a we yu a rait se ‘what kind of writing is that?’ apparently, the complementizer /se/ has properties in creoles that make it possible for it to be used in syntactic configurations that are different from those in which the thatcomplementizer is used in english. it seems to exhibit properties that are generally attributed to verbs (in its ability to be stranded) and to complementizers (in its ability to introduce clausal complements). this dual property has been attributed to influence from substrate languages. in both creoles and substrate languages, it is homophonous with the lexical verb meaning say; it does not take tense-aspect markings; and it is obligatorily overt. these are properties that are lacking in say when used as a sentential complementizer in non-standard english varieties. phonologically, its form in creoles is additionally similar to that in a few substrate languages, such as twi – in the above examples – and akan in general (huber 1999). huber (1999) further states that the complementizer /se/ is observed in ghanaian pidgin english and was probably consolidated in the language as a result of the presence of the near homophonous form /s`/ in akan, a kwa language used predominantly in ghana. to account for the dual status of the verb meaning say in substrate languages, some researchers (holm 1988; lord 1973, 1976, 1993) propose that the verb underwent a diachronic process of reanalysis during which it finney | 110special edition , 2012 | 109legon journal of the humanities evolved from a verb to a sentential complementizer in substrate (predominantly kwa) languages. lord (1976, 1993) claims that over a period of time, such verbs (e.g. ewe: be; efik: ke; yoruba: kpe) were bleached of their verbal properties and became grammatical functionmarkers (i.e. complementizers). this resulted in a shift from lexical to grammatical function through the process of grammaticalization. vii. concluding remarks the primary aim of this paper was to use the declarative/procedural model of memory to highlight the role of memory in the development of creoles (including sierra leone krio). krio currently exhibits characteristics of both english and multiple west african substrate languages, acquired through the interaction of declarative and procedural memory. based on this model, the linguistic properties of early pidgins and creoles of english origin consisted of linguistic information memorized from english (i.e declarative memory). this information primarily included lexical and basic syntactic properties of english. new, and for the most part complex, linguistic information was transferred from substrate languages and integrated into the emergent and later creoles, conditioning a restructuring and reorganization of the linguistic system until this knowledge became more subconscious and automated with practice and experience (i.e. procedural memory). endnotes 1 information provided by gerry beimers on the internet discussion group “creoletalk”. 2 information provided by joseph farquharson on the internet discussion group “creoletalk”. finney | 112special edition , 2012 | 111legon journal of the humanities references alleyne, mervyn. 1980. comparative afro-american. ann arbor: karoma publishers. allsopp, richard. 1976. africanisms in the idiom of caribbean english. in paul f. kotey and haig der-houssikian, eds. language and linguistic problems in africa. columbia, south carolina: hornbeam press. pp. 429-41. anderson, john. 1980. cognitive psychology and its implications. san francisco: w.h. freeman and company. anderson, john. 1983. the architecture of cognition. cambridge: harvard university press. arends, jacques. 1993. towards a gradualist model of creolization. in byrne & holm, eds, 371380. awobuluyi, oladele. 1973. the modifying serial construction: a critique. studies in african linguistics: 4 (1):87-111. bickerton, derek. 1977. pidginization and creolization: language acquisition and language universals. albert valdman, john reinecke, ian f. hancock, eds., pidgin and creole linguistics, pp. 49-69. bloomington: indiana university press. bradshaw, a. t. von. 1966. a list of yoruba words in krio. sierra leone language review 5: 61-71. byrne, francis. 1987. grammatical elations in a radical creole. amsterdam: john benjamins. byrne, francis & holm, john, eds. (1993). atlantic meets pacific: a global view of pidginization and creolization. amsterdam: john benjamins. clahsen, h. & felser, c. 2006. grammatical processing in language learners. applied psycholinguistics 27: 3-42. degraff, michel. 2001. morphology in creole genesis:linguistics and ideology. in michael kenstowicz, ed., ken hale: a life in language, pp. 53-121. cambridge: mit press. fyle, clifford. 1994. official and unofficial attitudes and policy towards krio as the main lingua franca in sierra leone. in richard fardon and graham furniss, eds., african languages, development and the state, london: routledge. pp 44-54. fyle, clifford and jones, eldred. 1980. a krio–english dictionary. oxford: oxford university press. george, isaac. 1975. typolology of verb serialization. journal of west african linguistics pp 10: 78-97. gupta, prahlad & dell, gary. 1999. the emergence of language from serial order and procedural memory. in brian macwhinney ed. the emergence of language,mahwah, new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates, publishers, ` pp. 447481. holm, john. 1988. pidgins and creoles. volume. 1. cambridge: cambridge university press. huber, magnus. 1999. ghanian pidgin english in its west african context: a sociohistorical and structural analysis. amsterdam: john benjamins. huber, magnus. 2000. restructuring in vitro? evidence from early krio. in ingrid neuman-holzschuh and edgar w. schneider, eds., pp. 275-307. finney | 114special edition , 2012 | 113legon journal of the humanities jones, eldred. 1971. krio: an english based language of sierra leone. in john spencer, ed. the english language in west africa harlow: longman. pp. 66 94. lefebvre, claire. 1993. the role of relexification and syntactic reanalysis in haitian creole:methodological aspects of a research program. in salikoko mufwene, ed., pp. 254-79. litman, leib., & reber, arthur. s. (2005). implicit cognition and thought. in keith james holyoak and robert g. morrison. the cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning. new york: cambridge university press.pp. 431-456. lord, carol. 1973. serial verbs in transition. studies in african linguistics: 4 (3): pp 269-96. lord, carol. 1976. evidence of syntactic reanalysis: from verb to complementizer in kwa. stanford b. streever, carol a. walker, and salikoko s. mufwene, eds., papers from the parasession on diachronic syntax, pp. 179-91. chicago: chicago linguistic society. lord, carol. 1993. historical change in serial verb constructions. amsterdam: john benjamins. lumsden, john. 1999. language acquisition and creolization. in michel degraff (ed). language creation and language change. cambridge, massachusetts/london: the mit press. pp. 129157 mather, patrick-andre. 2006. second language acquisition and creolization: same (i-) process, different (e-) results. journal of pidgin and creole languages 21: 231-274. jones, eldred. 1971. krio: an english based language of sierra leone. in john spencer, ed. the english language in west africa . harlow: longman. pp. 66 94. lefebvre, claire. 1993. the role of relexification and syntactic reanalysis in haitian creole:methodological aspects of a research program. in salikoko mufwene, ed., pp. 254-79. litman, leib., & reber, arthur. s. (2005). implicit cognition and thought. in keith james holyoak and robert g. morrison. the cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning. pp. 431-456. new york: cambridge university press. lord, carol. 1973. serial verbs in transition. studies in african linguistics: 4 (3): pp 269-96. lord, carol. 1976. evidence of syntactic reanalysis: from verb to complementizer in kwa. stanford b. streever, carol a. walker, and salikoko s. mufwene, eds., papers from the p a r a s e s s i o n o n d i a c h ro n i c s y n t a x , c h i c a g o : chicago linguistic society. pp. 179-91. lord, carol. 1993. historical change in serial verb constructions. amsterdam: john benjamins. lumsden, john. 1999. language acquisition and creolization. in michel degraff (ed). language creation and language change.cambridge, massachusetts/london: t h e m i t press. pp. 129157 mather, patrick-andre. 2006. second language acquisition and creolization: same (i-) process, different (e-) results. journal of pidgin and creole languages 21: 231-274. finney | 116special edition , 2012 | 115legon journal of the humanities matthews, stephen and yip, virginia. 2005. contact-induced grammaticalization as seen from bilingual development. paper presented at the society for pidgin and creole linguistics annual conference, albuquerque, new mexico, january 2005. mclaughlin, barry. 1987. theories of second language learning. london: edward arnold. mclaughlin, barry & heredia, roberto. 1996. information processing approaches to research on second l a n g u a g e acquisition and use. in william c. ritchie, & tej k. bhatia eds. handbook of second language acquisition, san diego: academic press. pp. 213-228. myers-scotton, carol. 2002. contact linguistics: bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. oxford: oxford university press. neuman-holzschuh, ingrid and edgar w. schneider. 2000. introduction: degrees of restructuring in creole languages. in ingrid neuman-holzschuh and edgar w. schneider, eds., pp.1-18. neuman-holzschuh, ingrid and edgar w. schneider, eds. 2000. degrees of restructuring in creole languages. amsterdam: john benjamins. opala, joseph. 1987. the gullah: rice, slavery, and the sierra leone-american connection. freetown, sierra leone: usis. paradis, michel. 2009. declarative and procedural determinants of second languages. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. schachter, paul. 1974. a non-transformational account of serial verbs. studies in african linguistics, supplement 5: 253270. siegel, jeff. 1999. transfer constraints and substrate influence in melanesian pidgin. journal of pidgin and creole languages 14: 1-44. ullman, michael. 2001. the declarative/procedural model of lexicon and grammar. in journal of psycholinguistic research, volume 30, no. 1, pp 37-69. ullman, michael. 2004. contributions of memory circuits to language: the declarative/procedural model. cognition 92: pp 231-270. veenstra, tonjes and hans den besten. 1995. fronting. in arends, jacques, pieter muysken, & norval smith (eds). pidgins and creoles: an introduction. pp. 303-315. amsterdam: john benjamins. williams, wayne. 1976. the so-called relativized and cleft predicates in krio: one step closer to an understanding of creolization. in paul f. kotey and haig der-houssikian, eds., pp.467-78. wyse, akintola. 1989. the krio of sierra leone: an interpretive history. london: c. hurst & company. finney | 118special edition , 2012 | 117legon journal of the humanities 141boamahvolume 23 (2012) the concept of african pianism emmanuel boamah1 abstract african pianism is a style of piano music which employs techniques and styles used in the performance of african instrumental traditional songs and african popular music. the percussive and melodic capabilities of the piano make it an ideal medium for expressing the rhythmic and percussive features of african music. deploying african traditional idioms in compositions using the concept of african pianism is however only one aspect of creating an art based on the fundamental principles which are essential to its well being. the paper discusses the various techniques and styles composers employ in composing music using the concept of african pianism. definition and scope african pianism describes the approach of composition that combines african elements and western elements for the piano. a composition can therefore be based on african traditional vocal music or instrumental music. the concept also deals with the keyboard music of african art composers. works by art music composers who are not africans, but who have learnt to use idioms in african music can be included in african pianism. the need to write african music for the piano arises in view of evidence that the piano is a more developed musical instrument and offers greater opportunity to the composer than was realised. the percussive and melodic capabilities of the piano make it a most ideal medium for expressing the rhythmic and percussive features of african music. akin euba, who coined this concept african pianism in an article entitled “traditional elements as the basis of new african art music”, writes: 1emmanuel boamah is lecturer and head of the department of music, school of performing arts, university of ghana. 142 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) for those composers interested in cross-cultural musical synthesis, this writer sees a possibility of evolution in the use of western pianoforte in combination with african drums and other instruments of percussion. the piano already displays certain affinities with african music and by creating a type of african pianism to blend with african instruments; it should be possible to achieve a successful fusion. in his introduction to the proceedings of an international symposium and festival held at the university of pittsburgh in october 1999, on the theme, “towards an african pianism” euba tries to propose a definition, scope and methodology for african pianism. tracing the history of the use of western keyboard instruments in africa to date, he says: western keyboard instruments were introduced to africa by christian missionaries (dating from the mid-nineteenth century in west africa) and therefore disseminate through trade and other agents of culture contact … today, they are among the most common western instruments in africa and (in their electronic forms) have been widely adopted by pop musicians (5). euba (1989:151) further states that techniques used in the performance of african instrumental music in general would form a good basis for an african pianistic style. the ingredients of an african pianism include (a) thematic repetition, (b) direct borrowings of thematic material (rhythm and tonal) from african traditional sources, and (c) percussive treatment of the piano. he later added another feature, which is making the piano behave like an african instrument. nketia, one of the african composers who endorsed the concept of african pianism, provides further insight into the theory of this concept. in the preface (piii) of his african pianism: twelve pedagogical pieces, nketia writes: african pianism refers to a style of piano music which derives its characteristic idiom from the procedures of african percussion music as exemplified in bell patterns, drumming, xylophones and mbira music. it may use 143boamahvolume 23 (2012) simple or extended rhythmic motifs or the lyricism of traditional songs and even those of african popular music as the basis of its rhythmic phrases. it is open ended as far as the use of the tonal materials is concerned, except that it may draw on the modal and cadential characteristic of traditional music. its harmonic idiom may be tonal, atonal, consonant or dissonant in whole or in part, depending on the preferences of the composer, the mood or impressions he wishes to create to heighten or soften the jaggedness of successive percussive attacks. in this respect, the african composer does not have to tie himself down to any particular school of writing, if his primary aim is to explore the potential of african and tonal usages. from euba’s and nketia’s observations on the definition and scope of african pianism, we understand that compositions in african pianism can employ techniques and styles used in the performance of african instruments like the xylophone, thumb piano and drum music. the idea is to let the piano act like an african instrument. there can also be the use of traditional songs or african popular music, arranged to suit the capabilities of the piano. the harmonic idiom may be tonal or atonal. the process of appropriation of local material may range from as little as a germ of ideas to a whole section of the local material. in his article, “is african pianism possible?” (1999), kofi agawu examines the concept from various angles. he argues that for musicians from africa to compose for the piano, they need to study very well rhythm in african music. he suggests four pieces of music by nketia (“the volta fantasy”), bankole (“oiyaka konga”), euba (“scenes from traditional life”) and joshua uzoigwe (“igbo folk songs arranged for piano”) as models to be studied. he finally acknowledges that if one were to accept the notion that there could exist a body of music called “african piano music”, then perhaps african pianism was not an impossible concept. 144 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) composers some of the composers whose works exemplify the concept of african pianism include akin euba, ayo bankole and joshua uzoigwe from nigeria; j. h. nketia, kenn kafui and gyimah labi from ghana; gamal abdel-rahim from egypt; and victor kasawu and edward ninna from south africa. examples of some of the works in african pianism are: “the volta fantasy” by j.h. nketia, “the pentanata” by kenn kafui, “the dialects” by gyimah labi, and “the african scene” by edward ninna. an examination of some of the works of these composers reveals deep and meaningful attempts to change african traditional music structure. they demonstrate the ways in which modern composers are trying to make the old traditions relevant today, and to bring traditional african music up to date with the society. it must be noted that composers have their preferred styles and traits in the selection of african traditional material for the piano. with regard to the musical elements (harmony, melody, form, texture and rhythm), composers also have their individual ways of dealing with the musical elements. in most of the compositions one finds that the harmonic vocabulary is based on western and african harmonic principles. among the african harmonic principles are: 1. homophonic parallelism in seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths and polarity 2. polyphony of a contrapuntal nature 3. ostinato accompaniment to a melody 4. notes occurring together at overlapping of call and response phrases 5. melodic decoration with sporadic division during unison passages among the western harmonic principles are:1. chromaticism 2. primary and secondary chords, used sometimes with their sevenths 3. twentieth century tonal vocabulary in the form of: 145boamahvolume 23 (2012) a. tone clusters, which add some color to the harmony b. chords built on super imposed thirds c. parallelism in 2nds , 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, and 6ths d. non harmonic materials such as passing tones, suspensions, changing notes, pedal points and unprepared suspensions with delayed resolutions. e. polychords f. atonality notable rhythms are: 1. the cross rhythm used especially in african percussion music 2. hemiola 3. shifted accents and rapid meter changes 4. asymetric divisions and meters 5. principle of repetition and variation or improvisation which helps in achieving rhythmic variety 6. isorhythms 7. polyrhythms 8. non-accentual rhythms 9. additive rhythms 10. traditional rhythmic patterns with regard to texture, most compositions reveal the alternation of different textures. horizontal and vertical occurrence of motifs is a common trait of some composers, as is variation of the density of texture by cutting down the number of voices at certain points. in addition, dissonant textures under an almost continuous string of changing melodies, homophonic parallelism, teaming up two parts and assigning them a thematic material against those of another team, the fragmentation of motifs, transfer of theme to a different register of the piano, the expansion and compression 146 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) of melodic and harmonic intervals, and the change of chords over a fixed textural phrase, are all kinds of textures composers employ. both western and african forms are employed by composers. the form of an african song is derived partly from the contexts in which it is used and partly from the form of the verbal texts on which the melody is based. there is always room for extemporization and for rearrangement of the order of verses. the actual shape of a song therefore grows out of the situation in which it is sung. some composers pay attention to the basic forms like the call and response, basic melodic patterns and phrase lengths, resultant forms and patterns as used in african music. composers try to do more than state the problems in using african elements. they try to fuse traditional african musical elements in such a way that closely reflects the value system of the culture. in a continent like africa, which is experiencing fundamental alterations of its basic structure, the role of the creative artist is not only very important but also one that requires much research into african music. certain aspects of some of the compositions in african pianism indicate transition and change of a major order; not a slow natural evolution, but a deliberate quick turn toward a particular direction (african pianism). composers make a good attempt to expand the expressive possibilities of the piano. at the same time, the compositions place greater emphasis on the composer as a unique personality, as an individual with a personal statement to make. the piano style the piano offers a great opportunity to the composer that seeks boundlessness. the piano, we should note, has its own style, and therefore any composer writing for it, whether in the african or western idiom, should know its style. it is not just a matter of transferring african music to the piano; the composition should be pianistic. the following are some of the styles used: 1. scalic passages, in ascending or descending order 2. appeggios and broken chords 147boamahvolume 23 (2012) 3. octaves 4. chromaticism 5. compound intervals and skips 6. concord and dissonant harmonies involving five or more notes problems when the composer adopts a syncretic approach in his compositions as regards idiom, some of the problems that arise include: 1) the conflict of theories, that is, theories of consecutive octaves and fifths under western conventional rules as against the principles of homophonic parallelism. 2) the presence of modulation in western music and its absence in traditional african music. the imperfect cadence progressing from a second inversion of the tonic chord to the dominant has been changed to the dominant seventh due to the constraints of text. 3). the need for a composer using the syncretic approach in his compositions to master the fundamentals of african melody, harmony and rhythm so that he can create typical african tunes based on any of the varieties of heptatonic, hexatonic and pentatonic scales used in african societies. when he is able to do this, he needs not always borrow tunes from the traditional repertoire, for he can create tunes that would be true to the traditional idiom. 4) the question of how to make western harmony less obstrusive in new african music that adopts the syncretic approach, that is, balancing or bringing out the african elements more than the western elements in composition 5). perceptions of the syncretic approach by consumers or audiences. because the african grows up with a musical language of his home culture, the typical african music lover is often unaware that there are other languages of music. if, therefore, a piece of music in a foreign idiom does not appeal to him instantly, he assumes it is because the music is not good. he does not consider the possibility 148 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) that he might have failed to understand the music, since he assumes music to be a universal language. 6). challenges to performers: the syncretic nature of compositions in african pianism poses challenges not only to composers who make meaningful creative use of african traditions and developments in form and harmony, but also to performers who need to expand their orientation and interpretative skills, particularly where such music embodies concepts and expectancies to which they are not accustomed because their performance background is in western music. a vibrant musical life can only be sustained if there is a good pool of competent performers who interpret the works of composers to an appreciative audience. for performers who are interested in works in african pianism, there is the need for them to familiarize themselves with melody, harmony, rhythm, texture and form in african music in order to interpret such pieces properly. 7) the problems that mastering the style of the piano sometimes creates for the composer. 8) the issue of aesthetics: while aesthetics is quite difficult to handle within one’s own culture, cross culturally it becomes impossible, as too many factors exist that are largely inaccessible to the outsider. nonetheless, the aesthetic criterion is the one which i find to be at least partially valid. in this respect several points need to be stressed. first, one does not expect a stylistic innovator to be the same person who perfects that style, particularly when the composer is moving from a long established and sophisticated oral tradition into a fledgling written tradition. second, modern composers are trying to reach an all-african audience who do not share the feeling for and knowledge of the cumulative meanings of traditional african music. finally, an aesthetic criterion that subsumes all other criteria is itself an innovation and is to some extent western. in a traditional society in which music is closely linked to religion and ritual, beauty is always subordinate to efficacy, and meaningfulness, relevance and simple usefulness are infinitely more important than the creation of sensually delightful sound patterns. in the best of all possible music systems, meaning and beauty coincide. a form of music universal to all africa would probably be used more for contemplation than to 149boamahvolume 23 (2012) serve as accompaniment for social events. there is already a clear need among africans for a new form of music which would serve a function roughly identical to that for which westerners use their art music. african musicians who have been exposed to western music have attempted to supply from this need by devising compositions which are essentially based on western idioms. these composers sometimes employ a few elements of african music in their works in the hope of creating a new idiom of african music. when such composers write a symphony, for example, they use african folk tunes for their thematic material in the belief that this is sufficient to produce an african symphony. yet not only do the folk tunes sound more european than african, but also the rest of the work is usually conceived, instrumentally and stylistically, in accordance with principles of european symphonic practice, and the resultant composition must be regarded merely as a variant of the western musical idiom. it is possible to create a kind of african symphony in which the notion of symphony is constructed to mean no more than an intellectual work of great depth and dimension. in order for such a work to be truly african, it must use the stylistic and instrumental materials of african music. african musicians who are seeking to create a new idiom of african music which is designed primarily for aesthetic listening, and who see the means to this end in some kind of fusion of african and western styles, have apparently decided that african traditional music is so limited in scope that it cannot furnish the elements necessary for the creation of the new idiom. on the contrary, my own exposure to western and other foreign idioms of music has made me realize that there are abundant possibilities in the traditional music of africa to develop a new african art music which makes little or no reference to foreign idioms. the basic elements for this kind of music certainly exist in african traditional music even though african musicians, in their preoccupation with the use of music as a part of social functions, have not exploited them for this purpose. within the limits of tribal music alone it is possible to devise new sound combinations with sufficient variety for extended listening. but by drawing upon the totality of african musical idioms, the modern african composer will not only broaden the scope of his music, but will also be able to create a language of music which can be 150 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) understood by all africans. african composers in the western idiom often lament the lack of performers to interpret their works and the absence of an audience to appreciate them on the continent. they are therefore forced to go to europe to seek both. these composers, it would appear, have not made much impact in europe either, partly because they are too few and partly because their works are often written in a style which is no longer fashionable in europe. thus, these artists must be regarded, at least for the time being, as constituting a marginal group whose work may never really take hold in africa, and as artists who may never command much influence in europe until their music is able to compete successfully with what is being produced by contemporary european composers. but by working towards the development of a style of african music which can serve as a common musical language for the whole of the african continent, african composers will have a wide audience for the performance of their music. africans should not be discouraged from acquiring foreign musical idioms either, since it is an advantage to be able to communicate with non-african audiences. african traditional music lays emphasis on repetition, but practitioners of new art should be less concerned with repetition and more with variation. in other words, they should aim at creating a musical idiom which would be suitable for contemplation. the new music should be a re-combination of the elements of traditional music and should be a realization of the stylistic potentialities of those elements. crafting compositions using african materials entails mastery of the elements that constitute the hallmark of african music as well as the principles of composition. to prepare a student for such an undertaking, there must be a worked out curriculum that progressively leads to the mastery of both western and african instruments. the objective of such a program would be to produce excellent practical musicians who would be bi-culturally literate. a comprehensive program in african music should address morphological as well as practical concerns. it should also aim at exposing the student to a wide body of african music which must be introduced at appropriate points in the curriculum. 151boamahvolume 23 (2012) the process of idiomatic writing entails the rewriting of one’s african musical thought process in an appropriate manner for conventional western instruments like the piano. the budding composer has to acquaint himself with structures in african music. matters such as meter, tempo, time line, rhythmic, harmonic and melodic characteristics, as well as instrumental organization become important in identifying african musical types. the issue of form would also have to be addressed. doing so entails acknowledging the basic notion that a piece is structured with elements that function like a living organism. this is not to say that folk music lacks this quality. to obtain a meaningful formal structure, one must have a coherent syntax. idea must be found, presented and worked out upon relationship. the relative importance and function of the elements would determine the nature of the construction. an appropriate subject must be found, one that would enable the vision of an entire composition. to aid this process, the student should be exposed to as large a body of folk material as possible. through a sifting process, the appropriate subject may be obtained. after obtaining the characteristic features of the musical types, the composer would have had to study analytically, the greater body of mater pieces in the greater music literature. the future african composer may consider techniques such as the hocket, stratification and improvisation, among others, for organizing his work on african lines. there are also a host of rich timbral resources as well as the structural aspects of the diversified musical genres of our continent which may be judiciously used. the various ways of handling form, harmonic and rhythmic structures, generation of motion, tensions and resolutions, coherence of syntax etc, would be quickly understood through the study of various masterpieces. however, the composer must understand that it is in the adaptation and expression of the universal compositional principles in african terms that the challenge lies. from the african perspective, the interrelationship between melody, harmony, polyphony, the time line and other instrumental supporting units must be clearly understood. the law of comprehension should reign supreme. coherence and authenticity should also be the decisive factors 152 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) in creativity. every composer cannot expect to have a universal message, but he may reasonably expect to have a special message for his own people. many young composers however make the mistake of imagining that they can be universal without at first being local. is it not reasonable to suppose that those who share our life, our history, our customs, our climate, even our food, should have some secret to impart to us which the foreign composer, though he may be perhaps more imaginative, more powerful, more technically equipped, is not able to give us? this is the secret of the african composer. the young composer must not shut himself up and think about art; he must live with his fellow artists and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community. young composers should learn how to use traditional idioms in their compositions. most of the best compositions in modern music come from composers who have kept close to their several native traditions and whose individual genius has enabled them to extend their music in directions undreamt of by their predecessors. in addition, in order to encourage budding african composers to become interested in the establishment of the new music, several workshops should be set up in each african country. in these workshops, young musicians could be made familiar with african music from various parts of the continent and taught to use this music as the basis of their own original work. exercises in creative writing should always be preceded by exercises in which the students are required to imitate existing styles of african music. to achieve this goal, performance workshops should be established in which the participants learn to play traditional music from different parts of africa, and which could be used as laboratories for the development of new performance techniques. this kind of experience would make a strong foundation for producing the new breed of performing artist needed to interpret the new african music. recommendations and conclusion for a form like african pianism to thrive, cultural institutions may have to upgrade their interests to promote the style of their art music and place it on an equal footing with its rival styles, that is, the popular and the traditional. competitions may be instituted not only in choral music, but 153boamahvolume 23 (2012) also in other spheres like composing for the piano and the orchestra and performances for boosting the standards in both african and western instrumental music. firms, corporations and individuals can complement the efforts of the national commission on culture to organize such competitions which will promote art music. the planning and the implementation of the music curriculum by the ministry of education must be aimed at lifting art music from its present state. music history, theory and compositional techniques are very important in promoting african pianism. the study of music history may include the history of ghanaian art music, while questions in theory and compositional techniques may involve styles associated with our ghanaian or nigerian composers, for instance, the solo and piano style of nketia, or the orchestral or harmonic style of gyimah labi. more theoretical studies should be conducted on traditional music of ghana on topics such as multipart organization among the akan or southern ewe. such work would aid future theorists and composers of art music of our country. future composers may also have to make exhaustive use of the different scales that can be abstracted from ghanaian traditional music, for example, in poly-modal or tonal devices. they could also borrow compositional techniques from debussy and schoenberg but use locally available scales. music programmes should intensify and continue to ensure accuracy in rhythmic transcriptions. there is a wealth of rhythms hidden in our traditional dances which are yet to be tapped and used in future works. the growth of a music is assured as long as the practitioners of that music continue to find new modes of expression for it. the vitality and potential of african pianism, viewed in the light of dynamic changes which are currently taking place in african culture, indicate that we are on the threshold of a new and exciting period of african music. the message to composers is that everybody should contribute his quota towards refining, preserving and developing the african art musical style into a stronger and enviable tradition. 154 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) references agawu, v. kofi. 1995. african rhythm: a northern ewe perspective. cambridge university press. euba, akin. 1967. multiple pitch lines in yoruba choral music, journal of the international folk music council. xix: 66-70. euba, akin. 1970. traditional elements as the basis of a new african art music. african notes 5.4: 33-39. euba, akin. 1989. essays on music in africa 2: intercultural perspectives. bayreuth: bayreuth african structures. euba, akin. 1999. towards an african pianism. keyboard music of africa. program and notes of symposium and festival, 7-9 october. university of pittsburgh. nketia, j h. 1974. the music of africa. new york: w.w norton and co inc. nketia, j. h. 2004. african art music. accra: african publications (ghana) ltd yates, peter .1967. twentieth century music. new york: pantheon books. 125olatunjivolume 23 (2012) yorùbá proverbs and musicality michael olutayo olatunji1 abstract this paper attempted to establish some links between traditional yorùbá instrumental music and instrumentation or performance with proverbs. eleven yorùbá proverbs that reflect either vocal or instrumental performance were collected, categorized and analysed according to their respective functionalities among members of this ethnic group. the analyses revealed that, among other things, yorùbá proverbs could be used to emphasise the importance of collaboration of music with other performing arts, express a relationship between the musical instrument combination and the concept of family co-existence, uphold the use of musical instruments as a communicative and panegyric tool, and emphasize the universality of yorùbá aesthetic value on speech and music. introduction just like in many other nigerian ethnic groups, music is as vital to the yorùbá people as air is vital to life. as a matter of fact, music is used in everyday activities of the yorùbá people, either individually or collectively. music is a vital tool in the day-to-day living of a yorùbá man. although scholars have always emphasised two major functions of music among african peoples, that is, entertainment and information, the roles and uses of music among africans are too numerous to mention (delano, 1987; euba, 1988; owomoyela, 2005; and kosemani, 2010). among the yorùbá people, for example, music is used to educate (especially the young ones) about almost all the facets of culture and traditions. it is used to praise, entertain and communicate (both in the physical and metaphysical realms). music is also used extensively in worship and as therapy for the drudgery of routines or to identify the members of a particular occupation or association. also, like most ethnic groups in nigeria, the two media through which the sound of music is performed among the yorùbá people are the musical instruments and the human voice. 1michael olutayo olatunji is a lecturer in the department of music, obafemi awolowo university, ile-ife, nigeria. 126 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) however, there seems to be no clear-cut boundary between vocal and instrumental music in african culture. this is corroborated by hornbostel (1928:62), who succinctly states that “african music is not conceived without dancing nor african rhythm without drumming, nor the forms of african song without antiphony”. in his analysis of the music performances of some repertoires of the people of central africa, akpabot (1975:5) asserts that …in effect, the vocal performance was a song with words and the xylophonist’s (instrumental) solo a song without words, and since the songs are derived from speech patterns, it is easy to see how the xylophone music could be used to transmit messages. therefore, any attempt to conceptualize or analyze yoruba instrumental music purely as musical sound would amount to belittling its functions. this is because words and music have to be viewed in one context in order for the totality of the musician’s performance to be appreciated. apart from those who are found in the kogi and kwara states of nigeria and in some parts of the republic of benin, the largest concentration of the yorùbá people is found in the south-western geo-political zone of nigeria. this geographical region covers both the african forest and savannah zones of the west african sub-region. this location is mainly responsible for the inequalities in the distribution of types of musical instruments among the yorùbá people. while there is an avalanche of both the membranophonic and idiophonic instruments, as a result of the types of animals and trees found therein, chordophones and aerophones are almost scarcely present. these last two categories are usually found in negligible quantities and, in most cases, they are sparsely distributed among certain yorùbá sub-groups. in his argument regarding why many black african peoples have no precise noun for music, francis bebey (1975:12) assets inter alia that the art of music is so inherent in black african people that it becomes almost superfluous to have a particular noun for it. however, this does not disprove the fact that most african cultures have words to define specific forms such as song, chant, and dance. in the light of this argument, 127olatunjivolume 23 (2012) although the yorùbá word eré could be used for music, it has a wider meaning to cover all aspects of entertainment, which include drama, poetry, masking and dance. this situation notwithstanding, some scholars have tried to coin some words to represent music. some of these coinages include ìlù àt’orin, which literally means drumming and singing, t’ìlùt’ìfon (meaning drumming and blowing), and so forth. the inadequacies of all these coinages are obvious. this study partially agrees with bebey’s argument that no definite noun exists to define the concept of music among among ethnic groups in africa, including theyorùbá people. however, it could also be argued that the almost over-distribution of membranophones is, to a large extent, responsible for the use of the generic terminology ìlù (drum) for most performances of music and lù (beat), which in most cases is used as the verb “play” among the yorùbá people. this argument becomes the framework upon which the combination of the structure, design and approach used in this study is anchored. musical instruments and instrumentation in yorùbá proverbs the proverb could be defined as a varied oral literary form of expression. it could also be in the form of aphorisms, wise sayings, and axioms. therefore, it is not out of place to assert that the cumulative realism of daily experiences is expressed through proverbs. yorùbá proverbs are usually made of short sentences, loaded with deep words of wisdom, and borne out of the experiences of the elders in the society. hidden in these short sentences are deep meanings which demand some knowledge of the oral tradition to decode and comprehend. yorùbá proverbs can be monoclausal, bi-clausal or multi-clausal in structure. among other things, proverbs are used to facilitate an easy comprehension of the cogent points and ideas in a speech. most yorùbá proverbs are predicated on the past experiences of the elders with regard to the relationships between friends, husbands and wives as well as between parents and children. some proverbs also reflect the lives and behavioral patterns among animals such as mammals, birds, fishes and insects. yet others are derived from folktales and oracle verses 128 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) (ese ifá). this experiential concept of proverbs ensures that they are held in high esteem among the yorùbá to the extent that such sayings are generally believed to be the property of the elders. indeed, it is believed that regardless of the high level of wisdom or intelligence attained by a young person – even if comparable to that of an elderly person – his experiences cannot match those of the elders. this is reflected in the yorùbá proverb that says: bómodé bá láso bí àgbà kò lè lákìísà bí àgbà. even though a lad has the same number of “clothes” as an elderly person, the number of his “rags” will not be the same as that which pertains to the elderly man. here, the use of both clothes and rags is symbolic: while the former represents intelligence, the latter stands for experience. clearly, the yorùbá strongly believe that experience is superior to intelligence; in fact, experience is considered as the “elder brother” of intelligence. be that as it may, whenever any young person is identified to be able to use a wide range of proverbs, he is usually accorded respect by both old and young members of his family and community. however, it is considered a great insult and an act of disrespect for a young person to use proverbs in his speech without paying homage to the elders. the homage may come either before or after a proverb or a chain of proverbs is said. if a person chooses to pay homage before saying any proverb, he will start with a short phrase like: èyin àgbàlagbà le máa n so pé… it is you elders that do say that… even in a situation where the speaker considers himself to be among the oldest people in that particular gathering, he is still expected to pay 129olatunjivolume 23 (2012) homage to the fore-fathers by saying: àwon baba wa ni wón máa n so wípé… our fathers would always say that… when the homage comes after the proverb(s), the speaker can say: kí òwe jé ti èyin àgbà o you elders, proverbs are your property or he may choose to say: tótó, ó se bí òwe o i pay homage for using proverbs or n kò tó òwe pa níwájú èyin àgbà o you elders, i’m not worthy to use proverbs in your presence. tradition demands that the elders around acknowledge the speaker’s homage by saying: wà á pa òmíràn/wà á rí òmíràn pa. you will have another opportunity. analysis of findings as already stated, this paper attempts to examine some yorùbá proverbs, and also through analysis, establish some links between traditional yorùbá instrumental music and instrumentation or performance with proverbs. we shall begin with an analysis of a proverb that reflects the yorùbá concept of performance of music, which in most cases include dancing: (i) ìròmi tí n jó lójú omi, onílù rè wà nísàlè odò. 130 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) a water insect that dances on the water surface has its musicians located on the river bed. this proverb substantiates hornbostel’s claim, which is corroborated by akpabot, that there is strictly speaking no absolute music. rather, in most cases, the ensemble performance of music is usually accompanied with dancing, and sometimes singing. however, the use of the singular noun for the drummer in the yorùbá text does not suggest a solo performance. rather,, this proverb emphasises the idea that a musical group is identified and called by the name of its leader. hence, we hear such statements as “we are inviting odòlayé àrèmú to come and perform” or “ògúndáre fóyánmu played for them last week”. the proverb in (i) above is used on an occasion when someone who ordinarily could not achieve any feat on his own is boasting or challenging a more powerful fellow to a duel just because he has support from elsewhere in most cases, the powerful person or group that sponsors the “weak” person is un-identified or concealed from the general public and is only known to the person who is being sponsored. the next set of four proverbs reflects the relationship between the combination of yorùbá musical instruments for performance (instrumentation) and the concept of family co-existence. (ii) akorin-ì-ní-elégbè, bí eni tí n jó àsán kan ìlù ni ó rí. a singer without people to chorous in response is like somebody who dances to a single drum (dáramólá 2004:30). musically speaking, the summation of divergent sonorities of various instruments often culminates in a unique “orchestra colour” of any instrumental ensemble among the yorùbá people. also, the co-ordination of multilateral rhythmic ostinati and improvisation often produce a complex result, which leads, guides, and guards the dancer’s steps during performance. 131olatunjivolume 23 (2012) this proverb brings into focus the yorùbá concept of instrumentation during performance which on many occasions include dancing. it is believed that no single drum is capable of providing a complete focus or direction for the dancer. according to dáramólá, “during performance, one drum means nothing without the others”. hence, the drum is perceived as a reflection of the concept of ebí or àjobí (family) among the yorùbá people. collective responsibility forms the basis for co-existence among members of any family. therefore, the proverb is used to encourage teamwork among members of a family or community. it is also used to promote the concept of division of labour as well as leadership and followership among members. (iii) bílù bá pé igba, agogo ni í borí won. in the midst of several drums, the sound of agogo is very prominently audible. agogo, a metallic gong, has a high carrying power which is considered even stronger than the combination of that of the other drums in an ensemble. this is so because of agogo’s strong numerous overtones. this proverb emphasises the concept of leadership and followership in any yorùbá community life. it also captures the concept of division of labour, which is very vital to mutual co-existence among members of a community. (iv) orí alu-opón kì í gún esè alu-ìyá-ìlù kì í tólè. the head of an opón player is always bowed, the legs of a (dùndún) master drummer are always crooked. this proverb reveals the effects of the differences in both the age and the areas of concentration between the players of the two instruments mentioned above. it is believed that playing in a dùndún ensemble starts from the opón, which is also known as gúdúgúdú. this graduation from playing the opón to performing in a dùndún ensemble vividly reflects the different priorities and interests between a mother and her child (ìyá n ronú, omo n rokà). therefore, in most cases, the youngest and the least experienced drummer plays the opón. in fact, an opón player is always 132 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) placed in front of the master drummer or any other highly experienced drummer of the group who constantly corrects the novice anytime he misses his rhythmic lines. such correction is effected by striking him on the head with the beater (kòngó). this arduous task of maintaining a faultless rhythmic ostinato is responsible for the opón player constantly keeping his eyes on the membrane surface of his drum. to exacerbate his situation, this surface is demarcated into two parts (to produce two separate pitches) by a wax. therefore, in keeping his eyes on the membrane, the opón player’s head is bowed almost throughout the period of performance. on the other hand, the master-drummer is the one saddled with the responsibility of reciting poetry, oríkì or oríkì-orílè, pertaining to individuals or the community, respectively. this task requires him to pull the tensioning thongs (osán) surrounding his drums more often. it also requires the support of his legs in order to achieve “a perfect voice of the drum”. in trying to achieve all these, the master-drummer’s legs, apart from being constantly on the move, always assume a limping position. however, just as the above argument is true when considering ensemble performance, we also need to state here that, among the yorùbá people, some occasions do call for the performance of a solo instrument. but it bears mentioning that the latter occasions do not call for dancing; they are like other contexts where a poet specialist in any of the chant modes of the yorùbá (ìjálá, ìyèrè-ifá, èsà, rárà, and ekún-ìyàwó) performs a capella in praise of a member or a group of people in the society. similarly, an instrumentalist can use any instrument that is capable of being used as a speech surrogate to render a solo performance. such a performance can be in the form of a recitation of individuals’ oríkì (praise or genealogy) or the transmission of messages to a group of individuals or the entire community and even beyond. among the yorùbá, only instruments in three categories (idiophones, membranophones, and chordophones) are capable of playing this communicative role. common examples include the village or town crier’s gong (agogo), the ògìdìgbó (war) drum, and the ekùtù (a kind of flute found mostly among hunters). for acoustic reasons, the chordophone, despite its dearth among the yorùbá people, may not be fit for this crucial role of an open-air transmission of signals and messages 133olatunjivolume 23 (2012) which most often requires a high level carrying power to cover a radius of several kilometres. the next set of three proverbs under consideration deals with the yorùbá concept of using a musical instrument either as a communicative or panegyric tool. (v) ajá tí yóó sonù, kì í gbó fèrè ode. a dog that is bound to get lost will not hearken to the hunter’s whistle. when hunting for game, hunters do communicate with one another or with their dogs, either by whistling or by playing the ekùtù, an aerophonic instrument. it is believed that any trained hunter or dog should be capable of discerning the meaning of any call or signal conveyed at such a time. but should a dog get immersed in its pursuit of game when a signal is transmitted to end the endeavour and for every hunter and dog to come together to return home, such a dog will eventually lose its way in the bush and will not be able to return home. this proverb is used when someone is identified as taking the wrong step in dealing with an issue. tradition demands that such a member should be warned severally by other members of the family or the entire community, especially the elders, who are the carriers of culture. but in a situation where the person is intransigent, in spite of all the efforts of other members, he should be responsible for a calamity that is bound to befall him afterwards. (vi) olè tó gbé kàkàkí oba, níbo ni yóó gbé fon ón?. the thief that steals the king’s bugle where is he going to blow it? (dáramólá 2004: 32) kàkàkí, a long valveless fanfare trumpet, probably a borrowed instrument from the hausa/fulani musical culture, has now formed part of some yorùbá obas’ (kings’) paraphernalia, especially the traditional rulers of òyó-yorùbá descent. because of the royal dignity which this instrument carries, it would be inappropriate for anyone who steals it to play it either for himself or for another person who is not an oba. the implication here 134 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) is that the instrument is useless if it is not played for an oba. this proverb is used to discourage anyone who is trying to obtain something, or who has aspires to a position to which, ordinarily, he is not entitled. according to dáramólá, the proverb is also used “as a warrant for people to desist from embarking on unprofitable ventures” because “the gold is not useful for the pigs”. (vii) bí òwe bí òwe là n lùlù ògìdìgbó, ológbón ní í jó o òmòràn ní í mò ón. ògìdìgbó drum is cryptically played like a proverb it is wise men that dance to it it is informed men that discern it (olátúnjí, 1984:170) ògìdìgbó is a drum of war, which is played to send signals and calls to warriors at the battlefront. the ability of any warrior to discern or decode the meaning of the signals of this instrument is very vital to his tactical approach and maneuvers in warfare. this proverb brings into focus the importance of interjecting conversations with proverbs among the yorùbá people. it is also used to warn the audience to be very attentive in order to get the import of the conversation. it is therefore implied that those who are versed in proverbs are usually endowed with wisdom and understanding, especially in verbal communication (dáramólá 2004:29). although the next two yorùbá proverbs have the same meaning and implications, they are presented differently. while the first one represents the usual or direct way of deploying the proverb in speech by an average yorùbá person, the second one suggests some level of embellishment or vocal aesthetics – as discussed earlier in this study. the three aesthetic elements (puns, heteronyms, and onomatopoeias) utilized in yoruba poetry are present in the second proverb. (viii) tí bàtá bá n dún ládùúnjù, yíya ní í ya. when a bàtá drum is played continuously at its highest pitch, 135olatunjivolume 23 (2012) the tearing of its membrane is imminent. (ix) tó bá ti pé tí bàtá tí n pelá, tí n pelá, ó ti setán tí yóó pe gbègìrì. when a bàtá calls ilá for too long a time, very soon it will call gbègìrì. ilá (okro) is one of the draw-soups (obèéyò) in yorùbá delicacies. one of the characteristics of any obeeyo is to facilitate a smooth transference of morsels or lumps of principal food (such as iyán, èbà, àmàlà and fùfú) from the mouth through the throat to the stomach for easy digestion by the appropriate enzymes. also, there seems to be an interesting curling movement of the hand after scooping the obeeyo with a morsel of food. although gbègìrì (beans) soup could also go with any of the meals mentioned above, it does not make for as smooth a swallow as does obèéyò. moreover, gbègìrì (beans) soup does not call for the characteristic gesture of “wrapping” the morsel with the soup.. the yoruba believe that the bata drum, as well as some other drum ensembles such as the gbèdu and the ògìdìgbó, are limited in their ability to act as speech surrogates when compared with some other instruments such as the dùndún. indeed, theyorùbá usually refer to the bàtá drum as akólòlò (stammerer) because no member of the bàtá ensemble is capable of saying a complete sentence accurately. however, this limitation is a result of the design of the instrument. the construction of the bàtá is different from that of the dùndún, which is built in such a way that pressure is exerted on the thongs (osán) to increase the tension of the membrane and thus raise the pitch of the drum note. but the bàtá’s “tensioning thongs” are bound to the body of the drum by leather straps, thus giving each of the two membranes both a constant tension and a note of the fixed pitch (king 1961: 2). therefore, in order to make up for this lapse, the hocket technique is employed by bàtá players whereby the syllables in a sentence are shared appropriately among the members of the ensemble. the expertise for doing this is gained through the oral tradition of drum playing. yorùbá orthography identifies three major tone marks, namely the low 136 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) (usually called doh and represented by \, the middle (referred to as re and represented by -), and the high (referred to as me and represented by /) tones. these are, invariably, the first three pitches of a major scale of solfa notation in music. the limitation of the bàtá becomes glaring in its inability to sound or “pronounce” the low tone (doh) perfectly. therefore, it stays on the two other pitches (re and me) most often. if we are careful enough to look critically at the construction of the sentence of the second proverb, we will notice that, apart from the first syllable in the bàtá (which is aligned with the low tone) and the three syllables of gbègìrì (beans soup), which symbolise the sound of a broken membrane of the drum, every other syllable depicts the bàtá sound mentioned above, that is, an interchange of the middle (re) and the high (me) tones. also, the repetition of the phrase, tí n pelá is a reflection of the african (and indeed yorùbá) musical concept of utilizing ostinati in a bid to construct a virile multilineal rhythmic and melodic phrase. the argument here can be approached musically and aesthetically. musically speaking, the sound dimension is often given much prominence in any discourse of music. in fact, one of the several definitions of music is that “it is a play with sound”. but music is not an all-sound endeavour. rather, music is a combination of both sound and silence. any student of the rudiments of music knows that, in terms of value, a note (the symbol used to represent sound) has a corresponding rest (the symbol used to represent silence), with which it shares the same value. therefore, just as a no-sound endeavour is not music, so also will an all-sound endeavour be inconceivable and artistically deficient. the aesthetic judgement of any yorùbá traditional music is predicated on two major criteria: fidelity to (oral) tradition and improvisation. a situation where one of these criteria is absent will result in either “good music but bad performance” or vice versa. therefore, when a bàtá player decides to go for either an all-sound endeavour, which, by implication, means sticking to the traditional (ponlá ponlá or pelá pelá) sound of bàtá in a continuous rapidity, there is bound to be a rise in temperature on the surface of the membrane which will eventually lead to its breakage. this proverb is always used to check excesses and simultaneously to 137olatunjivolume 23 (2012) encourage and promote moderation in any human endeavour. it is also used to warn any individual or a group of individuals against oppressive and tyrannical tendencies, the end result of which is believed to be selfdestruction or extinction. the last set of two proverbs strongly emphasises the yoruba concept of mutual co-existence within a nuclear or extended family setting as well as among other members of the community. (x) sèkèrè kò se é fòpá lù, jagunjagun kò se é foba mú. just as sèkèrè is not played with a wand, a war commander cannot be forcefully arrested. sèkèrè, a gourd rattle musical instrument of the yorùbá people, is played by shaking the instrument or by beating it with one hand while holding it with the other. since it is made from a gourd surrounded by nets of beads, any attempt to beat it with a strong object such as a wand or a metallic object would cause the gourd and the beads to break. the implication is that this would cause disharmony in the otherwise peaceful co-existence between the gourd and the beads surrounding it. in the same manner, any attempt to forcefully arrest a war commander would lead to chaos or pandemonium and, sometimes anarchy in the community. this is because unless there is a breakdown of law and order, no warrior will obey any order to arrest his commander. even if the warriors’ camp has been polarised, a situation which often leads to factionalisation, an outbreak of civil war is very likely if the commander is to be captured and arrested. this proverb is used to discourage those who are trying to embark on missions or tasks that the society believes to be impossible. it is also used to discourage a misplacement of priorities by any individual or group. however, the proverb could be used to encourage people to show respect for those in positions of authority to ensure a continuous harmonious coexistence. (xi) òtá n lùlù ìbàjé 138 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) olórun oba ni kò jé kó dún. the enemy is always playing derogatory music, it is the almighty god that dissipates the sound. this proverb is used mostly to address colleagues and counterparts that are fond of running other people down or tarnishing other people’s reputation. such treacherous people are sometimes referred to as “friends like enemies”(òré bí òtá) or “enemies like friends”(òtá bí òré). the text of the proverb makes it emphatically clear that attempts by detractors or opponents, often faceless or anonymous persons who engage in blackmail and defamation of character, will always prove abortive, if their would-be victims depend on the greater power of god. this conceptualization also emphasises the belief of the yorùbá people in the supernatural ability of the almighty god, the creator of the universe, to save and deliver the just from the hands of oppressors. conclusion this paper has attempted to analyse some yorùbá proverbs that are predicated on either the functionalities or combination of musical instruments. the study has also attempted to account for the significant instances of the lexemes of music, as well as levels of musicality or musicianship in/of yoruba proverbs. this combination, among other things, is employed to guard and guide the dancers during any performance. the veracity of akpabot’s (1975:5) claim that to africans, there is no clear-cut boundary between instrumental and vocal music is also confirmed. this point is predicated upon the fact that the medium of transmission notwithstanding, the raw material for music in the two media is song. while the yorùbá consider their vocal music as songs with words, they consider their instrumental music as songs without words. it is also revealed that some yorùbá proverbs may be presented in two forms, that is, either in a direct or in an embellished form. also, proverbs may be presented by an instrument either in an ensemble or as an instrumental solo performance. while the latter is almost an exclusive characteristic of most yorùbá aerophones, only those membranophones that are capable of producing several pitches through tensioning can 139olatunjivolume 23 (2012) achieve this task. the generality of the membranophones depend heavily on the use of the technique of hocketing – a technique by which the syllables in a proverb are distributed among some or all the instruments in a particular ensemble. we need to state here that very little scholarship exists on music and proverbs. therefore, it is strongly suggested that more research should be carried out in this area in order to generate a rich scholarship in several other specialised areas of music. 140 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) references adégbìté, adémólá (2003) “proverbs and conflicts among yorùbá popular musicians”. nigerian music review. no. 4, 25-32. akpabot, s. ekpe (1975) ibibio music in nigerian culture. u.s.a: michigan state university press. bebey, francis (1975) african music: a people’s art. (trs.) bennett josephine. new york: lawrence hill & co. dáramólá, yòmí (2004) “yorùbá proverbs in the perspective of music” proverbium: yearbook of international scholarship. vol. 21. (ed.) mieder, wolfgang. vermont: the university of vermont, 27-34. king, anthony (1961) yorùbá sacred music from èkìtì. ìbàdàn: university of ìbàdàn press. kosemani, supo. (2010) owe l’esin oro. ibadan: yew books. nketia, j.h.k. (1975) the music of africa. london: victor gollancz. olátúnjí, o.o. (1984) features of yorùbá oral poetry. ìbàdàn: university press limited. owomoyela, oyekan. yoruba proverbs. lincoln & london: university of press nebraska press, 2005. sadie, stantley (ed.) (1980) the new grove dictionary of music and musicians. vols. 9 & 13. london: macmillan publishers. 205okolochavolume 23 (2012) war and absurdity: reading the manifestations of trauma in uwem akpan’s “luxurious hearses” h. oby okolocha1 abstract this essay examines the circumstances of jubril, chief ukongo and colonel usenetok, three casualties of sharia war fleeing to safety in uwem akpan’s short story, “luxurious hearses” in her collection, say you’re one of them (2008). the paper particularly identifies the loss of personhood that afflicts these individuals as a result of war; that loss of self that manifests itself in absurdity. akpan paints poignant and convincing pictures of the horrors of war, of the physical and mental dislocation of individuals in a war situation. this paper finds that for those caught up in the throes of war or conflict, life has one basic meaning – physical survival. introduction nigerian “war literature” has almost become a genre of its own, yet chimalum nwankwo maintains that depictions of war in african literature have not been taken seriously enough because “war is africa’s muted index.” he however goes on to say that “muted as it is, one could read beyond simply trying to capture the regular zeitgeist which good national literatures capture. the index could guide the insightful reader towards the foundation of africa’s numerous perennial or still unfolding tragedies” (13). nwankwo alleges that most of africa’s problems can be traced to a long and turbulent history of wars and their unsavory consequences (13). the considerable corpus of war literature depicts the numerous situations associated with war—the loss of lives and property, the senseless cruelty and destruction, the physical dislocation and deprivation, the tense excitement, mystery and suspense, and the trauma of living through such trying times. however, the dire consequences of war on the psyche of the individual, the dislocation of the mind are the subject of uwem akpan’s h. oby okolocha teaches in the department of english and literature, university of benin, nigeria. 206 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) attention in “luxurious hearses” (2008). akpan demonstrates that while the tangible physical costs of war are huge, the loss of humanity that occurs in war situations is worse. the purpose of this paper is to look at some of the ways in which war trauma manifests as absurd behaviour in the personalities of the characters we have selected for study and illustrate that the loss of personhood that occurs in war situations has terrible implications for society. that war is central to nigeria’s history and has contributed to shaping the nigeria of today is evident in the corpus of war literature that we have. in burma boy (2007), biyi bandele recreates the experiences of nigerian soldiers in world war ii. onukaogu and onyerionwu assert that bandele’s novel sketches the “chequered contours of the nigerian soul excited by the closeness to gruesome death in a setting where the essential dignity of man and respect for life are at zero level” (123). war stories also abound in poetry. obi nwakanma, in horseman and other poems (2007), pays tribute to valiant nigerian soldiers. a solitary female voice in nigerian war poetry, catherine acholonu presents a woman’s point of view about war. her nigeria in the year 1999 (1985), is filled with images of rape and collective pain suffered by women in times of war. she provides poetic evidence that women suffer cruel abuses in war time. onyebuchi nwosu’s dramatic depiction of a biafran family disintegrated by war in bleeding scars (2005) particularly points out that even when a war is over, the physical and psychological scars still “bleed” profusely. that these psychological scars bleed so much more than physical scars is amply demonstrated in akpan’s “luxurious hearses” – hence the presentation of a war scenario in which people have been completely robbed of illusions—a situation that reveals itself in different absurd behaviour. akpan presents the physical and psychological experiences of the individuals affected by the sharia war in khamfi during a period that must have been the 1980s because the book situates the particular incident in the period when the military had just left power and ecomog forces were in service in liberia and sierra leone. like chimamanda ngozi adichie’s treatment of the nigerian biafran war in half of a yellow sun, akpan’s focus is not on the physical war itself but on its effects on the 207okolochavolume 23 (2012) minds of individuals. this essay analyzes three of the motley assemblage of persons in the luxurious bus carrying christians away from the muslim town of khamfi where they are being mindlessly killed. the fragile existence of chief ukongo, jubril and colonel usenetok and their relationships with other persons in the bus reveal that for these individuals whose lives have been shattered by war and conflict, the losses they suffer go deeper than physical dislocation and deprivation. they suffer different degrees of loss of self and the inability to hold their minds together which manifests in absurd behaviour. we witness that for these persons, life has only one basic meaning – physical survival. all they seek in this text is the physical removal from closeness to death; they do not have any aspirations, ambitions or plans for their relocation to the safety of the south. they do not think beyond the immediate present and escape. the essay also examines the absurdity of human relationships in conflict situations. absurdity absurdity can be described as something that defies logic; something that seems irrational or that cannot be reasonably explained. the concept of absurdity in this paper is taken from martin esslin – a drama critic whose writings about the theatre of the absurd have come to be the accepted terms that describe literature that shows the world as “an incomprehensible place” (1266). particularly concerned with drama and theatre, esslin posits that while “happenings in absurdist plays might be absurd, they remain recognizable as somehow related to real life with its absurdity, so that eventually, the spectators are brought face to face with the irrational side of their existence. thus, the absurd and fantastic goings on of ‘the theatre of the absurd’ will, in the end, be found to reveal the irrationality of the human condition and the illusion of what we thought was its apparent logical structure” (1266). the part of esslin’s absurdist theory that is particularly applicable to our purpose in “luxurious hearses” is his insistence that the second world war has brought with it “… the discovery of vast areas of irrational and unconscious forces within the human psyche, the loss of a sense of control over rational human development in an age of totalitarianism and weapons of mass destruction, all have contributed to the erosion of the basis for a dramatic convention 208 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) in which the action proceeds within a fixed and self evident framework of generally accepted values” (1267). this irrationality identified by esslin provides an explanation for man’s lack of a conscience, the thirst for blood and the meaninglessness of human life evident in the war situation in “luxurious hearses”. albert camus’ existential philosophy further explains the inherent absurdity of human life illustrated in akpan’s text. camus conceives of the world as: possessing no inherent truth, value or meaning; and to represent human life – in its fruitless search for purpose and significance, as it moves from the nothingness whence it came toward the nothingness where it must endas an existence that is both anguished and absurd. (qtd. in abrams 1) the anguished and meaningless existence of man on earth is captured in camus’ myth of sisyphus in which sisyphus is condemned for eternity to the futile job of rolling to the top of a steep hill a stone that always rolled back again (encarta). a world without truth, meaning or purpose would be predisposed to the bestiality that is visible in war. camus’ contention that human existence is inherently absurd aligns with esslin’s recognition that wars are often illogical and war situations provide the enabling atmosphere for the release of the irrational in the human psyche. the two theorists imply that the perception of the world as having a logical structure is only an illusion. the imperative therefore, is to rise up to the challenge of presenting the realities of war and its aftermath in their works. this implies that an honest representation of life must include the presentation of irrational realities such as the tangible and intangible absurdities of war and its aftermath. akpan does this successfully in “luxurious hearses”. the three characters chosen for study in this paper stand out in their manifestation of traumatized absurd behaviour. they are jubril, a young boy from whose lenses we view the situation, chief ukongo, a self-glorifying traditional ruler and colonel usenetok, an ecomog 209okolochavolume 23 (2012) soldier whose mind is in shreds. jubril is just a teenager but his life is like the country nigeria: multi-religious, multi-ethnic and a hybrid of cultures and languages. akpan describes the multi-linguistic situation of nigeria as ‘a babel of languages’(191), emphasizing the confusion of lack of understanding and alluding to a similarity to the confusion in the biblical tower of babel. jubril is a christian and a muslim; he is also a southerner and a northerner. this is indeed an irrational, absurd situation for any individual in a country “where ethnic and religious hate simmered beneath every national issue…” (nnolim, 213).the irrationality of jubril’s young life begins from the absurdity of the peculiar circumstances of his birth. we witness that he is aggrieved that “his personal story was not as straightforward as he would have wanted. over the years, he did everything he could, not to remember the parts he knew” (243). the shame of his dual ethnicity and dual religion is the beginning of his traumatized life. jubril’s feels shame about having a christian southern father and a northern muslim mother because the ethnic and religious division is so entrenched that children grow into it without conscious effort – hence he equates southerner with “infidel” and tries hard to groom his northern identity (244). that ethnic and religious dogmatism are indeed irrational is seen in the enmity between jubril and his brother yesuf resulting from their conflicting religious and cultural choices; enmity so severe that it defies logic. jubril actually watches in support as his muslim brethren stone his biological brother to death for professing the christianity instead of the islam and he feels nothing but righteousness. the greatest absurdity of this religious scenario is that he would have liked to join in killing his brother to “protect the honour of his family, neighbourhood and islamic faith” (216). only a total loss of sensibility can make it possible for a young man to have preferred to join others to kill his brother for nothing more than the latter’s belonging to another religious faith. it is testimony to a terrible loss of humanity resulting from conflict that has become innate. the paradox is that other muslims hold up jubril “as a true muslim for not allowing family loyalties to come between him and his religion when yesuf was given his just deserts…” (217). religion that should unite people in love or at least teach tolerance is the weapon of opposition, division, hate and pain. 210 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) in “luxurious hearses”, the word ‘christian’ or ‘muslim’ confers on the individual a life or death sentence in just seconds. the fraternity jubril was enjoying in the bus disappeared the second the stump of his right wrist identified him as a muslim; this identification amounted to an immediate and irreversible death sentence. jubril’s attempt to convey the mangled story of his religious identity meant nothing to them, “their murderous looks told him it was useless. these were not the stares of catholics or born-agains or ancestral worshippers…, their stares reminded him of his fundamentalist muslim friends, musa and lukeman” (321). in identifying an enemy that must die for professing a different faith, both muslims and christians are the same; illogical, unreasoning and unyielding. musa and lukeman discard in a heartbeat, a shared childhood of friendship and brotherhood in islamic attitudes as they try to kill jubril in religious zeal and frenzy because he is tainted with christian blood. similarly, tega, ijeoma, emeka, madam aniema, and chief ukongo do not hesitate to slit jubril’s throat at the realization that he is muslim. none of them would even give him the benefit of a hearing; the friendship they shared in the bus means nothing in the face of a conflicting religious identity. both muslims and christians presented in this text appear to be incapable of any deep-seated feelings of attachment, affection or love in any meaningful way—it’s all about religious identity. jacques lacan’s theory of alienation helps to explain the attitudes and behavior of characters in “lururious hearses” and free them from the abstraction of absurdity. lacan, a psychiatrist and a disciple of sigmund freud, identifies what he describes as “a fundamental alienation in the individual’s sense of self” (450). michael p. clark (1994) explains that lacan’s sense of self is oriented in the direction of ‘an other’ who is perceived as “omnipotent and thus a potential rival to the self, the ego that emerges from this stage inevitably bears within it a hostility or “aggressivity” that threatens the very stability attributed to it” (450). he summarizes lacan’s theory of alienation as follows: “lacan therefore concluded that the human identity is formed only within an intersubjective context in which alienation and aggressivity are the norm rather than aberrations” (450). this idea of innate aggression and alienation aligns with the attitudes of akpan’s characters and explains why jubril’s 211okolochavolume 23 (2012) childhood friends and comrades in the bus are able to turn into deadly enemies instantly. lacan’s theory sheds some light on the total absence of affection between jubril and his brother, yusuf. in addition, it positions their isolation from each other within the realm of normal behaviour. this inordinate hold onto religion at the expense of family, friendship and altruism also leads to the conclusion that war situations will easily destroy even close filial relationships. this alienation from feelings, or the insulation of sensibilities, is the consequence of violent emotional injuries such as witnessing too much cruelty. psychologists might argue that this ‘shutting down’ of emotions is a method of self-preservation, an unconscious effort to preserve one’s sanity in what emenyonu describes as “unique human conditions brought about by war” (xii). clearly, loss of humanity, absurdities in individual psyches, actions and relationships are very visible consequences of conflict and war in this text. we also note that none of the occupants of the bus has any ambition or plans for tomorrow. jubril does not even know where he is heading, neither do ukongo and usenetok. jubril holds on to a tattered piece of paper and the name of his father’s village, on which hinges his hopes for an identity that will keep him alive. this tattered piece of paper is “like an energy boost” (209). akpan does not provide for his characters any hope or possibility for gathering what nnolim describes as “the splintered shards of their broken lives” (148). we get the impression of people suspended in time and space, a bleak picture of hopeless traumatized existence. trauma trauma describes experiences that are physically and emotionally damaging and painful. physical trauma is damage to the physical body which may be caused by accidents such as gunshots, burns, electric shocks, bone fractures and birth stress. on the other hand, emotional or psychological trauma is severe damage or injury to the mind and emotions that has lasting psychic effects. in the introductory chapter of her book, trauma and recovery: the aftermath of violence--from domestic abuse to political terror (1992), the american psychiatrist, judith herman, posits that psychological trauma is a disordered behavioural state that one 212 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) is left in after terrifying and stressful events. herman maintains that “traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely but rather because they overwhelm in ordinary human adaptation to life” (31). similarly, maureen a. allwood et al (2002) point out the adverse effects of violence and deprivation during wars which ‘overwhelm’ the coping skills of individuals, especially children, making them vulnerable to externalized and internalized adjustment difficulties (450-457). both herman and allwood are particular about the fact that traumatic experiences ‘overwhelm’ the individual and hinder adaptation and integration into society. we can deduce that a natural consequence of these adaptation difficulties must be alienation. these psychiatric studies also cite catastrophic war experiences, as well as witnessing horrific killings, violent and malicious attacks as causes of psychological trauma. the varied victims of war assembled in the “luxurious bus” in this text act out attitudes which illustrate the postulations of herman and allwood. for akpan, in the war situation presented in the novel, buses such as this one are more appropriately means for carrying corpses than transportation for humans because people and corpses occupy spaces side by side. some of these buses are so filled up with corpses of war casualties being ferried home for burial that there are only a few spaces left for living persons. they are really ‘luxurious hearses’. akpan’s x-ray of the characters in interaction in this particular bus reveals that they are all traumatized and violated by war and they manifest different absurdities in behaviour. jubril, for instance, suffers both physical and psychological trauma. he suffers from the terrible physical pain of having his wrist violently chopped off as religious punishment for petty theft; at the same time, emotionally he contends with a permanent crisis of identity. his peculiar circumstances have resulted in jubril’s alienation from everything and everyone. he is unable to identify with his mother who is a muslim, like him, or his brother who is christian, as their father was. his sense of isolation is such that in this “between life and death scenario”, in the bus, where it should have been easy to bond with others in similar dire straits, he is unable to fit in. “he could not feel anything for these muslims (who had disowned him), nor for the christians with whom he was fleeing” to safety (218). the reason is that jubril has always 213okolochavolume 23 (2012) been a victim of conflict. even before this khamfi war, he had lived his entire life in war situations; war between his two conflicting ethnicities, between two opposing religions, and among different cultural attitudes and languages. it would be difficult to expect ‘normal’ behavior from anyone in jubril’s situation. the trauma of the ‘wars’ in jubril’s psyche is also seen in his absurd reactions to the women and television in the bus. as a muslim, he would have preferred to trek a thousand miles on foot rather than sit in the same vehicle with a woman. the paradox is that he is also fascinated by women: he watches them closely, vacillating between liking them and hating them. he compares their hairdos, nails etc. “he was like a person addicted, the more women he counted or watched, the more he needed to assuage his tv anxieties” (202). the psychological dislocation of his mind shows in the effect that watching tv has on him: it makes him feel as if “he is pushing himself into a bottomless pit of temptation and sin” (201) ,for he had heard of the incredible power of tv to corrupt and tarnish the soul. ironically, watching women, which formerly was the ultimate sin, becomes safe when he faces the greater evil of tv. these absurd attitudes result from the physical and psychological wars that afflict him. chief ukongo is an aging, displaced self-acclaimed traditional ruler. we are introduced to him when he occupies the young jubril’s seat and refuses to leave. he is aggrieved that fellow passengers do not recognize or acknowledge his exalted status as a royal father…a royal father should at the very least have the liberty of taking over another’s paid seat. educating them on the appropriate way to treat a royal father, he says: “to let a royal father take the better seat is nothing compared to what we actually deserve” (274). he intimidates jubril to the extent that the boy begins to feel guilty for demanding his seat and to think that giving up his seat to a chief is the only decent thing to do. ironically, a few minutes later chief ukongo turns around and tries to help jubril take over the soldier’s seat (289). in response to the request to produce a bus ticket, ukongo replies, “soldier, do you know that i am not even supposed to be on this bus? do you know that i am supposed to be helping the government solve this national crisis… not being insulted by a madman!” (280). he blissfully ignores the issue and calmly turns his attention to his preferred 214 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) subject— his importance. his fixed attention on his beads, the manner in which he strokes and clacks them together against each other “with measured alacrity” (279) and the manner in which the chief wallows in his laments about his lost glories, all point to a mind that has snapped. ukongo’s personality is disintegrated, or at the very least, unstable. at the point where the passengers appear to have settled down in the bus, he continues to be restless. we are told that “the momentary peace that pervaded the bus had evaded this man. every now and then, some indiscernible angst brought tears to the gullies of the chief’s eyes” (269). we see him take out his identity, look at it and cry for no visible explanation. his constant shifts between their present reality as displaced war victims, grand ideas of his own importance and a non-existent possibility of restored grandeur, are pathetic and absurd and like jubril’s attitudes, almost border on insanity. the soldier, colonel usenetok, appears to be the most traumatized. he has a head full of rotten dreadlocks with an army beret sitting “like a crown of disgrace” (278) over them. in appearance, he is like a madman and in behavior, he is not much better. he carries a sickly looking dog ever so gently “as if it were a two-day old baby” (278). soon we realize that the sickly, smelly blood-vomiting dog is the focus of his existence. he prays for his dog: “the gods of our ancestors will not allow you, nduese, to die!” (282). it is clear that this unnatural attachment to the dog is his tenuous hold on illusions of love and family. his is a mind in disarray, yet usenetok retains some rationality and a convoluted sense of self-worth. he is outraged that chief ukongo refers to him as a madman, and asks; “you are insulting me after all i have done for this country?” (280). he promptly produces his identity card to validate his worth, and with a sense of self importance he announces to them, “colonel silas usenetok… ecomog special forces!” (280). usenetok vacillates between attitudes of honour, logical reasoning and meaningless logic. the other occupants of the bus mock his wretchedness, they are amazed that he reached the rank of colonel in the army without amassing wealth by whatever means. he tells them that he “fought in sierra leone without pay. government still hasn’t paid me for a year now… i didn’t steal your money!” (284). monica is particularly blunt and scathing; she asks him: “and you dey 215okolochavolume 23 (2012) call yourself army colonel?....you be yeye man o! why you no steal? you no be good colonel at all….you tell us soldierman, wetin you dey retire to now?” usenetok replies “to dignity and conscience” (284). his talk about dignity and conscience is impressive and takes one by surprise; it is an aberration, coming from an almost insane soldier in ragged camouflage uniform. at the same time, he shouts at the top of his lungs, telling the bus about the rebels of liberia and the child soldiers of sierra leone. incoherently but with boundless energy, he rattles on endlessly about how he killed many of them and imbibed cocaine to be able to “march at the pace of cocaine madness exhibited by the child soldiers” (289). other occupants of the bus exhibit varied absurd behavior. for instance, we see that at the other end of the bus, emeka is out of control too, trembling like a sick man, speaking without catching his breath, flinging himself out of the window every now and then …his (emeka’s) is a different type of absurdity. usenetok on the other hand displays “the madness of the war front”, a mind that has snapped fighting savagery in sierra leone and liberia. jubril, chief ukongo and colonel usenetok act out attitudes that illustrate that the cost of war is both palpable and impalpable; that every situation of war comes with damage that goes deeper than merely the physical and the tangible. wars take their toll on the human mind, and the extent of this toll is seen in the reactions of the refugees to the turmoil around them. akpan presents a religious war so fierce that “madness whipped up the red dust of khamfi” (239). the khamfi the passengers watched on tv was “the corpse capital of the world. churches, homes, and shops were being torched….the unblinking eyes of the news camera poured its images into the darkening bus, zeroed in on charred corpses sizzling in electric-blue flames ” (235). only a total loss of sensibility (self) would permit the bestiality that makes possible the magnitude of the destruction they watch on the tv. the loss of humanity seen on tv is also evident in the lukewarm feelings/reactions of the refugees. we note that they show only a passive fury regarding all the terrible sights they see on tv. it is amazing that the strongest reaction they show to the gory sights being televised is to spur on the winning side in the conflict. 216 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) while their sensibilities are so shredded and hardened that these gory sights produce only lukewarm reactions, it is remarkable that the sight of free fuel wasted in the hands of almajeris provokes them to an active show of anger. akpan states: the refugees rose to their feet at the sight of hungry looking almajeris running around with fuel and matches, setting things and people afire…..it was not really the sight of corpses burning-or businesses of their southern compatriots being leveled by the fire bombs, or the gore when some of the kids were fried in gas before they had a chance to use it that roused the refugees. all over the country, people had developed a tolerance of such common sights; decades of military rule, and its many terrorist plots directed at the populace, had hardened them. what riled them was the sight of free fuel in the hands of almajeris (235). we are confronted with a dearth of sensibility that makes fuel wastage more important than the death of people; fuel has more value than homes and corpses burning. thus the characters’ lives are aberrations and their sensibilities are shredded to the point of loss – the loss of self that enables bestiality, a hardening of minds and souls that makes it possible to sit with corpses and feel nothing but resentment for the spaces the corpses occupy. they are people from whom joy has been removed, leaving only an isolation from humanity. what should have been sorrow translates into absurdity and irrationality; it is a strange world of strange reactions. the town is the same as the people—in varying stages of destruction; we see people and neighbourhoods burning senselessly. we are reminded of jeebleh’s reflections on the destruction and senseless slaughter of persons in the somalian war in nurrudin farah’s links (2003). jeebleh describes the war torn somalian city as a place of sorrow: many houses had no roofs and bullets scarred nearly every wall…. the streets were eerily, ominously quiet. they saw no pedestrians on the roads, and met no other vehicles. jebleeh felt a tremor, imagining that the residents had been slaughtered “in one another’s 217okolochavolume 23 (2012) blood”, … he would like to know whether in this civil war, both those violated and the violators suffered from a huge deficiency— the inability to remain in touch with their inner selves or to remember who they were before the slaughter began. could this be the case in rwanda or liberia? not that one could make sense of this war on an intellectual level (70). what farah’s jeebleh describes and reflects on here is the absurdity of war situations, as we find it in akpan’s “luxurious hearses”. akpan’s concern with the loss of personhood caused by war is also echoed in farah’s novel, hence jeebleh points out the huge psychological deficiency that all parties involved suffer in war— the loss of sensibility that makes it possible for people to slaughter one another in cold blood. an appropriate summary of the characters and situations in “luxurious hearses” is captured in camus’ description of absurdity. he maintains that absurdity is the presentation of man in “a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. his is an irremediable exile… this divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity” (qtd. in abrams 1). this means that absurdity in life and literature embraces the manifestation and depiction of arbitrary, illogical, irrational characters, thought processes, behaviours, situations and places. akpan depicts the absurdity of human life in war, the discovery of what esslin describes as ‘the vast areas of irrational and unconscious forces within the human psyche, the loss of a sense of control’ and the loss of personhood that manifests in war circumstances. conclusion charles nnolim points out that 20th century african literature was about what europeans enslavers, imperialists and apartheid operators have inflicted on africans, but modern african war literature depicts what fellow africans are inflicting on their brothers and sisters (148-149). akpan’s “luxurious hearses” is quite detailed in its illustration of what nigerians are doing to their brothers and sisters under the guise of religion. this depiction of the experiences of southern nigerian christians fleeing 218 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) from the sharia (muslim) massacre of non-muslims in the northern part of nigeria reveals how their psychological energies have been disintegrated and shredded to snapping point as a result of the horrors they experience. the author exposes the reader to varied manifestations of trauma in the minds of these dislocated individuals which emerges in the form of different absurd attitudes. akpan illustrates the effects of war on the human psyche, the psychological erosion of self and humanity, the hardening of heart and the bestiality that can easily take over the human mind, and the impact on human relationships. like the absurdities we find in the characters of jubril, chief ukongo and colonel usenetok, the human relationships akpan presents are also absurd. we find that those affected and violated by war suffer a huge deficiency or loss of personhood that results in depravity and absurd behaviour. akpan also reflects on the paradox of religion as an instrument of love and hate. he questions the relativity of truth as regards the fanatical issue of religious identity, the inability of human beings to reach a compromise or understand a different point of view, and above all, the insensitivity to the palpable and impalpable injuries of war that could have been avoided. war is clearly presented as illogical and absurd and those affected by war manifest this absurdity in thought processes and behaviour. akpan depicts, with an insight that only literature can provide, how the impact of war goes beyond the tangible, and he brings out clearly the absurdity of this religious war. 219okolochavolume 23 (2012) works cited abrams,m.h, and geoffrey galt harpham. 2012 a glossary of literary terms. 10th ed. wadsworth: cengage learning.. acholonu, catherine. 1985. nigeria in the year 1999. owerri: totan. adichie, chimamanda ngozi. 2006. half of a yellow sun. lagos: farafina. akpan, uwem. 2008. “luxurious hearses”. say you’re one of them. new york: little, brown. allwood, maureen a., debora bell-dolan, syed arshad husain. 2002. “children’s trauma and adjustment reactions to violent and nonviolent war experiences”. child and adolescent psychiatry. 41. 4. :450 – 457. bandele, biyi. 2007. burma boy. lagos: farafina. clark, michael p. 1994. “jacques lacan”. the john hopkins guide to literary theory & criticism. eds. michael groden and martin kreiswirth. baltimore: john hopkins up. 450454. emenyonu, ernest. 2008. “war in african literature: literary harvests, human tragedies” editorial page. african literature today 26: xixiv. esslin, martin. 2001. “the theatre of the absurd”. in lee jacobus (ed). the bedford introduction to drama. 4th ed. boston: bedford/ st. martin’s. 1266 -1270. farah, nuruddin. 2003. links. new york: penguin. herman, judith lewis. 1992. trauma and recovery: the aftermath of violencefrom domestic abuse to political terror. new york: basic. nnolim, charles. 2010. “chimamanda ngozi adichie’s half of a yellow sun”. african literature today 27: 145-151. 220 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) nwankanma, obi. 2007. the horseman and other poems. trenton: africa world. nwankwo, chimalum. 2008. “the muted index of war in african literature and society”. african literature today 26: 1—14. nwosu, onyebuchi. 2005. bleeding scars. ibadan: kraft. onukaogu, allwell. a and onyerionwu, ezechi. 2009.21st century nigerian literature: an introductory text. ibadan: kraft. “sisyphus”. 2008. microsoft encarta 2009 [dvd]. redmond, wa: microsoft corporation. towards an integrated formal model of fundamental frequency in overall downtrends1 firmin ahoua and david reid1 abstract although there are major differences in the various conceptual models of fo scaling, we suggest that the corresponding mathematical formulations may be compatible and that the theoretical differences need not hinder the empirical aspects and practical uses of the theories as demonstrated in speech synthesis. the method follows standard practice in mathematical logics: combining and “rounding off” the formalisms of the different models, then allowing for a consistent interpretation of the new unified theory. the approach is applied to two current models of decay in intonation curves. the models and then the conflicts between them are described. these latter were used to construct the integrated model. our short term objective is to validate the application of our approach by testing and implementing empirical instrumental data obtained independently. 1. introduction. while a review of the literature concerning fo scaling (see, for example, ladd 1984) shows a consensus that in most, if not all, languages speakers tend to lower their pitch (or “fundamental frequency fo”) during parts (“utterances”) of declarative sentences, there is no consensus as to which model can best account for this downtrend. when looking for predictability, there is still no agreement as to what part of the fo contour declines, with respect to what (pitch accent as opposed to time), what constitutes an utterance, what causes the decline, what kind of mathematical 1firmin ahoua is professor of linguistics at the university of cocody, ivory coast. david reid is a former researcher at the universities of chicago and mannheim, u.s.a 1ahoua and reid 2 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) formalism to use, what criteria should be used to see if the theory fits the data, or what relation there is between the formalism and the phenomena. it appears worthwhile to look for points of unification or normalisation among the various models and parameters by borrowing some standard concepts of mathematical logic. in general, unless it can be proven that two theories contradict, at least at the formal level as opposed to the conceptual level, one may look for unification or an extension. the modest goal of this paper is to carry out this first step: we indicate one possible approach for showing that two theories are relatively consistent with one another, illustrating this with the two leading models of f0 scaling, presently at loggerheads. in our exposition we use the word “model” as it is loosely deployed in the literature, namely to refer to a body of explanation for some phenomena. however, we insist on the following important distinctions, which continue throughout the paper. two separate aspects of each model are considered: its mathematical formalism (formulae, etc.: the model’s theory), on the one hand, and the values assigned to the formalism (the theory’s interpretation) on the other. a theory can have many different valid interpretations which may even contradict one another. however, the central point is that if a theory has at least one interpretation that makes sense, then the theory is consistent. therefore, to show that two theories are consistent with one another, we combine them into one theory (carefully redefining the domains of relations, renaming variables appropriately, and whenever possible, adjusting the arguments of relations to facilitate comparison) and find a reasonable interpretation. the resulting model, or modified fujisaki’s model, as we shall for exposition purposes refer to it, exists for the sole purpose of adjusting possible consistent parts of models relative to one another. in an application of these principles, it behoves us to look at the mathematical bases of established models. thus the fine points of phonological models do not receive more attention here than is necessary (see ladd (1984) for discussion); the reader should be warned not to look for extensive discussion of the conceptual differences between the models, nor any discussion of phonological categories and hierarchies. 3volume 23 (2012) the two models which we have chosen as the object of our investigation are that of liberman and pierrehumbert (1984), and that of ‘t hart and cohen (1973) (further elaborated in ’t hart et al (1982)). (we abbreviate the former model as “lp” and the latter as “’th”, using neutral pronouns to refer to them). contrary to lp, who use a linear scale, ’th apply a logarithmic scale. the latter refer to speech movements (instead of speech targets), so that rises and falls occur. the major component of ‘th’s theory is declination. this is a global outlook. declination refers specifically to the trend of the top and bottom lines that define the limits of the local pitch movements. the main construct of this model is the ‘hat patterns’, the ‘pointed hat”, and the “flat hat”. lp’s major component is the downstep factor, a coefficient that lowers the discrete targets. the organisation of the paper is as follows: in section 2 we describe these two models as well as sketch some of the elements of model fujisaki (1981) (henceforth “fujisaki”) relevant for expository reasons. here we shall assume that the reader is familiar with the mathematical formalism used (primarily elementary operations with logarithms. see also ahoua 1990). in section 3 we point out the major points of conflicts between the two models, ’th and lp. the point of departure in section 4 is a model in its first stages of development in the literature and known as “resetting”. there is not sufficient data or theory of this concept available, but we propose some extensions of it in its present form. in section 5 we construct our conciliatory model on the basis of the theory of the two warring models considered. theory is first developed, followed by the interpretation. section 6 them shows how our model takes into account the difficulties outlined in section 3. ahoua and reid 4 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) 2. overall falls in phonetic models. when the frequencies (fo ) of the voice in an utterance are graphed as a function of time (ignoring long pauses, as in a voice-activated recording), the result often resembles a tilted sinusoidal curve with decreasing amplitude (with the occasional deviation), the tilt being in the sense of a negative slope in most declarative sentences; i.e., when one connects the local maxima (“peaks” or “highs”) in these cases they yield a decay of fo with time or as a relation between peaks, as does connecting the local minima (“valleys” or “lows”). (for illustrative graphs see almost any of the articles cited.) in addition, comparing several such graphs of the same speaker shows that there is a frequency below which the speaker never descends in ordinary speech. that much is clear. it is at this point that the divergences mentioned earlier begin. ideally one would start with principles already well established. for example, as with any physical action, it is a tautology to say that physiological factors play some kind of role. indeed, several connections have been established, although how much is cause, and how much is effect, is another matter. in any case, one cannot simply assert that involuntary physiological factors are the major cause of this decay (see collier, 1975 and collier & gelfer, 1984). in the other direction, in attempting to work backwards from the data to the causes, one notices that the decay appears to be exponential, so a natural procedure is to graph the logarithms of the frequencies as a function of time, and regard the result as is done in ‘th, by expressing the pitch in semitones. that is, if p is a frequency, and m is some fixed base frequency, both in hertz, then 12*log2(p/m) is the equivalent of p in semitones (with respect to m). ‘th then finds a linear graph on this scale to match his data. ‘th’s formula is as follows: (1) f(t) = d*t + f(0) (“*” signifies multiplication) whereby t is time (in seconds, minus pauses longer than a quarter of a second); f(t) is the pitch in semitones with respect to a base frequency m, and f(0) the beginning pitch of the utterance. (we have substituted the “f” for ’th’s “p” so as not to confound it with lp’s “p”.) d is the slope of the lines, and is language-specific. for dutch, for example, ’t hart et al. (1982:143) find : 5volume 23 (2012) (2) d = -11/(1.5sec. + ts) for ts < 5 sec. = -8.5/ts for ts > 5 sec. whereby ts = the length of the utterance in seconds. the d applies to three lines: a high line connecting the peaks, a low line connecting the valleys, and a middle line where the pitch sometimes rests when changing between these two extremes. (i.e., mathematically speaking, the lines join respectively the relative maxima, the relative minima, and, roughly, the inflection points.) the separation of the lines is language-specific. since d has a negative slope, ’th terms this “declination”. see appendice 1 for illustration. one can also see the overall decay of a sentence as being composed of sections, each representing its own autonomous decay. this is the viewpoint of lp, wherein a theory of “downstep” is explained. lp’s model has been the most influential theory of intonation over the last decades and is sometimes labeled as the tone sequence model as its primitives are tones that are phonetically interpreted as fundamental frequency values. lp’s model can be understood as a sequence of discrete tonal events that constitute the overall contour. downstep is the basic component of that model and is a term that is independently motivated in african languages. its phonetic manifestation is triggered by a certain sequence of tones (hl), and specifically in english by a h-accent followed by a low tone (h*+l ...!h*). the effect is that a following high tone of an accent syllable will be lowered or downstepped. notice, however, that the low tone may be floating and trigger the downstep of the following high tone (h*..*!h) . to outline this process we must first distinguish between different types of peak accents. the latter correspond to peaks which are pushed higher by emphasis; i.e., higher than those levels achieved in the same utterance spoken with normal accent; “strongest” here refers to the local property of comparative strength. if a stronger accent is considered together with weaker (pitch) accents immediately preceding it, then this is considered an ab pattern; if it is considered together with weaker accents which follow it, then we have a ba pattern. in the latter case, according to lp, the stronger accent governs the fall of the succeeding peak accents; that ahoua and reid 6 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) is, the influence is hereditary: the first peak accent influences the second, the second the third, etc. each such pair is termed a “step accent”, since taken together they form a cascading series. finally, in lp the set of pitch accents is the union of the set of peak accents with the set of step accents. (in ’th on the other hand, pitch accents consist of only the peak accents.) lp formulates mathematical relations for this cascading series. we reformulate these a little for purposes of our exposition, but the essence remains the same. for example, lp’s rules cover both ab and ba cases, but here we shall break the two cases up. the case of ba patterns we consider a series of step accents, where the frequencies are expressed in hertz, or s-1 . the f0 value of the initial peak accent is labeled p(0) (or, for simplicity, p0 ). p(i + 1) is the f0 value of the peak accent following the peak corresponding to p(i). then, according to lp (see liberman & pierrehumbert (1984: 193); see also appendix 2): (3) p (i + 1) r = s*(p(i) r) s is a speaker-specific “downstep constant”, and r is an utterance-specific “reference value”, calculated by: (4) r = c*( p0 b)a + b + d whereby “b” is the minimal frequency possible for that speaker, and the other constants are other speaker-specific constants. [we have renamed lp’s constants “f” and “e”, as “c” and “a” respectively here, in order to avoid confusion with symbols used elsewhere.]. translating the recursive formula (3) into polynomial form, (5) p(n) = sn * (p0 r) + r the “reference level” p0 = r is explained as a non-zero asymtote to which the decaying peaks tend on a graph of frequency vs. “peak number”, i.e., the first, second, third, etc. peak. 7volume 23 (2012) we note that we have used “model 1” from lp. a “model 2” is also briefly mentioned (see liberman & pierrehumbert (1984: 207)); its primary difference to model 1 is to replace eq.(5) by: (6) p(n) = hn* p0 + n*c whereby h = (r-b)(1-s), and c = (1-h)*b we shall continue, however, to equate model 1 with lp, since this is the model to which this paper pays primary attention. the case of ab patterns lp replaces s in eq.(3) by k (roughly 1/s), which again is speaker-specific, reading p(j + 1) as the value of the highest peak accent, and p(j) as the pitch of the previous peak accent. yet another part of lp’s model is “final lowering”. that is, in the last pitch accent of the utterance, the pitch is lower than would be expected by equations (3) or (5), so that replacing the term sn in equation (3) by the term s*l, or equivalently the term sn in equation (5) by sn*l for the last peak accent provides us with that value. l is speaker-specific. in lp the formulae are based on curve-fitting, though by using phonological criteria and minimal categories. the best model, however, not only assigns a meaning to relations, but to its arguments (the variables and constants) as well, so that the combination of individual meanings matches the meaning of the combination. one such attempt that met with a certain amount of success is presented in fujisaki (1981). we outline this approach below in order to indicate its compatibility as well to our integrated model.. for ease of exposition and later development, we have submitted his formulae to quite a bit of renaming of variables and some algebraic manipulation. therefore the reader may note a contrast with the formulation as originally presented in fujisaki. in brief, in fujisaki the fo contour of a sentence is made up by summing up, over the length of the sentence, the non-overlapping fo contours of the individual words (his positive accent commands, lp’s high pitch accents as opposed to low pitch accents). each of these individual contours is the addition of two component curves, the “phrase command” and an ahoua and reid 8 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) “accent command”. each is activated by different signals. the duration between each phrase command signal is assumed equal to the others. in simpler terms, fujisaki’s model is a kind of overlay or superpositional model that contains a global trend and local f0 movements. his model is a quantitative model for speech analysis and synthesis. the phrase component is modeled as an impulse response: graphically, it rises rapidly to a peak and then decays exponentially towards an asymptote. the accent component is modelled as a step function, which creates a string of steps up and steps down that represent the local rises and falls of pitch at accented syllables. the step function is smoothed by the addition of a time constant and is then added to the phrase component to create the contour (ladd 1996:25). in order to clarify our discussion of fujisaki, we introduce some definitions and remarks at this point: a. let a(t, i) and b (t, j) be functions that vary discretely in time (minus pause) at the ith phrase (or tone) command and the jth word accent, respectively. the values of these functions will then indicate the strength of the respective signals at the beginning of their associated intervals. b. the accent commands will start later and end earlier than the associated phrase command which forms their base. for a given moment in time t we let: tpb = the duration since the beginning of the phrase command, tpe = the duration until the end of the phrase command tab = the duration since the beginning of the accent command, tae = the duration until the end of the accent command c. the horizontal axis of fujisaki’s graphs is time, and the vertical axis is in terms of ln( fo ). by a minimal amount of algebraic manipulation, his formulae can also be expressed by using ln(fo/b) [ which is merely equal to the semitones times ln2/l2], and b is the minimum possible frequency, 9volume 23 (2012) as above. (the reader has perhaps already guessed that this formulation can help with a comparison with ’th.) d. let g (t, q) and h (t, r) be fujisaki’s exponential expressions in terms of time with parameters q and r respectively, which are speaker-specific constants. more specifically, these are functions, one of whose arguments is the speaker, since the other arguments are unknown and the values are very nearly constant. fujisaki takes them to be equivalent to speakerspecific parameters, having noted this distinction in his experimental approach as well as his conceptual exposition. the utterance component is the concatenation of the individual components of the utterance considered, each phrase component being expressed by: (7) a (t, i)*[g (tpb, q) g (tpe, q)] each accent component is formed by: (8) b(t, j)*[h(tab, r) h(tae, r)] (see fujisaki (1982: 7).) to arrive at the fo contour for the utterance, in terms of ln(fo/b) one sums up the phrase components and the accent components over time and individual accents, i.e., summing the two over t, i, and j. the (very flexible) exponential functions g and h [g(t, q) = q*t*exp(-q*t) and h(t, r) = (1 (1 + r*t)*exp(r*t), resp.] are based partly on curve-fitting, but also partly on certain physiological connections, such as subglottal pressure. this pressure on the lung cavity seems to vary with time grosso modo in the same way that frequency does with time, as do certain other physiological mechanisms. this does not necessarily point to a direct cause¬-and-effect relationship, but rather to the fact that these various mechanisms respond to the same stimuli (such as, perhaps, the larynx). (besides fujisaki see also collier 1975.) ahoua and reid 10 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) 3. conflicts each of models ’th and lp has its weaknesses and its strengths. these come out most clearly when a strength of one is contrasted with a weakness of the other. thus, keeping in mind the definitions and formulae of these two models as presented in the last section, we present seven areas of conflict. doing so will guide us in the development of a model designed to resolve these conflicts. conflict 1. look-ahead. the eq.’s (1) and (2) of ’th depend upon tg, the length of the utterance. this assumes that, in order to choose the beginning pitch and the slope of declination, the speaker must know the duration of his utterance in advance. this idea, especially for longer or spontaneous utterances, is disputed by lp and others, despite the general impression to the contrary. as ladd (1996: 29-30) expresses it, agreeing with lp (1984:220 ff.): ”this degree of lookahead may be psycholinguistically implausible, and for speech synthesis models is certainly computationally expensive.” conflict 2. reference levels. comparing eq.’s (1) and (2) with eq.’s (4) and (5) may not immediately show a conflict unless one notes that the value r prevents the decay from proceeding below the asymptote fo = r, the reference level, whereas no such mechanism is present in ’th. referring to the line fo = b as the “baseline”, lp remark: “among authors who have tried to be explicit about how fo contours are scales, log transforms are popular. `t hart and cohen (1973) propose a model of dutch intonation. such models make wrong predictions because they lack any counterpart in our reference level, which changes with overall pitch range while leaving the baseline (seen in the final l(ow) tones) invariant.” (liberman and pierrehumbert 1984: 225). the paper does not elaborate on which kinds of “wrong predictions” are meant, but one possibility is that these refer to predictions obtainable by extrapolation of the curves in order to determine what would happen if the 11volume 23 (2012) utterance continued longer than intended. that is, in this case the speaker might be forced to go below the lowest possible frequency: a contradiction. this weakness of ’th is avoided by lp via the reference value r, but this then points out a weakness of lp: what is the interpretation of r ? conflict 3. ad hoc variables and formulae. in lp the ad hoc nature of the means of calculating the reference level is admitted: …perhaps only the portion of p0 above b should be relevant in determining r. except for b, which is identified with the speaker’s invariant final low f0 value, none of the parameters in this equation have any clear interpretation. the parameter d is the translation of ‘somewhat’, while e and f are just a way of getting a curved function with a minimum number of additional parameters (liberman and pierrehumbert 1984: 205). we may add that the non-linear part of the formula differs from one utterance to another about as much as the value of d, thus emphasizing the ad hoc aspect of this part of the model. conflict 4. pitch range. here we repeat the point indirectly made in the quotation cited in conflict 1: that ’th does not take into account the pitch range variations. eq. (4) has already shown us how the reference value depends on the pitch range; also, for lp the pitch range is tied to emphasis, apparently not taken into account in ’th. (a note of caution when comparing the pitch ranges in the two models: lp measures pitch range from the highest peak, whereas ‘th measures it from the (lower) beginning frequency.) conflict 5. peaks vs time. in the above equations, even more striking than the difference in vertical axes as treated in the last two conflicts is the difference in horizontal axes: lp referring to peak number, and ’th using time (minus long pauses). admittedly, lp thereby avoids the difficulty of “look-ahead” as ahoua and reid 12 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) explained above, but the idea of eliminating all dependence on time seems a little strange. conflict 6. non-declining patterns. despite the differences in axes, some characteristics can be compared. for example, a falling curve will fall in both frames of reference. but whereas for ’th all declarative sentences decline, for lp this is far from the case: only those sections after a strong accent decay; just beforehand there is an upstep, and otherwise the line connecting the peaks may be flat or v-shaped (two roughly equal pitches with a lower pitch in between) or follow other patterns than declination would allow. conflict 7. final lowering. in section 2 we remarked that the highs and lows come progressively closer to one another. the precise manner in which this occurs is represented in ’th by the theory in which the low-line is parallel to (has the same slope d as) the top line when on a logarithmic scale (such as semitones). (a lower line on such a scale will, when converted to a linear scale such as hertz, descend less rapidly.) the constraint that every utterance ends on this line, i.e. as a low, corresponds in this model to the lowering of pitch which one uses to signal the end of an utterance. lp, on the other hand, pays little attention to patterns of lows other than establishing the minial frequency b, and making a few speculative comments (these latter in liberman and pierrehumbert (1984): 218 219). for lp, then, this pitch lowering is to be found in an unusual lowering of the last high. for ’th the last high follows the same pattern as the others. 4. resetting the above conflicts seem at first glance to doom any attempt at a formal or mathematical unification. however, upon closer inspection they turn out to be differences in interpretation, including differences in domains (i.e., sets or classes of possible values for the respective symbols); a unification of theories thus implies a union of their respective domains, and often, as here, a new domain extending this union, although one reasonable extension will serve as well as another to show the compatibility of the 13volume 23 (2012) original domains. the extension chosen here, that of greater possibility for variability, including discontinuous variability, is inspired by the requirements posed by the solutions needed for the conflicts enumerated above. this present section is devoted to those components. the central idea is that of resetting, inspired by techniques already known under that name (see, for example, ladd (1988) and ladd (forthcoming)). in our explanation of the term, we shall use “strategy”, by which we mean the activation of motor nerves, based on predictions, allowing one to adjust one’s physiological mechanism to be ready for a longer or shorter utterance. (of course, if the semantic strategy changes, so do the syntactic and thus the physiological ones, so the term may be a little loose without causing undue confusion.) the motivation is that the curves described by models of decay are dependent upon the strategy of the speaker. over longer sentences, speakers obviously change strategies as they speak: the curve changes accordingly, not only in shape but also in position (i. e., a different frequency). a function describing this process may very well include arguments of a syntactical nature. for example, ladd (forthcoming) finds that the amount of resetting is greater for the conjunction “but” than for the conjunction “and”. moreover, this research established that if the continuous (i.e., non-reset) pieces of a discontinuous (i.e., reset), f0 contour are compared, then a difference exists between the corresponding points on each piece (e.g., the beginnings) and the syntactical points of the piece. however, this can be difficult, since the resetting is not always obvious as, for example, in a parenthetical phrase. when the resetting is sufficiently frequent, it may manifest itself as a different decay rate. as an example, umeda (1982) remarked that declination is different according to whether the text spoken was a read list, a read text, or normal conversation. investigations by cooper & sorenson (1977) were not conclusive as to whether resetting occurred, as is pointed out in the article, even though an interpretation of “local inflections” is preferred there. obviously, further quantitative research is necessary before adequate mathematical functions describing resetting and declination-of-reset-decays can be established. nonetheless, we assume that such functions exist. a further complication in searching ahoua and reid 14 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) for such functions is that each function may be composed of several parts: for example, not only may the pulse within a frame of reference be reset, but the frame of reference, asymptotes, baselines, parameters, may all be subject to resetting, and sometimes these are interconnected; for example, resetting a parameter may change the frame of reference, and vice-versa, although neither direction is automatic. we give some examples of these in the next section, but here we wish to say a few words about frames of reference and related ideas relevant to our later discussion. by a “frame of reference” is meant a system in which something is expressed. graphically, the axes, together with the means of graphing, form the frame of reference for a curve. not every baseline or asymptote forms a new frame of reference. for example, the “guidelines” of the connected highs and lows, respectively, do not form one for the f0 contour unless the curve is expressed strictly in terms of them. in changing the vertical axis from hertz to semitones, ’th has changed the frame of reference; lp could have changed (but didn’t) the frame of reference to express the results in “pitch above reference level” (f0 r). however, these changes of the vertical axes were for convenience of expression, having no correspondence in the interpretations. in fujisaki, on the other hand, the interpretation seems to be clear that the accent component is based on the utterance component, leading one to feel that the latter forms a new form of reference for the accent component. in this case, however, there is no correspondence for this interpretation in the theory: he combines the function by a simple addition. 5. proposal for an integrated model in this section we form our model by outlining first the extension of the theories of lp and ’th and then giving an interpretation. our integrated model is formed by first defining the symbols, and then the equations, and finally the interpretation. although this separation requires a bit of patience, we hope that the reader will bear with us. the model is formed as follows: (a) we take all the symbols of ´th and of lp, and rename them appropriately (i.e., if two symbols are to always have the same 15volume 23 (2012) interpretation, then they are to be assigned the same symbol, and only then). (b) strictly, we should introduce new symbols to distinguish them from those of the other models, while keeping enough similarity in the new symbols to remind us of their connection with the old. for example, we could use m^ rather than m, b^ rather than b, etc. but except for some points below that need to be made explicit, this would be awkward, and so we shall trust the reader to make the necessary distinctions according to the context. as well, we could introduce a function to account for the lack of perfect predictive power of the model due to hidden variables, but this may be left implicit: (i) the variables b^, r^, m^, s^, m^, t^s, f(ô) and pô, so named as to be associated with the parameters without the hat, (ii) the variable symbols “state”, “syntax”, and “language”, and the function d´ (language, ts), (iii) for every variable symbol x, introduce a function symbol fx. for every discontinuity of this function, define another function equalling fx restricted to a neighbourhood of the discontinuity. the union of these latter functions forms a resetting function equalling fx restricted to neighbourhoods of its discontinuities. (iv) for each function f(x) with parameter p being one of those mentioned in (i), introduce the function f(x, p^). (v) for every function f, introduce the set of functions (f1, f2, f3,…) so that f may be expressed as their combination (addition, composition, etc…) (vi) for every function symbol g, introduce the symbol g^. (viii) for every relation or function symbol r, introduce the symbol domr. (in discussion the subscript will be left out if the context is clear.) (c) introduce the following new relationships: ahoua and reid 16 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) (i) in equations (1) (5) replace m, b, r, d, f(0) and po by m^, b^, r^, s^, d’, f^(0), and p^o^ respectively, and adjust the function symbols as in (b)(v). (ii) for each variable x introduce the relation: (9) x^ = fx(state, syntax, language) (iii) for each application of step (i) transforming an old formula f into a new formula g and transforming y to y^, both with variable x, solve g(x, y^) = f(x) for y^, stating its validity dom. example: take eq. (5) and its transformed version, and we arrive at: (10) s^ = (sn*(po r) + r r^]/(po r) 01/n (this can of course then be combined with (ii); i.e., setting the righthand sides equal when left hand sides are equal.) (iv) for every function g, introduce the relation: (11) g^ (u(x, state, syntax)) = u(g(x), state, syntax) the interpretation of the integrated model is formulated as follows (the upper case letters correspond to the lower case ones of the syntax.): (a) keep those symbols which already have interpretations in lp and ’th; the interpretations of the others will be explained below as special cases of new variables. (b) (i) b^ is a base frequency below which the speaker could not descend at a given moment (i.e., given conditions) if he wished to lower his frequency. thus when the interpretation of “syntax” (see below) includes being at the end of a declarative sentence, b^ = b. for the next two variables we assume that, among the characteristics of pitch which the speaker uses to modulate his voice, there are bases to which the speaker compares his voice. among these there would be a (variable) highest and a (variable) lowest value at any point. these are the interpretations of r^ and m^, respectively. it is possible that m^ = b^, but this 17volume 23 (2012) requires further research. fujisaki assumes that m^ = b^ = b, assumptions that we are not willing to make. we assume rather the relationships as in (c) (ii) above; that they depend on “state” and “syntax” (subglottal pressure, anger, emphasis, etc., as below). furthermore, by “bases” is meant an interpretation corresponding to composition of functions in the theory. s^ has the same meaning as s, except that it is variable as indicated by eq.(9). the remaining hatted variables are explained in (b)(iv) below. (ii) “state” is interpreted as the set of relevant measurable physical, physiological, and psychological constraints of the speaker at the time considered. “syntax” is interpreted as the union of (1) syntactical constraints imposed by the language in the context of the speaker’s state and (2) relevant previous values of “syntax”. (thus its fuller description would be recursive.) “language” is dutch, english, japanese, etc. and would include cultural as well as grammatical relations and variables. “strategy” could also be defined in terms of these three not necessarily independent variables. (iii) the replacement of d by d’ is necessary since the slope formula is perhaps language-specific or situation-dependent. (iv) resetting corresponds to the resetting functions above. however, we do not use them to define utterances: in the integrated model, an utterance can be any part of a sentence, spoken or intended. furthermore, f/s is to be interpreted as the duration of an utterance, not necessarily, but possibly of a sentence (the duration of an utterance or possibly a sentence ?). thus po^ and f(0) correspond to po and f(0) respectively, but are the beginnings of the utterances considered, of which there can be many in a sentence, and thus are variable. (v) this definition of new functions is obviously a formal necessity stemming from the use (explained in (c) below) of the newly defined variables. (vi) the decomposition of functions allows one to take into account that ahoua and reid 18 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) more than one function at a time may be relevant: that is, more than one strategy can occur at once, so that the end effect is a combination of the individual corresponding functions. this corresponds to the fact that a human thinks in parallel terms rather than serially, even though the end result is required to be a serial representation. the combination may be an addition of weighted values, as in fujisaki (the functions a and b providing the weights), a composition of functions (as in the changing of frames of reference), or other combinations of operations. (vii) the formal necessity of g^ is made evident in eq.(11). (viii) “dom” indicates the domains of relations, and thus is used to hold in check any unfounded universality. (c) (i) the new interpretations of the equations of lp and ’th, as formally adjusted, follow automatically from the interpretation of the variables above. (ii) eq.(9) indicates the dependence of the new variables on more fundamental factors. an example of the use of this equation was already given above in mentioning a constraint on b .̂ (iii) eq.’s (1) (5) we take to be valid in the sense that they yield correct data (within fuzziness) under their respective original domains. thus we constrain our variables to be equal to the values found for the parameters of these equations. the example of b^ was just given; eq.(10) is an example with s .̂ in the latter, s^ will be equal to s under the original dom despite the “hatting” of the other quantities; however, under an extension of dom, there is no reason to expect it to take on the same values elsewhere. dom can here be given a wider interpretation, but only very cautiously. upon an extension of dom, the original formulae will likely be shown to be approximations to other formulae, so it is dangerous to claim any universality for a formula developed from limited data. to take a simple example: if, for an utterance that began at 119 hz and lasted 4 seconds, one calculated the middle line in the model of ’th, then one could just as 19volume 23 (2012) well have used the linear formula f0 = 119 11*t, coming within 3 hertz of the values given by the more complicated formulae (1) and (2) above. only by observing other cases would it become apparent that the linear formula would not suffice. thus by expanding dom one also corrects formulae. another advantage of such an expansion would be to clarify the resetting functions, as can be seen by combining (c)(iii). (iv) eq. (11) is a formal necessity, given our previous definitions. 6. resolution of conflicts. with regard to the difference in approaches, we share the outlook of beckman and pierrehumbert (1986: 302) that a theory of downstep (renamed “catathesis” in this later work) need not contradict a theory of declination. indeed, we show how the seven conflicts of section 3 are to be resolved in the integrated model, thus reinforcing the idea that the theories, if not the interpretations, of lp and ’th are consistent with one another. the numbering of the seven resolutions below corresponds to that of the conflicts above. resolution 1. look-ahead. that the declination of the speaker’s voice will vary according to the length of the utterance does not necessarily imply a “look-ahead” strategy, since an alternative interpretation could be that the speaker selects the slope and beginning pitch, thus determining the length of the sentence. however, this latter is somewhat unnatural, so we shall assume the former. the resolution lies rather with our interpretation of “utterance” as any part of a sentence, spoken or only intended. that is, there is no contradiction in assuming that the speaker combines a “look-ahead” strategy with a “seeas-you-go” one in that he makes tentative predictions upon which he acts (speaks) until he makes another one, whereby a “prediction” refers to a physiological and psychological state, not to a conscious calculation. if the speaker changes his strategy, then this would be equivalent to either (1) choosing from a family of states, i.e., dispositions to a new slope and starting frequency, or (2) changing the (physiological, psychological, and ahoua and reid 20 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) mathematical) frame of reference, and either also changing the slope and frequency, or keeping one or both in the frame. in any case the contour is reset, and the necessity for a correct prediction of utterance duration is avoided. resolution 2. reference levels. lp praises its reference level as an asymptote for the contour, and criticises ‘th for not having one. does ‘th need one ? the straight lines in the graphs of ‘th are each specifically defined for a limited domain. that is, the slope of the line is defined by the length of the utterance, and not beyond. in other words, a strategy is identified with a slope and, by extension, with a starting frequency, a frame of reference, base line values, and so forth, over the interval of time corresponding to the duration of the (possibly interrupted) strategy. reasons for changes in strategy and hence the associated values are multiple, including physiological, psychological, and syntactic grounds. such changes are thus associated with an adjustment, or “resetting”, of these values. each “reset” then defines a new domain. to talk of extrapolation in this context is inappropriate; asymtotes are unnecessary (an asymptote being a linear extension of an extrapolation to infinity), given proper attention to dom, to insure that the decay includes the function of “brake” which is performed in lp by the reference level. resolution 3. ad hoc variables and formulae. a certain amount of curve-fitting is inevitable, but a basic requirement for any model is for the interpretation of the combined symbols to be the same as their combined interpretation. this principle of strict correspondence between theory and interpretation cannot be fulfilled if the individual symbols do not each have an interpretation; however, the workability of the formulae as a whole indicate that with a bit of care, an interpretation could be given to the individual symbols so as to fit this criterion. this was the motivation behind our definitions and interpretations in the integrated model. the interpretations may not be to everyone’s taste, but at least there is a correspondence. resolution 4. pitch range. 21volume 23 (2012) we return to lp’s assertion that a “reference level” is meritorious because it links pitch range with the type of decay (as is seen by combining eq.’s (3) and (4) or, equivalently, (4) and (5). this link is present as well in `th. purely formally, combining eq.’s (1) and (2) shows that the pitch range varies with the length of the sentence, or, put another way, the length of the sentence varies with the range, until a maximum pitch range is attained. (although lp does not handle longer utterances, one would presume that it admits the limitations of pitch range.) even when the pitch range is the same in terms of semitones, it will not be the same in terms of hertz if the beginning frequencies aren’t. similarly, for the slope, although the semitone scale is actually pushed slightly down by emphasis (emphasis increases utterance duration slightly), the higher beginning frequency would cause a steeper decline on the hertz scale, as is the case in lp. for `th, then, the ability of its graphs to take in differing pitch ranges due to emphasis is clear. (in the integrated model, furthermore, a more subtle distinction is made: it is possible for m^ to be reset, altering yet again the relationship between the hertz and the semitones, just as resetting b^ or r^ can alter the interpretation of lp’s theory. thus this additional flexibility of the integrated model makes contradiction even more unlikely). resolution 5. peak number vs. time. we continue our assertion that flexibility regarding one or the other frame of reference resolves many a difficulty. the difference in horizontal axes reflects not only two different attempts to fit data to a curve, but also a difference in outlook regarding phonological phenomena: in considering peak number, lp concentrates on the discrete characteristics, whereas ‘th rather considers the continuous aspect. as both aspects are likely in play during an utterance, our model uses one when considering peak number, and another when considering time. is there a danger of contradiction here? a direct comparison is impossible due to the discrepancy of axes. let us illustrate how the two may be compatible by assuming, for the moment, that both are used to analyse an utterance with the first word ahoua and reid 22 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) heavily emphasized (the so-called “ba” pattern in lp), and where no resetting occurs. furthermore we shall, in order to make the demonstration simpler, assume that b^ = b, s = s, etc., as well as leaving out the final lowering for the moment (returning shortly to the latter). given a fixed pair of beginning frequencies (beginning the utterance and the first accented peak), a fixed speaker, and a fixed peak number, is there a time (within reason) when `th’s value = that of lp ? if the answer is in the affirmative for every n before resetting might occur, then the functions are compatible. using the notation of section 2, our above question then becomes whether there is, given fixed values for s, r, b, ts, q(0), p(0) and n, a reasonable value of t so that p(n) = q(t), whereby we let q(t) mean f(t) converted into hertz. for the sake of illustration we take the following random possible values: (12) s = 0.6 r = 100 hz b = 60 hz ts = 4 sec. q(0) = 150 hz p(0) = 200 hz n = 2 m = 60 hz then, rewriting q(0) and p(0) as qo and po respectively for legibility, we solve for the equation: (13) t = [log2(12*[sn*(p0 r) + r]) 12*log2(qo/m)]/d 23volume 23 (2012) which is obtained by converting and setting q(t) = p(n). for these values we get t = 2.6 sec, a not unreasonable value. (we emphasize, however, the purely illustrative nature of this and other examples in the text. among other factors, the slope d is language-specific, and english and dutch do not necessarily share the same slopes.) lp points out that peaks follow the same rule, no matter how far apart in time they are, and that the same difference should apply for the two peaks being 1 or 3 seconds apart. however, we can take eq.(10) and easily (if tediously) solve it in terms of a given t, setting some other quantity as a variable: s, po, or using eq.(2), ts. for example, this latter would mean that the longer time between the same peaks would indicate a longer sentence not surprisingly. if resetting forms part of the interpretation, introducing the variables with hats, then using at any given moment the adjusted formulae (4) and (14), one could solve for po ^ and d simultaneously, the interpretation being that the speaker resets his pitch and his state as he discovers how quickly or slowly he is speaking (accenting). resolution 6. non-declining patterns. in reading that downstep exists in the case of emphasis but not in the case of normal accenting, as lp asserts, one is tempted to raise the question as to the exact border between an accent and an emphasis. since the border is assuredly not precise, and since a smaller pitch range will mean a smaller absolute decrease, they are very likely unrecognised downstep patterns. nonetheless there are still cases of the upsteps and other non-declining patterns. we show that these fit into the integrated model, by dividing them up into three groups. (group i.) upsteps can be the result of resetting mechanisms. of these we distinguish two types: (a) a resetting of the pitch from one curve to the next; and (b) the same curve with regard to the frame of reference, but a resetting of the frame of frequency. ahoua and reid 24 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) (group ii.) valleys, peaks, and flat sections on the line connecting the highs then are results of combinations of effects of group i. to see this, and to show that this is perfectly in accordance with lp’s formalism, we first recall our definition of utterance. in our model, a sequence of pitch accents x-y-z can yield an utterance of not only xyz but also the utterances xy and yz. if xy is an utterance of the “ba type” and yz an utterance of the “ab” type, or vice-versa, then the end effect is a change by a factor of k*s (using the notation of section 2) which is approximately 1, giving the impression of an utterance xyz with a v shape or inverted v, respectively, and an impression that xz is flat. (group iii.) as with all these analyses, it is possible that there are patterns which were handled by ‘th, and not by lp, and vice-versa. the most obvious differences are the language and cultural differences, but others may be of relevance. resolution 7: final lowering. on one side, we seem to be on solid ground with the concept of a lowering of frequency to mark the end of a declarative sentence: everyone agrees that this happens, and we even have the basis for a possible representation in a physiological frame of reference, in that there is a clear (physiological) release at the end of the utterance. (see the graphs of collier, 1975.) that, therefore with respect to the horizontal axis of such a frame of reference, the curve need not show such a strong fall, if at all, would simplify the task of building the integrated model with a clear interpretation and make possible a simpler theory. on the other side, when looking at the details, the ground seems to become shaky again. is this phenomenon different from an extension of the pattern from the rest of the sentence ? lp says yes, ‘th says no. is this a direct contradiction ? on the formal level, not at all, since the patterns in question are different. the difference may be a matter of formulation, but also perhaps due to a difference in domains. for example, since lp treated only english and ‘th only dutch, there remains a question: is final lowering a language-specific phenomenon? if yes, then the rate for 1 will be around 0.7 for english -i.e., for english l will be equal to 1 (small l), 25volume 23 (2012) and for dutch, one may approximate also 1 (one). if no, then the question arises: does final lowering exist ? if no, then a bit of adjusting of the various constants in lp will do away with the need for 1 (or, of course, another formula). for example, if s = 0.6, p = 200 hz, r = 100hz, and l = 0.7, then one can calculate the fo decay. one can then describe another decay with the same equations except without a final lowering constant, using s = 0.54, r = 106 hz. in this case the decays are never more than about 2hz away from one another! if, however, final lowering does exist, a very slight adjustment in ’th’s equations can also account for it. for this process we diverge for a moment to handle significant figures; this may seem pedantic, but it is important to explain our example. given any measurement or results of calculations based on measurements, one assumes that the numbers could have been rounded off; for example, given simply “11”, this could have been round off for any number between 10.5 and 11.5. likewise, a number 1.5 is really some number n, for 1.45 < n < 1.55. so, the formula (2) above allows us to say that the slope for ts < 5 sec. is given by (14) 11.5/(ts + 1.45 sec.) < d < 10.5/(ts + 1.55 sec.) for example, if we have an utterance of exactly three seconds, the slope will vary between -2.6 and -2.3 st/sec. using a base of 50hz, this can make the difference between the 148 hz and the 139 hz of the example for a final lowering of subject dws in lp (compare figure 21, p. 187 and table 10, p.202, of liberman and pierrehumbert (1984)). thus final lowering need not be contradictory to the declination of ‘th on the formal level, especially given the use of the ‘uncertainty relation u’ as explained previously. there remains the contradictions on the interpretive level: what is the phonological phenomenon ? does the final peak have a different decay or not ? from the preceding explanations, it is clear that the theories are compatible due to the application of the fuzzy function u, so that the integrated formal model could take either ‘th’s or lp’s interpretation and remain consistent (assuming it was consistent beforehand). however, u’s ahoua and reid 26 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) interpretation makes such a choice unnecessary: in denying the validity of such precision as appears in these other two models the integrated model differs equally from both; yet the presence of u assures that the predicted values in each are included in the range of predicted values in the integrated model. 7. the conceptual differences again by developing a formal mathematical model that integrates different properties of the two leading models of f0 scaling, our purpose is not to overshadow the conceptual differences that underlie these models. we intend in this closing chapter to briefly present the major conceptual differences that need to be empirically tested. we shall also summarize some of the controversial points discussed above. lp’s model is based on level tones or peaks and eliminates the necessity of contour tones or tunes; the ipo model has pitch movements among its primary categories. the ‘hat’ model is for instance a combination of a rise and a fall. this is phonologically relevant, but may not be inconsistent, viewed from a quantitative perspective. lp’s model does the same. the level approach integrates previous approaches that were configurational or contained contour tones. however, this is not to say that the ipo model is only phonetically oriented. as ladd (1996:14) has stated it: ‘the ipo tradition is in many ways the first to make a serious attempt to combine an abstract phonological level of descriptions with a detailed account of the phonetic realisation of the phonological elements.” lp’s model doesn’t reject an overall slope dependent on time. according to lp’s empirical finding, even among variant speakers, the relationship between two accent peaks is constant, irrespective of the pitch range and of the length of the syllables. a local downstep, respective to a previous one, predicts the location of the next accent peak. here again the choice between a downstep model and a time oriented model is based on phonology. downstep is largely motivated by a slope independent on time among many languages, especially african languages. time is a variable factor, and a continuous factor as opposed to tones that are discrete. 27volume 23 (2012) a fundamental conceptual difference with fujisaki’s model is that it is based on positive, high peak tones (or accent commands) and doesn’t take into account the low (accented) tones. as pointed out by ladd (1996:285) ‘it is possible [emphasis, a&r] to approximate the low-rising contours, but this is inconsistent with the intend function of the phrase component’. we would like to conclude this paper by quoting ladd’s (1996:285) fundamental remark that “(t)here seems little doubt that an overlay model is the best way to treat [microprosodic phenomena] in generating f0 for synthetic speech’. if this is true, then we have shown how this type of model can be extended to formally integrate other different formal properties of f0-scaling such as final lowering, lowering of successive peak accents and resetting. 8. conclusion when comparing two models, the present trend in linguistic f0 scaling has focussed on the conceptual differences. however, the proponents of one linguistic model do not ignore the fact that even opposing models represent a considerable amount of data, as represented by the formulae as restricted to the conditions of the measurements (i.e., before extrapolation). since any model should correspond to the tested and the testable, it is the theories which are primary which should form the basis for a unification. to convince the respective proponents and opponents of various theories that such a unification is even possible, one must show that the theories do not contradict one another on the formal level and need not contradict one another on the interpretative level. this is the raison d’être of the model presented here. furthermore we have included in our formal model some elements which should invite the type of further experimentation so necessary to assure a proper correspondence between theory and interpretation. endnotes 3. we thank especially dafydd gibbon, bob ladd, johan ‘thart and rose vondrasek who have made valuable inputs to this paper. the first author had the ahoua and reid 28 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) opportunity to informally discuss a few of the issues with mark liberman who has been generous with his time. we are however responsible for all possible misinterpretations of the theories and all the errors contained in this paper. the first author would like to thank the alexander von humboldt foundation for providing him with a grant that helped him to finalize the paper. 29volume 23 (2012) ahoua and reid references ahoua, f. 1990. “two current phonetic models of intonation analysis.” cahiers ivoiriens de recherche linguistique 25: 63-89. beckman, m. and pierrehumbert, j. (1986). “intonation structure in japanese”. phonology yearbook 3: 255-310. collier, r. (1975). “physiological correlates of intonation patterns.” journal of the acoustical society of america 58: 249-255. cooper, w. and sorenson, john (1977). “fundamental frequencies contours at syntactic boundaries”. journal of the acoustical society of america. 683-692. fujisaki, h. (1981). “dynamic characteristics of voice fundamental frequency in speech and singing.” in stl-qpsr 1. 1-20; also in peter f. macneilage (ed.) 1983. the production of speech. heidelberg: springer-verlag, pp. 39-55. ladd, r. (1984). “declination : a review and some hypotheses”. phonology yearbook 1: 53-74. ladd, r. (1990). “metrical representation of pitch register”. papers in laboratory phonology i. ed. kingston, j. and beckman, m. cambridge university press. ladd, r. (1988). “declination ‘reset’ and the hierarchical organization of utterances”. journal of the acoustical society of america 84: 530-44. liberman, m. and pierrehumbert, j. (1984). intonational invariance under changes in pitch range and length. in language sound and structure. ed. aronoff, m. and richard oehrle. cambridge, usa: mit,. ‘t hart, j., nooteboom, vogten, l.l. and willems, l.f. (1982). “manipulation of speech sounds”. phillips technical review 40: 143-145. 30 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012) ‘t hart, j. cohen, a. (1973). “intonation by rule: a perceptual quest.” journal of phonetics 1.309-327. thorsen, n. (1983). “two issues in the prosody of standard danish”. in prosody: models and measurements. ed cutler, a. and ladd, r. berlin, new york: springer. umeda, n. (1982). “fo declination’ is situation dependent”. journal of phonetics 10: 279-290. 31volume 23 (2012)   ahoua and reid 32 legon journal of the humanities volume 23 (2012)   19volume 24 (2013) the instrumentality of the black “other” in primitivist modernism: a critical analysis of modern dance and modernist language maryam beyad and farshad roshnavand1 abstract blaming the logic-stricken culture of western civilization for the bloodshed of world war i, the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century set out on a quest for alternative cultures. the desire to find the redeeming life force eventually resulted in modernists’ fascination with the long subalternized african culture. however, the black other, represented as primitive and exotic, was no more than an instrument in the hands of primitivist modernists. this paper tries to analyze modern dance and modernist language as the two major spheres in which the instrumentality of the black other is evident in the discourse of primitivist modernism. keywords: primitivism, modernism, instrumentality, the “other”, world war i, disillusionment 1. introduction the qualities that mark a subaltern group as deviant and in need of white control are labile (brown, 1993: 664). in pre-twentieth century discourse of colonization and enslavement, blacks were mostly portrayed as minstrel buffoons, wicked brutes or angel-like creatures (ellison, 1972: 26), all images that justified the sociopolitical misdeeds practiced against blacks and provided whites with “the comforting shock of unfavorable contrast to the social ‘realities’” (redding, 1964: 66). all the same, these stereotypes were replaced, or better still, reinvented, in the modernist discourse of the early twentieth century through the image of the primitive, exotic and hedonistic black. in other words, the instrumentality of black stereotypes was not reduced to the negative representations; the positive myths about blacks also served western self-definition (keim, 2009: 11). according to james snead, the mythification of the other simply replaces history “with a surrogate ideology of [white] elevation or [black] demotion along 1maryam soltan beyad is an assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures at the university of tehran, iran farshid nowrouzi roshnavand is a phd student of english literature at the university of tehran, iran beyad and roshnavand 20 legon journal of the humanities volume 24 (2013) a scale of human value" (cited. in yancy, 2005: 216). in effect, the exotic black became an object of fascination for white modernists who sought to unchain their consciousness from the constraints of the victorian values of western civilization; that is to say, black life and culture were estimated and appreciated just in terms of their utility in undermining the restrictive puritan conventions of early twentieth century (moses, 1987: 64-66). this paper first addresses the great impact of world war i, a watershed that gave many “the feeling of having lived in two eras, almost on two different planets” (cowley, 1973: vii), on engendering a pervasive sense of disillusionment with western civilization among the avant-garde intellectuals of the day, and thus their quest for alternative cultures, as a result of which the vogue of primitivist modernism gained momentum. this paper tries to demonstrate the instrumentality of the “other” in the discourse of primitivist modernism through analyzing modern dance and modernist language in the early twentieth century. 2. world war i, disillusionment and the rise of primitivist modernism the storm has died away, and still we are restless, uneasy, as if the storm were about to break. almost all the affairs of men remain in a terrible uncertainty. we think of what has disappeared, and we are almost destroyed by what has been destroyed; we do not know what will be born, and we fear the future … doubt and disorder are in us and with us. there is no thinking man, however shrewd or learned he may be, who can hope to dominate this anxiety, to escape from this impression of darkness. (paul valéry, cited in spielvogel, 2009: 831) perceptions of war throughout history and in different civilizations have for the most part been centered on two opposite sets of images: the first speculated war as an uplifting and heroic experience; the second posited war as a site of destruction and grief. thus, the dichotomy in the depiction of war either as an opportunity for mankind to show its nobility and/or as an occasion for human savagery to come to the fore is profoundly implanted in different cultures and civilizations (bartov, 2000: 10). in a similar manner, the same extreme reactions were repeated before, during and after world war i. in its early stages, many western intellectuals considered world war i to be invigorating, ennobling and purifying, and believed that it was the natural pursuit of all men and nations (pinker, 21volume 24 (2013) 2003: 148). the eagerness with which its outbreak was welcomed in the major competitive nations was compounded with a wave of youthful volunteerism, all-encompassing industrial mobilization, intellectual and academic propagandistic activities, and political consensus to convert war into a noble and edifying experience (bartov, 2000: 10). however, to use the german expressionist george grosz’s words, “after a few years when everything bogged down… when everything went to pieces, all that remained … were disgust and horror” (cited in spielvogel, 2009: 832). the war cost approximately ten million lives; twenty million were crippled or severely injured, nine million children orphaned, five million women widowed, and ten million individuals dislocated from their homelands to become refugees (heyman, 1997: 114). there were also numerous traumatically scarred soldiers of the war who were forced to live in the complex network of trenches and dugouts with its discomforting constant din of gunfire, the stench of decomposing bodies, and the ever present menace of a gas attack (allen et al., 2003: 8). world war i was europe’s first industrial war and drew together the power of industry and science as never before. between 1914 and 1918, governments appealed to their scientists and inventors for new discoveries and to their manufactures for new acts of production (heyman, 1997: 124). world war i witnessed the application to warfare of the telephone, barbed wire, air travel, safety apparatus like the guidance and control gyroscope, and even mustard gas (dawes, 2002: 73). among many people, the unwholesome experiences of the war created a kind of technoskepticism which finally resulted in the belief that human beings were bloodthirsty and impetuous animals incapable of originating a sane and rational world (spielvogel, 2009: 829). consequently, foundational epistemological borders (like the distinction between the morally sanctioned and the morally forbidden), the dominant spencerian-hegelian notion of teleological evolution and the concepts of national purpose, history, identity and human will were all deemed in the post-war atmosphere as tenuous sociopolitical constructs, a widespread attitude that finally gave birth to a radical uncertainty and a crisis of confidence in western civilization (dawes, 2002: 131; baker, 1987: 86). the great war was marked by a kind of prevalent, collective and irremediable shell-shock which affected not only soldiers but also the artists of the day, and on that account, the world of art and intellect beyad and roshnavand 22 legon journal of the humanities volume 24 (2013) underwent a drastic metamorphosis. prewar artistic trends, such as abstract painting or the interest in the absurd and the unconscious substance of the mind, which had then been the preserve of a small group of avant-garde artists and often frustrated the expectations and conventions of plebeians, became more widely diffused in the 1920s and 1930s as they seemed more fitting after the bloodcurdling experiences of war battlegrounds (spielvogel, 2009: 831). as an aftermath of war, the assumed supremacy of the racist, sexist, wealthy anglo-saxon males collapsed and a sense of inevitable doom, of being wounded, of living in an unsafe irrational world wormed its way into the circles of avantgarde artists and intellectuals (baker, 1987: 86). with the recognition that “the europe of earlier centuries was broken, possibly beyond repair” (raymond sontag, qtd. in heyman, 1997: 123), there appeared a tendency among artistic movements to discuss the inanity of human existence, as in dadaism, or initiate a quest for reality beyond the material and tangible world, as in surrealism and symbolism (spielvogel, 2009: 832); in other words, post-world war i writers, disaffected and disgruntled, headed for human subconsciousness and also for the primitive origins of mankind in an attempt to arrive at a cure-all for the malaise of the modern man (baker, 1987: 86). primitivist modernism began to gain momentum in such an atmosphere. 2.2. primitivist modernism other regions give us back what our culture has excluded from its discourse (michel de certeau, cited in sweeney, 2004: 1). after world war i, the promises of enlightenment human rationality and the idea of history as moving towards progress were committed to the earth with the young soldiers who had died in the trenches. one significant result of the increasing disenchantment with western civilization was a primitivist vogue which appeared primarily among writers and artists in europe. maintaining that emotional and sexual freedom, believed to constitute the essence of human happiness, existed only among primitive peoples; a number of european avant-garde writers and artists of the day went for those groups who had presumably avoided the corruptive effects of civilization. south sea islanders, american indians, bullfighters, culprits, 23volume 24 (2013) and even the insane were considered to be leading a natural life and so were attributed with a primitive identity. however, it was black africa, the formerly notorious and frightening dark continent, which appeared as the typical symbol of primitive life. the primitivist modernist vogue began in europe with the alleged discovery of “primitive” african paintings and sculptures by french artists, as a result of which many painters (such as picasso, derian, matisse and vlanick), composers (including satie, honneger, milhaud and poulenc) and writers (like apollinaire, cocteau, jacob and cendars) were inspired by primitive negro art (washington, 2001: 32). the depiction of western culture as spiritually lacking and dominated by an unproductive consumerist capitalism and the representation of modern urban life as dilapidated, unoriginal, and devoid of exuberance was a common theme in european cultural settings in the early twentieth century and especially in the years immediately following world war i (sweeney, 2004: 1). rejecting the repressive ambiance of their homelands and trying to break from their parochial culture, many modernist intellectuals and artists such as guillaume apollinaire, filippo marinetti, james joyce, gertrude stein and pablo picasso underwent a self-imposed expatriation, a phenomenon that gained momentum after world war i with the morally and spiritually confounded lost generation moving to paris in their search for a richer literary and artistic milieu and a more liberated way of life (burt, 1998: 17; cuddon, 1999: 479). to all these artists, the metropolis was the embodiment of modernity; nevertheless, living in it was an alienating experience with the sense of living in exile and of being an immigrant in an unknown foreign environment, a feeling of discomfiture which was indispensable to the development of the new formal and artistic idioms of modernism (burt, 1998: 18). and out of such a climate grew primitivism which came along with a condition of exile, as the exile desperately casts about man’s primeval past for another spiritual abode (north, 1998: 32). up to that time, black culture was shown by colonialist discourse to be demonic, backwards and without any kind of cultural presence. at the turn of the century and under the influence of freudian psychology, the concept of the violently repressed id which symbolized the natural state of humanity unaffected by civilizing forces was combined with the recurrent trope of the nineteenth century africanist writing which beyad and roshnavand 24 legon journal of the humanities volume 24 (2013) depicted primitive blacks as debased and irredeemable (sweeney, 2004: 15). to the turn of the century writers, the freudian id contained all the dionysic energies repressed in order to build up a civilized facade; this signified that the primitive existed in us, and if not allowed expression, it could change into the negative impulses of annihilation (sweeney, 2004: 28). the trope of the malevolent primitive was best depicted in joseph conrad’s heart of darkness (1902) whose barbaric wild-eyed africans inhabited the “black and incomprehensible frenzy” of the congo (conrad, 2009: 42). relating the supernatural vice with the african wilderness, the novel portrayed africa as “a place of negations ... in comparison with which europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (chinua achebe, cited in watts, 1996: 53). throughout the novel, africans were dehumanized and demeaned, represented either as grotesque figures or a howling mob; they were robbed of voice, or were granted voice only to denounce themselves out of their own mouths. in fact, the novel presented africa as a “setting and backdrop which eliminates the african as human factor” (chinua achebe, cited in watts, 1996: 53). partaking of dark romanticism and the nietzschean philosophy (lemke, 1998: 25), africa was portrayed to be dark, menacing and unfathomable, a space in which one could pursue everything that was tabooed and censored by western civilization (fortunati and franceschi, 2007: 662). though in conradian primitivism, africanness was placed in a completely negative oppositional relationship to western identity and symbolized the irrational, the spontaneous and even death, the desire to leave civilization and its discontents goaded the exhausted westerner to set out on journeys into the african jungle, the other inhabitants of which helped him or her (kurtz in the case of heart of darkness) to escape from the tedious, mechanical rationalism of the western civilization (lemke, 1998: 28). in fact, the quest for identity necessarily passed through the definition of the other; the primitive was a kind of mirror to come to a better understanding of the westerner’s identity, a site upon which he could project his needs and fears (fortunati and franceschi, 2007: 662). however, although the ‘negative’ portrait of blacks was transformed into an apparently ‘positive’ representation in the modernist primitivism of the post-world war i era, the instrumentality of the black other was still the cornerstone of 1920s primitivism. here, we will address the 25volume 24 (2013) influence of primitivist modernism on the formation of modern dance and the mongrelization of modernist language, and will later discuss the critiques of the primitivist modernist vogue in the concluding section. 2.3. modern dance to have one's dark body invaded by the white gaze and then to have that body returned as distorted is a powerful experience of violation. the experience presupposes an anti-black lived context, a context within which whiteness gets reproduced and the white body as norm is reinscribed (yancy, 2005: 217). in line with the spirit of the age, modern dance was employed by the younger generation of the west as a tool in getting away from the victorian customs of the nineteenth century societies and their stale cultural conservatism. representing the deconstructive inclination of modern consciousness, modern dance intentionally eschewed the employment of traditional aesthetic conventions. with its visceral characteristics, modern dance deliberately emphasized the affective power of the body in order to pose a challenge to the judaeo-christian value system which generally marginalized and neglected the body (burt, 1998: 5). in order to materialize the program to frustrate bourgeois expectations, modern dance moved toward the primitive dances which, according to freudian principles, were deemed to manifest the childlike, simple, and innocent nature of the savage (burt, 1998: 138; kraut, 2003: 435); and so there emerged a vogue for the negro “danse sauvage” and the black body which represented not only a reservoir of ancient history but also a layout for a prospective future (lemke, 1998: 8; sweeney, 2004: 5). this new consciousness reasoned that while europeans could only dance with their minds, negroes danced with their passionate senses and that was why european civilization was in dire need of negroes whose blood could recultivate the “long-since dried-up land that can scarcely breathe” (ivan goll, cited in lemke, 1998: 95). overnight, the west was infatuated with negro jazz music and dance, and out of this craze emerged the animal dances (e.g., turkey trot, fox trot, bear hug, bunny hop, etc.), charleston and black bottom, which were mostly performed in down-and-out cabarets (barros, 1999: 308). beyad and roshnavand 26 legon journal of the humanities volume 24 (2013) the most notable example of the europeans’ immense infatuation with the black female body and dance was la revue nègre at the theatre des champs-elysees in 1925 which staged the primitive dance of the african-american josephine baker (1906-75). up to that time, the chief presentation of the black female body as a sexual objectified commodity was that of the “hottentot venus” which primarily referred to an african woman known as saartje baartman. for ten years, this woman was put to exhibition at street fairs and dances all over france. her physiognomy itself was regarded as a curio and intrigued many visitors who were attracted to her hair, buttocks, and breasts. when she died in 1815 at the age of twenty five in paris, she became an object of immense scientific interest. after the performance of an autopsy, several treatises studied her physiognomy and pathologized her extended buttocks, large labia, and bulky pelvis as anatomical anomalies. consequently, at the end of the nineteenth century most europeans viewed black female sexuality as repulsive and degenerate (lemke, 1998: 100-101; burt, 1998: 63). however, with the advent of modernism and its unconventional stance, the victorian ethos of the late nineteenth century drastically changed and this time, the black body was to serve a different function. in the first act of la revue nègre, josephine baker crawled onto the stage on all fours. then, she bent over and recited the following nonsense syllables: "boodle am, boodle am boodle am now. skoodle am, skoodle am skoodle am now" (cited in lemke, 1998: 96). in the final act, called “charleston cabaret”, baker was brought to the stage on the shoulders of a sturdy black man, joe alex. both of them were sparsely dressed, their bodies embellished with pearls and feathers. after a while, she bent toward the back, with her head down and her feet up, and exposed her naked breasts to the audience. as baker started her dance, a pink feather between her thighs began to move, and immediately, her steps grew wilder. these seemingly unrestrained, spontaneous, and violent movements fascinated her audience who acclaimed her “danse sauvage” with a hysterical standing ovation. very quickly, nineteen-year-old josephine baker became a celebrity. the parisian audience were enamored with this provocative young girl from st. louis and many of them returned to see her dance five or six times. because of the show's remarkable success, la revue nègre went on for ten weeks at the theatre des champs-elysees, and for the most part it was sold out (lemke, 1998: 96). 27volume 24 (2013) during those years, when the europeans’ aspiration to eradicate the moral concepts of the previous generation had reached its culmination, the exhibition of black female sexuality on stage was an outlet through which many spectators attempted to counteract the inherited social and religious conventions toward sexuality. indeed, baker’s black body was viewed as a catalyst that could stir up the exhausted european spectators from the morbid lassitude and teach them, in the words of a review published in volonte in 1929, “the secret that would impede them from dying from the weight of civilization” (cited in lemke, 1998: 101). in other words, baker’s primitive dance was considered to be the messiah and the saving grace of western civilization, and was employed as a spiritual weapon to contend any sense of lethargy and to soothe mundane worries (lemke, 1998: 100; burt, 1998: 51). in sum, the popularity of baker and her dance illustrated the instrumentality of the primitivist vogue which pandered to the western colonialist fantasies of the exotic: with a jungle décor in the background, josephine baker, dressed in a skirt of bananas, crept on the floor, walked on all fours, and shook her ebony body in tempting ways before coming back to one of her favorite postures, i.e., knees bent and back extended, after which she would crisscross her eyes and smile coquettishly at the audience. bringing herself to cater to the repressed fantasies of the westerners and become exactly what they wanted, she placed the eruption of sexual energy at the core of her appeal and made parisian spectators voyeurs who desired baker's black body (lemke, 1998: 96-97). as crispin sartwell put it, “the [white] oppressor seeks to constrain the oppressed [blacks] to certain approved modes of visibility (those set out in the template of stereotype) and then gaze obsessively on the spectacle he has created” (cited in yancy, 2005: 217). 2.4. modernist language words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. the words we seek hang close to the tree (virginia woolf, cited in dawes, 2002: 76). linguistic imitation and racial masquerade are so important to transatlantic modernism because they allow the writer to play at self-fashioning (north, 1998: 11). beyad and roshnavand 28 legon journal of the humanities volume 24 (2013) in the early twentieth century, it had been tacitly established that a white man had to act black in order to become modern (locke, cited in gates, 1997: 4; north, 1998: 66). this concept was literally materialized by many modernist writers, especially in america, when they passed for black in different situations. this racial masquerade gradually worked its way into the sphere of language and created a vogue of racial ventriloquism. there are many accounts of white modernists’ fascination with the so-called “mesmeric” quality of black dialect. in 1923, sherwood anderson wrote to jean toomer about listening to some black longshoremen sing, and described how he craved for their voice while at the same time he was held back from talking to them by an inscrutable reluctance. likewise, the heroine of hermoine, hilda doolittle’s autobiographical novel written in 1927, sensed a similar kind of vocal magnetism in the speech of her family’s black cook. moreover, wallace stevens signed himself “sambo” while corresponding with his fiancée; t. s. eliot signed himself “tar baby” when he was in london; gertrude stein randomly utilized “dey” and “dem”, and ezra pound called eliot “de possum” and employed what he considered to be black dialect in his letters (north, 1998: 8-9). however, this linguistic imitation should be analyzed and interpreted in the light of the demands for linguistic standardization which had been put forward from the earliest days of printing. the call for “language loyalty” was intensified with the publication of the oed in the 1880s which stirred a fad for the criticism of linguistic faults. the belief that language was a precious thing to which one must remain faithful was a generalized application of romantic philology, under the influence of which language became the foundation of national identity and an indication of cultural health. with the increasing urbanization and mass emigration of the industrialization era, all kinds of languages, dialects and idiolects, formerly segregated by space and social distinction, were brought together. the influx of linguistic criticism was in fact an effort to assort these competitive languages and rank them in the order of prestige, an agenda that stigmatized dialect and thus excluded dialect words from the entries of the oed. this exclusionary attitude was more forceful regarding black english which was deemed not only aberrant and corrupt but also the source of corruption (north, 1998: 12-21). all the same, this strict view of the inviolability of the standard language underwent a drastic change in the early twentieth century and many 29volume 24 (2013) researchers and intellectuals of the day, such as franz boas and bronislaw mallinowski, rejected the alleged superiority of one specific language. as already discussed, the advent of modernism was concomitant with a fascination with the black other. richard huelsenbeck’s dada manifesto, the new man (1917), described the disgruntled modernist writers as “saturated, stuffed full to the point of disgust with the experience of all outcasts, the dehumanized beings of europe, the africans, the polynesians, all kinds” (cited in north, 1998: 29); in other words, africans and polynesians came to represent all outcasts, and so did their languages, which, in the eyes of the avant-garde writers of the day, enjoyed an extralinguistic power of expression in which syntax and semantics were avoided in favor of a direct, unmediated representation of the senses; and that was exactly what “the new man” desired (sweeney, 2004: 24). to cite an example, huelsenbeck himself was reported to have cited some of his own negro poems at the cabaret voltaire. these poems were among the numerous “chants nègres” read at the cabaret voltaire where the pastime also included huelsenbeck’s drumming and the exhibition of “african” masks by marcel janco. dadaist poetry at that time largely hinged on what can be called “pseudo-african” languages which were composed of nonsense syllables like “umba umba”, “mee low folla”, “fango fango” and “mee too buggi”, all without any kind of signification (north, 1998: 30-31). at its extreme, dadaist poetry even overstepped nonsense syllables and used the very letter itself, as in huelsenbeck’s chorus sanctus (1916): aao a ei iii oii ou ou o ou ou e ie a ai ha dzk drr br obu br bouss bourn ha haha hi hi hi 1 i 11 i li leiome. (cited in sweeney, 2004: 23) this pattern of rebellion and defiance through racial ventriloquism was more evident in the cultural and literary scene of early twentieth century united states in which the clash between linguistic authoritarianism and american dialects was in fact a conflict between oppression and liberty (north, 1998: 26). for long, the american academy had related immigration with linguistic decline and denounced modernists’ linguistic experimentation as another form of mongrelization which was “against virtue and decorum and… against the grammar and idiom of english beyad and roshnavand 30 legon journal of the humanities volume 24 (2013) speech” (stuart sherman, cited in north, 1998: 27). however, to the younger generation of writers who aimed to mix english with several other tongues and dialects in order to depict the complicated states of mind and the multi-layeredness of emotional responses (adams, 1978: 28), the black dialect was in effect an instrument of rebellion not only against smothering linguistic authoritarianism but also against all kinds of tyranny and standardization. put simply, the generational conflict between the older critics of the american academy and the younger iconoclastic writers was fought over the body of the black other (north, 1998: 27; lemke, 1998: 11-12). in short, dialect played an equivocal role in the 1920s. as “broken english”, dialect was the inverse without which “pure english” could not be alive; that is to say, dialect, slang and other kinds of linguistic deviations had to be kept in circulation to keep “pure english” viable. this can be observed in the case of black dialect which served as a kind of refuge for the whites and provided them with an opportunity to escape from the social tensions imposed by the standard language movement. however, at the end of the day, such an escape only confirmed and reinforced whites’ long-held categories and resulted in no great metamorphosis in the dominant view of black english (north, 1998: 24-28). 3. conclusion: critiques of primitivist modernism the traces of imperialism can … be detected in western modernism, and are indeed constitutive of it (fredric jameson, cited in ramazani, 2009: 96). primitivism repeated certain paradigms of imperial and colonial relations in specific cultural and institutional ways (sweeney, 2004: 5). no one can deny that many avant-garde branches of modernism such as dadaism, vorticism, imagism, cubism, expressionism, futurism and surrealism attempted to perpetuate the binarisms of self/other and civilized/primitive, and were even engaged in finding the cracks in these hierarchical binaries and in changing the mechanisms which kept the dynamics of center and periphery at work. the dialogism created by modernism’s openness to and fascination with the other was a space in which different voices could be heard, a multivocal space that turned 31volume 24 (2013) out to be anti-establishmentarian, internationalist and nonhierarchical. primitivist modernism was often a countercultural effort that denounced the silencing of colonial subjects; in fact, it worked to restore the agency and voice of the primitive other and to create new spaces of articulation in which anti-colonialism could develop (sweeney, 2004: 7). nevertheless, no major concrete improvement took place in the status of colonized blacks during and after the vogue of primitivist modernism. a close look at the sociopolitical occurrences of post-world war i france, considered the cradle of primitivist modernism, can elucidate the futility of the vogue in ameliorating blacks’ living conditions. the epidemic popularity of “l’art nègre” and “le jazz hot” in the clubs of paris did not make trendy parisians aware of the pan-african congress of 1919 in versailles or of the establishment of the union inter-coloniale in 1921. while black jazz musicians and dancers were glorified in 1920s europe, an anti-imperial uprising in north africa was cruelly cracked down by french and spanish forces, senegalese soldiers who had participated in the war for france were denied citizenship or even war pensions, and north african workers imported to france from colonies during the war were being evicted in favor of a more tractable european migrant labor force from poland and czechoslovakia (sweeney, 2004: 3). to put it concisely, the modernist fascination with the other was not translated into the sociopolitical scene because primitivism, in the words of lemuel a. johnson, was “a one dimensional taste for the exotic and the picturesque” which lionized only certain aspects of black culture and identity (cited in sweeney, 2004: 3). a similar belief was shared by bell hooks who maintained that “colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity … represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy” (cited in burt, 1998: 53). scrutinizing the colonial rhetoric of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, david spurr, in the rhetoric of empire (1993), designated four major categories for the appreciation of otherness in literature and journalism: debasement, negation, idealization and aestheticization. broadly speaking, the first two categories are purely negative and pejorative, while the latter are based on a nostalgic longing for a return to origins and original plenitude and integrity (cited in sweeney, 2004: 15-16). following spurr’s outline, one can conclude that the negrophilie vogue was in fact a shift from the blatant racism of the nineteenth century to a more paternalistic program which beyad and roshnavand 32 legon journal of the humanities volume 24 (2013) represented blacks as primitive, infantile and picturesque. the erratic tastes of urban whites in the early twentieth century ephemerally lauded particular aspects of blackness which were previously deprecated and scorned (james clifford, cited in burt, 61). consequently, what happened was in fact an inversion and a continuation, and not an elimination of earlier derogatory racial stereotypes of blackness (moses, 1987: 63-64); and this new stereotype was so powerful that the real black presence was battered down by its objectifying weight (fanon, cited in sweeney, 7). another factor that should be taken into consideration is that it was not the real black subject with a visible existence in the world which was being invoked in primitivist modernism, but a metaphorical creation and construction. (north, 1998: preface). this racial “other”, then more materially accessible through the systematic plundering of the colonization juggernaut, was deemed to provide the potential of revitalization for a bedraggled western modernity. we should note that since the early european encounter with the americas, the west has been representing its “others”. however, the ideological and epistemological discourses forming the representations of otherness have changed over geographies, histories and political regimes, but the west’s relationship with its others has always been an unbalanced act of the self reaching out, going for the unknown, and for the most part, the unknowable other; that is, the figure of the racial other was required so that against and through it the modern subject could be retranslated and reinterpreted (sweeney, 2004: 11-12). in other words, the modern man regarded the primitive other as an “alterity” that was essential in constructing and molding his own image and consciousness (fortunati and franceschi, 2007: 661). as a matter of fact, the primitivist vogue functioned as a critique of the barrenness of western civilization and a way of avoiding a homogenous western monoculture. the figure of the black other provided a means of reconnection with the past, while also offering a path conducive to the future. primitivist modernism was a response to the yearning for historical amnesia, i.e., the desire to forget the past through an escape from the incubus of recent human history, and simultaneously spoke to a kind of nostalgic longing for the past and a redeeming mythological space in which time, not disjointed by the trauma of destruction and slaughter, was still whole. in other words, this past was always represented in a reflexive relationship to a european present which was considered to develop and 33volume 24 (2013) move forward while the time of the other stood still, and this meant that the time and the space to which the primitive other belonged existed in an alternate constructed continuum (sweeney, 2004: 13-22; fortunati and franceschi, 2007: 668). the black other was not more than an instrument in the hands of the faddist westerner. beyad and roshnavand 34 legon journal of the humanities volume 24 (2013) references adams, r. m. 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(2004). from fetish to subject: race, modernism, and primitivism, 1919-1935. westport, ct: praeger publishers. beyad and roshnavand 36 legon journal of the humanities volume 24 (2013) washington, r. e. (2001). the ideologies of african american literature. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. watts, c. (1996). ’heart of darkness’. in j. h. stape (ed.), the cambridge companion to joseph conrad (pp. 45-62). cambridge, ma: cambridge university press. yancy, g. (2005). whiteness and the return of the black body. the journal of speculative philosophy, 19, 4, 215-241. ljh vol. 29 issue 1 (2018).indd legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 1 linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction in mary specht’s migratory animals1 romanus aboh lecturer department of english university of uyo, nigeria e-mail: romanusaboh@uniuyo.edu.ng; romeaboh@gmail.com submitted: october 3, 2017/ accepted: april 29, 2018 / published: june 8, 2018 abstract the study of literary texts within their contexts of production has been the primary concern of literary discourse analysts. against this backdrop, this paper examines the confl uence between mary helen specht’s use of language in her novel, migratory animals, and the articulation of transcultural identity. the preference for migratory animals over other novels is motivated by the fact that the novel provides evidence of how people live in transculturalism. the analysis is anchored on literary discourse analysis, an aspect of discourse analysis that deals with the social context that backgrounds the production of literary texts. the paper reveals that though an american, specht deploys nigerian expressions, loanwords from nigerian languages and nigerian pidgin expressions to situate her novel in the context of transculturalism. also, the analysis suggests that the way people use language in socio-discursive situations can enrich our understanding of the identities they create either for themselves or for others. keywords: transculturalism, loaning, nigerian english expressions, nigerian pidgin english, migratory animals 1 the author is grateful to the african humanities program (ahp) of american council of learned societies (acls) for supporting this study by giving him the opportunity to attend the manuscript development workshop for journal article writing at kampala, uganda in 2016. he also acknowledges the contributions of the participants (fellows and mentors) whose suggestions helped in reworking the manuscript. also, the three anonymous reviewers are appreciated for their close reading of this paper. aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v29i1.1 legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 2 aboh, r./ linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction introduction the aim of this paper is to illustrate how mary helen specht’s migratory animals shows a symbolic parallel between the use of language and transcultural identity construction. specht, an american novelist who was a fulbright fellow at the university of ibadan between 2006 and 2007, returned to america in 2007 to produce her debut novel, migratory animals in 2015. the novel describes the world as a cornucopia of people living in transculturation. through the metaphor of birds or travel imagery, the novel depicts people’s cultural migration from one part of the world to another. specht’s character formulation of kunle, santiago, flannery, alyce, molly, brandon, steven and harry shows specht’s fi rm disposition to transcultural identities. these are characters who have, at various points in their lives, moved around the world such that their behaviour points to them being a combination of several cultures. for example, santiago is hispanic-american who has travelled to diff erent parts of the world. however, the emphasis in this paper is on the migration from america to nigeria, focusing on specht’s narrator and heroine, flannery. it is through her that we come to terms with the polygonal feature of other characters. specht’s novel illustrates the shifting trend of literature in terms of focus and linguistic resourcefulness. the novel brings together opposing cultural forms, transcends diff erences and generates an ‘other space’ where specht’s articulates her desire for cultural pluralism. in migratory animals, therefore, the reader comes across issues that are germane to transculturalism –family bonding, illustration of the positive eff ect of transnationalism and migration, home, cultural hybridity, mixed identities, broken relationships and unfulfi lled dreams. these issues imprint transculturation on the text and its form, illuminating the connection between the intended message and the central metaphor of the novel, migratory birds. flannery is presented as the prototype of her generation because she off ers a refl ection of a moral code arising out of a combination of innocence, love, alienation and redemption. kehinde argues that both ‘contemporary american and african writers prioritise cultural legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 3 aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) pluralism to envision enduring experience and consciousness of mixed racial, ethnic and cultural identity’ (2010, p. 231). the author of migratory animals appears to be interested in depicting the signifi cance of contemporary existence, global interaction and the migration not only of individuals, but of cultures and identities across the globe. migratory animals captures the notions of identity and transculturalism in that the novel traces the coming of flannery, a young scientist, to nigeria, her romantic relationship with kunle –a postgraduate student at the university of ibadan and the complex turn of events. drawing from the subjects of migration, transnationalism and transculturalism, specht depicts the fragmented nature of human existence. the novelist presents us with a panorama of american and nigerian life where her characters engage questions of culture, identities and belonging. this trajectory is profoundly exemplifi ed in the character of flannery. flannery, whose characterisation schema details the modern individual’s multi-layered existence, breaks the kernels of her american-ness to take up a nigerian identity or something akin to it. essentially, flannery’s duality as expressed in ‘migration’ dramatises a motivation to locate one’s self in a continuously mutating world. although there are instances where other languages, most frequently spanish expressions (no mames, giiey and callate, gringo p. 201), for example, are used in the novel to depict transculturalism, our concern in this paper is to interrogate how nigerian ways of using english echo transcultural identity construction in migratory animals. the author, in her creative inventiveness, interlaces her narrative with her experiences in nigeria and it is in this kind of interspacing that the collective narrative of the novel takes shape and its central metaphor of migratory animals fi nds articulation in our fragmented reality. through flannery, also known as flan, specht delineates what is nigerian as well as allows flan to take up a voluntary identity. voluntary identity, as conceived by kavalski, legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 4 aboh, r./ linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction depicts the idea of an independent choice of individual identity accentuated by a more fl exible understanding of cultural frontiers; it is an articulation of the conjecture of the past with the social, cultural and economic relations of the present. (2003, p. 3) specht’s description of nigeria’s culture through the prism of flannery’s characterisation is an instantiation of the multidimensionality of humankind. this is why flannery does not consider it an issue to be ‘nigerian’. her willingness to marry kunle and ability to fi nd nigeria habitable implies that nigeria is her constructed new home. she admits: ‘it really hadn’t been diffi cult to adjust to daily life in nigeria’ (p. 137). but specht’s construction of dual identity relies on her ability to use american english, nigerian english, pidgin and indigenous expressions. it could be said that her understanding of the culture of the nigerian people helps in making her creative process an eff ective link between literature and reallife situations. bitsani elucidates this process when she postulates better that ‘cultures and identities are dynamic sets, they change over time and adapt to circumstances. they are also complex wholes, encompassing heterogeneous components’ (2016, p.3). it is, therefore, diffi cult to ‘coagulate’ or abridge them at just one level. bitsani’s observation has epistemological validation since one can hardly talk about an entirely pure or singular culture. to study language in terms of identity construction implies buttressing the fact that cultural identity is a constantly shifting phenomenon because neither identity nor language is fi xed. the changes we see in language are but a refl ection of the changes that take place in human lives and people’s ways of perceiving the world. it is in line with the above that this paper examines specht’s use of loaning, nigerian english expressions and nigerian pidgin, exemplifying how her linguistic choices shed light on people’s transcultural identities in the fi ctional world of her novel and in the wider referential world that frames the narrative. legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 5 transculturalism defi nitions of transculturalism, like identity, are varied and rooted in diff erent scholarly traditions or orientations. transculturalism, according to onghena (2008, p. 183), is ‘a process the elements of which are altered and from which a new, composite and complex reality emerges; a reality that is no mechanical mixture of characters, nor mosaic, but instead a new, original phenomenon’. transculturalism, therefore, describes a practice in which the singularity of existence is altered, thereby creating opportunities for the emergence of a complex reality. kehinde defi nes transculturalism as ‘a quintessential weapon for uniting peoples across races, ethnicities and cultural divides’ (2010, p. 231). kehinde’s argument underscores the fact that transculturalism, in practice, breaks individual, cultural and national limitations. people or nationals no longer live in a single culture; they embrace multiple ways of confi guring the world. in a similar vein, tartaglia contends that ‘transculturalism is about looking for shared interests and beliefs, which cut across cultural, historically contingent boundaries’ (2016, p. 1). this postmodern trait is a further illumination of coming together of cultures because there is hardly any society in today’s world that is insulated from the others. the advancement in technology, for example, is making it easier for people across diverse cultural spaces, races and nations to share their ways of life with others as well as appreciate other ways of doing things. in so doing, the world is being brought together and the individual becomes a compendium of manifold identities. perhaps another way to say this is that transculturalism tries to explain that cultures are being fashioned, shaped and infl uenced by their constant interactions. culture and identity are not static, and are in a constant state of fl ux, making every individual a mosaic of cultural identities. in the context of transcultural identity construction, linguistic identities describe ‘the sense of belonging to a community as mediated through the symbolic resource of language, or to the varying ways in which we come to understand our language aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 6 ourselves’ (park, 2012, p. 1080). through the linguistic choices we make, we position ourselves in a social context. linguistic identities become, in the context of transculturalism, central to our understanding of the world because ‘most of people, ideas, products, and cultural forms across national boundaries intensify contact among languages’ (park 2012, p. 1080). this suggests a symbolic parallel between meaning-making and context of discourse. identity construction, therefore, is a constitutive part of human existence and can manifest in diff erent forms and various human transactions. however, the notion has remained very diffi cult to defi ne. it could be seen as the way an individual wants to be regarded or the way an individual is regarded or constructed by others. the multifaceted and fl uid nature of identity is perhaps the reason why ahmed (2016, p. 138) argues that ‘identity can, hence, change, just like the chameleon’s multicolours, to suit diff erent situations and occasions’. ahmed’s position resonates with the concept of transcultural identity. human experience and existence, argues cuccioletta, are ‘due to the contact with the other, who in reality is like, oneself’ (2002, p. 2001). although there are factors that articulate as well as construct people’s identity or identities, language is central to identity enactment. one’s knowledge and use of language reveal much about one’s experiences in life, the reason this paper focuses on specht’s use of language. theoretical framework this paper is anchored on the analytical principles of literary discourse analysis (lda). the development of lda as a branch of discourse analysis in the 90s produced a profound transformation in the condition under which literature can be studied (maingueneau, 2010). as an approach of analysing literary texts from a discourse analysis perspective, unlike traditional stylistics, lda deals with literary texts ‘as part of the discursive practices of a given society’ (maingueneau, 2010, p. 152). thus, lda is concerned with the function language performs in a particular context. it deals with ‘the specifi c use of language in literature’ (van dijk, 1985, p. 1), focusing on how sociocultural context intersects with meaningaboh, r./ linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 7 making as well as explication. expressed in another way, lda is interested in reviewing and explaining the origin and the nature of the social meaning attached to both the linguistic and literary forms. proponents of lda –tolliver (1990), vendonk, (2002), porras, (2011), among others– strongly hold the view that the complete meaning of discourse can be understood from the context rather than the sentence. therefore, understating context will make ‘reading a purely relativist process’ (miall, 2002, p. 324) and also what the text is saying will be forcefully foreclosed. ‘literary interpretation’, argue allington and swann, ‘is wholly contingent upon socio-interactional context of a particular reading event or activity, and the most interesting aspect for analysis is the way these socio-interactional contexts (involving individual and group identities, for instance) are produced and refl ected in the discourse’ (2009, p. 227). the context in which a text is situated is very important to lda. context, in lda, describes the situations in which something exists (yina, 2011). a reader of a text is therefore required to have profound understanding of the sociocultural context of the text’s discourse in order to account for what a text is actually saying. yina further argues that the conception of ‘literature as discourse allows the reader to create his own contexts of meaning adduced in actual manifestation of behaviour and attitudes depicted in a text’ (2011, p. 19). as a literary representation of reality, literature as discourse ‘enables us to account for the artistic axiom that diff erent readers in diff erent times and places would attach diff erent sets of contextual interpretations to one and the same verbal structure or text’ (yina, 2011, p. 20). lda locates the language of literary texts within its context of production. the ideas that inform the writers’ use of language are important indices to be considered by analysts in order to understand the fundamental message of a text. both the text and the context of the text are important to the literary discourse analysts. maingueneau reasons that ‘for discourse analysts, there is no inside and outside text. what is “inside” must construct its own “interiority” through interdiscourse’ (2010, p. 151). therefore, aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 8 it is less helpful to analyse specht’s migratory animals without recourse to the nigerian sociolinguistic milieu in which the novel is partly situated. in conjunction with the above, bradford (1997, p. 96-97) argues that ‘language is always dependent upon its historical contexts. the conventions of speaking and writing refl ect or engage with the social, political or ideological resources of a word, a phrase or locutionary habit, and these non-literary registers inform the texture of poems and novels’. it follows that, in order to understand how transcultural identity is constructed, one needs to understand how language works in context-specifi c ways. this analytic paradigm has more sociocultural direction since the analysis of texts, in terms of meaning-making, involves the analysis of broader, fundamental discursive questions. meaning is not semantically fi xed; therefore, meaning-making crucially ‘depends on the essential indeterminacy of language’ (widdowson, 2012, p. 15). literary discourse analysts, then, are interested in deciphering the various hidden signifi cations of a text. they project the idea that the analyst should be interested in analysing the web-like trajectories of linguistic choices, identities and cultural ways of speaking. widdowson makes the point that understanding literary texts ‘is particularly elusive’, because ‘literary texts do not key into context and pretext in conventional ways’ (2012, p. 5). deducible from the foregoing argument is that lda supports variable ways of reading texts in order to highlight how discursive encounters confl uence with the meaning-making process. therefore, lda accounts for how social, psychological and socio-historical contexts infl uence the art of communication. the way people use and interpret language is often linked with their identities. in line with lda’s analytic principle of engaging literary texts from contextual perspectives, specht’s migratory animals can be seen as an authentic sociocultural linguistic corpus. ajtony (2013, p. 258) explains that ‘the social variables that shape identity of the characters are tied to their language use and social behaviour’. the concern of this study, then, is to investigate the role language plays in literary characters’ articulation of their aboh, r./ linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 9 multifaceted existence. the use of loanwords in migratory animals loanwords are not the only linguistic means by which transcultural identity is enunciated. but loanwords have underlying meanings; they transcend stylistic motivation to provide information about why people use language the way they do. loaning and borrowing are two code-switching phenomena that have been used interchangeably without paying close attention to the sharp peculiarity that exists between them. code-switching, a common feature of bilinguals/multilinguals, describes the simultaneous use of two or more languages in written and spoken situations (lamidi, 2017). while a loanword, as described by the oxford companion to the english language, refers to ‘a word taken into one language from another’ (1992, p. 623), borrowing goes far past taking an individual word to show the structural changes the borrowed words undergo as they leave one language to a host language. loanwords deal with individual words; ‘lexical borrowing implies the adoption of individual words or even large sets of vocabulary items from another language or dialect’ (aboh, 2012, p. 53). the diff erence between the two linguistic notions is that the former is about single words, also known as ‘switch tag’, while the later involves ‘large sets of vocabulary items’ (rahim, 2008, p. 5). although there are many languages (spanish, yoruba, nigerian english, hausa, etc.) that used in the narrative, the focus of this paper is on loaning from nigerian languages to english. as writers loan from one language to another, they provide information about their ‘double’ or ‘multiple’ selves. specht deploys loaning as a narrative strategy to refl ect the transcultural composition of her major character, flannery. for example, there is the use of oyinbo. in nigeria, anyone who is white in complexion is called an oyinbo. kunle, as well as other nigerians, calls flannery, the white american, oyinbo. when she returns to america, she tells molly, her sister, what the lexical unit means. by so doing, flannery imprints in molly’s consciousness that if she has the opportunity to be in nigeria, she will also be called an oyinbo. but perhaps aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 10 the most signifi cant aspect of such a linguistic socialisation is that the lexical unit reveals how flannery has learned a new word, a word that defi nes many nigerians’ naming technique, especially in western nigeria – because the word has a yoruba etymology. in learning a new word, she also learns another way of understanding the world. this makes it possible for us to talk of both identities and transculturalism. in her ‘new world,’ flannery does not quite encounter diffi culties in adapting to nigeria’s lifestyle. her transmutation appears to be very fast. for example, she and kunle go out to drink palm wine, juice tapped from palm trees in most parts of nigeria, and as they drink from little plastic cups, ‘flannery imagined she and kunle were bound in the pages of the palm-wine drinkard [an allusion to amos tutuola’s novel] [has been included in the references] and sitting and drinking was the only job they had in the world’ (p. 4). specht, in this instance of language use, forays into a cultural pattern of her host community where members of the community sit out to drink palm wine and have open conversations about what their immediate environment off ers. but more than this, palm wine functions as a means of formulating a nigerian identity for the american. the palm wine drinking is one spectacular moment for flannery as it captures a series of symbolic identity constructions for her, which draws strongly from the overall metadiscursive context of transculturalism. it is not that she attempts to forget or obliterate her american identity; rather, she provides a compelling example of how human beings navigate the seams of cultures and identities. it is this intersection of multidimensionality that hobsbawm clarifi es: the concept of a single, exclusive, and unchanging ethnic or cultural or other identity is a dangerous piece of brainwashing. human mental identities are not like shoes, of which we can only wear one pair at a time. we are all multi-dimensional beings. (1996, p. 1067) aboh, r./ linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 11 hobsbawm persuasively argues that individuals operate a framework of multiple identities. even nations that are thought to be homogenous are, in eff ect, heterogeneous in identity. for, there are diverse people, in that supposedly homogenous nation, with diverse ways of existence, of viewing the world. flannery goes on with her daily life the way she fi nds nigerians do. language constructs identities and gives us belonging. kunle uses abi? (p. 15), a yoruba expression that translates roughly as ‘isn’t it?’ or ‘right?’, when talking on the phone with molly. in non-literary situations in nigeria, interlocutors loan the word as a conversational strategy to ‘make’ listeners agree or confi rm what they say. the fact that kunle uses the yoruba word with an american who has never been to nigeria should not be conceived as a demonstration of arrogance but a deliberate act of identity ‘transfer’. he presupposes that molly would understand what it means. but most importantly, in ‘fi xing’ this word in her characters’ mouth, specht typifi es the fact that one does not necessarily have to live in a particular community for one to imbibe the cultural patterns of a people, for language embodies the ways of life of a people. kunle’s use of abi while talking with molly is strategic in that he has expanded the linguistic frontiers of english so as to relate in an unencumbered manner with molly. there is the calculated loaning of wahala by flannery when she thinks of molly. wahala is a hausa expression that translates as ‘trouble’, ‘problem’ or ‘controversy’. but the context actually determines the depth of the meaning. in some cases, its meaning is weightier than mere ‘trouble’ or ‘problem’. having lived in nigeria, flannery understands that it can be used to mean more than ‘trouble’. this is the reason she loans wahala to tell the degree of the psychological trauma molly is undergoing because of huntington disease – a genetic disease passed to her from their mother. in displaying transculturalism, flannery, through the discourse strategy of linguistic apposition, tells us what wahala means – ‘big trouble’ (p. 16). wahala better explains what she thinks of molly’s situation. it is fascinating to see how flannery navigates the seams of existence through the linguistic choices she aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 12 makes. specht loans indigenous expressions in her creative initiative to explain the confl ation of language and the presentation of sociocultural reality. she uses the nigerian term okada which describes both a commercial motorbike and the rider. ontologically, it describes a town in present-day edo state, nigeria. flannery systematically mediates an internal sense of belonging to nigeria. this feeds into the fact that she will become nigerian if she marries kunle. kunle is a yoruba-nigerian flannery falls in love with. she reminisces about the way they sped by on the back of an okada. … flan behind the driver; kunle behind her. she remembered how his breath passed along her ear and the side of her face as she leaned back into him. his legs straddled hers, and his hands barely touched her torso as if held there not by muscle but by magnetism. it was joy and movement and freedom in a liminal space, invisible ghost licking at their heels. (p. 22) although there are motorbikes all over the world used both as private and commercial means of transportation, the lexical entity okada is a means of transportation that is specifi cally known by nigerians. the word ‘movement,’ in the context of the novel, is symbolic: it connotes a transitional process flannery undergoes to embrace a new identity while maintaining her american-ness. in this instance, it does not seem out of place to argue that okada systematically functions as a vehicle of psychological identifi cation: a means that liberates her from cultural constraints. specht’s use of language activates flannery’s schema of dual or multiple existences. the preference for the nigerian expression over the english one (motor bike) should not be read as flannery’s eradication of her americanness, but an explicit account of her ‘transcultured selves’. this is why when she goes back to america, she feels a deep sense of incompleteness without kunle and she laments: ‘i wish kunle were aboh, r./ linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 13 here’ (p. 41). relatedly, there is the loaning of danfo (p. 41), a minibus taxi. although the origin of the word danfo is not certain, it means ‘hurry’ in yoruba. it is one of the chief means of commercial transportation in lagos, nigeria. a ride in a danfo can be quite uncomfortable; it is not the best means of transportation because of what it signifi es. signifi cantly, the novelist deploys danfo to provide her readers with visual accounts of transportation system in the city of lagos. so flannery imagines when kunle ‘would be riding a danfo crowding four to a seat…painted with maxims like “protected by the blood” or “no food for lazy man”’ (p. 41). the other important thing to note from the above use of language is flannery’s consistent psychological fl ux between america and nigeria that represents a further illustration of transculturalism. besides that, expressions such as ‘protected by the blood’ and ‘no food for lazy man’ are hand-written inscriptions one fi nds on commercial vehicles and on some private cars in nigeria. they function as semiotic constructs because they enable flannery to identify with and accept something new, something that, perhaps, she does not see in america. both okada and danfo function as transforming processes that diminish the concept of a single identity. in her cultural excursion into nigeria’s ways of life in terms of greeting, flannery loans the yoruba word ekaaro (p. 135) to illuminate the premium some nigerians place on greeting. it means ‘good morning’. unlike the american greeting culture, ekaaro comes with body movement –the male child is expected to prostrate and the female to genufl ect while greeting an elderly person. this body movement speaks volumes for the amount of respect attached to greetings in nigeria, implying that it goes beyond phatic communication. meeting with kunle’s mother, flannery takes on a diff erent identity than the american one. she switches from the formal mode of the english language to yoruba which carries its own sensibilities and social functions. hudson argues that ‘the choice of language at a point is decided by situation which in turn is defi ned by it’ (1996, p. 53). hence, flannery having understood that she is conversing with a yoruba woman, uses the expression aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 14 ekaaro. flannery’s conscious cultural transportation intersects with her identity construction goal. this is manifest in her tongue swap. her linguistic representation echoes onghena’s (2008, p. 182) view, ‘we can safely say that cultures are constantly evolving and that we should consider them dynamic. moving from the descriptive to the more explanatory nature’. it does not appear to be out of place to mention that flannery’s loaning indicates her transitive process of navigating two cultures simultaneously. the position of this paper is that there seems to be a conjunction between the language of literature and the identity that produced it. the deployment of suya (p. 154) to capture the culinary habit of many nigerians is an instantiation of the foregoing conjecture. suya describes strips of beef with oil sprinkles grilled on skewers over open fi re. it is a hausa expression that is commonly used in nigeria. knowing this, flannery buys it for kunle and they both sit out ‘devouring’ it (p. 154). while flannery is familiar with grilled meat, it can hardly be said that she is used to suya. even kunle marvels at flannery’s adaptability. he says, ‘i’m surprised an oyinbo can take the spice’. therefore, her having suya despite the fact that it is spicy could be seen as an attempt to calibrate herself into the cultural pattern of nigerians in terms of food. this is why ajtony argues that ‘the social variables that shape the identity of the characters are related to their language use and social behaviour’ (2013, p. 258). it is during the scene of suya eating that ‘they talked about their childhood’. the ‘suya atmosphere’ off ers a perfect opportunity for them to dig into their respective histories, enabling them to get to know each other even better. this is a dynamic transformation, an indexicalisation of our polygonal existence. the next section of the paper focuses on the signifi cance of nigerian english expressions in migratory animals. nigerian english (ne) expressions extensive studies by odumuh (1984), jowitt (1991), adegbija (1998), udofot (2007), aboh and uduk (2016), among many others have validated the existence of a variety of world englishes known as nigerian english (ne). these scholars, in aboh, r./ linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 15 their respective studies, have described the dynamic use of english in nigeria as domestication, nativisation, acculturation and hybridisation. as in a typical nigerian novel, there are numerous uses of nigerian english expressions such as goat stew, pepper soup, calabar stew and periwinkle snails in migratory animals. pepper soup is a special type of pepper-based consommé made with meat or fi sh, and prepared mostly without red oil. while most nigerians prepare and enjoy pepper soup at home, it is worth noting that it is also served at restaurants. as the name suggests, it is usually very peppery. goat stew (p.135) is prepared with mutton or the off al of a goat. calabar stew (p.136) is a kind of efi k soup known as edikang ikong and is consumed in many parts of nigeria, especially the south. periwinkle snails (p.136) are obtained from some nigerian rivers and are used to make soup and other sorts of food. by making specifi c references to nigeria’s food technology, specht takes her readers on an anthropological excursion into the culinary culture of nigerians. as she does so, she allows flannery to manifest her transcultural identity. food is a constitutive aspect of a people’s material culture. the various references to nigeria’s food culture in migratory animals transform the author’s natural setting, enabling her to enact not only a nigerian identity for her characters, but to also draw attention to people’s fragmented existence. apart from flannery, characters such as santiago, brandon and alyce are typical manifestations of our split existence. using language as the gateway to nigeria’s linguistic space, specht reproduces a pattern of life that is ontologically nigerian. for example, the expression calabar stew, as used when one of kunle’s neighbors from cross river state stuck her head in to ask if they’d eaten – “done chop?” they spooned up her calabar stew, sucking the periwinkle snails from the shells and scooping big chunks of leafy greens with balls of soft fufu made from boiled cassava. (pp. 136137) aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 16 the passage provides cultural information about the food culture of the efi k ethnic group of southern cross river state in nigeria. the sucking of periwinkle snails and swallowing of balls of fufu are telling examples of the eating pattern of the people described. the fact that specht’s central character fi nds herself assimilating such a pattern of life is an illumination of her multiple existences. specht tells of how ‘flannery was living in mental possession of two worlds’ (p. 224). in a similar anthropological cum historical excursion, the expression, boys quarters (bq), refers to the quarters where (male) servants are housed. boys quarters is a vestige of colonialism that has continued to recur in ne usage. in nigeria today, as in some ex-british colonies such as sierra leone, the gambia and uganda, some people build a main house and a special, small apartment slightly cut off from the main residence and they call it bq, a place reserved for the ‘boys’ and possibly home helps. in other instances, it is reserved for non-members of the immediate family and visitors. many present-day nigerian bqs do not have that subservient, dehumanising colonial tinge. flannery tells us what a bq means: kunle’s room was in a bq, or ‘boys quarters,’ a term for the small building adjacent to a residence that, during colonial times, had been used to house servants or ‘houseboys.’ bqs – and his was no diff erent – were usually a row of three or four rooms connected by a slab porch, which, since there wasn’t a proper kitchen, was where inhabitants set up hot plates and buckets of water. (p. 135) besides providing architectural information about bqs and the fact that it is a colonial vestige, it tells us about some students’ housing lifestyle in some nigerian universities, specifi cally the university of ibadan. when flannery goes to see kunle, she is amazed how he lives in a small apartment with two other postgraduate students. whenever bq is mentioned, many nigerians can tell what it means aboh, r./ linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 17 because it describes a familiar housing system. signifi cantly, specht has consciously unravelled the historical situation and condition responsible for the creation of a linguistic expression that can be deemed as typically nigerian and west african. as much as flannery does not belittle where kunle lives, she identifi es with him: such identifi cation is signifi cant in the understanding of transculturalism. kalpana corroborates this, as he notes, ‘identity is stuck within the nation’s history, for individuals are at a point identifi ed only if they have a location within the historical moment’ (2015, p. 50). we can then say that specht’s use of language symptomises how writers use their artworks to give expressive force to transnational identity. according to the backdrop provided by specht’s narrative, it could be argued that migratory animals is anthropological in many ways because it insightfully details nigeria’s culture. the nigerian identity reproduced throughout the novel provides an objective ground for a valid discussion of transcultural identity construction. the expression, village, in nigeria describes a rural, undeveloped area as contrasted with an urban area so that my village means my rural, undeveloped hometown where my roots lie. an important indicator of the use of my village is that it connects a nigerian to his or her roots. it has everything to do with identity and one’s place of birth. there is a saying in nigeria that ‘everybody comes from a village’, meaning that, however sophisticated or educated one may be at present, one’s roots are located in an underdeveloped place called village. it is in my village that kerosene lamp (a local lamp made with a reduced metal can with a wick in the middle that uses kerosene to burn) is used by villagers. specht succinctly details village life in: kunle’s village was beautiful in its way – a pastoral answer to the maddening crowds and jammed roads of the major nigerian cities. women carried water on their heads, to and fro from the wells. cocks fought and chased each other while the occasional teenager kicked up dust on a motorbike, probably going nowhere, aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 18 killing time. (p. 159) for the nigerian who has lived or been to the village, these are familiar features of rustic glamour: pastoral décor and answers, women (not men) carrying water on their heads, cocks fi ghting and chasing each other. true to specht’s narrative, it is in the village that kunle’s mother uses a kerosene lamp to illuminate the kitchen and the compound. it is also in the village that mango trees are commonly found. each of these expressions represents life in many nigerian villages. it is not that village is a nigerian english word, but its deployment in the novel refl ects a typical nigerian rustic lifestyle, which flannery comes to like. for flannery to consider kunle’s village beautiful and habitable in its pastoral way means that she has accepted where he comes from, and to accept his origin is to accept him for who he is. this has a mental representation – that people shift in tune with the shifting nature of reality to have a new defi nition. the expression let me land is an example of semantic shift in ne. it means allow me to make my point or let me be through. in either standard british or american english, to land is to bring an aircraft down onto solid ground or water, especially in an airport. contextually, kunle reads through flannery’s data and becomes unhappy because she is elongating her stay in america only for a ‘mere’ cloud seeding. on interrupting him when he fi nally makes up his mind to discuss her overstay, he says, ‘let me land’ (p. 195). immediately, flannery gives him back his conversational turn. flannery understands what kunle means because she has lived in nigeria and knows what nigerians mean when they say ‘let me land’. this, of course, is an explication of linguistic transnationalism. the fact is that specht’s use of language demonstrates the way many nigerians use english. the nigerian english expression is often used when a speaker’s conversational turn is interrupted. in line with this analytical approach, it can be argued that specht’s migratory animals is a linguistic behaviour that highlights the role of language in displaying our transcultural identity. aboh, r./ linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 19 nigerian speakers of english demonstrate a penchant for creative usages that often link the created expressions with their context of use. in nigeria, according to eka (2002, p. 80), the nigerian english expression been-to(s) describes ‘someone who has travelled overseas, particularly to britain’. eka further explains that the term has a social meaning in that it tells of nigerians who were early visitors to britain. and when they returned to nigeria, they were in the habit of announcing it to people that they had been overseas, had ‘been to’ britain, for example. so, the word was seen as an appropriate tag for such people. specht uses the expression in a similar way. she tells us that been-tos are ‘people who had been abroad’ (p. 192). such a usage signposts the mutual infl uence that english and nigerian languages have on each other in the nigerian sociolinguistic context, thus testifying to the healthy co-existence between the languages in this contact situation. it also confi rms that in transculturalism, as languages come in contact with each other, they also exchange cultural ideas. against this context, this paper insists that specht’s linguistic choices illuminate her thematic thrust in migratory animals. having drawn attention to the use of some nigerian english expressions in the construction of transcultural identity, the attention of the paper will be turned to the deployment of nigerian pidgin expressions in relation to the enunciation of transcultural identity. nigerian pidgin in migratory animals nigerian pidgin (henceforth np) is english-based; it draws from the vocabulary of the english language and from indigenous languages to form a new unique language. balogun draws attention to the fact that ‘the dynamic and generative capacities of nigerian pidgin to create from a fi nite set of lexical items have continued to foster communicative process and interaction among nigerians’ (2013, p. 90). however, np is mostly used in informal transactions. it is a vehicle for the formulation of friendly relationships among its users. some np expressions used in migratory animals are examined presently. aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 20 the expression body no be fi rewood has several signifi cations. specht narrates flan’s thoughts: there was a saying in nigerian pidgin: “body no be fi rewood,” meaning that a body is not meant to be put through all the searing pains and horrors of this life. but when she’d fi rst heard kunle use the phrase, she thought he was talking about romantic sparks, the burn of physical attraction. love turning your body into sticks of fi rewood. (p. 42) the context in which the expression, body no be fi rewood, (literally means ‘the body is not a log of wood’) is used determines its meaning. it can be used by someone who has been stressed or strained to mean that his/her body, unlike fi rewood, is not meant to be subjected to unbearable suff ering. but it is also commonly used in nigeria to refer to sexual craving or readiness, suggesting that one is not as sexually insensitive as a log of wood. flannery thought that kunle, using such an expression, means his sparkling love—as fi rewood does when burning— towards her, but later she realises that his usage aligns with the explanation off ered above. she understands this more in the stressful situation she fi nds herself in. one noticeable feature of np is that it is ‘liberal’ and fl uid. sometimes, its meaning can be deduced from its subtle, witty and metaphorical combination of individual words. this can be seen in the interaction between flannery and kunle: ‘i’m sorry i’m not in a better state. it’s not often i get house calls from americans. how do you fi nd nigeria?’ this was a question everyone asked flannery and two other americans working with her. ‘i like it here. i’m still here’. ‘you try small, small. but for how much longer’? he asked. (p. 136) aboh, r./ linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 21 the expression, you try small, small, has its cultural embedding: the reduplication, small, small, is used to commend someone who has been able to perform a given task to an extent so that small, small means that the commendation is commensurate with the impartial completion of a duty. in the case of kunle and flannery, the remark is on her commendable progress, encouraging her to do more. she is commended for her fi rst-time experience in nigeria as she tries to adapt to it. the language –np– that is used is not a language flannery has originally known. but the time she has spent in nigeria enables her to understand what kunle means. a symbolic aspect of kunle’s use of language is his intention to ‘initiate’ flannery into nigerian ways of using language. one inference that can be drawn from specht’s novel is her refl ection of nigeria’s cultural semantics. since many nigerians still live communally, a member of a community would always want to know how other members of the household or community are faring. there are questions asked about one another’s welfare, health status and, in fact, well-being in general. these cultural tenets are backgrounded in np expressions such as done chop? (p. 136), how body? (p. 138) and body fi ne-o (p. 138). in a sense, while done chop? is a question that ordinarily asks whether one has eaten or not, it implies more. it usually comes from a caring friend or relative. specht tells us how, ‘one of kunle’s neighbors from cross river state stuck her head in to ask if they’d eaten – “done chop?”’ (p. 136). the question, done chop? (‘have you eaten?’), demonstrates the communal practice of nigerians as well as details the charitable things nigerians do for one another. it presupposes that despite the fact that most nigerians’ modes of living bear marks of western infl uence, some communal fragments are still noticeable among contemporary nigerians as can be inferred from the use of np. specht portrays the life of living together and sharing possessions and responsibilities as a feature of transculturalism. corroborating this postulate, amao contends that ‘nigerian pidgin is also acknowledged as a formidable stride in the re-creation of nigerian and african socio-cultural identity’ (2012, p. 45). specht tells us that flannery not only observes this cultural exigency, but aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 22 participates fully in the process. through the use of this pidgin expression, we can understand a connection between food behaviour and the formulation of a new identity. perhaps we should not forget that flannery does not at any time reject any nigerian food she is off ered. kunle tells his aunt, ‘flan loves our food’ (p. 223). it is in the eating of the food that she actually comes to know their names. in this way, we understand the eff orts she makes to forge a new identity for herself, a formulation that does not destroy her american-ness. rather, it is an identity that makes her fi t snugly into the complex dynamics of human manysided existence. accordingly, although food in principle is morally neutral, in practice, it makes moral and political statements. it is a site, in fact, an advantaged site for the enunciation of identities. even when kunle’s pronominal choice –our– appears to exclude flannery, it captures his desire to see flannery as a member of his group. in this way, ‘our’ rather expands to include the american. similarly, how body? with its corresponding response body fi ne-o is a question that requests an answer not just on the respondent’s physiological well-being (as could be inferred from the linguistic context of the sentence) but also on his/her total wellbeing, which includes psychological, social, economic, fi nancial, mental health and, in fact, family relationship. in this sense, the answer body fi ne-o could be synonymous with the english version of all is well. some np expressions are pure transliterations of indigenous languages. in the novel, the very fi rst words kunle used when flannery calls him on the phone are how body? and she responds body fi ne-o. from this question-response transaction, kunle is certain that, all things being equal, flannery is doing well back in america. every point at which specht deploys a nigerian pidgin expression seems signifi cant to our understanding of the discourse of transcultural identity construction. kunle’s village is a stark contrast to the noisy, busy and crowded nigerian cities. back home in kunle’s village, flannery will always notice kunle’s mother shake her head signaling her disapproval of flannery’s consistent going out. the likes of flannery, according to kunle’s mother, are aboh, r./ linguistic choices and transcultural identity construction legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 23 called waka waka. the term could be either derogatory or jocular. it is derogatory when used to describe a commercial sex worker, and jocular when used to refer to one who likes going out a lot. the latter meaning explains why kunle’s mother calls flannery waka waka (p. 159). thus, waka means ‘to walk’ and ‘waka waka’ means ‘to walk a lot’. the meaning of np words and expressions is best understood in their context. the few examples discussed in this paper show how specht interlaces american english with np expressions to tell the stories of plural identities. in the specifi c case of flannery, her transculturalism is manifest in her being a nigerian on the one hand and retaining her american-ness on the other. similarly, kunle is willing to marry the american, to leave nigeria for america and to accept flannery’s family as his. kunle’s readiness to be part of another culture signposts his understanding of the multifaceted nature of human existence. conclusion drawing examples from the author’s reading of specht’s linguistic strategies vis-a-vis scholarly summations on the confl uence of language and identity, the paper supports the view that people’s use of language can help us to understand how they live in transculturation. we have seen how the novelist’s use of loanwords, nigerian english expressions and nigerian pidgin depict her characters’ articulation of their multiple identities. in this way, specht tries to show that literary language cannot be disconnected from the social uses to which it is put. whether we admit it or not, we are always mindful of how we use language. our use of language is in many respects constrained by what we want to say or the message we intend to communicate. this symbolic parallel provides us with examples of flannery’s simultaneous belonging to nigeria and america. belonging to nigeria does not warrant abandoning her american-ness. the argument thus far is that an individual’s choice of a language or languages is a contextual activity that determines both the linguistic form of a text and its implied meaning. aboh, r./ legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) legon journal of the humanities 29.1 (2018) page | 24 references aboh, r. 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(2011). the semiotics of tiv oral poetry. makurdi: aboki publishers. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 23 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v28i2.2 the ethnosemantics and proverbs of ohia, ‘‘poverty’’ in akan1 kofi agyekum professor, department of linguistics, university of ghana, legon, ghana kagyekum@ug.edu.gh submitted: june 9, 2017 / accepted: september 2, 2017/ published: october 31, 2017 abstract this paper examines the concept of ohia, ‘poverty’ in the akan sociocultural worldview. these include factors that cause it, the people who suffer from poverty and the implications of their condition. it identifies social, cultural, individualistic and fatalistic sources of poverty. the paper is discussed employing the theoretical framework of language ideology, which reflects people’s beliefs about their language and how they justify the language structure and practical uses. to understand the akan concept of poverty, one must resort to their cultural beliefs, past experiences, perception, worldview and social structures. the paper employed the qualitative method, using interviews for the primary data. the secondary data was collected from akan highlife songs, books on proverbs and oral and written literature books. the major finding of this paper is that poverty in akan is best viewed from akan language ideology and proverbs. it is also worth noting that despite the negativity of poverty, some proverbs console the poor, and stress that poverty is not the only adversity as other conditions in life are more stressful than poverty. keywords: akan, poverty, language ideology, proverbs, marginalisation mmuabɔsɛm saa krataawa yi hw1 sɛdeɛ akanfo4 hunu ohia w4 abrab4, amammerɛ ne wiase asetena mu. yɛbɛhwɛ nno4ma a ɛde ohia ba, deɛ enti a ohia ba, ne nnipa ahodoɔ a ohia ka w4n. nhwehwɛmu yi da ohia farebae ahodo4 nnan adi, weinom ne asetenam, amammerɛ, ankorɛankorɛ ne hyɛberɛ. yɛgyinaa kasa adwenemusɛm nnyinaso4 so na pɛsɛmpɛnsɛm nhwehwɛmu yi mu. saa adwenemusɛm yi da 4manfo4 gyidie a w4w4 w4 w4n kasa mu, sɛdeɛ w4twitwa gye w4n kasa nhyehyɛeɛ ne ne dwumadie ahodo4. krataawa yi da no adi pefee sɛ yɛbɛte sɛdeɛ akanfo4 hunu ohia aseɛ no, gye sɛ yɛgyina w4n amammerɛ mu gyidie, abrab4 mu suahunu w4n anibusɛm, ne sɛdeɛ w4hunu wiase ne w4n asetena mu nhyehyɛeɛ. yɛfaa sukyerɛ nsɛmmoano kwan, anim-ne-anim nsɛmmisa, so na nyaa mmɛ ahodo4 de dii dwuma yi. afei yɛtasee ohia ho mmɛ firii, akan anom ne atwerɛ kasadwini mmɛ nwoma ahodo4 ne akanfo4 nnwom mu. deɛ krataawa yi hunuu p4tee ne sɛ yɛbɛtumi agyina 1 this paper is a contribution to the debate on the sociocultural concept of poverty in akan in the song of a renowned highlife composer, alex konadu (cf. agyekum 2016). legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 24 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 mmɛ ne akan kasa adwenemusɛm so ate ohia ase yie. yɛsan hunuu sɛ ɛwom sɛ yɛhunu sɛ ohia yɛ adeb4ne deɛ, nanso akanman mu no ɛnyɛ ohia nko ne ka. nsɛmfua titire: akan, ohia, kasa adwenemusɛm, nhyehyɛeɛ ne amammerɛ nnyinaso4, mmɛ introduction: definition and factors of poverty the un (1998) defines poverty as follows: fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. it means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. it means not having enough to feed and cloth a family, not having a school or clinic to go to; not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. it means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. it means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living on marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation. (un statement, june 1998 – signed by the heads of all un agencies) the definition above is all-embracing and the akan concept of poverty may capture some of its features. poverty, in the view of the un, is a multifaceted concept, denoting limited access to technological and infrastructural amenities, thus making the poor only able to survive with the absolute minimum of daily food. poverty is extended to lack of access to social, economic, infrastructural facilities, deprivation, and remoteness, disempowerment, lack of freedom of speech and unfairness in development (agyekum 2016). harrison (1981) outlines issues on poverty to include lack of fertile land, denial of land, inequality, injustice, blatant ruthless and violent exploitation. based on these definitions, poverty, in the current study, is used to mean the condition in which one lacks the necessary resources to meet socially expected ways of living. scholars of social inequality, such as generalao (2005), jordan (2004), stephenson (2000), smith and stone (1989) and feather (1974), have identified four basic causes of poverty and wealth. these are: (a) individualistic attributions, which draw attention to the behaviour and/or actions of individual people, (b) structuralist beliefs that concentrate on socio-economic factors that affect people, (c) cultural notions, which look at poverty through the culture or group of people and their beliefs, and (d) the fatalistic principles, which attribute poverty to luck and fate. stephenson (2000), however, uses the social construction theory where social reality is the basis for the explanations and policies that cause poverty. he asserts that, “beliefs in the causes of wealth and poverty are determined by the individual’s perception of the justice of the current economic system” (p. 85). legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 25 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) each of the causes of poverty are briefly discussed below. factors that explain poverty studies on poverty have outlined some basic factors that act as the catalyst for poverty. in some cases, it is possible to attribute poverty to one or more of these factors. they are individual, cultural, structural and fatalistic determinants. let us briefly look at them. the individual factor in poverty some social psychologists discuss poverty from the standpoint of the individual. in discussing the individual factor, nilsson (2014) avers that “this approach suggests that the individual is the source of his own poverty, and other factors, such as the structures of a society are not very important. if a person is unemployed, it is the individual’s own responsibility to find a job, rather than society’s responsibility to create more job opportunities.” (p. 23) stephenson (2000, p. 89) did a comparative study on poverty in russian and estonia from 1991 to 1996. he observed that respondents predominantly blamed the poor for their poverty and identified the sources of their poverty as their loose morals, drunkenness and lack of effort (cf. agyekum 2016; generalao 2005; smith and stone 1989). this notion of the individual being responsible for poverty cannot solely explain the incidence of poverty worldwide. it is thus not wholly acceptable and has been criticised by those who allude to cultural, structural and fatalistic factors of poverty. agyekum (2016) interrogates the concept of poverty as espoused in the song ɛnneɛ mɛk4 na maba by alex konadu, a renowned highlife composer. it is worth noting that while society blames the poor for being lazy, the poor exonerate themselves by saying ɛnyɛ me a, ofie nnipa ayɛ me bɔne, obi na ɔde biribi ayɛ me, “i am not the cause of my woes; it is caused by family members and other people”. poverty is thus not attributed to only the individual’s behaviour. these other factors are explored in subsequent sections. culture and poverty nilsson (2014) opines that “the cultural approach to poverty, explains poverty through a culture or group of people, rather than one individual.… if a person is poor, it is likely that other persons within the same culture are also poor” (p. 24). in support of this notion, agyekum (2016) argues that 2 he provided an example where in the 1960s, a ghanaian church did not allow its members to be cocoa purchasing clerks fearing that they may cheat the farmers. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 26 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 “the sociocultural structures in the society, the perceptions, beliefs, taboo systems may debar some people from entering into some modern entrepreneurship thereby pushing them into conservative jobs” (p. 164).2 the cultural approach postulates that a given culture has certain values and attitudes that make the culture to survive. undoubtedly, if one is born into a culture of poverty, she can hardly release herself/himself from the vicious circle of poverty. the akans refer to this state as ohia ntentan, ‘poverty web’, which entangles the individual. as one struggles fiercely to release oneself from the web, some of the branches push the one back to the centre of the poverty web. kirby et al (1997) consider the cultural factors to poverty and note how certain cultural norms, values and attitudes make the poor resign themselves to their fate. discussing the cultural theories of poverty in ghana, asiedu et al. (2013) assert that among ghanaians, “poverty or the lack of economic advancement can be attributed to demons and other spirits (the spirit of poverty) or be the result of a accurse through witchcraft or sorcery” (p. 20). the belief in supernatural beings and what they can do is part of the cultural beliefs of ghanaians and africans. structural factors in poverty the structural factor of poverty extends beyond the individual, ethnic group or the culture, stressing the structures in society (beeghley 1988 p. 201; 3 jordan, 2004, p. 22; nilsson, 2014 p. 25) as the major cause of poverty. nilsson (2014) explains: according to the structural approach, it is not only the responsibility of the individuals to tackle poverty, but rather the structures within a state that keep individuals poor, should help them to escape from poverty. poverty can emanate from social stratification and institutional discrimination, if the structure of a society’s economy, employment, political system, education, class, race, gender is skewed towards the disadvantage of the masses, it creates social inequality. inequality in the distribution of the resources creates poverty. (p. 25) harrison (1981) discusses the structuralist notion of poverty, and posits “gross inequality is more usually the result of a deliberate and calculated attempt by the rich to increase their wealth to widen the gap between themselves and the masses [at the cost of absolute poverty]” (p. 331). galtung (1990) describes this phenomenon as ‘structural violence’, which is considered from the basis of gender whereby women are discriminated against in most patriarchal societies. 3 beeghley (1988) argues that “the structure of a society could work as an indication of how people behave; if people have fewer choices on how to deal with their situation, they would also be less effective to change it” (p. 205). legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 27 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) in akan communities, certain professions were traditionally the preserve of men, and women did not participate in them. these included driving, police, army, sports and lumbering. the inequality could be ethnic, racial, religious, partisan affiliation and cronyism that create a gap between us and them. in such a situation, where you find yourself determines whether you would be rich or poor. stephenson (2000) compares the individualistic and structural factors behind poverty and wealth, contending that “people who view society as operating unfairly tend to attribute wealth and poverty to societal causes and those who consider society to be fair see poverty as a result of individual deficiencies” (p. 98). if the basis of structural factors is inequality, then it is the responsibility of governments to design interventional mechanisms to reduce poverty. this is the basis for setting up welfare mechanisms to cater for the poor (kirby et all 1997 p. 590). in ghana, such social interventional programmes include: ghana poverty reduction strategy (gprs), national health insurance scheme (nhis), ghana school feeding programme, livelihood empowerment against poverty (leap) and free senior high school (fshs). fatalistic explanation of poverty the fatalistic factor argues that one’s poverty is not caused by the individual or the social inequalities in the society but rather by bad luck. stephenson (2000, p. 91) argues that fatalism is partly a consequence of the growing uncertainty and risk which has become an important factor of modern societies. sen (1992) similarly states that personal responsibility does not apply in conditions of uncertainty“the predicament of a person due to adverse happenings over which he has no control can scarcely be dismissed on the ground of personal responsibility” (p. 149). one’s poverty could result from sickness, epidemic, disaster, fire outbreak, sudden death of one’s benefactor or a vicarious curse inherited from a previous generation. theoretical framework: language ideology an ideology is a body of shared and predictable beliefs, values and cherished notions of a people that are real and implicit in their everyday life situations within a period of time. in the view of fairclough (1989), “ideologies are closely linked to language, because using language is the commonest form of social behaviour” (p. 2). for silverstein (1998), “language ideologies are sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (p. 123). language use and its interpretation are based on the linguistic ideology of the group. speakers’ awareness about the structure and nature of their language, affects their social and rational behaviour. verschueren (1999) states that “language ideologies are habitual ways of thinking and speaking about language and language use, which legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 28 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 are rarely challenged within a given community” (p. 198). irvine (1989) postulates that “language ideologies are the cultural systems of ideas about social and linguistic relationship, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (p. 225). language ideology effectively oscillates between language, culture, politics, concepts, perceptions, worldview, people’s intellect, psychological behaviour and sociocultural world. rumsey (1990) opines that “linguistic ideology refers to shared bodies of common sense notions about the nature of language in the world” (p. 346). since the beliefs are shared, their application is also predictable. language ideology provides a sociocultural understanding of the worldview, as well as the interpretation of the political, cultural, economic, law and religious processes and people’s way of life that inform the local beliefs about language and culture (kroskrity, 2006 p. 498). language ideology further links language to social identity, class, ranks, status and indexicality, gender, aesthetics, morality, epistemology, and operations of institutions of power, law and economics as we find in akan socio-economic systems (agyekum 2016 2010; kroskrity 2001, p. 413; silverstein 1998, p. 126). interrogating language ideologies from the standpoint of law, haviland (2003), submits that “linguistic ideology reflects the ‘ideas about language and its place in social arrangements or its use and usability for social and political ends, of which the concept of “language rights” must surely be a part and a product” (p. 764). with regard to the use of language, language ideology discusses language policies in multilingual societies and choice of language in education, politics and judicial systems. the emphasis can be on the major and official languages and any attempt to use any of the minority languages in official settings will be considered as linguistic paranoia (haviland 2003). 4 the understanding of the akan sociocultural concept of ohia, ‘poverty’, its types and characteristics is based on the akan worldview, society and cultural beliefs. irvine and gal (2000) aver that linguistic ideologies refer to “the ideas with which participants and observers frame their understanding of linguistic varieties and map those understandings onto people, events, and activities that are significant to them” (p. 35). participants in the linguistic environment are thus at the very centre of linguistic ideology. language ideology is a useful framework for the ethnographic and comparative analysis of ideological systems and communicative practices in different societies (van dijk 1998). the theory of language ideology has been used in many interactional concepts and studies of ethnographic topics. haviland (2003) states that linguistic paranoia “is the presumption that when co-present persons use a language you cannot understand, it can only be because they are saying something they do not want you to understand, probably because whatever is being said is “against” you” (p.771). the use of such a minority language in a multilingual society is taken as inherently insulting or threatening. there are misfeelings of insecurity since people think that they are being harassed by not knowing what is being stated. 4 legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 29 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) for instance, agyekum (2012, 2011, 2010, and 2006), employed it in his study on akan aphorisms and proverbs on marriage, language and conflicts, language, gender and power, and akan traditional arbitration. in these studies, it was noted how these practices are performed based on the perception and worldview of the akan people embodied in their language ideology. the akan people the word ‘akan’ refers to both the people and their language. the akan language has 13 dialects, namely asante, akuapem, akwamu, fante, akyem, agona, assin, denkyira, twifo, wassaw, kwawu, bron and buem. some bron speakers are in the ivory coast. the akan people are the largest ethnic group in ghana. according to the 2010 national population census, 47.5% of the ghanaian population are native akans and has the majority of the ghanaian population, speaking it fluently as non-native speakers. the akans are found predominantly in southern ghana. akan is spoken as a native language in six of the ten geographic regions in ghana namely, ashanti, eastern, western, central, brong ahafo and volta (northern part) regions. the akan speaking communities in the volta region of ghana are sandwiched by the ewe communities. akan is studied from primary school up to the university level. methodology the methodology employed for this paper was basically qualitative. the specific method used was interviews. the interviewees were four retired akan lecturers of the university of ghana, winneba and cape coast. all of them are mphil holders in akan. a greater proportion of the data was collected from library studies as secondary data that i picked from books on akan proverbs, especially appiah et al (2000) and ayisi (1966). i also collected some of the proverbs on poverty from akan written literature books including fiction (brako by adi), drama (etire nni safoa by amoako) and poetry (mewɔ bi ka by adi). furthermore, i tapped some of the proverbs from akan oral literature materials such as recorded folksongs, proverbs, folktales and dirges. i crosschecked the proverbs from the secondary data with the four renowned akan speakers and fellow akan lecturers mentioned above who gave their comments on issues. a renowned speaker in this context is one who speaks the akan language fluently and can read, write and analyse the language. on the whole, i collected 64 proverbs on ohia, ‘poverty’ among the akans. some relate specifically to poverty, poor persons, money, and the power of money. the expressions are analysed from lexical, syntactic and semantic perspectives. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 30 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 proverbs in akan proverbs are terse sayings that embody general truths or principles and ways of life of a people. the general truths are based on people’s past experiences, philosophy, perception, ideology, socio-cultural concepts and worldview. we will see how the akans view poverty. their perception cannot be separated from their experiences about poverty, and how they look at poverty and wealth through proverbs. oral literature scholars such as finnegan (2012), agyekum (2005), okpewho (1992) and yankah (1989) have researched extensively into proverbs. agyekum (2005) postulates that “proverbs are interpretations of traditional wisdom based on the experiences and socio-political life of our elders” (p. 9). in akan indigenous communication, the use of proverbs is the acknowledged mark of one’s communicative competence.5 agyekum (2005) asserts that, in akan, there are adages such as ɛbɛ ne ɔkasa mu abohemmaa, “the proverb is the most appropriate aspect of speech”, ɛtwa asɛm tia, “it curtails matters”, ɛnka asɛm ho a, ɛnwie dɛ yɛ, “without it, a speech does not acquire its seasoned nature” (p. 10). akan proverbs are aesthetic devices of vitality in speech, and the salt of a language, without which the real taste of the ‘language dish’ is not felt. proverbs are used as verbal strategies to stave off, or contain, tense situations stemming from face-to-face communication in akan (agyekum, 2010; yankah, 1989). multiple proverbs concretise the value of language and the positive attributes of the speaker to handle face-threatening acts and to depict his politeness level. if an akan speaker is well versed in the culture and knows the background of his/her interactants, s/he would be able to use the proper thematic proverbs as we find in this paper. analysis of the proverbs on poverty the proverbs on poverty in this paper are analysed from the point of view of (a) conditional clauses, (b) use of causative marker ma, “let, cause”, and (c) the use of the copular verb yɛ, “to be”. use of conditional clauses to depict the effects of poverty the proverbs under this category show that when you are afflicted by poverty there are certain negative results that dog your life. the proverbs in this section are captured in conditional clauses to indicate that the presence of the entity x calls for y and vice versa. 5 speakers’ ability to use appropriate proverbs in their appropriate socio-cultural contexts depict their language competence (agyekum 2012; yankah 1989). for instance, in agyekum (2016 and 2005) the composer, alex konadu, uses a series of proverbs to depict his competence in the akan language. the proverbs are aesthetically woven to promote the song’s functions and confirm the artist’s creativity. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 31 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) they are marked by the split conjunction (sɛ)….a, which can denote the concept of conditionality (if) and temporality (when); both are expressed by identical lexical and syntactic forms in akan. the first part (sɛ) is optional but the …a, is obligatory and it is always followed by a comma to mark the clausal boundary between the subordinate conditional clause and the main clause. (1) (sɛ) ɛhia buroni a, ɔsan ɛpo. “if the white man becomes poor he crosses the ocean.” 6 traditionally, the akans assumed that the white man lived in a country of abundant wealth and therefore felt comfortable over there. for him to travel overseas, implies that he was driven by a certain crucial need that he felt could be only satisfied in africa. (2) (sɛ) ɛhia ɔbarima a, ne yere bɔ no so mpokua. “if a man becomes poor, his wife despises him” (appiah et al 2000 p. 465). among the akans, (a traditionally male-dominated society), the husband traditionally exerts absolute power and control over his wife and children. the wife should respect him because he is the breadwinner. if the man is poor and thus becomes irresponsible, and his financial duties are performed by the wife, he is not respected. the wife can control the husband. an extension of the above is captured by the expression x bɔ y so mpokua, which means x bluffs on y. poverty has reduced the status, dignity and power of the man. (3) (sɛ) ɛhia wo a, ɛnwu. “if you are poor do not die.” do not despair in adversity. this proverb consoles the poor, and stresses that poverty is not the only adversity as there are some other situations in life (sickness, bereavement, false accusation, etc.) that are more stressful than poverty. it is supported by another akan motivational proverb; wowɔ nkwa a, na wowɔ adeɛ, “if you have life you have wealth.” in so far as there is life, there is hope. (4) (sɛ) ɛhia wo a, woka asɛmpa mpo a, ɔmanfoɔ bu no nsɛnhunu. “when you are poor, even when you say sensible things, it is regarded as nonsense by the people.” this denotes the power of money and the predicament of the poor person. 6 a need is what drives people to do things and is normally referred to as adehiadeɛ, while ohia, ‘poverty’ normally refers to money and other material things. everyone has needs which may drive them to do certain things, but not everyone is poor. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 32 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 (5) (sɛ) ohia hia wo a, ɔba kwasea mpo tu wo fo. “if you are poor, even the foolish person advises you.” in proverbs (4) and (5), poverty is associated with folly and non-intelligence. it is assumed that the poor have nothing sensible to offer. s/he is side-lined when it comes to deliberations of important issues even in their own family. example (5) further indicates that the poor person’s intelligence becomes evident when fools arrogate to themselves the right to advise him/her on financial issues so as to reduce poverty. the advice is not restricted to finances as it also relates to a general disregard for the poor due to their low financial social status. this is based on the concept of the individual as the source of poverty (cf. section on the individual factor in poverty). (6) (sɛ) ohia hia wo a, w’anim te sɛ akaatia, w’ano sɛ onipa ano nso wontumi nkasa “if poverty afflicts you, your face looks like a chimpanzee, your mouth resembles a person’s mouth but you cannot speak.” (this proverb is cited from one of the highlife songs of the renowned composer agyemang opambour entitled ohia asɛm.). (7) (sɛ) ohia soma wo a, ɛbɛyɛ dɛn na worenkɔ? “when poverty sends you on an errand, how can you refuse?” (8) (sɛ) ohia ka wo a, na woayɛ mmɔbɔ. “when you are afflicted by poverty you become miserable.” in proverbs (6), (7) and (8), poverty is connected with silence, vulnerability and pity because of how the society perceives the poor. a poor person is downgraded to the level of an animal. s/he has all the features of a human being but does not have the human mouth and potency to participate in human communication. in the chronolgy of evolution, the closest animals to human beings are apes and chimpanzees. in this proverb, a poor person is equated to a chimpanzee who has some similar linguistic human features but cannot talk. the poor man’s human rights to freedom of speech are trampled upon and curtailed. this notion supports harrison’s (1981) assertion that “the greatest tragedy of third world poverty today is the underdevelopment of man himself. poor people never reach their full human potential in physical strength, intelligence and well being. they are trapped in a pattern of overlapping vicious circle” (p. 212–213). in ranking the status of people in society, the poor are placed very low. in proverb (7), poverty controls the person and decides even his/her movements. wherever poverty sends you, you cannot refuse; poverty causes legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 33 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) you to do menial jobs and run errands for little money. poverty does not respect age even in african where age is often highly respected. in proverb (6), if a person is reduced to the level of an animal, s/he is a non-entity, marginalised and despised. in present-day ghana, young employers can engage older people and disrespect them, due to the power of money. (9) (sɛ) wo ni di hia a, wonnyae nkɔfa obi nyɛ na. “if your mother is poor, you do not put her aside and take somebody as your mother.” this proverb is in line with the structural factor in poverty discussed earlier. when you find yourself in a certain social stratum of poverty, it is difficult to move out of it. hence, you have to be content with what you have and who your relatives are. you cannot despise your mother because she is poor. proverb 9 further indicates that even though poverty is negative, family and community ties are ranked higher than money. there are times therefore when the poor, on account of their social ties and good interpersonal relations, are revered despite their material status. we saw in proverb 3 that life supersedes poverty and wealth. therefore if you have life, it is better. these two proverbs imply that poverty is not negative in all cases. the use of causative ma, ‘let’ in proverbs on poverty some akan proverbs on poverty have the causative marker ma to imply that poverty causes you to fall into some unpleasant situations. the causation implies that poverty is so strong that it acts as the controller and agent while the poor person is the controlled, undergoer and the patient (cf. agyekum, 2004 and dua, 2013 on causation). ohia (poverty) ------------> ohiani (poor person) controller (agent) ---------> controlled/undergoer (patient) in all the akan proverbs and ideology under this section, poverty is the powerful stimulus and the person has to respond to the dictates of its power. poverty leads to stress, loss of one’s intellect and wisdom and suppression by the rich. again, poverty causes the poor to reveal their expertise or sell their conscience to the rich who are then glorified. it reduces the poor person to the level of an animal (a vulture). it makes one eat unwholesome food, and deprives one of one’s favourite dish. it drives away one’s friends and makes one aware of real friends. it can finally change one’s status drastically and turn a royal into a slave. most of the causative sentences in the proverbs employ the focus marker na, ‘it is’, which implies that ohia is exclusive to cause the situation inherent in legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 34 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 the proverb. a focused item in a sentence refers to the most relevant information in a given discourse. according to boadi (1974) in akan, na is the basic focus marker and implies an ‘exclusive, emphatic, restricting’ item in a sentence. in akan, an item focused with na is normally fronted and the subject is repeated after the na. if the focused item is human, it is represented by the 3rd person singular pronoun ɔ‘he /she’; if it is inanimate, as in poverty, it is represented by the inanimate pronoun ɛ‘it’, as in the examples below. some of the proverbs indicate that poverty triggers the emotional state of the individual or make him/ her act in a certain way. these examples are based on akan folk knowledge, wisdom and experiences. in duah (2013, pp. 212-217), ohia in proverbs 10-17, would be acting as the trigger/prompt, which causes a voluntary or an involuntary change in the cause.7 (10) ohia ma adwenedwene. “poverty causes worrying/planning” (11) ohia ma awiɛmfoɔ nyansa yera. “poverty makes the humble person lose his/her wisdom.” (poverty lowers one‟s standard (appiah et al 2000, p. 469). (12) ohia na ɛma ohiani tɔn ne nyansa ma osikani. “it is poverty that makes the poor person sell his/her wisdom to the rich.” (if you are poor, you are easily influenced or deceived (appiah et al, 2000 p. 470). (13) ohia na ɛma ɔdehyeɛ dane akoa. “it is poverty that makes the royal become a servant.” (14) ohia na ɛma ɔkanni yɛ aboa anka ɛnyɛ saa na ɔteɛ. “it is poverty that makes the akan person look like a beast, for that is not his/her nature.” (15) ohia na ɛma ɔpɛtɛ di bini anka ɛnyɛ aduane a ɔpɛ ne no. “it is poverty that makes the vulture eat faeces for that is not the food it likes.” (this is one of the lines in a song entitled ohia asɛm by the highlife musician, agyemang opambour). 7 in discussing causation duah (2013, p. 217) posits that “the prompt and trigger configurations are similar in some ways. in both trigger and prompt, the causer is usually an event acting as a stimulus which causes the causee to undergo a change of state.” legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 35 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) (16) ohia na ema obi tua n’akɔnnɔdeɛ. “it is poverty that lets someone abstain from his/her favourite delicacy.” (17) ohia da na ɛma wohunu nnipa. “it is the period of poverty that makes you see people.” “adversity tests the sincerity of one’s friends or neighbours.” in examples 14 and 15, we encounter the subjunctive marker anka ‘would have’ to imply that since the proposition stated is not real and practical, there is the need for circumspection. the discourse marker anka also indicates that an occurrence is based on the absence of a necessary condition that did not materialise (agyekum 2012, p. 140). amfo (2007) posits that anka is one of the modals in akan. in the translated english versions, the proverbs start with ‘it is’ which is the gloss for the akan focus marker na. in english grammar, such constructions are labelled as cleft constructions. in akan, they are referred to as focus constructions. cleft sentences are used to help us focus on a particular part of the sentence and emphasise this part by fronting it, and in the akan construction, focus sentences are treated the same way. the importance of the focus marker na in the proverbs of poverty as seen in examples 12-17 is that it focuses on the power of poverty to trigger the actions and inactions of the poor person. downing and locke (2006) indicate that “in clefting, we re-organise the content of a single clause into two related parts. the effect of the resulting structures is to focus on one element, the new, which always follows a form of the verb be” (p. 250). there are two kinds of cleft: the it-cleft and the whcleft, and they both put the element under discussion into a strong focus. the main function of the it-cleft is to mark contrastive focus, which is very often implicit. when the focus items are highlighted the other elements are ‘given’ or ‘presupposed information.’ downing and locke (2006) define presupposition as a piece of information, which is assumed by the speaker, without it being asserted (p. 250). the use of the copula verb yɛ, ‘to be’ in poverty proverbs in the akan proverbs under this category, poverty is metaphorically compared to some negative social aspects of life to indicate that poverty is actually negative. some of the negative things compared with poverty are madness, loss of reputation, unpreparedness, bitterness, etc. in some of the proverbs, the link between poverty and the negative attribute is the copula verb yɛ, ‘to be’. the metaphor implies that poverty has all the semantic attributes that come after the copula verb; x yɛ y. the stative verbs that encode the akan copula verbs indicate that the antecedent np is in a state of affairs. the copula verb also connotes that the np that comes after it, complements the antecedent and that legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 36 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 they both share a commonality. (18) ohia yɛ adammɔ. “poverty is madness.” a popular ghanaian song entitled sika frɛ bogya by slim young in 2004 has the line ohia yɛ adammɔ, “poverty is madness”. he then laments on poverty as follows: (a) ohia hia wo a, hwɛ sɛ wiase teɛ. “if you become poor look at how the world is.” (b) wonam baabi a, mmɔbɔmmɔbɔ. “you walk at places miserably.” (c) amanfoɔ hunu w’anim a, ɛwɔ deɛ wɔbɛyɛ. “when people see your face they behave differently” (d) wotwe wo ho nso a, ɛwɔ deɛ wɔbɛyɛ. “when you depart they do something different.” (e) abusua kɔ agyina a, yɛnhwehwɛ wo. “when the family goes into counsel they do not look for you.” (f) woka asɛmpa koraa a, yɛbu no nkwadaasɛm. “when you say something very important, others consider it childish.” the statements in a-f reflect akans’ ideology and perceptions about the poor and how people despise and marginalise them on all fronts. (19) ohia yɛ animguaseɛ. “poverty is a disgrace.” (20) ohia nam yɛ nwono. “the meat of poverty is bitter.‟ this implies that poverty is a cruel state of affairs. (21) ohia panin nyɛ panin pa. “an impoverished elder is not a real elder.” (if you do not have the financial means you do not wield power) the status of the poor elder can be changed and handed over to a younger person who is rich. a typical example is when there is a chieftaincy vacancy in the family. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 37 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) (22) ohia nyɛ adepa. “poverty is not a good thing.” (23) ohia nhyɛ da. “poverty does not appoint its day of visitation.” this example alerts people that there is uncertainty as to when poverty can afflict a person. a rich man can easily become bankrupt and poor; invalidity and loss of job and property can easily change the rich person for him to become very poor. in examples 21-22, the copula verb is in the negative to indicate that poverty does not match with the positive complements after it. the concept of ohiani, ‘a poor person’, in akan agyekum (2016) states that “the word ohia is derived from the verb stem -hia, ‘to be in need’, plus the nominalising prefix o-; the agentive suffix -ni is added to derive ohiani, ‘a poor person’, (pl. ahiafoɔ)” (p. 165). ohia-ni is a poor person, who is in need of money and other essentials of life to function like others in the society. s/he is a person who does not have the basic means and resources of subsistence and living. asiedu et al. (2013 p. 19) record that where the elite perceive poverty as a lack of basic necessities and provision of social services, the rural poor see poverty in terms of the vulnerability to environmental factors that affect their livelihood including lack of food security. even though akan is a communitarian society where people traditionally care for one other, there is a latent economic class system whereby the poor are distinguished from the rich. the proverbs and concepts about poverty and the poor people discussed in this paper are clear manifestations of a covert class system which marginalises the poor. when you are pushed into the vicious cycle of poverty, there is no way you can disentangle yourself. even when there is a chance, there would be an obstacle that closes the door to prosperity and wealth. proverb 29 refers to this situation as follows; (29) ohiani bɛnya ne ho no na bata kwan asi. “by the time the poor man becomes wealthy, the road for monetary ventures would have ‘been blocked’.” this is best appreciated from the viewpoint of structural violence. the semantic domains in which the poor person finds himself include pandemonium, loss of items, accusations, regret, lack of sympathy and ill-luck. others are nondiscrimination of food and accommodation, non-recognition of one’s good deeds and potentials, attachment to dirt and insects, lack of love for one’s wife/ husband and lack of a befitting funeral. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 38 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 other issues portrayed by the proverbs imply that the poor should be tolerant and hide their ideas and good thoughts, for nobody takes them seriously. proverb 26 states that ohiani asɛm hwehwe nnipa aso. “a poor man’s problem is ‘wondered about’ by people.” his/her ideas, speech and thoughts are always misinterpreted such that even when he says good things they are considered bad. his wisdom resides in the hands of the rich and they can only display their wisdom in private where nobody recognises them (see proverbs 30 and 39). when the poor person blows a melodious tune on the horn it is considered cacophonous. this is explicated by proverb 36 as (sɛ) ohiani hyɛn abɛn a ɔnnya tiefoɔ. “if the poor person blows his/her horn s/he does not get a listener.” the poor wear ragged clothes, are always found guilty, shunned and cheated, cannot brag in public and do not have friends (proverbs 45 & 46). they are cursed not to be wealthy because the day they become wealthy, the state will be ruined (proverb 48). all accusations and criminal activities are attributed to them. finally, the poor treat their sores in a corner to avoid the gaze and sympathy of others (proverb 51). some proverbs depict that being poor evokes sympathy and it is painful to be poor (proverbs 27-28). (24) abogyanbumbɔ a, ohiani na ne nnoɔma yera. “in times of pandemonium it is the poor person’s goods that are missing.” (25) asɛmbɔne sɛ ohiani. enti deɛ ɛnni me soɔ no momfa nto me so. “criminal cases befit the poor, so level false charges against me.”8 (26) ohiani asɛm hwehwe nnipa aso. “people wander about a poor person’s problem.” (27) ohiani asɛm yɛ ya. ‘‘issues about the poor person are painful.‟ (28) ohiani asɛm yɛ mmɔbɔ. ‘‘issues about the poor person are pitiable.’’ (29) ohiani bɛnya ne ho no na bata kwan asi. “by the time the poor person becomes wealthy, the road for monetary ventures would have ‘been blocked’.” this proverb is used when poor people miss good opportunities that could have freed them from poverty. 8 proverb 25 is the title of a song composed in the 1970’s by vasco osei kofi, a renowned highlife artist. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 39 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) (30) (sɛ) ohiani bu ɛbɛ a, yɛmfa. “if a poor person quotes a proverb, it has no value.” the import of this proverb is that proverbs are supposed to come from the wise people and in the akan society it is wrongly perceived that a poor person cannot be wise. (31) ohiani didi abra-abraa. “a poor person eats without discrimination” (appiah et al 2000, p. 473). a poor person has no choice and it tallies with the english proverb, “a beggar has no choice.” (32) (sɛ) ohiani dɔ ne yere a, ɔnhunu. “when a poor man loves his wife, she does not see it.” a poor husband cannot express his love by providing his wife with cash and gifts. (33) ohiani funu nkyɛre fie. “a poor man’s corpse does not remain in the house for a long time.” 9 (34) (sɛ) ohiani fura kente a, yɛse ɔfura kyɛnkyɛn.10 “if a poor person puts on a kente cloth, we say that s/he is wearing an inferior cloth.” (35) (sɛ) ohiani fura kyeme a, ayɛ sɛ ɛfura dunsini. “if a poor man wears an expensive cloth, it looks like a cloth on the stump of a tree.” (36) (sɛ) ohiani hyɛn abɛn a ɔnnya tiefoɔ “if a poor person blows his/her horn, s/he does not get a listener.” (this proverb was tapped from a song entitled ‘aba saa’ composed by the late highlife musician, dr. paa bobo). 9 the family of the poor person is not ready to spend so much time, energy and funds on his/her funeral so s/he is buried very early. these days, akans put their corpses at the morgue. they put the poor person’s corpse there for a few days/weeks but a rich person can be there for months while the family prepares for a glamorous burial. 10 kente is a rich and expensive cloth occasionally worn by chiefs, rich people and dignitaries. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 40 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 (37) ohiani mfura ne ntomago mfa nni apiripiragorɔ. “the poor person does not wear his/her cloth and engages in dangerous games.” since it is the only cloth s/he cannot afford to lose it though tough games. (38) ohiani gyaaseni ne nwansena (appiah et al 2000, p. 473). “a poor person’s domestic attendant is the house fly.” a poor person has to put up with dirt and discomfort. s/he wears ragged clothing and eats poor food where house flies hover around the food. (39) (sɛ) ohiani ka asɛm a, ɛdane asɛmmɔne. “if a poor person says something it is misinterpreted and depreciated.” 40) ohiani kanea ne ayerɛmo “the poor person’s light is lightning.” s/he stays in darkness and it is only lightning that provides him/her with light. (41) ohiani mfa abofu. “a poor person does not become angry.’ s/he has to tolerate all provocations.” when s/he becomes angry and offends others s/he has no money to settle the case. if s/he is angry, s/he may lose favours and gifts from benevolent people. (42) (sɛ) ohiani ne sikani goro a, ɛnsɔ. “if a wealthy person befriends the poor, the friendship does not last” (akrofi 1958, p. 147). people always befriend their peers; the rich only play with their fellow rich people. he/she may over-cheat the poor friend and the poor will definitely break off. if the rich person becomes fed up with the consistent requests from the poor, the friendship breaks up. (43) ohiani mpo daberɛ. “a poor person does not refuse a sleeping place.” (44) (sɛ) ohiani nim nyansa a, ɛka ne tirim. (appiah et al 2000, p. 475) “a poor person keeps his/her wise ideas to himself.” this implies that when the poor even express their wise ideas, nobody listens to them. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 41 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) (45) ohiani nni asɛm nni bem. “a poor person is never innocent in a case.” prejudice is always against the poor. in the current akan situation, the poor can only win a case if s/he can hire a good lawyer. (46) ohiani nni adwamsɛm. “a poor person does not brag in public.” this is so because nobody takes the poor serious. (47) ohiani nni yɔnkoɔ. “the poor person has no friend.” (48) (sɛ) ohiani nya adeɛ a, ɔman bɔ. “if a poor person becomes rich the state is ruined.” (quick acquisition of wealth results in dissension (appiah et al 2000, p. 475)). (49) ohiani nyansa hyɛ osikani nsam. (appiah et al 2000, p. 476). “a poor person’s wisdom is in the hands of the rich person.” a poor person’s intelligence is of little use unless he/she is backed by a wealthy person. (50) ohiani nyansa/ano nnuru dwam. “a poor person’s wisdom/mouth does not reach public places.” the wisdom or ideas of the poor person are disregarded. the poor are not invited to public deliberations that involve monetary affairs. (51) ohiani tutu ne kuro mantwea. “the poor person treats his/her sore in the corner.” all the above notions about the concept of poverty reflect the folk knowledge and wisdom of the akans based on societal evidence rather than on scientific evidence. proverbs based on the word sika, ‘money’. this section discusses proverbs based on the akan socio-cultural concept of money which sees poverty as something unwarranted. the presence of money marks poverty as a social canker. some of the examples denote the humiliations legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 42 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 and difficulties people experience when they lack money. this is depicted by the verb nni (do not have). some of the examples were adopted from akrofi (1958), ayisi (1966) and appiah et al (2000). the semantic domains expressed by poverty are lack of wisdom, forced mutism, having faint ideas, rejection of one’s suggestions, complaints about hunger and small thefts. the examples are couched in conditional clauses indicating that if you do not have money, then something negative happens. they are marked by the conditional clause marker (sɛ) ….a, ‘if/when’ as we saw in the first section. (52) (sɛ) wonni sika a, asɛ wonnim nyansa. “if you do not have money it looks as if you are not wise.” (53) (sɛ) wonni sika a, woka asɛm a, yɛmfa. “if you do not have money you are not taken seriously.” (54) (sɛ) wonni sika a, wonni ano. “if you do not have money you lose your power of speech.” (55) (sɛ) wonni sika a, wose akura afa wo nam. “if you do not have money you claim that a mouse has taken your meat.” (56) (sɛ) wonni sika a, wose ɛmo mmee. “if you do not have money you claim that rice does not ‘make your belly full’.” the traditional staple food of the akans is fufuo, a very heavy food; a small quantity can fill the belly, but rice is lighter. it is believed that to fill your belly with rice, you have to eat a lot, and thus you need to spend more money. a poor person who can afford to buy only a little amount of rice will complain that it does not fill the belly. he/she will rather prefer to use the small amount of money on a heavier meal that can sustain him/her for a longer period. (57) (sɛ) wo sika sua a, wo koso nam nso sua. “if you have little money your share in meat is also very little.” (58) (sɛ) wo sika sua a, w’asɛm sua. “if you have little money, you do not have much to say.” even when the poor have much to say, the society and the rich may not invite them or will not be ready to listen to them. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 43 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) the power of money akan proverbs under this section reveal how powerful money is. the proverbs elevate money and make it more powerful and indispensable in life such that without it one is nothing. the semantic entities to which money is compared are innocence, chiefdom, power, masculinity and suppression. there is the english adage that states that ‘he who has gold makes the rules. ‘in the bible, ecclesiastes (10:19) states that ‘a feast is made for laughter, and wine makes merry: but money answers everything.’ (new king james version (nkjv)). the latter part of the text shows the absolute power enshrined in money; it can make and unmake. (59) sika na ɛma ɔfɔdifoɔ di bem. “it is money that makes a guilty person become innocent.” (60) sika frɛ bogya. “money attracts relatives” the proverb literally means that money ‘invites blood.’ in akan, the word bogya ‘blood’ refers to blood relations and the society thinks that if you are rich then your relatives are always ready to draw closer to you. on the contrary if you are poor, all your relatives will despise and avoid you. in a song sika frɛ bogya by slim young composed in 2014, he compared richness with poverty and gave the accolades of money as follows: (61) sika yɛ ɔmama, “money is a dignitary” (62) sika wɔ tumi, “money has power.” the power attached to money makes the rich powerful enough to control the entire family. the musician states that abusua anhu wo a, wɔmmɔ pɔw. “if the family does not see you they do not take any firm decision.” abusua anhu wo a, wɔnkasa, “if the family does not see you, they do not speak”, and finally sɛbe wotumi keka deɛ wopɛ, ‘you can say whatever you like.’ the rich person is also linguistically powerful and can therefore break the decorum of communication and say what he/she likes. (63) sika ne barima. “money is the man.” (money is powerful.) (64) sika ne ɔhene. “money is king.” (money rules all.) legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 44 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 conclusion in this paper, we have considered how the akans conceptualise poverty based on their language, culture, society and experience. we discussed poverty under language ideology, which rationalises people’s experiences, behaviours, attitudes and expressions based on their culture, beliefs, religion, philosophy, economic and political systems. we identified four basic sources of poverty and these are individualistic, cultural, fatalistic and structural. the akan sociocultural concept of poverty was discussed through the lenses of proverbs. the proverbs were discussed under the negative attributes of poverty. these include foolishness, disgrace, madness, de-personification, lack of speech, vulnerability, solitary life, marginalisation, stigmatisation, suppression and oppression, prejudice, lack of love and respect, and lack of intelligence. these notions and concepts about poverty in akan cohere with akan language ideology. the paper sees the use of indirection through proverbs as a channel of expressing the akan sociocultural concept of poverty. the concept still prevails in modern times even when the class system in akan has widened on account of western education, globalisation and technology all of which have created various strata, nuances and differences between the rich and the poor. the degradation of the poor person has been worsened now that the society has become more materialistic. the economic power anchored on monetary gains is now associated with linguistic power, and the poor have to keep quiet in most sectors of public life. ghanaian politics, civil service, other parts of the economy, religion, education and the whole society have become more materialistic. akans, and ghanaians as a whole, have fallen prey to the western capitalist idea of development and the society. for example, politics has become so monetary based that if one is not rich, one cannot join the main stream partisan politics since electioneering campaigns involve a lot of money. the smaller parties that are not rich have performed abysmally low in all elections. the proverbs in this paper point to the power of money and the woes of the poor and further account for why people try all means, fair or foul, to become rich. the paper noted that poverty does not relate only to lack of money but also lack of basic items, accusations, ill-luck, non-discrimination of food and accommodation, non-recognition of one’s potentials, lack of love for one’s spouse and non-befitting funerals. notwithstanding the negative connotations painted by most of the proverbs and akan ideology about poverty, the paper stresses that poverty is not negative in all aspects because some of the proverbs rate family and social ties over and above money. again, the paper has through one of the proverbs argued that poverty is not the only adversity since there are some other conditions in life that are more stressful than poverty. poverty then does not warrant death. we have also seen that the definition of poverty and a poor person may change from legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 45 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) one community to another. however, there are common denominators. legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | 46 agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 references adi, k. 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[recorded by faisal helwani records]. accra legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) p a g e | agyekum, k. / legon journal of the humanities 28.2 (2017) 23 48 legon journal of the humanitie_2.cdr on the origins of locative for in west african pidgin english: a componential approach 1 micah corum abstract this paper discusses possible origins of locative for in west african pidgin englishes. the development of for is framed componentially, that is, in terms of deriving its constructional meaning from different components that sustained linguistic and cultural contact along the upper and lower guinea coasts during the early modern period (1500-1800) among west african, portuguese, afro-portuguese, british and afro-british populations and the sailing populations of both official naval vessels of the british and portuguese empires and privateering ships. 1. introduction this paper investigates traces of contact in the emergence of locative for in west african pidgin english. we take a “componential approach” to the formation of the construction in various west african pidgin englishes (hancock 1986, 1993, 1994) and discuss how the construction would have developed in the early modern period from prolonged linguistic contact with upper and lower guinea coast languages, the portuguese creoles and the regional varieties of english that were spoken on board both the official naval vessels of the british empire and privateering ships. thus, following hancock, a division of the 1 micah corum is a research fellow in linguistic diversity management in urban areas, universität hamburg. linguistic components is made as follows: the creole component, the guinea coast component, and the english component. convergence among the three components led to the formation of for as the prototypical locative construction in west african pidgin englishes. 1.1 the general locative construction in all west african pidgin and creole languages, there exists a polysemous locative construction that conveys a general concept of space. today the construction is realized as na in portuguese-lexifier creole languages and certain english-lexifier creole languages spoken from guinea bissau to equatorial guinea, and as for in west african english-lexifier pidgincreoles in ghana, nigeria and cameroon (bakker, 2008). apart from pidgins and creoles, the general locative construction appears in niger-congo languages. table 1 lists locative constructions in some lower guinea coastal languages and west african pidgins and creoles. corum | 44special edition , 2012 | 43legon journal of the humanities table 1. west african coastal languages and their locative constructions language general locative locative copula construction construction english-lexifier pidgin/creole ghanaian pidgin english for dé nigerian pidgin for dé kamtok for dé pichi na dé kwa akan w? w? ewe le le fon dò dò west benue-congo yoruba ní ~ n’, l’ wà igbo na ibì, ?n? east benue-congo efik ké ~ k’ du ijoid kolokuma ? tími, emí bantu duala o bé mpongwe go ni~na~ne ne, (a)re as table 1 shows, the general locative construction derives its form from an identical locative copula in kwa languages. in other languages, including the pidgin and creole languages, the origin of the general locative construction is not as transparent. it can be stated with confidence, though, that the general locative construction in west african pidgin and creole languages is not derived from the locative copula construction. in addition to the obvious differences in form between for and the locative copula de, the historical uses of the two constructions are incompatible. the general locative construction appeared in pidgin english more than two centuries before the first attestation of the locative copula de in 1897 (huber 2011: slide 16). the emergence of for should not be argued for in terms of internal linguistic motivation then. the general locative construction is assumed in this paper to have been modelled on uses of similar constructions in languages that contributed to the development of west african pidgin englishes. both portuguese and guinea coast languages contributed to the formation of na in portugueselexifier creoles. this paper implies that na in the portuguese creoles would have served as a springboard for a general locative construction to emerge in the english-based pidgins of the lower guinea coast. the orthography and abbreviations used in the linguistic examples below appear as they do in the works from which they were taken. the authors’ glosses are retained so that the meanings that had been assigned to a morpheme, lexical item or other construction would not be lost. portuguese and guinea coast languages contributed to the formation of na in portugueselexifier creoles. this paper implies that na in the portuguese creoles would have served as a springboard for a general locative corum | 46special edition , 2012 | 45legon journal of the humanities construction to emerge in the english-based pidgins of the lower guinea coast. the orthography and abbreviations used in the linguistic examples below appear as they do in the works from which they were taken. the authors’ glosses are retained so that the meanings that had been assigned to a morpheme, lexical item or other construction would not be lost. 2.1 portuguese-lexifier creole component portuguese-lexifier creoles could be found along the lower guinea coast throughout the early modern period (barbot 1732; atkins 1735; protten 1764). in reference to the linguistic situation on the gold coast in the mid 18th century, christian protten remarked on: fante-eller aming-sprog, som strax sagt er, fra axim lige indtil riovolta, crepe eller popo, naest det negerportugisisk, forstaaet, talt og af alle sorte som et generalsprog. fante or amina language which, quickly said, is understood and spoken from axim even to river volta, crepe or popo, next to the negroportuguese [pidgin, i.e.] by all sorts [of people] as a general language (trutenau, 1971: 5-6, original brackets). merchants on the lower guinea coast would have carried over remnants of the portuguese varieties when they interacted on a more regular basis with english and dutch traders at the beginning of the 18th century. even the asante traders from inland would have used elements of the portuguese variety when dealing in english, as huber surmises: after about 1700, the hinterland akanists must also have started to use this english-lexicon variety when coming to the coast, perhaps by relexification of their traditional portuguese jargon. (1999: 45) it cannot be said with certainty that na was the general locative construction par excellence in 17th century portuguese creole–there is no documentation of the creole during that time; th the first documents of kriyol, for example, are from the 19 century (bocandé 1849; schuchardt 1888). however, the construction occurs in many of the atlantic creoles that are believed to have an upper guinea origin (hancock 1986; martinus 1997; jacobs 2009). if features of the core grammar of papiamentu can be linked to language (jacobs 2009: 27-31), then one can assume those grammatical features were in place much earlier in the guinea bissau and cape verde varieties. taking this as a point of departure, we infer that persons on the gold coast who were familiar with the “negroportuguese” language that protten refers to, would have used na in locative constructions when referring to space in a general way. in fact, by protten’s time at least, it had already emerged as the prototypical marker for locative relations in the surinamese creole varieties. the construction was recorded in a court deposition in 1745 and glossed as a preposition meaning “in, up, at,” in early sranan (van den berg 2000: 92). no creolist would suggest that the portuguese-lexifier creoles inherited na from the importation of creole languages from the americas to west africa, an issue that seems to be certain for krio (huber 1999a). on the contrary, the locative construction na was carried across the atlantic to the caribbean and across the indian ocean to asia, where it survives in various forms in afro-caribbean creole languages, philippine creole spanish, and indo portuguese creoles (forman 1988). the issue at hand, then, is to identify possible local sources for the general locative construction na in the portuguese-lexifier corum | 48special edition , 2012 | 47legon journal of the humanities creoles. these same sources could have potentially influenced the formation of locative for in pidgin english. kihm believes that na in the portuguese-based creoles is derived from an item in the lexifier language (1994: 69): na, from portuguese na 'in the (feminine)', appears as the locative preposition par excellence, encoding as it does the spatial relations be-inside (i sta na kwartu 's/he's in the room'), be-on-the-surface (i sta na mesa 'it's on the table'), be-at-a-location (i sta na fera 'she's at the market'. concerning the first of these relations, na has a broader meaning than dentru di as it is not limited to clear-cut containers or locales. for instance, one may say dentru di kwartu or dentru di kasoti 'inside the box' as well as na kwartu orna kasoti. but ?i na dita dentru di kama 'she's lying inside the bed' is not a proper alternative to i na dita na kama 's/he's lying in bed.' many atlantic and mande languages, however, have lexical items that are similar in meaning and sometimes identical in form (e.g., sérèr, bambara, and susu) to the locative construction na in the portuguese-lexifier creoles. even more, there are polysemous items in languages of the lower guinea coast and one of the functions of those items is to convey a general notion of spatial relations between entities. igbo, for example, uses ná in this general locative construction, which is “one of the few words in igbo that can be called prepositions…translatable as ‘at, on, in, to’” (lord 1993: 14). the example in (1) shows the particle ná as a preposition in igbo (ibid), which is similar to the locative item in example (2) taken from kriyol (kihm, 1994: 69): 1) ó bì ná oká he live at awka ‘he lives at awka.’ 2) omi sinti kusa ngata i na garganti man feel thing attach him at neck ‘the man felt that something was attached at his neck.’ taylor (1971) has argued that na in creole varieties holds a broader semantic range than the preposition in portuguese. in addition to igbo, though, there are numerous locative structures from guinea coast languages that have functions resembling the locative construction in the portuguese-lexifier creoles. we begin with those that are identical in form and then move on to items that are different in form, but mirror the construction in the creoles in terms of function. 2.1.1 guinea coast contributions to locative na in west african creole languages lord suggests that a proto-niger-congo verb na meaning be at is the source for many of the conjunctions, comitative prepositions, locative verbs/prepositions, incompletive aspect particles, and structures used in possession constructions that are found in benuekwa languages today (1993: 30, 50; see also welmers 1973: 312). traces of the proto-niger-congo verb can be found in locative verbs/prepositions, possessive verbs, and aspect particles in west african languages spoken along the guinea coasts as far as gabon. mpongwe, a coastal language of gabon, uses both na and go as two polysemous locative particles (wilson 1847). in douala, a coastal bantu language of cameroon, there is a lexical corum | 50special edition , 2012 | 49legon journal of the humanities construction similar in form and meaning to the general locativeconstruction na in the portuguese creoles. saker calls na in douala a dative case marker (1855: 37). he glosses the dative case marker na as according to, concerning, with, from, for, and towards (ibid). saker also notes that adverbs in douala can be constructed by prefixing na to an abstract noun. saker provides the following example, “na janwa, ‘wisely,’ lit. with wisdom. he speaks truly, a makwala na mbadi” (1855: 35). yoruba has a similar construction with ni and west african pidgin englishes use for in this way. moving west along the coast, the same construction can be found in ??an?, an ijoid language of nigeria. blench lists only two items in the dictionary of ??an? that he compiled: ??, which means on and in, and na, a conjunction meaning and and a preposition meaning with (2005: 70). in ga, na functions as an adposition. zimmerman (1858: 70) described it in one entry as mouth, which serves as “a postposition and adverb expressing the relation of place and by tropic use also that of time and manner (§ 29) as: at, to, near, according, according to; at the point of; along etc.” in susu, an atlantic language spoken on the coast of sierra leone, na is the copular verb to be (houis 1963: 114). duport recorded instances of the language almost a century earlier. he glossed a postposition ra meaning “with, or for,” which becomes na in certain linguistic environments (1865: 15). as an adverb, the na construction means there in susu (duport 1865: 24). similarly, certain kru languages employ na as an affix that roughly means “place” (koelle 1854). the fact that there are remnants of various forms of the protoniger-congo verb na in guinea coast languages and those structures resemble the functions of na in the portuguese creoles does not prove substrate influence on the emergence of the general locative construction in portuguese creoles, though it does not hurt the argument either, which had been made early on by taylor (1960: 157). this paper does not argue that those identical structures were the sources from which the portuguese developed t h e i r g e n e r a l l o c a t i v e c o n s t r u c t i o n . t h e f a c t t h a t thoseconstructions exist in the languages that came into contact with the “negro portuguese” that protten refers to provided the motivation for the use of a multiple meaning-function construction in the portuguese varieties that were used by speakers of douala, igbo, ga, kru languages, susu, bambara, and sérèr. aside from identical forms of the locative construction in portuguese creoles and guinea coast languages, there are also numerous semantic similarities in the use of locative structures in the upper and lower guinea coast languages. those locative structures are used as general locative constructions and can be considered an areal feature of the languages of the guinea coast. 3. the general locative construction as an areal feature of guinea coast component the languages of the guinea coast contain items that can be considered general locative constructions. the following sections explore how the constructions are similar to locative na and for in west african pidgin and creole languages. corum | 52special edition , 2012 | 51legon journal of the humanities 3.1 the upper guinea languages hancock (1986) provides a map that illustrates the location of early lançado settlements along the upper guinea coast in the 17th and 18th centuries where an early creole english emerged. the language called guinea coast creole english was used alongside atlantic and mande coastal languages, as seen in figure 1 below.table 2 provides the general locative constructions that appear in the languages that hancock lists as pertinent to the areas where the early lançado settlements were located. interestingly, a polysemous locative item exists in the majority of the languages that hancock includes in his map. table 2. general locative constructions in upper and lower guinea coast languages. figure 1. distribution of languages along the upper and lower th guinea coasts. 17th & 18 century settlements indicated with ? (taken from hancock 1986: 89) corum | 54special edition , 2012 | 53legon journal of the humanities two basic assumptions are made concerning the linguistic situation in and around the lançado communities. the first one is confirmed by sociohistorical research, but is common knowledge about west african communities in general: the lançado communities that hancock identifies would have had multilingual speakers of portuguese-lexifier creoles who would have spoken one or more of the languages that surrounded their communities (kihm 1994: 4-5). the second assumption relies on outcomes of language mixing in multilingual settings: the atlantic and mande coastal languages spoken around lançado communities would have influenced aspects of the emerging grammar in portuguese-lexifier creole languages and guinea coast creole english. since mande, atlantic, and kru languages contained items that conveyed a general notion of location, it is not surprising that the portuguese varieties and guinea coast creole english inherited similar constructions as well. the upper guinea coastal languages were not the only linguistic source for the portuguese varieties. the contribution of the lower guinea coast languages on the upper guinea creoles must not be underestimated. general spatial grams in lower guinea coast languages could have influenced locative na in portuguese creole varieties and guinea coast creole english too, as briefly mentioned in section 2.1 above. portuguese creole varieties were in use along the upper and lower guinea coasts by the end of the 17th century. barbot, a 1685 french huguenot refugee, remarks on language use on the gold coast: the fetu [afutu] language being most generally understood at the gold coast amongst the blacks, as i have said before; i have made a collection of some familiar words and phrases, which shall be found in the supplement.... besides the other languages, in which we can talk to them: for many of the coast blacks speak a little english, or dutch; and for the most part speak to us in a sort of lingua franca, or broken portuguese and french. (1732: 249) the lower guinea coastal languages indigenous to the areas where europeans had recorded a portuguese creole language should be included as an ingredient of the guinea coast component as well. in addition to their influence on locative na in the early portuguese varieties, those languages would have motivated locative for in pidgin englishes after portuguese creole had lost linguistic strength in those areas at some point in the 18th century. 3.2 the lower guinea languages the attention is now turned away from the semantic and formal similarities in the use of locative particles in atlantic and mande languages and the locative construction na in creole varieties of the upper guinea coast, to focus on locative structures in the lower guinea coastal languages that could have influenced the use of locative for in west african pidgin english. 3.2.1 certain bantu and east benue-congo languages in addition to na, which provides a wide range of meanings, douala has a spatial gram o. kolokuma, an ijoid language of nigeria, contains the same grammatical morpheme (williamson 1965: 38). the semantics of o in douala and kolokuma matches the general meanings that for expresses in west african pidgin english. saker translates it as about, around, in, into, to, and unto (1855: 37). the locative compound is also used in more complex constructions in douala. for example, the deictic adverb there is a compound word une or one, which means at yonder place (saker 1855: 35). the o + ne construction in saker’s grammar looks similar to the for + deictic de constructions corum | 56special edition , 2012 | 55legon journal of the humanities that are often used in nigerian pidgin and ghanaian pidgin english. ibibio and efik have a lexical item ke that serves a multipurpose locative function (anyanwu 2010; una 1900), though efik also has a construction ye that has a general locative meaning as well (una 1900: 29). with regard to ke, una states, “‘ke’ seems to be infinite in its capacity for producing prepositional meanings. it is sometimes combined with nouns or verbs to form prepositions” (1900: 29). the same combination occurs with na in the portuguese-lexifier creole languages and in saramaccan and sranan. similarly, for combines with nouns to form “complex prepositions” in the pidgincreoles, for example for on top, for inside, and for im side (faraclas 1996; mann 1993). the constructions discussed in this section support a case for the domestic origin of locative for that were used in the pidgin english in the calabar area or in cameroon by the end of the early modern period (fayer, 1982). 3.2.2 some west benue-congo languages yoruba contains a locative-relational marker that is similar to the associative function of for in west african pidgin englishes when the construction co-occurs with the locative copula de. in yoruba, as in many benue-kwa languages, possessive constructions share semantic and syntactic characteristics with locative structures. lord provides the following example (1993: 13): 3) ó ní owó he have money. ‘he has money.’ historically, this could be derived from a construction that meant money is at him. that would be compatible with lord’s argument concerning the development of the yoruba locative structure ní, which she believes is “historically derived from a former locative verb ní, related to the homophonous verb of possession” (1993: l13). crowther also provides an example of possession in his grammar of yoruba: “‘to have money’, lówo; ‘to have or possess heaven’, l?run’” (1852: 8). in yoruba, /l/ and /n/ are variants of the same locative construction. crowther and lord’s examples demonstrate the close relationship that exists for constructions of possession and location in yoruba. similar to the douala example above, the spatial gram ní in yoruba can also be used before adverbs, as shown in the following example (lord 1993: 20, originally in awobuluyi 1978: 77): 4) ayé ñ l? ní m.èl?m.èl? life prog go at smoothness ‘life went on smoothly.” a similar construction is found in nigerian pidgin (faraclas 1996: 145): 5) a byud haws fòr smol-smol isp buildf house p be small/nr ‘i built the house slowly.’ temne can form the same construction using locative ka, as seen in the more than 100 examples that schlenker lists in his grammar (1864: 48-60). 3.2.3 gbe influence in ewe, pé serves as a relational noun for place or area. it has grammaticalized into a possessive marker, according to heine (1997: 93): 6) kofí pé x? kofi of house ‘kofi’s house’ (historically: ‘the house at kofi[’s place]’) corum | 58special edition , 2012 | 57legon journal of the humanities welmers (1973: 308) found that in ewe the expression for possession was realized as a construction in which the possessed was located at the possessor’s hand. heine claims that these types of possessive constructions are based on a location schema, which is composed of two sub-schemas (1997: 92): y is at x’s home, and y is at x’s body-part. according to heine, the location schema “forms one of the most frequently employed templates for expressing attributive possession: the possessor is conceptualized as the place where the possessee is located” (1997: 93). we combine the two schemas in the chart below and list the glosses in english from coastal guinea languages that could have influenced locative for in west african pidgin englishes. the schema is represented as a general conceptualization of location for possession. table 3: locative structures used in possessive functions this kind of possessive construction occurs in nigerian pidgin as well. it fits heine’s ‘y is located at x’s body-part’ location schema (faraclas 1990: 108): 7) mòni dé yù fòr hánd money copula you preposition hand ‘you have money.’ and again in rotini and faraclas’ grammar of nigerian pidgin (n.d.: 42): 8) dì búk dé mì f?r hánd def book cop pron1ps loc hand. ‘the book is in my hand.’ the nigerian pidgin example can be interpreted as, i have the book, which looks strikingly similar to the mande example below, except that nigerian pidgin for is prenominal and the construction in kpelle is postnominal (heine 1997: 93): 9) s?ŋkau a n yeei money pl be my handloc ‘i have money.’ (lit.: ‘money is in my hand.’) languages of the akan dialect cluster also have a locative verb that functions as an existential or possessive verb. riis gives an example of 19th century twi (1854: 113): 10) mogya vo yeñ ãnom blood be_located 3pp-poss mouth_inside ‘there is blood in our mouth.’ the sections above showed that the general locative construction exists as an areal feature of guinea coast languages. the locative structures of those constructions are used for possessive functions in many cases. the origin of na in upper guinea portuguese lexifier creoles should not be traced solely back to a preposition in portuguese. similarly, for in west african english-lexifier pidgincreoles should not simply be considered a borrowing from metropolitan english. corum | 60special edition , 2012 | 59legon journal of the humanities language possessed y possessor xlocated at/ location of english gloss mande ewe yoruba money house money located at location of located at my hand kofi him i have money kofi’s house he has money 4. where did for come from? na did not survive in the general locative construction in the lower guinea english varieties that europeans recorded in their travel accounts in the 18th century. instead, for took its place. since for subsumed the functions that na held in the early englishes of the lower guinea coast, it is less useful to ask, “where did na go?”, and more pertinent to ask, “where did for originate from?” the following sections will attempt to answer this question. 4.1 early uses of for the earliest uses of for are found in the second half of the 17th century. the following quote was recorded by ralph hassell in 1686 and, according to huber, it is the earliest attestation of restructured english from the gold coast that has been discovered so far: butt hee no savee for wt hee noo love mee (1999: 42). in the next century, john conny, the caboceer at axim, was heard saying, “by g--me king here, not only for my water, but the trouble has been given me in collecting it” (atkins 1735: 75; also in huber, 1999b: 43). for in that instance would mean in, on, at, around, etc., which makes it the earliest attestation of for as a locative structure. this is much earlier than huber’s date for the earliest attestation of the “locative/temporal preposition” for in west african pidgin english, which he identifies as 1773 in nigerian pidgin (1999b: 82). sometime in the 1790s, adams reported hearing four uses for by an anomabo man: you be old man for dis country….you hab black man net too. agar man, name quacoo, lose net; some man teef him; you hab for ship, brinny omo….suppose he be teef for aberrikirry (england), he no be teef for dis water…(adams 1823: 22-3, taken from huber 1999b: 43) the polysemy of for in the previous quote is similar to the uses of for that antera duke uses in his diary, which dates from 17861789 (forde 1956). the use of for as a locative structure emerged on the lower guinea coast at the beginning of the 18th century. it took over the role of na, which was already an entrenched feature of portuguese-lexifier and portuguese-derived creole varieties. one factor that contributed to locative for–the factor that most scholars implicitly accept as the source, in fact–was the use of the preposition for in early modern english. the construction had a much wider range of use than it does today in british or american varieties of english, although not as wide a semantic range as the guinea coast languages discussed above. 4.2 the english component some of the uses of for in early modern english look similar to the kinds of for instances that one finds in west african pidgin englishes. the sailors and merchants that visited the gold coast during that era employed for in ways that sound anachronistic to speakers of regional englishes today. literature of the early modern period can shed light on acceptable uses of for in the 17th and 18th centuries. the following examples are taken from the first 10 chapters of the gospel of john in the king james bible, which was standardized in 1760 by francis sawyer parris. each excerpt appears as it does in the king james version along with the translation from the english standard version from 2001: 11) the same came for a witness (john 1:7) he came as a witness 12) grace for grace (john 1:16) gracupon grace corum | 62special edition , 2012 | 61legon journal of the humanities 13) jesus would go forth into galilee (john 1: 43) jesus decided to go [ø] to galilee 14) samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman (john 4: 39) samaritans believed in him because of the woman’s testimony 15) the thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy(john 10:10) the thief comes only [ø] to steal and kill and destroy the five examples above show extended uses of for as a preposition, a conjunction, and an infinitive marker. there are hundreds of examples throughout the new and old testaments of these uses of for. popular 17th-century literature depicts similar polysemous uses of for. george chapman’s monsieur’s d'olive contains an instance in which for functions as a lative preposition: “i leave your highness to deal with atropos…i am for france” (1606: iii.1.75-76). in shakespeare’s all’s well that ends well, a derived construction of the spatial gram functions as a preposition of place, which today would be said using in front of or before: “fore whose throne ‘tis needful…to kneel” (1623: iv.4.3-4). for had a wider range of use in 17th and 18th-century english than it does today. if the construction had extended grammatical functions in literary language, one can imagine the range of use it retained in dialects, jargons and secret languages. sailors, for example, were known to speak a particular vernacular of ship english (rediker 1987: 162). their uses of for either equaled the polysemous functions of for that can be found in literature of the early modern period, or possibly even exceeded it. james parris, an englishman who visited the factory sekondi on the gold coast, wrote in 1683, “addoomes came on board with two small canoes for to have us come on shoare againe with our flgg…” (law 1997: 2). james’ english is typical of the linguistic variety of the times in which for preceded infinitive constructions. african persons who dealt with sailors, traders and merchants speaking early modern english would have heard for used frequently and in extended ways. in addition to the british, the dutch were also an important historical and linguistic component in afro-european contact on the gold coast. the dutch took the são jorge castle at elmina from the portuguese in 1637. the elminans who were portuguese interpreters remained in the community and were involved in dealings with africans and europeans well after the period when the portuguese had lost political ground on the gold coast. huber says of the linguistic situation: “in the dutch possessions previously held by the portuguese these interpreters spoke (jargonized) portuguese, which, towards the end of the 18th century, was possibly relexified and later supplanted by (jargonized) dutch” (1999a: 87). it is likely that na was used by those interpreters who spoke “jargonized portuguese.” spatial grams in dutch, possibly voor, could have supplanted na in the general locative construction. although this is conjecture, it is the best hypothesis since voor is the closest lexical item to for in west african english-lexifier pidgincreoles and it conveys other meanings than just the benefactive, for example, before and because. however, the dutch componentshould only be taken so far: “there is no clear evidence of a dutch-derived domestic creole having developed on the coast, although a dutch pidgin may have been used at some time in calabar (smith, robertson, & williamson 1986); it is probably for this reason that the dutch employed creole portuguese as a medium of communication” (hancock 1986: 88). this section will not focus on linguistic corum | 64special edition , 2012 | 63legon journal of the humanities aspects of voor in middle dutch or the dialects that emerged from it. future research should investigate aspects of this issue by looking into polysemous uses of high-frequency spatial expressions in the varieties of dutch that were spoken in areas where sailors lived who were recruited by the west india company in the 17th and 18th centuries. the majority of those young men were from lower class backgrounds and were not only of dutch origins, as feinberg explains (1989:86): many of the company's recruits, especially the military, came from the orphanages and workhouses of such cities as rotterdam. zielverkoopers (literally,"soul sellers"), labor recruiters and seedy characters marginally cared for poor and homeless men until a ship sought a crew or a company hired new men for its forts and factories overseas. boxer [1977, p. 51] suggests that many of the men who served with the overseas companies were the ‘dregs of the dutch nation’.... though the west india company was of dutch origin, the company's employees included not only netherlanders, but also men from other parts of the continent, including what are today known as belgium, france, and germany. thus, the designation europeans is more accurate than dutchmen, especially for those serving the company as soldiers. the european component does not provide a complete account for the appearance of locative for in west african pidgin englishes. aspects of the local languages where pidgin english varieties were spoken would have contributed to the formation of an all-purpose construction that expressed spatial relations in a general way. we turn to the guinea coast component again to address this side of the issue. 5. the gold coast component in the emergence of for both barbot and protten stated that “negro portuguese” and varieties of english were spoken on the gold coast in the 18th century. the speakers of those languages resided on the coast where they could trade with europeans. inland persons also travelled to the coast to trade with europeans. after they traded, they often needed help returning inland with their goods. barbot says of hiring slaves to travel inland: those inland blacks, who come down without slaves of their own to carry back the commodities purchased, hire either free-men or slaves, who commonly live under the forts, at such rates as they can agree upon, according to the distance of the places the goods are to be carried to. (barbot 1732: 261) free men and slaves who needed to communicate with the inland traders would have spoken one or more of the coastal languages, most likely a dialect of the akan cluster or ga. however, if they lived around the european forts, they would have also been familiar with some form of the portuguese-lexifier creole or an emerging english-lexifier pidgin or creole that europeans kept referring to in their early accounts of the guinea coasts. this means they would have used a locative structure in one of the kwa languages that they spoke, or, quite possibly, they used the existing na structure from portuguese creoles. since we have already explored na above, we turn now to possible influence from akan languages on the formation of for. 5.1 locative w? in the akan dialect cluster speakers of the dialect cluster referred to today as akan can be found throughout central and southern ghana. by the end of the early modern period, fante was the language that had the most widespread use in areas where slave forts and castles were corum | 66special edition , 2012 | 65legon journal of the humanities built along the gold coast. fante is one variety of the akan dialect cluster. another important variety is twi, which was spoken inland. the akuapem dialect of twi was the first to be described in detail (riis 1853). akuapem twi is spoken north of accra. the main language spoken in accra, and hence around fort christiansborg, is ga. grammars of ga, fante and twi date from the mid 18th and 19th centuries. the present study uses those grammars and dictionaries in order to get an idea about the structure and lexicon of the indigenous languages that were being used alongside restructured european varieties on the gold coast at that time. there is a locative/possessive verb w? in all dialects of akan. the verb takes the form ni in the negative, which is close to the proto-niger congo verb na that lord hypothesizes influenced locatives and possessive verbs in benue-kwa languages (1993: 13). wo can also serve as a general spatial gram in certain linguistic environments. christaller provides the following description for w? in the section on prepositions and postpositions in his 1875 grammar of tshi: rest in a place: (in answer to the question where?) is indicated by wo (section 102,3). this verb introduces a place where the subject or object is, or an action goes on; the place itself is indicated by nouns of place, parts of which, when referring to certain objects, are also called postpositions (section 118-127). together with such postpositions, wo may stand for the prepositions in, on, by, with, upon, over, above, under, below, amongst, between, before, behind, about, near. (74) riis (1854), another basel missionary who lived in ghana in the mid-19th century, produced an early description of the akuapem dialect. the description of the locative/possessive verb w? is similar to what christaller included in his dictionary (christaller admits that he drew on riis’ work when compiling his own grammar and dictionary 20 years later (1881: vi)). however, the entry that riis uses for the form of w? in his description of akuapem is peculiar. he transcribed w? as vo. his section on the pronunciation of consonants in akuapem might provide an idea why he chose to use /v/ instead of /w/ (1854: 6, original italics): the pronunciation of v and w it is difficult to describe [sic]. the former is not so very different from the english v, though not quite the same. w has nothing of the bread sound of the english w. it is the softest and least articulated consonantal sound, so that it in some words easily escapes a european ear altogether. in the german version of the same grammar and dictionary, riis described the /v/ sound (1853: 5): “in ‘v’ herrscht das labiale element vor, und es steht daher dem deutschen w oder dem französischen ‘v’ näher. in v the labial is dominant, and so it is closer to the german w or the french v” (translation credited to l. pietsch, personal communication, may 23, 2012). riis lists two different lexical items, vo and wo in his index (1854: 244-45), so we can assume that [w] was qualitatively different from [v]. when riis refers to w?, he uses vo, which would have been pronounced va. if the locative/possessive verb was va and that item appeared as a general locative construction in particular linguistic environments, then that sound could have been interpreted as [f] in some cases by persons not familiar with the akan dialects, for example, west india company slaves who came to elmina and also akan speaking boatmen who travelled to the slave coast and the niger delta region (feinberg, 1989: 81). this would have rendered a locative particle [va ~ f?]. almost a century earlier in 1764, protten describes ga and fante, and uses /v/ to represent sounds that start with /w/ today (trutenau 1971). corum | 68special edition , 2012 | 67legon journal of the humanities he includes w? in his index of ga, but provides readers with two options for /w/ pronunciation: either omitted altogether, or pronounced as [v]. in wilhelm müller’s 1667 list of efutu vocabulary, words that begin with /w/ that are followed by a back vowel in modern fante are either omitted or changed into a cluster of consonants. there is one entry in müller’s work that matches the same form used in the general locative construction in akan languages: o fa, which means mother’s brother and is listed in 19thand 20th-century akan grammars as w?`fa (jones 1983: 286). zimmermann remarks that in ga, /w/ is “somewhat different from the english and from the german /w/; though nearer to the latter, it is an /u/ slightly modified by the lips (1858: 5). according to 18thand 19th-century accounts of kwa languages on the gold coast, the pronunciation of word initial [w] followed by a back vowel was different from what pertains in varieties today. in sum, the gold coast languages in the 18th century could have contained a lexical item vo that was frequently used as a pronoun, a locative verb, or a general locative construction. riis provides a number of examples in his grammar in which the construction cooccurs with the locative verb it is derived from (1854: 244): 16) o-vo mosia vo ne kotoku-m 3pssub-wo pebbles loc 3psposs bag-inside ‘he has pebbles in his bag.’ 17) mivo abusuafo vo ha ni akam 1ps-wo relatives loc here and akam ‘i have relatives here and in akim.’ 18) mivo nnamfo bebri vo kra yim 1ps-wo friends many loc place this ‘i have many friends in this town.’ riis describes vo as locative marker as well (1854:244): it is used to connect an object of locality with the predicate if the object is merely qualifying or accessary (not integrant), and the action expressed by the predicate is conceived as a motion or rest in a place (not as motion to or from a place). examples of vo as a general locative construction include (riis 1854: 244): 19) mi-hû no vo mamfe 1pssub-see 3psobj loc mamfe ‘i saw him at mamfe.’ 20) o-digwa vo b?bi 3pssub-trades loc somewhere ‘he is trading somewhere.’ riis lists a number of examples in which the spatial gram occurs with the verb fi, ‘to come forth’, as in “sarre fi vo asâse so (more frequently fifi), grass grows on the ground” (riis 1854: 182). this could be rendered today in ghanaian pidgin english or nigerian pidgin as roughly grɑs de gro f? groŋ (bankole, personal communication, november 4, 2010). the w? construction as a general or as sole preposition as some linguists have called it (osam 1997), behaves syntactically similar to for in the west african pidgin englishes. the following twi example from riis (1854: 183) resembles the nigerian pidgin example from faraclas (1996: 64): corum | 70special edition , 2012 | 69legon journal of the humanities 21) mi-ko fy? no vo fiase 1pssub-go visit 3psobj loc prison ‘i went to visit him in the prison.’ 22) a gò bit yù fòr haws. lspr beat 2op p farm ‘i will beat you at the house.’ the languages of the akan dialect cluster often use the general locative construction in combination with the deictic adverb (riis 1854: 92): 23) mi-h?u no vo ho empriñpriñ 1pssub-see 3psobj loc deictic temporal adverb ‘i saw him there just now.’ welmers gives a similar case (1973: 374): 24) wë-tën èdìbán wë hë they-sell food be-at there ‘they sell food there.’ an excerpt of educated ghanaian pidgin english reveals similar uses of for (huber1999b: 278): 25) d? koti kam, bat ì no si nob? di f? di det [police] come but 3sb neg see nobody for there ‘the policeman came, but he did not see anybody there.’ yourba has the same kind of constructions. the spatial gram ní appears as an adverbial there construction in nìb? and a here construction in nihiŋyi (bowen 1858: 51). akuapem twi also has a similar construction to the for + np + spatial gram constructions that appear in ghanaian student pidgin, a variety of ghanaian pidgin english: “micia no vo kwanm, i met him on the road” (riis 1854: 86, bold added). other examples include (riis 1854: 244): 26) o-y? adyuma vo afu so 3pssub-is worker loc plantation upper_surface ‘he is working in the plantation.’ 27) mu-gyaw me poma vo ne dañ-m 1pssub-leave 1ps-poss stick loc 3psposs houseinside ‘i have left my stick in his house.’ 6. conclusion this paper argues against the widely accepted claim that locative for in nigerian pidgin and ghanaian pidgin english is derived solely from the preposition for in metropolitan english. as section 5.1 showed, the locative/possessive construction in akan languages more than likely motivated the use of a general locative construction that emerged in pidgin english spoken on the gold coast in the early modern period. at the same time, locative na should be considered a template for locative for, since it was in place as a general locative construction in the portuguese varieties that were established as trade languages since the mid17th century. the research in creolistics on the origins of locative for in west african pidgin englishes is not conclusive. metropolitan english and sailors’ jargon from the 17th and 18th centuries contributed to the use of a polysemous locative structure in pidgin english, but the general spatial gram cannot fully be attributed to the english preposition for. corum | 72special edition , 2012 | 71legon journal of the humanities niger-congo-speaking persons were part of the speech networks in the gold coast communities that saw the emergence of contact language varieties of european languages (feinberg 1989: 42): the towns were developed by the akan and the ga, not by the europeans. european forts were constructed where people already lived, not on uninhabited stretches of the coast. the people came first, then the forts. however, the presence of a fort may have contributed to the growth of the population of an area, definitely so if a headquarters fort was located there. the scale of the town, but not the origin, and the population mix of the people, but not their existence, were affected by the european presence. the meanings associated with the general locative construction in west african pidgin englishes resemble locative particles and verbs in upper and lower guinea coastal languages too much to discount the niger-congo role in the emergence of locative for. convergence among the three components discussed in this chapter led to the emergence of a general locative construction that europeans would eventually record as for in their accounts of the pidgin english spoken on the lower guinea coast. references abiven, o. 1906. dictionaire francias-malinké et malinké francais: précédé d’un abrégé de grammaire malinkée conakry: mission des pp. du saint-esprit. adams, j. 1823. remarks on the country extending from cape palmas to the river congo […]. london: g. & w. b. whittaker. anyanwu, o. 2010. the ibibio locative copular constructions. journal of language and linguistic studies. 6(2): 69-85. atkins, j. 1735. a voyage to guinea, brazil, and the west indies. london: c. ward & r.chandler. awobuluyi, o. 1978. essentials of yoruba grammar. ibadan: oxford university press nigeria. bakker, p. 2008. pidgins vs. creoles and pidgincreoles. in j. v. singler & s.kouwenberg (eds.), the handbook of pidgin and creole studies .london:blackwell. pp. 130-157 blench, r. 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(n.d.). a dictionary and grammar of nigerian pidgin. unpublished manuscript. saker, a. j. s. 1855. grammatical elements of the dualla language. with a vocabulary compiled for the use of missionaries and teachers. cameroon: baptist mission press. sauvant, l. p. 1913. grammaire bambara. algere: maison carrée. schuchardt, h. 1888. beiträge zur kenntnis des kreolischen r o m a n i s c h i i : z u m n e g e r p o r t u g i e s i c h e n senegambiens. zeitschrift für romanische philologie. 12: 301-322. senghor, l. s. 1963. l’harmonie vocalique en sérèr. in manesset & sauvegeot (eds.), wolof and sérèr: etudes de phonotique et de grammaire descriptive.dakar: université de dakar. pp. 287294 shakespeare, w. 1623. all’s well that ends well. the complete works of william shakspeare. retrieved from shumway, r. 2004. between the castle and the golden stool: transformations in fante society in the eighteenth century (unpublished doctoral dissertation). emory university, georgia. singler, j. v. 1987. where did liberian english na come from? english world-wide. 8: 6995. swift, l. b. et al. 1965. fula basic course. washington d.c.: foreign service institute. taylor, d. 1960. language shift or changing relationship? international journal of american linguistics, 26(2): 155-161. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/works.html corum | 80special edition , 2012 | 79legon journal of the humanities taylor, d. 1971. grammatical and lexical affinities of creoles. in d. hymes (ed.), pidginization and creolization of languages . cambridge: cambridge university press. pp. 293-296 trutenau, h. m. j. (trans.) 1971. christian protten's 1764 introduction to the fante and accra (gã) languages. 2 n d edition. ga dictionary project: documents and studies 1. london: afro presse. una, rev. f. x., 1900. efik language. uyo, nigeria: modern business press. van den berg, m. 2000. mi no sal tron trongo: early sranan in court records 16671767 (unpublished master’s thesis). university of nijmegen, netherlands. welmers, 1973. african language structures. berkeley: university of california press. welmers, w.m. e. 1976. a grammar of vai. berkeley: university of california press. westermann, d. 1924. die kpelle-sprache in liberia: grammatische einführung, texte, und wörterbuch. berlin: reimer. williamson, kay. 1965. a grammar of the kolokuma dialect of ?j?. london: cambridge university press. wilson, j. l. 1847. a grammar of the mpongwe language with vocabulary. new york: snowden & prall printers. wilson, w. a. a. 2007. guinea languages of the atlantic ggroup: descriptions and internal classification. schriften zur afrikanistik 12. frankfurt: peter lang. zimmerman, j. 1858. a grammatical sketch of the akraor galanguage, with some specimens of it from the mouth of the natives and a vocabulary of the same, with an appendix on the ada? me-dialect. stuttgart: basel missionary society. corum | 82special edition , 2012 | 81legon journal of the humanities 129issah reflexive pronouns in dagbani samuel alhassan issah1 abstract this paper examines reflexivization in dagbani, a gur language spoken in northern ghana. the data are examined within the parameter of co-referentiality and antecedence. i argue that reflexives are formed by suffixing the reflexivizer, maŋa, meaning ‘self’, to the possessive pronominal. the pronominal varies in form depending on the singularity or plurality of the antecedent. i minimally compare reflexive pronouns with pronouns within the binding theory and observe that whilst pronouns are free within their domains, reflexives are governed within the clausal domain. i conclude that anaphors and pronouns of dagbani match the principles of the government and binding theory. 1: introduction the main focus of this paper is to examine the morpho-syntactic features of dagbani reflexive pronouns. genetically, dagbani belongs to the south western oti-volta central gur languages spoken in northern ghana (bendor-samuel, 1989; naden, 1988). though dagbani has a continuum of geographical/regional dialects, three major dialects stand out: tomosili (the western dialect) which is spoken in tamale, the northern regional capital and its environs, and nayahali (the eastern dialect), spoken in and around yendi, the seat of the political head of dagboŋ, that is the land that is occupied by the dagbamba, and nanuni spoken around bimbilla, that is the nanumba districts and south of yendi. hudu (2010) and abdulrahman (2005) both argue that nanuni be seen as a dialect of dagbani rather than a distinct language. dialectal differences between these two major dialects are mainly at the phonological and lexical levels. the canonical word order of dagbani is svo. the data used in this paper is based on the tomosili dialect of the dagbani language. though dagbani is a tonal language, for purposes of this paper 1 samuel alhassan issah teaches at the university of education, winneba. 130 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) i do not mark tone because it does not make a difference to the problem addressed. reflexives are typologically grouped into two: those that are referred to as long distance anaphors, as with the norwegian ‘seg’, and the dutch ‘zich’. there are also those reflexives which are standardly viewed as local such as the english ‘himself. the “local” anaphors are anaphors that have strictly local antecedents, in that they receive their reference from strictly local syntactic arguments while “long distance” anaphors are anaphors which have non-local antecedents. they are said to have nonlocal antecedents because they can take an antecedent outside the local domain. it is argued by faltz (1977) and pica (1985, 1987), that when reflexives are complex expressions, then, they are universally assumed to be local, whereas the simplex reflexives as with the norwegian ‘seg’, are generally the long-distance type of reflexives. different languages employ different strategies to form reflexive pronouns. for example, in a language like english, reflexives are a combination of possessive pronouns and the reflexivizer “self” as in “myself” “herself” or “ourselves”, or a combination of the accusative pronoun and the reflexivizer as in “himself ”. i shall show that dagbani has bimorphemic reflexives. based on the observation that the accusative form of the pronominal does not participate in the formation of reflexive pronouns, i make a tentative proposal that accusative forms of reflexive pronouns might be simply absent in dagbani. dagbani thus shares the same features with a language like buli where the reflexive pronouns are also made up of a suffix reflexivizer and the possessive pronoun as in wadek, “myself” and ba-dek “themselves” (agbedor 2002). dagbani also differs from other languages such as norwegian and dutch which have simple reflexives in that they are made up of monomorphemic items. for instance norwegian has ‘seg’ as its reflexive pronoun whilst dutch has ‘zich’ 2: the binding theory. binding theory deals with the distribution of pronominal and reflexive pronouns in languages. the canonical binding theory of chomsky (1981, 131issah 1986) groups nominal expressions into three basic categories: (i) anaphors (reflexives), (ii) pronominals, and (iii) r-expressions. anaphors (also called reflexive pronouns) are characterized as expressions that have no inherent capacity for reference. anaphors also refer to reciprocals. according to haegeman (1994:228), the three principles that govern the interpretation of the established nominal expressions are referred to as the binding theory. hence, anaphors must invariably depend on some other expression within a sentence for their interpretation. the expression on which the anaphor depends for its meaning is called the antecedent. the structural relation between a reflexive and its antecedent is accounted for using c-command. haegeman (1994:212) claims that a node a c-commands a node b if (1) a does not dominate b; (2) b does not dominate a; and (3) the last branching node dominating a also dominates b. on the other hand, he claims that the pronominal is an abstract feature representation of the np that may be referentially dependent but must always be free within a given syntactic domain. it could be deduced from these definitions that an anaphor (reflexive pronoun) must obligatorily have a local or a “nearby” antecedent within a given syntactic unit to which it will refer, whilst a pronominal may, but need not necessarily have its antecedent within the same syntactic domain. adger (2004:54), on what he calls the co-referentiality hypothesis argues that for “two expressions to be co-referential, they must bear the same phi-features”. according to adger (2004), “phi-features” is a linguistic term used to describe the semantic features of person, number and gender encoded in such lexical categories as nouns and pronouns. this, he further argues, is a “kind of general interface rule that relates syntactic features to semantic interpretation”. compare the english sentences in (1) and (2): 1. mandeeyaj admires himselfj 2. suhuyinii destroyed himj these examples illustrate the (syntactic) distributional difference between an anaphor (a reflexive) and a pronominal. in sentence (1) for instance, himself can only refer to its antecedent, mandeeya, which is found in the same local domain of the clause. in sentence (2) however, the pronominal 132 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) him is free within the clausal domain as it cannot refer to suhuyini. it could therefore only have some element that is not within the clause as its antecedent, and not suhuyini since pronouns are free within the clausal domain in which they are found. the fact that himself can only refer to an entity already mentioned in the discourse, and him can refer to an entity outside the clausal domain, means that whilst reflexives are referentially dependent, pronouns are not referentially dependent. the abstract features of reflexives and pronominals make four major distinctions of np, three of which are overt and the other non-overt. the three np types, which include anaphors, pronouns, and r-expressions, are not syntactic primitives since they can further be broken down into small components as shown below. lexical reflexives [+reflexives, -pronominal]: these are reflexives and reciprocals, e.g., himself, each other. pronouns [-anaphor, + pronominal]: these are basically pronouns. e.g., he, she name (full np) [-anaphor, -pronominal]: names e.g., samuel, bonyeli, jeremy. pro [+anaphor, -pronominal] these three overt np types are accounted for using principles called binding principles. principle a of these principles is concerned with reflexives and reciprocals, principle b deals with pronominals. principle c on the other hand concerns itself with names or what have been called full nps. in haegeman (1994:228-229), the binding principles which govern the syntactic distribution of overt np types are stated as follows: principle a an anaphor must be bound in its governing category. principle b a pronoun must be free in its governing category. 133issah principle c an r-expression must be free everywhere. these three principles govern the distributional properties of pronominals and reflexive pronouns in languages. 3: the morpho-syntax of dagbani reflexive pronouns once it is observed that dagbani reflexive pronouns are a combination of pronouns and the –maŋa morpheme, there may be justification for one to assume that in the language, the pronoun prefixes of reflexives are lexically pre-specified as possessive. this explains why it is not possible to form or generate reflexives using the accusative forms of the pronominals. considering the fact that the nominative and possessive pronominal forms are morphologically the same (as will be seen in table 1), it may seem rather tasking to tell which form of the pronominal is suffixed to the reflexivizer. my proposal that the attached pronominal is the possessive and not the nominative form is based on the fact that cross-linguistically, nominative forms of pronominals do not seem to be specified for reflexive pronouns (cf. english: *iself, *heself, *youself, *sheself etc). i argue that dagbani contrasts with english in this light since it is not possible to form reflexives in dagbani via the suffixation of the accusative pronoun to the reflexivizer forms as in english“himself”, which is made up of an accusative pronominal “him” and the reflexivizer, ‘self’. an insight into the pronominal system of dagbani will help give a better insight into the reflexive pronominal system. table 1: dagbani pronominal system nominative case accusative case genitive case person singular plural singular plural singular plural 1st m,n,ŋ ti ma ti m,n,ŋ ti 2nd a yi a ya a yi 3rd o bɛ o ba o bɛ critical readers will observe from table 1 that, the first person plural and the third person singular pronominals do not make a morphological 134 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) distinction between the nominative and the accusative plural forms. the third person plural pronominal and the second person singular and plural pronominal, however, do make a morphological distinction between the nominative and accusative plural forms. as already mentioned, there is a tight relationship between the pronominal and the reflexive system of dagbani. this is because the reflexives of dagbani are complex (bimorphemic) expressions which are formed via the suffixation of a reflexivizer -maŋa meaning ‘self’ to the possessive or genitive form of the pronominal as shown in table 2. we also observe in this table that attempts to suffix the – maŋa morpheme to the accusative form of the pronominal yields an ungrammatical form. table 2: reflexive pronouns in dagbani possessive pronouns suffix reflexiziver reflexive pronoun n/m/ŋ“my” -maŋa m -maŋa “myself” *ma-maŋa o-“his/her” maŋa omaŋa “himself/herself” a-“your” (singular) maŋa amaŋa “yourself” ti“our” maŋa timaŋa “ourselves” b-“their” -maŋa b-maŋa “themselves” *ba-maŋa yi-“your” (plural) maŋa yi-maŋa “yourselves” *ya-maŋa i argue that dagbani reflexives manifest the cross-linguistic syntactic distribution associated with reflexive pronouns as they do not occur as semantic subjects of sentences. based on this syntactic property, when they occur as the semantic subjects of sentences, the resulting structure will be ungrammatical. in the data that follow, i illustrate the distributional properties of the reflexive pronouns in dagbani. 135issah 3. *m-maŋa ku-ri bi-hi maa pam 1stsg-self kill-imperf child-pl def inten 4. abuj sa ku-ø o-maŋaj abu tdp kill-perf 3sg-self “abu killed himself yesterday” 5. *abuj sa tu-ø abuj abu tdp insult-perf abu 6. *bɛ-maŋa tu-ri bɛ-maŋa 3pl-self insult-imperf 3pl-self from examples (3) to (6), we observe that (3), (5) and (6) are ungrammatical. the ungrammaticality of (3) and (6) is based on the fact that reflexive pronouns have been used as semantic subjects of those two sentences. however, reflexives are known, cross linguistically, to pick up their reference from an old syntactic element as their antecedents. they however, defy this syntactic expectation, hence their ungrammaticality. note also that the ungrammaticality of (5) is based on the fact that abu has abu as its antecedent as seen in the co-indexization, which is not allowed by the binding principles. however, the data in (4) is grammatical because o-maŋa has abu as its antecedent with which it agrees in number and person. consider (7) and (8) below for further explication on the distribution of dagbani reflexives: 7. bɛj sa tu-ø bɛ-maŋaj sɔhala 3pl tdp insult-perf 3pl-self yesterday “they insulted themselves yesterday” 8. bɛmaŋa ka b sa tu-ø sɔhala 3pl-self foc 3pl tdp insult-perf yesterday “it was they themselves (that) they insulted yesterday”. example (7) is also grammatical since the anaphoric expression bɛ-maŋa “themselves” has bɛ “they” as its antecedent and the two share phi-features 136 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) in terms of number. the grammaticality of sentence (8) indicates that, the prohibition on the syntactic occurrence of reflexive pronouns is not on their being in subject positions, but on their being semantic subjects of the sentences as in (6) and (3). for instance, in (8), although bɛ-maŋa is in the subject position, it is not a subject; rather, it is the object that has been moved from the in-situ position to the sentence initial position or left periphery position. perhaps, the reflexive pronoun being in that syntactic slot is just to fulfil the extended projection principle (epp) which has it that every sentence must have a subject. by this observation, i make the hypothesis that dagbani reflexives can occur in subject position, once they are syntactic, but not semantic subjects. if this were not possible in the language, then example (8) above should have been ungrammatical. i further submit based on evidence from the data that, it is possible to have non-subject oriented reflexive pronouns in dagbani. when a reflexive pronoun is a non-subject oriented reflexive, such a pronoun will have another syntactic element as its reference rather than the subject of the sentence. this observation seems to tally with the generalization that one usually finds in the generative literature claiming that monomorphemic reflexive pronouns are subject oriented (and can be long-distance bound) whereas bimorphemic ones are strictly clause-bound and not subject oriented (reinhart & reuland 1993). based on the current claim that dagbani has bi-morphemic reflexives, it is no surprise that one finds nonsubject oriented reflexive pronouns in dagbani. the same is observed in ewe and buli (agbedor 2002). the dagbani example in (9) below explicates the claim about the non-subject oriented nature of reflexive pronouns in dagbani. 9. ni yɛli-ø bonyelij o-maŋaj yɛla 1stsg talk-perf bonyeli 3sg-self matters “i have spoken to bonyeli about himself/herself ”. we see in (9) that though the subject of the sentence is n, meaning “i”, it is not the antecedent of the reflexive pronoun, o-maŋa [“himself/hersef”]. it does have a no-subject reference which is bonyeli. this situation also pertains in english. when the reflexive pronoun in english has a nonsubject reference or antecedent, there is usually an oblique subject in 137issah cases where a reflexive could be assumed to be non-subject oriented, as in (10) below: 10. wej spoke to theresak about herself k. though we is the subject of the sentence, the reflexive “herself” definitely does not refer to we, but to theresa, which is not the subject of the sentence. 4. dagbani pronouns, reflexive pronouns and binding principles in this sub-section, i investigate how the binding principles a and b capture the distribution of pronouns and reflexives in dagbani. it will be recalled that principle a deals with the distribution of reflexive pronouns whilst principle b deals with the distribution of pronouns. 11. bonayoi tu-ri o-maŋa bonayo insultimperf 3sg-self “bonayo is insulting/insults himself ” 12. bonayoi tu-ri oj bonayo insult-imperf 3sg “bonayo is insulting/insults him/her” 13. bi-hij maa tu-ø b-maŋaj child-pl def insult-perf 3pl-self “the children have insulted themselves” 14. paɣabai maa sa ku-ø baj/*i sɔhala woman-pl def tdp kill-perf 3pl adjun “the women killed them yesterday” in sentence (11), it is clear that the sentence is grammatical as the reflexive has its antecedent within the same clause (which, as observed above, is the subject of the clause). in (12) and (14) however, it is seen that the pronominal o meaning ‘him/her’ and ba meaning ‘them’ can only refer to entities that are not within the same clause. it is seen from the co-indexization in (14) that if ba, meaning ‘them’, should have paɣaba maa, meaning ‘the women’, as its antecedent, the resulting structure will 138 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) be ungrammatical. i assume that the entity that the pronominal refers to within the syntactic system could be an entity that has already been mentioned in the discourse, but does not necessarily have to be in the same local or clausal domain. this is what calls for the cross-linguistic generalisation that pronouns are free within their syntactic domain. the data given so far seems to indicate that reflexive pronouns and pronouns in dagbani perfectly match the behavior predicted by principles a and b of the government and binding theory. all the data i have dealt with are simple sentences and thus may not provide enough basis for making a generalization on the behavior of reflexive pronouns and pronouns. i will therefore look at complex sentences as well to help ascertain the behavior of reflexives and pronouns in relation to binding principles: 15. [bɛnitichei mi [ni fatij tu-ri oi/k] bɛnitiche know that fati insult-imperf 3sg “bɛnitiche knows that fati insults/is insulting him/her” 16. [bɛnitichei yɛli-ya [ni oi/j bi bɔ-ri fati] bɛnitiche say-perf that s/he neg want-imperf fati “bɛnitiche has said that s/he does not want fati” 17. babai yɛli-ya [ni mikashinij tu-ø oi/k/*j] baba say-perf that mikashini insult-perf 3sg “baba said that mikashini has insulted him/her”. in sentence (15), it is observed that the pronominal item, o is free in its minimal domain. accordingly, it is observed from the co-indexization that it is possible for the pronominal to refer to the subject of the independent clause, which is bɛnitiche, or to an item labeled k which is an item not mentioned within the clausal structure or domain. the same explanation holds for sentence (16) where the pronominal o, meaning “s/he”, could refer to the subject of the independent clause, bɛnitiche, or to any item that is outside the clausal structure. these sentences are nevertheless grammatical as they do not defy the binding principle b, which asserts that a pronominal and its potential antecedent may be found within the same clausal structure and that it is also possible for the 139issah pronoun to refer to an entity outside the sentence. the example in (17) also suggests that the object pronoun o is free within its domain. we observe from the co-indexation that the pronoun o could have the subject of the independent clause, baba, as its antecedent. it could however also have as its antecedent an item not mentioned within the sentence which is labeled as k. however, it will be ungrammatical for the pronoun o to have the subject of the embedded clause, mikashini as its antecedent. this observation leads me to tentatively postulate that the pronominal in dagbani o of the complex sentence is ambiguous since it can refer to the subject of the independent clause within which it is found or to an unmentioned entity, that is, an entity that is found within the clausal structure. discussing the distributional properties of the pronominal in ewe, agbedor (2002:151) argues that ewe is able to deal with this kind of ambiguity in the pronominal by using a special type of pronoun called a logophoric pronoun. clements (1975:142) is of the view that the logophoric pronoun is a special pronoun form that is used to indicate reference to the person whose speech, thoughts and perceptions are reported. this pronoun thus invariably has the subject of the main clause as its reference. consider these data from agbedor (2002:150) which clearly show the distributional pattern of the logophoric pronoun and the pronoun in ewe. 18. john nya be ama lɔ ye john know that ama loves log “johni knows that ama loves himi”. 19. john nya be yelɔ ama john know that log-love ama “johni knows that hei loves ama”. 20. john nya be ama lɔ -e john know that ama loves-3sg “johni knows that ama loves himj”. 21. john nya be e-lɔ ama john know that 3sg-love ama “john knows that he loves ama”. 140 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) in the ewe data taken from agbedor (2002:150), we see that there is no ambiguity in the sentences unlike their english or dagbani counterparts which will invariably be ambiguous. in english and dagbani, it is possible for him to refer to either the subject of the sentence or to an entity which is not within the clausal structure (an oblique object). in ewe, however, such ambiguity is avoided as agbedor (2002) argues using the logophoric pronoun ye which he claims could only have one reference, and that is the subject of the main clause. he further postulates that unlike the logophoric pronoun, the ewe pronoun can only pick up its reference from outside the entire sentence. he posits, based on this observation that the ewe pronoun and logophoric pronouns are in complementary distribution. data used in this paper suggest that dagbani does not have a technique of dealing with this kind of ambiguity. i therefore conclude that dagbani, like most other ghanaian languages, does not have a logophoric pronoun. cross-linguistic studies of reflexives seem to suggest that a reflexive picks up its reference from a local subject np. according to haegeman (1994: 192) “the np on which a reflexive is dependent for its interpretation is the antecedent of the reflexive”. haegeman (ibid: 207) further argues that we use co-indexation to indicate that a reflexive and its antecedent have the same referent and that the reflexive and its antecedent must agree with respect to the nominal features of person, number and gender. these prescriptions on reflexives give rise to issues of agreement and locality constraints on reflexives. however, the typological generalization that one finds in generative literature, including the work of cole and hermon (1998), yang (1983) and vikner (1985), is that monomorphemic reflexives are subject-oriented and can be long-distance bound, whereas bimorphemic ones are strictly clause-bound and are not subject-oriented. i thus argue based on evidence from the data presented in this paper, that dagbani reflexives can be used as genuine evidence in favour of this typological claim. the data in (22-25) will further indicate that dagbani pronouns may also function as antecedents of reflexives. 22. [*bɛi tɛhi-ya [ni maryj je bɛ-maŋai] 3pl think-perf that mary like-not 3pl-self 141issah 23. [oi yɛli-ya [ni abuj ku-ø o-maŋaj] 3sg say-perf that abu kill-perf 3sg-self. “s/he has said that abu has killed himself”. 24. [*oi tɛhi-ya [ni abuj ku-ø o-maŋai] 3sg think-perf that abu kill 3sg-self 25. [oi yɛli-ya [ni bi-hij maa tu-ø b -maŋaj] 3sg say-perf that child-plu def insult-perf 3pl-self “s/he has said that the children have insulted themselves”. we observe from these data that sentence (22) is ungrammatical. the ungrammaticality of this sentence is caused by the violation of the locality constraint imposed on reflexives. if the antecedent and its referent were found in the same local domain, then the constraint would not have been violated, thereby resulting in ungrammaticality. we observe however that sentence (23) is grammatical. the grammaticality of this sentence is borne out of the fact that the locality constraint is not defied. this is because the reflexive o-maŋa “himself” has the subject of the embedded clause abu as its antecedent. these two arguments, abu and o-maŋa are however found in the same local domain. when the reflexive and its antecedent are in the same local domain, the reflexive is said to be clause bound. the sentence in (24) on the other hand is ungrammatical. the ungrammaticality of this sentence is caused by the fact that the reflexive pronoun o-maŋa “himself or herself and its antecedent o “s/he” are too far away from each other in the sentence structure; whilst o “s/he” is found within the independent clause, o-maŋa “himself or herself” is found within the dependent clause. a tentative conclusion could then be drawn, based on these data provided, that the locality constraint imposed on bimorphemic reflexives is valid for dagbani reflexives since defying that condition results in the formation/ generation of ungrammatical sentences. it is then shown that dagbani is like english in that the reflexives are clause bound. thus, the syntactic behaviour of dagbani reflexives patterns 142 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) with the cross linguistic generalization that languages with complex or bimorphemic reflexives are strictly clause-bound. in the data that follow, adapted from cole and hermon (1998:57), we see the contrast between the syntactic properties of mononmorphemic reflexives and bimorphemic reflexives as typologically argued. 26. zhangsani renwei lisij zhudao wangwu xihuan zijii/j/k zhangsan thinks lisi knows wangwu likes self ‘zhangsan thinks lisi knows wangwu likes him/himself’ we see from the data in (26) that ziji could have a reference that is nonlocal, that is the possibility that it can have zhangsan or even lisi as its antecedent. the same property of non-local reference is not available for dagbani reflexives as it has so far been observed from the data examined. this seems to suggest that the reflexive pronouns of mandarian chinese should be non-local. the same property is reported of the reflexive pronouns of russian which are also argued to be non-local as argued by rappaport (1986). the same non-local syntactic property has been associated with monomorphemic reflexives in languages like danish. the data is adapted from wayne (1996:193). 27. at peteri bad anne om [prok at ringe til sigi] that peteri asked annk (for) at ring to selfi vikner (1985) from the data in (26) and (27), we see that in mandarian chinese and danish, it is possible for the antecedent of the reflexives to be non-local. we see from these examples that the reflexive sig can have peter as its antecedent, though the two are syntactically apart from each other. one common feature that runs across the data from danish and mandarian chinese is the fact that the reflexives in both languages can have non-local antecedents. both languages however have monomorphemic reflexives, as seen in their morphological composition. these data adapted from cole and hermon (1998:57) and vikner (1985) cited in wayne (1996:193), also provide a basis for a genuine argument in favour of the claim that dagbani reflexives, which are morphologically complex (bimorphemic) reflexives, differ in their locality property. 143issah also, it is a cross linguistic expectation that reflexives agree with their antecedents in number. number is a feature of nouns that distinguish between singular and plural nouns. since reflexives are not independent items in languages, haegeman (1994:207) states that “the reflexive and its antecedent must agree with respect to their nominal features of person, gender, and number” in languages that have number agreement. a close look at the distribution of dagbani reflexives suggests that the assumption on number agreement between an antecedent and its reflexive is valid for dagbani, as in (28), (29), (30) and (31). 28. *zaapayim tu-ri bɛ-maŋa zaapayim insult-imperf 3pl-self 29. *a zu-ø yi-maŋa 2sg steal-perf 2pl-self 30. yi zu-ø yi-maŋa 2pl steal-perf 2pl -self “you have stolen yourselves”. 31. abu ŋme-ø o-maŋa abu knock 3sg-self “abu has knocked himself”. in (28), the ungrammaticality is borne out of the fact that there is a mismatch between the subject np zaapayim and the reflexive bɛ-maŋa “themselves” in terms of number. the reflexive bɛ-maŋa cannot have zaapayim as its antecedent since the two do not agree in number. zaapayim is a singular noun functioning as a subject of that sentence whilst bɛ-maŋa is a plural reflexive pronoun with its english equivalent as themselves. in example (29) too, we see that the second person singular pronoun a, “you” does not agree in number with yi-maŋa “yourselves” which is plural. the lack of number agreement between these two accounts for the ungrammaticality of example (29). example (30) however is grammatical since the subject of the sentence, the second person plural pronominal yi [“they”] agrees in number with the reflexive yi-maŋa. in (31) too, we observe that abu is the antecedent whilst o-maŋa is the reflexive. these two agree in terms 144 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) of number since the antecedent of the reflexive abu is singular and the reflexive pronoun o-maŋa [“himself” or “herself”] is also singular. the agreement in number between the antecedent and the reflexive results in the grammaticality of the sentence. 5. summary and conclusion this paper has investigated the morpho-syntactic properties of dagbani reflexive pronouns using the theoretical framework of co-referentiality and antecedence as an analytical tool. morphologically, i argued that dagbani has complex (bimorphemic) reflexives. i also investigated the syntactic distribution of dagbani reflexive pronouns. it was discovered that dagbani reflexives as cross-linguistically assumed, cannot work as semantic subjects. they could however work as syntactic subjects, particularly in ex-situ focus type constructions. dagbani reflexive pronouns were also found to be bound within their local domain since they cannot have an antecedent outside their clausal domain. i minimally compared the distributional properties of reflexives with those of pronominals and concluded that the two differ syntactically: pronouns are free within their syntactic domain whilst reflexives are clause-bound. i therefore came to the conclusion that essentially, reflexive pronouns and pronominals in dagbani match the behavior predicted by principles a and b of the gb binding theory. based on evidence from the data analyzed, i conclude that dagbani patterns with the typological assumption in the generative literature that monomorphemic reflexives are subject oriented (and can be long-distance bound) whereas bimorphemic ones are strictly clause-bound and not subject oriented. _________________________ ii am very much obliged to the anonymous referee for his or her comments and suggestions which have been duly integrated into the final version of this paper. iiabbreviations used in this paper include: tdp= time depth particles, perf=perfective, imperf=imperfective, plu=plural, def=definite, sg=singular, inten=intensifier 1st, 2nd, 3rd for first, second, and third person respectively, foc=focus, adjun=adjunct, neg=negative. iii though dagbani does make a formal distinction between reflexives and reciprocals, i do not make a further discussion on reciprocals since the focus of this current paper is to discuss reflexive pronouns. ivthe first person singular pronominal n assimilates to the place of articulation of the following segment. v note that the third person singular pronoun in dagbani, o, “s/he” is not sensitive to gender since the language generally does not have gender as a prominent grammatical feature. 145issah references abdul-rahman, f. 2005. a spectrographic analysis of dagbani vowels. mphil thesis, department of applied linguistics, university of education, winneba. adger, d. 2004. core syntax: a minimalist approach. oxford: oxford university press. agbedor, p. 2002.reflexivation in buli: a preliminary observation. in m.e. kropp dakubu and e.k. osam. selected proceedings of the annual colloquium of the legon-trondheim linguistic project. 1: 147-152. bendor-samuel, j.t. 1989. the niger-congo languages:a classification and description of africa’s largest language family. university press of america. chomsky, n. 1981. lectures on government and binding. dordrecht: foris publications. chomsky, n. 1986. barriers. linguistic inquiry monograph 13. mit press. clements, g. n. 1975. the logophoric pronoun in ewe: its role in discourse: journal of west african languages 10:139-177. cole, p. and gabriella, h. 1998. long-distance reflexives in singapore malayan: apparent typological anomaly. linguistic typology. 2(1). faltz, l. m. 1977. reflexivization: a study in universal syntax. doctoral dissertation, university of california at berkeley. haegeman, l. 1994. introduction to government and binding theory. second edition. cambridge, massachusetts: blackwell. oxford uk& cambridge usa. hudu, a.f. 2010. dagbani tongue-root harmony: a formal account with ultrasound investigation. phd dissersation, university of british columbia, canada. 146 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) naden, a.j. 1988. language, history and legends in northern ghana, ms gillbt, tamale. pica, p. 1985. subject, tense and truth: towards a modular approach to binding. in gueron, obenauer, and pollock 1985: 259-292. pica, p. 1987. on the nature of the reflexivization cycle. in proceedings of nels 17: 483-499. glsa, university of massachusetts, amherst. rappaport, g. c. 1986. on binding and reflexives in russian. natural language and linguistic theory 4: 97-120. reinhart, t. and reuland e. j. 1993. reflexivity. linguistics inquiry 24. 4: 657720. vikner, s. 1985. parameters of binder and binding category in danish. working papers in scandinavian syntax. 23: 1-58. wayne, h. 1996. binding theory, control and pro. in gert webelhuth (ed). government and binding and the minimalist program. (place of publication/publisher?) 180-240. yang, d.w. 1983. the extended binding theory of reflexives. language research 19:169-92 27dzahene-quarshie language policy, language choice and language use in the tanzanian parliament josephine dzahene-quarshie1 abstract the paper examines the pros and cons of the checkered nature of language use in the tanzanian parliament. it focuses on language policy, language choice and the practicality of language use in parliamentary discourse. right from the eve of independence, the medium of communication in the tanzanian parliament has been swahili although the option is between swahili and english; swahili has been and still is the preferred choice among parliamentarians. nevertheless, we observe that language contact phenomena such as various forms of alternation between swahili and english occur quite regularly in parliamentary debates and submissions. the paradox however is that various forms of documentation in parliament are drafted in english. from data extracted from a corpus drawn from issues of the tanzanian parliamentary hansard, the paper attempts an analysis of particular choices, the advantages and disadvantages of such choices and their impact on the swahili language. 1. introduction although language problems can generally be viewed as global, language problems in africa tend to be precipitated by the legacy of colonialism, coupled with globalization and the very highly multilingual situation in most african states. as a result of these problems, various compromises come into play where language related issues, especially issues that have to do with education, are concerned. language is dynamic and therefore undergoes changes from time to time, and one factor that plays a major role in language change is language contact. there are many language contact phenomena that affect indigenous languages all over the world. in order to maintain some level of order and uniformity in various aspects of social, educational and administrative life, various agencies are set up by ruling governments 1 josephine dzahene-quarshie is a lecturer in the department of modern languages, university of ghana. 28 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) to put together and implement language policies. these policies usually involve national language policies, language in education policies and other special policies such as parliamentary language policies. while many parliaments in africa have adopted english only or french only policies in their parliaments, others have allowed the use of several indigenous languages in addition to a colonial language. those who have adopted colonial languages as the sole acceptable or permissible media of communication have done so for convenience sake due to the highly multilingual situation in which they find themselves. tanzania proves to be fundamentally unique where issues related to language are concerned. for instance, during the immediate post-colonial era when many african governments turned to the use of colonial languages as a solution to their language problems, the then new tanzanian government chose to use swahili as the sole medium of instruction for primary education and as the preferred medium of communication in parliament. although it would have been expected that most parliamentarians would use english in parliamentary discourse, swahili turned out to be the obvious choice as medium of communication. nevertheless, although the preferred choice is swahili, the paradox is that various forms of documentation in parliament are drafted in english, and often in practice some parliamentarians resort to code-switching between english and swahili. the paper attempts to interrogate the relationship between language policy, language choice and language practice as they pertain to tanzanian parliamentary discourse. the paper goes further to analyze a corpus of parliamentary hansard, paying particular attention to the persistent use of english in language contact phenomena, specifically code-switching and code-mixing, the role they play in language use and the positive and negative impact of these alternations on the swahili language. 2. post-colonial language policies of tanzania almost immediately after the declaration of tanzanian independence in 1961, steps were taken by the then new tanganyika african national union (tanu) government to address the language situation in 29dzahene-quarshie tanzania. as has been addressed by various scholars, all declarations concerning language policies were made against the background of the spirit of nyerere’s policy of ujamaa ‘socialism’.2 the first language policy to be addressed was the national language policy; it was followed by the language in education policy, then policies concerning language use in various sectors of government such as parliament, the law courts and other para-government bodies. given the fact that swahili was very instrumental to politicians during the struggle for independence, it is understandable that it would be made to continue to play a major role in the newly independent state. it was declared the national language of tanzania by president nyerere in 1962, shortly after independence (mulokozi 2002: 2; topan 2008:258, reuzaura 1993:32). this was because it was very widespread and its use as a national language tied in with the ideals of ujamaa, a socialist, classless and egalitarian society united by a common language, swahili. as a national language it was to be used at state and public functions. subsequent to the declaration of swahili as a national language was the adoption of a new language in education policy in 1967, the education for self-reliance policy under the arusha declaration. the policy declared the use of swahili as the sole medium of instruction throughout primary education. 3.0 background to the use of swahili in parliament from the british colonial rule up to the immediate post-independence era, english was the sole language used in the tanzanian parliament for submissions and debates, until 1962 when president nyerere made history by delivering his public day speech in swahili. this single act of the president became a basis for the use of swahili in parliament because subsequently there was a gradual shift from the use of english to the use of swahili for parliamentary discourse (abdulaziz 1980: 155). abdulaziz 2 nyerere’s policy of ujamaa was a socialist political ideology which sought to achieve a totally self-reliant classless and egalitarian society with a common language where all institutions are owned by the state. the policy of ujamaa also consciously pursued national integration and sought to substitute national for tribal loyalties (maxon 1994). 30 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) (1980) points out that the shift from english to swahili accelerated when the union between tanganyika and zanzibar was formed in 1964. this is because “many of the zanzibari delegates either did not know english or already were used to debating in swahili”. their presence in parliament was instrumental in boosting the use of swahili because the mainland delegates got the benefit of a large vocabulary relating to debating government matters (1980: 156). harries (1969: 277), states that the use of swahili in the bunge ‘parliament’ at the time was never challenged. the shift from english to swahili culminated in the official declaration of the adoption of swahili as the language of parliament on july 4th, 1967, by the vice-president, rashid kawawa (topan 2008: 258; rwezaura 1993: 33). this directive concerned the use of swahili in various sectors: as the language of communication in the discharge of the duties of all civil servants, for parliamentary discourse, government gazette and subsidiary legislation, among others. despite the takeover of swahili from english, the permissible choice is still between swahili and english. indeed, while swahili is used for parliamentary debates in general, english is reserved for special functions in parliament. apart from the 1967 constitution which was originally drafted and published in swahili, all other acts and bills and laws are drafted and passed in english (rwezaura 1993). it is therefore not surprising that although the language of parliament is swahili, english still finds its way into parliamentary debates on a regular basis. below is a typical example that illustrates this fact: wa-heshimiwa wa-bunge, katika m-kutano ya cm-hounourable cm-parliamentarians at cm-meeting of kumi na mbili (uliopita), bunge hili ten conj two (3sbj-pst-rel-pass) parliament dem li-li-piti-sha mi-swada mitatu i-fuata-yo: 3sbj-pst-pass-caus cm-bills three 3sbj-follow-rel: the appropriation bill, 2008, finance bill, 2008 na the national conj 31dzahene-quarshie assembly administration bill, 2008. mi-swada hiyo ni-li-i-fiki-sha kwa m-heshimiwa cm-bil dem 1sbj-pst-obj-arrive-caus to cm-honourable rais ili i-pat-e kibali chake, president in order that 3sbjobtain-scj approval poss <28oc08:1> “honourable parliamentarians, at the (past) twelfth meeting of this parliament, this parliament passed the following three bills: the appropriation bill, 2008, finance bill, 2008 and national assembly administration bill, 2008. these bills i presented to his excellency the president for his approval.” an attempt to draft bills in swahili in the sixties is said to have been discontinued due to difficulties such as lack of vocabulary for some precise legal and technical terminologies (abdulaziz 1980:156-7). however, these documents are eventually translated into swahili. for instance, statutes are still required to be in english with a swahili version appended. indeed, considerable efforts were made at expanding the swahili language to enable it fulfill its new role, mainly by the setting up of a select committee. this committee developed a glossary of stereotype phrases of parliamentary jargon (abdulaziz 1980). 4.0 language choice and language use in parliament although language policy has to do with choice, language choice is distinct from language policy. language choice refers to one’s choice to use a particular language. however, language choice is subject to language policy and therefore can be restricted by it. in the case of education, language choice is subject to language policy. language policy determines when swahili is used and when english is used. swahili is used as medium of instruction (moi) at the primary level and english is used as moi at the secondary and tertiary levels. in the case of the tanzanian parliament, language choice under the language 32 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) policy of parliament is between swahili and english; however, as pointed out in section 2, there are further restrictions when it comes to the drafting of bills and acts of parliament. in this case there is no choice; english must be used. the current practice of exclusive use of swahili for parliamentary debates is a voluntary choice by parliamentarians, but the status quo has been so much accepted that the use of english would be regarded as a marked choice. it is clear that one of the factors that may affect language choice is language ‘code-capacity’ (mkilifu 1972: 204).3 a particular language may be the choice but it may not be possible to employ it because its vocabulary does not have the necessary repertoire to support the particular subject area in question. in the case of the tanzanian parliament, language choice can be regarded as checkered in that although swahili is used for debates and general discourse, english becomes the code choice for the drafting of bills and encoding of acts. again, in the law courts english is the official medium of communication, especially in the high and supreme courts (rwezaura 1993). clearly, the main reason for drafting bills in english and writing acts first in english is the lack of code-capacity of swahili, despite the numerous efforts at overcoming this challenge. one of the resulting paradoxes of this problem is the prescription that the national language should be used in parliament and the use of english for bills and acts and as the language of law at the same time in the same parliament. as pointed out in rwezaura (1993), these bills are drafted in english but debated in swahili. so although language choice is swahili, in reality, language use is often checkered, with swahili code-mixed intermittently with english as a result of lack of code-capacity and due to other factors that will be discussed later. one of the conditions given for the use of swahili or english in parliament initially was that mixing of the two languages was not allowed (abdulaziz, 1980). however, a look at parliamentary hansard spanning many years indicates that this has not been the case. the actual practice and the policy are at variance. alternation between swahili and english occurs quite often in parliamentary discourse. this is perhaps an indication that it may not be possible to use swahili throughout one’s submission depending on 3 mkilifi (1972) refers to the ability of a language to expand its vocabulary as ‘code-capacity’. 33dzahene-quarshie the subject under discussion and on a speaker’s individual choices and proficiency in swahili and english. in the following sections the paper will examine and analyze the various alternations that occur and discuss the factors that may have led to these alternations. the paper concludes that language alternation in parliamentary discourse is inevitable and goes further to establish that code-switching in this case functions as a tool for focus or emphasis, for economy (time saver) and due to problems of code-capacity. 5.0 code-mixing and code-switching in the literature, while some scholars distinguish code-switching from code mixing, others use it as an umbrella term for two distinct forms of language alternation. it has been defined by myers-scotton as alternations of linguistic varieties within the same conversation (1993:1). winford (2003) refers to code-switching as “cases where bilingual speakers alternate between codes within the same speech event, switch codes within a single turn or mix elements from two codes within the same utterance.” bokamba (1988) on the other hand distinguishes between code-switching and code-mixing. he defines code-mixing as “the mixing of words, phrases and sentences from two distinct grammatical (sub) systems across sentence boundaries within the same speech event… codemixing is the embedding of various linguistic units such as affixes (bound morphemes), words (unbound morphemes), phrases and clauses from a co-operative activity…” and code-switching as “cases where bilingual speakers alternate between codes within the same speech event, switch codes within a single turn or mix elements from two codes within the same utterance.” ritchie and bhatia (2006:336) refer to inter-sentential switches between two codes as code-switching and intra-sentential switches as code-mixing. for the purpose of this study all forms of switching of codes are considered as instances of code-switching (cs). cs is not as arbitrary as it may seem (matras 2009). socio-pragmatic factors such as identity and social negotiation have been cited as motivation for code-switching (myers-scotton 1993a). the lack of “codecapacity” has also been cited as a motivation for cs (mkilifi 1972; matras 2009), although in certain situations, lack of code-capacity or appropriate 34 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) vocabulary is not deemed to constitute a legitimate motivation for cs since circumlocution could be used as a cs avoidance strategy (collins2005: 252). various types of switching have been distinguished in the literature, inter-sentential and intra-sentential (myers-scotton: 1993a, 1993b, 2002, matras: 2009, winford 2003). also, various approaches to the study of cs, socio-linguistic and structural, have been explored. the focus of this study is not so much the structure of cs as the reality of cs in a formal setting such as the tanzanian parliament and its implications for the development of the swahili language. 6.0 data analysis the data for the study was extracted from a corpus of code-switched items in six issues of the tanzanian hansard dated between 2003 and 2011. the hansard is a fully comprehensive verbatim transcript of every speech event in parliament. it can therefore to a large extent be classified as naturally occurring data, despite the fact that some submissions by parliamentarians are not spontaneous (that is, they are read from previously written material). all instances of cs in the submission of parliamentarians were extracted. a total of approximately 367 instances of 4 main categories of cs involving mainly intra-sentential cs were realized. in table (1) below, the description of the various categories and the number of tokens are listed. table 1: categories of code-switching category a: cs involving english verbs no. of tokens i.english verbs with swahili inflectional affixes 30 ii.english verbs with swahili infinitive marker 28 total 58 category b: cs involving english nouns i. single english nouns 45 ii. english nouns with swahili demonstratives 32 35dzahene-quarshie iii. english nouns/noun phrase with swahili connecter –a 21 iv. english nouns with swahili possessives 19 v. english nouns with swahili noun class marker 4 vi.swahili adjectival prefix kiwith english noun 2 total 123 category c: cs involving multiple switches multiple code-switching 44 total 44 category d i. swahili label linked to its english counterpart by a conjunction 33 ii. stereotype english labels and fixed expressions 74 iii. english names of organisations and terms without reference to their swahili counterparts 35 total 142 grand total 367 the category (a) code-switched items are of two types: english verbs that occur with swahili inflectional affixes as in examples (2) – (5) and english verbs that occur with the swahili infinitive marker as in examples (6) – (8) below. in all 58 instances of english verb cs the english verbs are used with swahili inflectional affixes such as subject prefix, tense marker, relative marker and object marker, or with the infinitive prefix kuas in examples (2) to (8) below. 2. a-ka-institute ‘he has instituted’<13ju11:108>1 3subj-pst3. huyu tu mclassify vipi? ‘how do we classify these?’<28oc08:55> dem 2subjhow? 4. i-me sink ‘it has sunk’<13ju11:25> cm-perf36 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 5. wa-na-operform ‘they who performed’<4no03:8> 3subj-pres-rel6. ku-wa-compensate ‘to compensate them’<28oc08:62> inf-3obj7. kujump the bail ‘ to jump the bail’<4no03:28> inf8. ku-release funds ‘to release funds’<13ju11:68> infin the data all code-switched items are invariably content morphemes of the embedded language (el), english, particularly nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, while the grammatical morphemes, that is, function words and inflectional affixes, are employed from swahili (i.e. the matrix language) except in the cases of phrasal, clausal or sentential switches. while it is clear that some of the english verbs employed may not have readily available equivalents in swahili, it is also evident from the examples above that others do. category b cs items involve english nouns. the data indicates that the cs english nouns may occur with swahili qualifiers, as in examples (12) – (20) or without such qualifiers, as in examples (9) – (11)). swahili qualifiers that cs nouns typically occur with include the demonstrative, as in examples (12) – (15), the genitival connector -a as in examples (16) and (17), and the possessive as in examples (18) – (20). 9. fogging <10ju03:28> 10. forgery <10ju03:48> 11. incentives <28oc08:60> 12. hawa professionals ‘these professionals’<4no03:42> 13. hii ceiling ‘this ceiling’<28oc08:52> 37dzahene-quarshie 14. hivi industry ‘these industries’<4no03:42> 15. vile braille ‘those braille’<13ju11:13> 16. amendment ya muswada ‘amendment of a bill’<4no03:43> of bill 17. application for leave ya ku-weza of inf-able ‘application for leave to enable’<10ju03:44> 18. campaign manager w-ake ‘his campaign manager <29d05:13> cm-poss 19. concern y-etu ‘our concern’<10ju03:38> cm-poss 20. economics z-ake ‘his economics’<28oc08:6> cm-poss the use of english nouns with swahili qualifiers presupposes that speakers first of all must assign the cs noun to a swahili noun class so as to use the corresponding concord for the qualifier. this is because in swahili, every noun belongs to a grammatical class and as such every modifier that is used with it must agree in number and class. so far, judging from the data, almost invariably the concords that are used with the code-switched english nouns are concords of classes 9/n for singular and class 10/n for plural; these are classes to which the majority of borrowed nouns are assigned.4 in the data, a relatively small percentage of cs nouns are assigned class 5/ji and 6/ma concords as in example (21) in which the swahili demonstrative that qualifies ‘contempt of parliament" corresponds to class 5. we note that in one instance, example (15), the concord of class 8/vi which is the plural counterpart of class 7/ki, the class that denotes non living objects, diminutives as well as physically challenged persons, has been used for the demonstrative vile ‘these’ 4 the assignment of concord of classes 9 / 10 and classes 5/6 to cs items seems to be motivated by the fact that many nouns of classes 9, 10 and 5 have ø (zero) prefixes. this makes it convenient for most of the cs items to occur without class prefixes, except cs nouns like ma-contractor ‘contractors’ that are assigned to class 6. 38 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) which qualifies the english noun ‘braille’. the use of class 8 concord for braille seems to be motivated by this word’s relationship with vipofu ‘blind person’ which also belongs to class 8. 21. hili contempt of parliament "this contempt of parliament" dem <10ju03:27> although most cs english nouns are usually assigned to the noun classes 9/10, there are four instances (examples (22) – (25) where the cs items are prefixed with the class 6 prefix and two instances where the prefix kiis prefixed to english nouns as complements (examples (26) and (27)). 22. ma-auditor <13ju11:99> 23. ma-butcher <4no03:45> 24. ma-contractor <28oc08:56> 25. ma-veterinary <4no03:44> 26. kitechnicality ‘technicality’<4no03:43> 27. ki-skills ‘skills’<13ju11:62> often code-switched items are single items within a speech event, but in our data the category c examples display multiple switches within single speech events as in examples (28) – (31) below. 28. bila ku-i-pa time limit na bila ku-ji-commit without inf3sbjgive conj without inf-reflmaana <13ju11:86> meaning ‘without giving the time limit and without committing ourselves to the meaning’ 29. impression i-li-yo-kuwa created pamoja na taarifa <10ju03:41> cm-pst-rel-to be together with information ‘impression which was created together with the information’ 30. kaangali-e capacity na service zi-na-zo-tole-wa <13ju11:82> 39dzahene-quarshie looking-sjc conj sm-pres-rel-give-pass ‘looking at the capacity and service which are being given’ in category d there is a peculiar alternation that takes place quite regularly. here, the swahili versions of technical terms and expressions are referred to by their swahili equivalents and at the same time the conjunction ama ‘or’ or yaani ‘that is’ is used to introduce the english term as in examples (31) – (34) below. this, it seems is a strategy that is employed to ensure that there is no room for confusion or doubt about the swahili label. it is observed also that often where a parliamentarian refers to a swahili label for a special term without giving its english equivalent, the typist of the hansard inserts the english term in brackets. this supports the impression that members may be more used to the english terms than to their swahili counterparts. 31. digrii ya pili yaani masters <4no03:3> degree sm second that is 32. hu-malizia w-enye hisa yaani shareholders.<4no03:30> habfinish sm-having share that is 33. kazi za miradi ya ujenzi ama construction works work of miradi cm construction or <28oc08:38> 34. kipengele hiki cha matumizi ya tafsiri ama item dem of usage of translation or application of interpretation <28oc08:38> another characteristic of cs in parliamentary debates is the use of stereotype english expressions within various speech events. sometimes these represent highly technical terms that may have no ready equivalents in swahili. such expressions occur in examples (35) – (37). 35. a vote of thanks <29thd05:31> 36. chief whip <29thd05:14> 37. consolidated effort <28oc08:20> 40 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) when a bill or act or an institution with an english name is being referred to, its english label is used rather than its swahili equivalent. in addition, because bills and acts are passed in english it is easier to use the english label. the swahili versions usually involve circumlocution. see examples (38) – (41) below. 38. tanzania society for the blind (tsb) <13ju11:13> 39. the contractors registration act <28oc08:63> 40. veterinary bill <4no03:38> 41. world society for protection of animals (wspa) <28oc08:11> 7.0 further discussion the data indicates so far that cs in parliament agrees with the general principles of cs. it is in line with myers-scotton’s matrix language frame model (mlf) (1993) where the code-switched english items are governed by swahili grammatical and syntactic rules. typically, the intra-sentential switching constitutes classic cs (myersscotton 2002:8) as swahili is the source of the morpho-syntactic structure of the clause involved. we also observe, as indicated in (42) below, that often when members have made the effort to use the swahili labels for terms, bills, acts etc., they subsequently revert to using the english labels. for instance, one minister first uses the swahili rendition of deep sea fishing and reiterates it by referring to the english label, without mentioning its swahili rendition. within the same speech event, this same minister, when referring to the term, again used the english label instead of the swahili one. 42. yapo matatizo machache katika utendaji wa muungano, likiwemo na eneo hili la utoaji wa leseni katika shughuli za uuvi wa bahari kuu yaani deep sea fishing. mheshimiwa spika, napenda kuliarifu bunge lako tukufu kwamba, shughuli ya deep sea fishing siyo jambo la muungano, linashughulikiwa pia na serikali ya mapinduzi ya zanzibar. <04no03: 26> 41dzahene-quarshie ‘there are a few problems with the action of the union, one of which is the issuance of license for the deep sea fishing business. honourable speaker, i would like to inform your revered parliament that the deep sea fishing business is not an issue of the union only, it concerns the revolutionary government of zanzibar too.’ the general conformity of the code-switched items to swahili morphosyntax has very positive implications for swahili, because this type of cs does not pose a threat of pidginization. similarly, code-switched verbs are used with swahili inflectional affixes and therefore do not pose a threat of interference from english morpho-syntax. as mentioned above, the main type of cs that occurs in the data is intra-sentential switching. the codeswitched items are single items, phrases, clauses and whole sentences or utterances. however, single item intra-sentential switches occur more than any other types of code-switching. where single items are switched they are more likely to be nouns than verbs. abdulaziz (1980:157) points out that the standing order on the use of english or swahili in parliament was that of language purity. members were supposed to use either of the two languages but not a mixture or shift unless they were quoting. however, it is evident that this ‘no mixture’ directive has not been adhered to over the years, simply because english is unavoidable under certain circumstances, so long as it is the language in which acts, bills and laws are passed. a careful look at the hansard from 2003 to date indicates that although language choice for parliamentary discourse has remained swahili over the years, in practice english is still part and parcel of parliamentary discourse. the standing order on the passing of acts, bills and law in english is therefore one of the anomalies that precipitate the use of english in parliament despite the fact that language choice is swahili. kjekshus (1974: 22) criticises this state of affairs in the tanzanian parliament. on the other hand, one can argue that since these acts, bills and laws are eventually translated into swahili, it does not constitute enough motivation for the referral to those acts, bills and laws in english, as has almost consistently been the practice. also, it is observed that the quest to use swahili for the discussion of all manner of subjects from economics to science and technology has led to various innovative ways of expanding the swahili language registers in order to 42 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) accommodate the various modern concepts, ideas and technologies that have english as their source (see appendix d). for this purpose, in 1962, a select committee was appointed to look into the problem of using swahili in parliament. subsequently, a glossary of stereotype parliamentary jargons was developed (abdulaziz 1980:156). despite all these efforts, english still forms part of parliamentary discourse. the president’s parliamentary address of 2010 exhibits the characteristic code-switching pattern, yet he does not code-switch any english verb at all. instead, he makes do with the appropriate swahili verbs. he uses the repetition strategy too, whereby one uses the swahili label and introduces the english label with a conjunction. this indicates that no matter how formal the occasion in parliament, cs is used without any visible constraints. cs can be seen in a positive light from the perspective of its general functions. one of the benefits of cs is the creation of a relaxed atmosphere for parliamentary proceedings. another is that cs saves time by offering interlocutors the option to quickly fall on english where they are in doubt regarding the swahili caption or do not know the swahili equivalent. there is the probability that the single english items may eventually become assimilated into swahili phonology and become full-fledged borrowed words, therefore expanding the swahili language in line with myers-scotton’s (2002:41) argument that core borrowed items enter the recipient language gradually through cs. although there is every indication that the practice of cs in the tanzanian parliament does not pose a threat of pidginisation and interference, it is important to note that the constant practice of cs poses the danger of perpetuating the limited code-capacity of swahili. if parliamentarians continue to resort to the use of english items and terminologies, this practice will inhibit the motivation for expanding the swahili language through innovative means such as coinages, loan translation and semantic extension. furthermore, the freedom to code-switch does not motivate parliamentarians to improve their proficiency in swahili. it does not complement the efforts at painstakingly translating english terminologies as well as acts and bills of parliament into swahili, for what is the point 43dzahene-quarshie in doing so if such documents will not be used? consequently, these attitudes deprive the swahili language of the opportunity to develop and expand. 8..0 conclusion the paper has established that alternation between swahili and english is part and parcel of tanzanian parliamentary discourse. it has attempted to discuss the background to the use of the code-switched variety of swahili in the tanzanian parliament, as well as describe the actual usage of cs in parliamentary discourse and point out the advantages and possible threats the continuous practice of cs can pose to swahili. in conclusion, it is important to reiterate the point that, if efforts have been made by state agencies including parliamentary special committees to ensure that acts and bills as well as other technical and special terminologies are translated into swahili for the benefit of all tanzanians, then the use of the swahili versions of english terms and expressions should be encouraged at all times. although cs cannot be ruled out completely, it can be minimized to a large extent, since in many cases cs cannot be attributed to the lack of appropriate equivalents in swahili. from the discussion, we have established that although cs in itself does not pose a threat to swahili, it does have negative implications for the growth and expansion of the swahili language. 44 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) references abdulaziz, mohamed. 1980. the ecology of tanzanian national policy. language in tanzania, ed. polomé, edgar c. oxford: oxford university press. pp 139-175. azuma, shoji. 1997. lexical categories and code-switching: a study of japanese/english code-switching in japan. the journal of the association of teachers of japanese. 31(2): 1-24. bhatia, t. k. & william c. ritchie. 2006. bilingualism in the global media and advertising. the handbook of bilingualism, ed. tej k. bhatia and william c. ritchie. cambridge :cambridge universities press. pp. 513 – 546. bokamba, eyamba. 1988. code-mixing, language variation, and linguistic theory: evidence from bantu languages. lingua 76:21-62. collins, wesley m. 2005. codeswitching avoidance as a strategy for mam (maya) linguistic revitalization. international journal of american linguistics 71(3): 239-276 kjekshus, helge. 1974. parliament in a one-party state-the bunge of tanzania, 1965-70. the journal of modern african studies 12 (1): 19-43. lyndon, harries. 1969. language policy in tanzaniadisadvantages. journal of the international african institute 39 (3): 275-280. matras, yaron. 2007. the borrowability of structural categories. in yaron matras, jeanette sakel (eds.). grammatical borrowing in crosslinguistic perspective. berlin: mouton de gruyter. pp. 31-74. maxon, robert m. 1994. east africa: an introductory history. west virginia university press. mkilifi, m. h. a. 1972.triglossia and swahili-english bilingualism in tanzania. language in society 1 (2): 197-213. 45dzahene-quarshie mulokozi, m. m. 2002. kiswahili as a national and international language. http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/aakk/documents/kiswahili.pdf, asian and african department university of helsinki. myers-scotton, carol. 1993. common and uncommon ground: social and structural factors in codeswitching. language in society 22 (4): 475-503. myers-scotton, carol. 1993b. social motivations for codeswitching: evidence from africa. oxford & new york: oxford university press. myers-scotton, carol. 2002. contact linguistics: bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. oxford & new york: oxford university press. polomé, edgar c. 1980. language in tanzania. oxford: oxford university press. rubagumya c. m. 1991. language promotion for education purposes: the example of tanzania. internal review of education 37 (1): 67-85. rwezaura, b. 1993. constraining factors to the adoption of kiswahili as a language of law in tanzania. journal of african law 37 (1): 30-45. topan, farouk. 2008. tanzania: the development of swahili as a national and official language. .in andrew simpson (ed.). language and national identity. oxford, uk: oxford university press. pp 252-266. winford, donald. 2003. an introduction to contact linguistics. oxford: blackwell. 46 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) list of abbreviations cm class marker sm subject marker hab habitual tense past past tense pres present tense perf perfect tense fut future tense inf infinitive marker dem demonstrative cond conditional tense conj conjunction sjc subjunctive sbj subject obj object poss possessive marker complcomplementizer adv adverb adj adjective 1,2,3 1st, 2nd and 3rd persons 47dzahene-quarshie pass passive caus causative rel relative marker appendix a i. english verbs with swahili inflectional affixes 1. aka-institute 'he has instituted'<13ju11:108> 2. alilidesign 'he designed it'<29thd05:18> 3. aliyeli-design 'he who designed it'<29thd05:18> 4. amebid 'he has bid'<28oc08:56> 5. ame-clear pale 'he has cleared there'<13ju11:6> 6. amesha-grade 'he has already graded'<28oc08:60> 7. anaye-tender 'he who is tendering'<28oc08:56> 8. huyu tumclassify vipi? 'how do we classify these?'<28oc08:55> 9. ime-sink 'it has sunk'<13ju11:25> 10. inamitigate 'it mitigates'<10ju03:32> 11. ina-weaken mapendekezo 'it weakens development'<10ju03:32> 12. ita-react 'it will react'<28oc08:72> 13. nikaialert system 'i alert the system'<10ju03:45> 14. niki-organize 'if i organise'<29thd05:41> 15. tume-amend 'we have amended'<29thd05:44> 48 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 16. tume-double 'we have doubled'<13ju11:86> 17. tuna-institutionalize 'we are institutionalising'<29thd05:13> 18. tunao-design 'which we are designing'<28oc08:55> 19. tuna-summarise 'we are summarising'<13ju11:68> 20. tunayo disaster map ya nchi 'we have national disaster map'<10ju03:3> 21. tuta-focus on 'we shall focus on'<29thd05:21> 22. tutayasummarise 'we shall summarise it'<13ju11:68> 23. u-delcare interest 'you declare interest'<13ju11:11> 24. ume-conspire 'you have conspired'<10ju03:38> 25. ume-solve 'you have solved'<28oc08:62> 26. unainvolve 'you (are) involve'<4no03:8> 27. wame-preserve 'they have preserved'<13ju11:81> 28. wana-control 'they control'<28oc08:54> 29. wanao-perform 'they who performed'<4no03:8> 30. zime-shift kutoka 'it has shifted from'<13ju11:7> ii. english verbs with swahili infinitive marker 1. ku-wacompensate 'to compensate them'<28oc08:62> 2. kujump the bail 'to jump the bail'<4no03:28> 3. ku-access 'to access'<13ju11:70> 49dzahene-quarshie 4. ku-addresss 'to address'<13ju11:105> 5. ku-allow 'to allow'<28oc08:62> 6. ku-amend 'to amend'<29thd05:44> 7. ku-challenge 'to challenge'<13ju11:107> 8. ku-compensate 'to compensate'<28oc08:56> 9. ku-concentrate 'to concentrate'<29thd05:12> 10. ku-create consultancy 'to create consultancy'<13ju11:6> 11. ku-declare 'to declare'<29thd05:19> 12. ku-design programme 'to design programme'<10ju03:8> 13. ku-draft 'to draft'<10ju03:37> 14. ku-empower middle class 'to empower middle class'<28oc08:62> 15. ku-finance 'to finance'<13ju11:72> 16. ku-fit 'to fit'<28oc08:55> 17. ku-identify 'to identify'<28oc08:20> 18. ku-import 'to import'<28oc08:53> 19. ku-invest 'to invest'<13ju11:79> 20. ku-liregularize 'to regularise it'<29thd05:44> 21. ku-takeoff 'to takeoff'<28oc08:62> 22. ku-protect 'to protect'<28oc08:12> 50 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 23. ku-prove 'to prove'<10ju03:31> 24. ku-reclaim 'to reclaim'<13ju11:100> 25. ku-refer 'to refer'<13ju11:89> 26. ku-relate 'to relate'<13ju11:86> 27. ku-release funds 'to release funds'<13ju11:67> 28. ku-release funds 'to release funds'<13ju11:68> appendix b i. english nouns 1. agenda <10ju03:20> 24. incentives <28oc08:60> 2. alphabet <29thd05:5> 25. initiator <29thd05:13> 3. amendment <29thd05:44> 26. instalment <10ju03:15> 4. automatic <28oc08:5> 27. investment <29thd05:47> 5. available <4no03:28> 28. investment <16jul10:21> 6. canteen <10ju03:21> 29. megawatt <16jul10:22> 7. commonwealth <29thd05:38> 30. mitigated <10ju03:30> 8. confidential <10ju03:24> 31. monopoly <29thd05:13> 9. consultant <13ju11:17> 32. morale <13ju11:10> 10. corridor <10ju03:13> 33. negotiation<16jul10:18> 11. cumulative <16jul10:18> 34. nomination <29thd05:5> 12. development <29thd05:34> 35. photocopy <10ju03:24> 51dzahene-quarshie 13. document <10ju03:3> 36. pigeonholes <10ju03:21> 14. document <13ju11:106> 37. quotation <10ju03:34> 15. engineer <13ju11:19> 38. reckless <29thd05:12> 16. field <13ju11:12> 39. research <13ju11:12> 17. fogging <10ju03:28> 40. secretariat <16jul10:1> 18. forgery <10ju03:48> 41. policy<10ju03:3> 19. gallery <10ju03:1> 42. squatters <10ju03:14> 20. garnishing <28oc08:10> 43. support <13ju11:14> 21. hemorrhoids <4no03:28> 44. treasury <10ju03:17> 22. homeboy <13ju11:4> 45. uranium <16jul10:21> 23. idle <28oc08:33> ii. english nouns with swahili demonstratives 1. gape hiyo 'this gape'<13ju11:70> 2. hapa procedure ‘here he procedure’t<10ju03:30> 3. hawa consultant 'these consultants'<28oc08:60> 4. hawa professionals 'these professionals'<4no03:42> 5. hii ceiling 'this ceiling'<28oc08:52> 6. hii industry 'this industry'<28oc08:58> 7. hii paper 'this paper'<13ju11:106> 8. hii programme 'this programme'<13ju11:82> 52 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 9. hii statement 'this statement'<13ju11:25> 10. hii, is a giant country 'this is a great country'<16jul10:21> 11. hili contempt of parliament 'those contempt of parliament'<10ju03:27> 12. hivi industry 'these industries'<4no03:42> 13. hiyo identification 'that identification'<13ju11:81> 14. hiyo mic 'that mic'<13ju11:93> 15. hizi definitions 'these definitions'<28oc08:55> 16. hizi facilities 'these facilities'<4no03:42> 17. hizi interventions 'these interventions'<13ju11:66> 18. hizo fields 'those fields'<13ju11:12> 19. hizo industrial materials 'those industrial materials'<13ju11:76> 20. ile draft 'that draft'<13ju11:8> 21. ile grade 'that grade'<13ju11:101> 22. ile master plan 'that master plan'<28oc08:14> 23. ile measurable kwenye 'that measurable on'<13ju11:98> 24. ile visibility study 'that visibility study'<28oc08:32> 25. lile gap 'that gap'<13ju11:74> 26. opportunity hiyo 'that opportunity'<13ju11:70> 27. point hiyo 'that point'<10ju03:33> 28. private sector hizi 'these private sector'<13ju11:68> 53dzahene-quarshie 29. vile braille 'those briale'<13ju11:13> 30. zile correspondence 'those correspondence'<10ju03:37> 31. zile interventions 'those interventions'<13ju11:74> 32. zile mindset 'those mindset'<13ju11:66> iii. english nouns/noun phrase with swahili connector a1. agenda ya kumsamehe 'agenda of forgiving him'<10ju03:19> 2. amendment ya muswada 'amendment of a bill'<4no03:43> 3. application for leave ya kuweza 'application for leave of capability/ability'<10ju03:44> 4. career path ya mtendaji 'career path of an actor'<28oc08:2> 5. gallery ya bunge 'parliamentary gallery'<10ju03:1> 6. grid ya taifa 'national grid'<16jul10:22> 7. industry ya mifugo 'livestock industry'<4no03:42> 8. issue ya reli 'issue of railway/ railway issue '<13ju11:93> 9. kuna registration ya hizi 'we have these registrations'<4no03:42> 10. kwenye transformation ya kutoka 'on transformation from'<13ju11:61> 11. liabilities ya kampuni 'liabilities of a company'<4no03:30> 12. master plan ya tanesco 'master plan of tanesco'<13ju11:61> 13. ndiyo function ya ndc 'its truly a function of ndc'<10ju03:13> 14. nilifahamu nature ya swali 'i understood the nature of the question'<10ju03:5> 54 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 15. note book ya bwana 'note book of mr.'<10ju03:21> 16. order paper ya leo 'order paper of today/today's order paper'<28oc08:72> 17. register ya madaktari 'register of doctors'<4no03:36> 18. registration ya vizazi 'registration of parents'<28oc08:20> 19. significance ya daraja 'significance of a bridge'<13ju11:3> 20. topography ya wilaya 'topography of a district'<10ju03:8> 21. tukaiangalie status ya jambo 'we should look at the status of the issue'<13ju11:3> iv. english nouns with swahili possessives 1. campaign manager wake 'his campaign manager <29d05:13 > 2. concern yangu ‘ my concern’ <28oc08:28> 3. concern yetu 'our concern'<10ju03:38> 4. degree yangu 'my degree'<29thd05:40> 5. economics zake 'his economics'<28oc08:6> 6. economy yetu 'our economy'<28oc08:62> 7. figures zake 'his figures'<13ju11:94> 8. intention yake 'his intention'<10ju03:38> 9. junction yake 'his junction'<28oc08:60> 10. la size yake 'of his size'<29thd05:19> 11. line yetu 'our line'<29thd05:28> 55dzahene-quarshie 12. mastering studio yao 'mastering their studio'<16jul10:28> 13. mindset zetu 'our mindset'<13ju11:66> 14. profession yao 'their profession'<29thd05:27> 15. programme yetu 'our programme'<13ju11:82> 16. repetition yake 'his repetition'<10ju03:32> 17. spirit yetu 'our spirit'<29thd05:15> 18. statements zetu 'our statements'<28oc08:50> 19. television yao 'their televiion'<29thd05:23> v. english nouns with swahili noun class marker 1. ma-auditor <13ju11:99> 2. ma-butcher <4no03:45> 3. macontractor <28oc08:56> 4. ma-veterinary <4no03:44> vi. swahili adjectival/adverbial prefix kiwith english nouns 1. ki-technicality 'technicality'<4no03:43> 2. ki-skills 'skills'<13ju11:62> appendix c multiple code-switching 1. ajili ya reward naye tu-na-m-wita contractor? <28oc08:28> because of poss 1pl-prescm-call ‘because of the reward with him, we call him contractor?’ 56 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 2. a-na-jua demand na serikali i-na-sikia demand, this is 3sbj-pres-know conj government 3sbj-pres-hear very important <13ju11:86> ‘he knows the demand and the government hears the demand, this is very important’ 3. bila ku-i-pa time limit na bila ku-ji-commit maana without inf-3sbj-give conj without inf-refl meaning <13ju11:86> ‘without given the time limit and without committing ourselves to the meaning’ 4. campaign finance. lazima tu-we na ethics za campaign finance <29thd05:6> must 1pl-sjc be with cm ‘campaign finance. we must have ethics of campaign finance’ 5. check and balance katika parliament <29thd05:49> in ‘check and balance in parliament’ 6. don’t worry about it, si-semi kwamba wa-fanye neg-say compl cm-sjc harrassing <29thd05:14> ‘don’t worry about it, i am not saying that they should harass’ 7. hapa kwamba the intentional meaning ya kitu fulani here compl of something and in the interpretation meaning ya yule <10ju03:37> of dem ‘here that the intentional meaning of something and in the interpretation meaning of that person’ 8. hawa professionals w-ote, veterinarians <4no03:42> dem cm-all, ‘all these professionals are veterinarians’ 57dzahene-quarshie 9. impression i-li-yo-kuwa created hapa ni kama ku-li-kuwa na 3subj-pst-rel-to be here is as if inf-pst-to be conj some conspiracy <10ju03:41> ‘impression which was created here is as if there was some conspiracy’ 10. impression i-li-yo-kuwa created pamoja na taarifa <10ju03:41> impression cm-pst-rel-to be together with information’ ‘impression which was created together with the information’ 11. kaangali-e capacity na service zi-na-zo-tole-wa <13ju11:82> looking-sjc conj sm-pres-rel-give-pass ‘looking at the capacity and service which are being given’ 12. kama za singapore au malaysia ambao leo ni mini tigers lakini singapore like of conj rel today is conj growth yao <13ju11:72> poss ‘like that of singapore or malaysia which are mini tigers today but singapore their growth’ 13. kila kitu ni zero, kila kitu ni zero <13ju11:96> every thing is , everything is ‘everything is zero, everything is zero’ 14. ku-it-wa ni architect, mtu wa pili ni quantity surveyor, inf-call-pass are , person sm second is m-tu wa tatu ni structure engineer<28oc08:59> cm-person sm three is ‘those to be called are architect, second person is quantity surveyor, the third person is structure engineer’ 15. kuleta application ya chamber summons kwa njia ya chamber summons inf-bring of by way of <10ju03:45> ‘to bring application of chamber summons by way of chamber summons’ 58 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 16. ku-li-kuwa na conspiracy au ujanja ujanja wowote na ujanja to -pst-to be conj or deception (red) any sort conj deception huu source lazima <10ju03:41> dem must ‘there was conspiracy or any sort of deception and the source of this deception must’ 17. kuna claim kwamba in fact hizo pesa <10ju03:41> there is compl dem money ‘there is a claim that in fact that money’ 18. kuna gape kuna mismatch <13ju11:74> there is there is ‘there is a gap, there is a mismatch’ 19. kuna mashapo reserve ya pounds milioni 90 na kwa pounds milioni there is sediments of pounds million 90 conj of million <16jul10:22> ‘there are reserve sediments of 90 million pounds and by one million pounds’ 20. kuna registration ya hizi facilities kwa <4no03:42> there is cm dem of ‘there is registration of these facilities for’ 21. kutoka point a kwenda point b ha-li-wezekani <13ju11:64> from inf-go neg-pst-possible ‘from point a to point b, it is not possible’ 22. kwa hiyo i-guarantee ku-rejesha agenda amba-yo <10ju03:38> therefore, subj inf-go back amba-rel ‘therefore, i guarantee to go back to the agenda which’ 23. kwa hiyo, kama voucher u-na-zi-ona, entry zi-me-kuwa therefore, if 2-suj-pres-obj-see subj-perfbe nzuri, <16jul10:9> nice ‘therefore, if you see the vouchers, the entry is nice’ 59dzahene-quarshie 24. kwamba curriculum na syllabus kwa shule za private na za public that conj of school of conj cm u-ki-ondoa zile za international school zi-na-fanana 2sbj-cond-remove dem of cmpres-resemble <28oc08:28> ‘that the curriculum and the syllabus of the private schools and the public schools, if you should remove that of international schools’ 25. ruhusa ya application ya leave <10ju03:44> permission of of ‘permission of application for leave’ 26. labda bubble gum economy au i-ta-kuwa house of cats. <29thd05:6> perhaps or sbj-futto be ‘perhaps bubble gum economy or it will be house of cats’ 27. lakini at the end of the day takwimu zi-me-shift kutoka <13ju11:7> but statistics sub-perf from ‘but at the end of the day, the statistics have shifted from’ 28. lakini sisi actually ki-sheria is not even binding yale <10ju03:46> but we adj-law dem ‘but for us actually the law is not binding those’ 29. m-moja na technicians wa wa-tano na craftsmen <13ju11:61> cm-one conj cm cm-five conj ‘one person and five technicians and craftsmen’ 30. ni music na film katika <16jul10:28> it is conj in ‘it is music and film in’ 31. ni-na-quote hapa i want to be concrete <13ju11:5> 1sbj-pres – here ‘i am quoting here i want to be concrete’ 32. pale pana politics na economics zake zi-na-ji-tokeza <28oc08:6> dem there is conj poss cm-pres-refl-emerge ‘the politics and economics of that place is becoming prominent’ 60 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 33. pingamizi la muda (temporary injunction), wa-ka-sema temporary injunction of period 3sbj-pst-say prohibition injunction. hayo <10ju03:44> dem ‘temporary injuction, they said temporary prohibition injunction. those’ 34. si-na gold wala silver, ni mimi <10ju03:48> neghave neither it is me ‘i don’t have gold neither gold, it is me’ 35. suala la management of time hapa ni paramount, ha-kuna <13ju11:82> question of here is neg-there is ‘the issue of management of time here is paramount, there is no’ 36. technicality ni-li-soma kwenye amendment ya <4no03:43> 1sbj-pst-read in the of ‘technically, i read in the amendment of’ 37. u-na-toa document for reference, lazima i-w-e signed<13ju11:108> 2sbj-pres-give must 3sbj-be-sjc ‘you are giving the document for reference, it is a must it be signed’ 38. utapeli katika industry nzima ya construction <28oc08:55> swindling in adj-whole of ‘swindling in the whole construction industry’ 39. vi-wili vya specific pamoja na realistic <13ju11:98> cm-two of together with ‘two of the specific together with the realistic’ 40. wa-ka-sema fedha nyingi zipo za climate change na environment cm-pst-say money lot there is cm conj <13ju11:82> ‘they said there is a lot of money in climate change and environment’ 41. wa-me-preserve marine products zao <13ju11:82> cm-perf poss ‘they have preserved their marine products’ 61dzahene-quarshie 42. x-ray na ultra sound <16jul10:24> conj ‘x-ray and ultra sound’ 43. yaani order ya prohibition kukataz-wa <10ju03:44> that is of inf-refuse -pass ‘that is order of prohibition is been cancelled’ 44. z-ote a hundred percent pamoja na tsunami <13ju11:82> cm-all together conj ‘all a hundred percent together with tsunami’ appendix d swahili label linked to its english counterpart by a conjunction 1. digrii ya pili yaani masters <4no03:3> degree cm second that is 2. hu-malizia w-enye hisa yaani shareholders.<4no03:30> habfinish sm-having share that is 3. kazi za miradi ya ujenzi ama construction works work of miradi cm construction or construction works <28oc08:38> 4. kazi za wa-kandarasi wa umeme ama electrical works work of cm-contract cm electricity or contractors <28oc08:39> 5. ki-kandarasi ama issuance of stop order <28oc08:39>adj contract or 6. kipengele hiki cha matumizi ya tafsiri ama item dem of usage cm translation or application of interpretation <28oc08:38> 7. kipindi cha uangalizi wa mradi ama defect liability period period of supervision cm intention or <28oc08:38> 62 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 8. ku jenga kiwango cha uhimilivu yaani perseverance inf-construct level of endurance that is <16jul10:6> 9. kuondoa utata ama clarity of progress <28oc08:40> infremove complexity or 10. ku-ongeza muda ama renewal <28oc08:40> inf-add time or 11. ku-pandisha kwa chupa ama kwa kiingereza artificial insemination inf-grow by bottle or in english <16jul10:17 12. ku toa wito ama summons <28oc08:41> infgive call or 13. ku-toa zuio ama stop orders <28oc08:42> inf-give restrain or 14. ku-toroka au ku-jump the bail <4no03:28> inf -run or inf15. madai ya sheria yaani statutory creditors <4no03:30> claims cm law that is 16. madawa ku-ulia wadudu au food drugs, cosmetic < 4 n o 0 3:45 > drugs inf-kill insects or 17. mamlaka ya rufaa ama appeal authority <28oc08:41> authority cm appeal or 18. maombi ya mdomo ya ruhusa yaani application for leave to request cm mouth of permission that is appeal <10ju03:45> 63dzahene-quarshie 19. marekebisho ya jedwali la sheria ama amendment of schedule amendment cm schedule cm law or <28oc08:42> 20. m-kandarasi ama contractor <28oc08:38> cmcontract or 21. sisi w-enye matatizo w-enyewe sisi ndiyo jawabu we cm-having problem cm-ourselves we indeed solution yaani that is we are source of the problem, we are also part of the solution <16jul10:7 22. smarter maana yake ni specific measurable, attainable smarter meaning poss is realistic time bound evaluatable "na" rewarded <13ju11:98 "and" 23. ugonjwa wa kisaikolojia au psychiatric illness <4no03:10> disease cm psychology or 24. ujira ama reward <28oc08:67> wages or 25. ukaguzi wa thamani ya fedha yaani value for money audit audit cm value cm money that is <16jul10:9> 26. ulipaji wa dhima yaani liabilities <4no03:30> payment cm debt that is 27. utaalam wa kihandisi ama structural design <28oc08:68> expertise cm construction or 28. uvuvi wa bahari kuu yaani deep sea fishing <4no03:26> fishing cm sea main that is 29. vi-nait-wa satelite cities au towns <28oc08:57> subj-prescall-pass or 64 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 30. wa-dai w-enye dhamana yaani secured creditors <4no03:30> cmcredit sm-having surety that is 31. wa-kandarasi au contractors <28oc08:56> cm-contract or 32. wa-kandarasi maalum ama specialist contractors<28oc08:39> cm-contract special or 33. ya kazi za ziada yaani overtime <4no03:3> of work cm excess that is ii . stereotype english labels and fixed expressions 1. a vote of thanks <29thd05:31> 2. application for leave <10ju03:43> 3. assembling plants<13ju11:39> 4. attorney general <10ju03:33> 5. building control bill <28oc08:49> 6. campaign finance <29thd05:6> 7. chief whip <29thd05:14> 8. consolidated effort <28oc08:20> 9. construction works <28oc08:47> 10. controller and auditor general <13ju11:5> 11. data base <28oc08:18> 12. deep sea fishing <4no03:26> 13. double road <28oc08:62> 65dzahene-quarshie 14. egalitarian society <13ju11:70> 15. exchange rate <13ju11:75> 16. ferrous sulphate <4no03:11> 17. final version <10ju03:23> 18. financial intermediation <13ju11:48> 19. foreign affairs <29thd05:27> 20. fund for reconstruction and reconciliation <4no03:7> 21. gene concentration<13ju11:70> 22. guest house <10ju03:37> 23. human capital development <13ju11:109> 24. in-service training <4no03:40> 25. institutional frame work <13ju11:79> 26. iron deficiency <4no03:10> 27. joint venture <28oc08:62> 28. long liner <28oc08:8> 29. manufacturing sector <16jul10:17> 30. medical board <13ju11:20> 31. medicine board <4no03:38> 32. memorandum of appeal <10ju03:45> 33. merchant shipping <4no03:33> 66 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) 34. middle school <10ju03:34> 35. mitigation points <10ju03:35> 36. open space <29thd05:37> 37. order in the house <29thd05:39> 38. national stadium <29thd05:17> 39. natural justice <10ju03:32> 40. nutritional iron deficiency <4no03:11> 41. order paper <10ju03:1> 42. order paper <28oc08:72> 43. order paper <4no03:33> 44. original in blue ink <10ju03:24> 45. overtime allowance <4no03:3> 46. procedural motion <4no03:33> 47. professional misconduct<4no03:38+e45> 48. properly tested <29thd05:47> 49. public document <28oc08:72> 50. public hearing <28oc08:47> 51. quasi judicial <10ju03:32> 52. rather than <29thd05:47> 53. red blood cells <4no03:11> 67dzahene-quarshie 54. regional manager <28oc08:58> 55. restricted area. <13ju11:12> 56. sergeant at arms <29thd05:15> 57. sergeant at arms <29thd05:49> 58. sitting allowance <13ju11:17> 59. sitting allowance <29thd05:45> 60. speaker’s gallery <29thd05:6> 61. special development initiative <10ju03:13> 62. special request <10ju03:29> 63. specific intervention <13ju11:48> 64. sub-standard <28oc08:62> 65. supplementary budget <10ju03:6> 66. transboundary water <13ju11:20> 67. under the carpet <29thd05:28> 68. value for money <28oc08:51> 69. value for money audit <16jul10:9> 70. vessel monitoring system <28oc08:8> 71. village assembly <28oc08:21> 72. vote of thanks <29thd05:2> 73. wheel chair <13ju11:13> 74. world economic recession <16jul10:5> 68 legon journal of the humanities volume 22 (2011) iii. english names of organisations and terms without reference to their swahili counterparts 1. african union <29thd05:27> 2. air tanzania <10ju03:38> 3. beyond tomorrow <16jul10:23> 4. civic united front (cuf) <4no03:6> 5. deep sea fishing authority <28oc08:6> 6. ferrous sulphate <4no03:10> 7. gulmeti game reserve <28oc08:23> 8. identification bureau (ib) <10ju03:31> 9. internal ruminant academy<13ju11:26> 10. international civil aviation organisation-icao <28oc08:13> 11. international growth centre (igc) <13ju11:42> 12. livingstone mountains <29thd05:23> 13. millennium development goals <13ju11:99> 14. mtwara development corridor <10ju03:12> 15. mwanza engineering <4no03:30> 16. national construction council (ncc) <28oc08:50> 17. national construction council <13ju11:8> 18. ocean road <10ju03:32> 19. pamba engineering <4no03:29> 69dzahene-quarshie 20. pan-african youth movement <29thd05:41> 21. private agricultural sector support pass <13ju11:23> 22. public procurement regulatory authority <28oc08:67> 23. sea sense, root and shoots, dar es salaam animal haven(dah) <28oc08:11> 24. southern africa transport,communication and meteorology commission satcc <10ju03:12> 25. tanzania animal protection organisation(tapo) <28oc08:11> 26. tanzania investment centre <29thd05:47> 27. tanzania society for animal welfare (taweso) <28oc08:11> 28. tanzania society for prevention of cruelty to animals (tspca) <28oc08:11> 29. tanzania society for the blind (tsb) <13ju11:13> 30. the contractors registration act <28oc08:63> 31. united democratic party <29thd05:47> 32. veterinary act <4no03:34> 33. veterinary bill <4no03:38> 34. veterinary surgeons ordinance cap <4no03:34> 35. world society for protection of animals (wspa) <28oc08:11> a look at how students in the university of ghana realise final stops in monosyllabic words. kari dako and.george frimpong kodie1 abstract: some students in the university of ghana appear to elide the.final stop in monosyllabic words or replace it with a glottal stop. a survey of 20 male and 20 female students of the university of ghana under the age of 25 was undertaken to elicit how final stops were realized in monosyllabic words. introduction this paper attempts to find out how students at the university of ghana treat final stops, especially in monosyllabic words. we thus: 1. wanted to look at the tendency in younger students of the university of ghana to elide final /t/ /d/ /p/ /b/ /kl and /g/; 2. attempted to determine the prevalence of glottal stops (gs) as finalstop substitutes; and 3. wanted to find out whether the subsequent sound and/or preceding sound influences the selection of final stop or not. the study was undertaken because it is apparent that some english words have assumed a distinct mode of pronunciation in ghana. but, for example, is often heard as [ba] or [ba?]. that a final consonant sound can be elided in ghana is not unusual, after all, as was noted by strevens (1965: 113): one would expect a description of the pronunciations of english which may be heard in west africa to bear a close relationship to description of the phonetic characteristics of the language spoken as a mother tongue by various groups of people. this is in fact the case". 1 kari dako is associate professor, george frimpong kodie an assistant lecturer. they both teach in the department of english, university of ghana. legan journal of the humanities i 181 kari dako and george frimpong kodie volume 21 (20!0) however, this quotation leads us into a further question: do aspects of pronunciation in ghanaian english always reflect transfer phenomena? in many ghanaian languages the syllable structure does not have a consonantal coda, so one might wonder whether we are dealing with a transference phenomenon when students elide final stops. but as many students substituted final stops with a glottal stop, we have had to ask, where does the glottal stop come from? 2 whereas final consonant elision is a common feature of student pidgin, glottal stops are rare in this code. can the use of the glottal stop or the elision of final stops be explained by the number of ghanaian students going to the uk to work during the summer vacation and picking up cockney traits in their speech? can the use of the glottal stop or the elision of final stops be a temporary fad inspired by, for example, tv announcers who use glottal stops? how widespread is the elision of the final stop or its substitution by a glottal stop? a glottal stop, according to gimson (1972:9), is produced when "the glottis is held tightly closed with the lung air pent up below it". this "glottal stop" [?] frequently occurs in english, e.g., when it precedes the energetic articulation of a vowel or when it reinforces or even replaces p, t, k. in some english dialects glottalisation can be heard when especially unvoiced stops[p],[t],[k]initiate an unstressed syllable that occurs between. vowels, as in water, or between a vowel and a sonorant, as in bulfon, or at the end of a word, as in put if on. it is, however, not a sound found in rp, which is the target pronunciation in the ghanaian education . system. word final consonant sounds, especially alveolar sounds, often assume the features of the word initial consonant of the following word. we can therefore expect that final stops are elided when the initial sound of the following word is consonantal. methodology twenty male and twenty female students under 25 years were asked to read 20 sentences (as in handout). the students came from a good spread of secondary schools from all the regions in ghana (list appended). the ·sample students were carefully selected to represent all the regions of the 182 i legan journal of the humanities volume 21 (2010) kari dako and george frimpong kodie country and a broad selection of lls (breakdown appended). care was taken to avoid students who had been abroad. the students were not told beforehand which aspect of their speech was of interest. as each student read a sentence, it was noted how each final stop was realised. to gain a better feel of students' speech habits, an additional 90 minutes of informal conversation was recorded, using different students from the ones who had read the sentences. the recorded data was used to support our evidence from the read data. analysis of data the results can be broken down as follows. sentence l:water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink. six females and nine males read this sentence with all final stops. i) water: no deviance in medial position ii) but: 8 females and 7 males used glottal stop (hence gs), 2 males elided the final stop. iii) not: 7 females and 3 males used gs, 1 female elided the final stop. iv) drop: 1 female and 2 males used gs, none used elision. v) drink: no deviance. sentence 2: the big, bad wolf ate the sheep. 19 females and all males read with all final stops. i) big: 1 female used gs. ii) bad: no deviance. legan journal of the humanities i 183 kari dako and george frimpong kodie volume 21 (2010) iii) ate: no deviance. iv) sheep: no deviance. sentence 3: i could not log into the internet last night. 3 females and 3 males read with all final stops. i) could: 15 females and 13 males used gs. 1 female and 3 males elided the final stop. ii) not: 3 females and 3 males used gs. 1 female elided the final stop. iii) log: no deviance. iv) internet: no deviance. v) last: no student used gs, 1 female elided the final stop. vi) night: no deviance. sentence 4: but what does it mean? 10 females and 5 males read with all final stops. i) but: 7 females and 7 males used gs. ii) what: 8 females and 11 males used gs. 1 female and 1 male elided the final stop. iii) it: 1 male used gs. sentence 5: he works in a lab somewhere all students observed stops. i) work(s): no deviance. 184 [ legan journal of the humanities volume 21 (2010) kari dako and george frimpong kodie ii) lab: no deviance. sentence 6: i liked kwesi, but did he like me? 11 females and 11 males read with all final stops. i) liked: 2 males used gs. 1 female and 4 males elided the final stop. ii) but: 5 females and 2 males used gs. 1 female elided final stop. iii) did: 2 females and 1 male used gs. 1 male elided final stop. iv) like: no deviance. sentence 7: don't kick the dog! 16 females and 16 maies read with all final stops. i) don't: 4 females and 4 males elided final stop. ii) kick: no deviance iii) dog: no deviance sentence 8: i asked him to put it down. all females and io males read with all final stops. i) askc.;d: 8 males elided final stop. ii) put: 2 males elided final stop. iii) it: no deviance. sentence 9: if you are still hungry, lick the plate! legan journal of the humanities i 185 kari dako and george frimpong kodie volume 21 (2010) 16 females and 15 males read with all final stops. i) lick: 2 females and 2 males used gs. 2 females and 3 males elided final stop. ii) plate: no deviance. sentence 10: you must pat the dog gently. 11 females and 6 males read with.all final stops. i) must: 1 male used gs. 9 females and 13 males elided final stop. ii) pat: 1 male used gs. iii) dog: no deviance. sentence 11: would you look at that great, red bud! 12 females and 11 males read all final stops. · i) would: 5 females and 5 males used gs. 1 female and 2 males elided stop. ii) look: 1 female elided stop. iii) at: 1 female used gs. iv) that: 1 female and 2 males used gs. v) great: 1 female and 2 males used gs. vi) red: -1 female elided stop. vii) bud: no deviance. sentence 12: he put the book away and could sit down. 186 i legan journal of the humanities volume 21 (2010) kari dako and george frimpong kodie 15 females and 10 males read with all final stops. i) put: 1 female and 1 male used gs. 1 male elided stop. ii) book: no deviance iii) and: 4 males used gs. 1 female and 2 males elided stop. iv) could: 3 females and 3 males used gs. v) sit: no deviance. sentence 13: the cat sat on the mat and jumped into my lap. 18 females and 15 males read with all final stops. i) cat: no deviance . .ii) sat: 1 male used gs. iii) mat: 1 male elided stop. iv) and: 1 female and 3 males elided stop. v) jumped: no deviance. vi) lap: 1 female elided stop. sentence 14: do you get it? be tip top and .a bit fad. 18 females and 17 males read with all final stops. i) get: no deviance. ii) it: 1 female and 1 male used gs. 1 male elided stop. iii) tip: 1 male elided stop . iv) top: no deviance legan journal of the humanities i 187 kari dako and george frimpong kodie v) and: no deviance vi) bit: 1 female used gs. vii) fad: 1 male elided stop. sentence 15: i just bought a new set of books .. 11 females and 10 males read with all final stops. volume 21 (2010) i) just: 2 females used gs. 7 females and 9 males elided stop. ii) bought: no deviance. iii) set: 1 male elided stop. sentence 16: i bet he stopped the fight. 18 females and 17 males read with all final stops. i) bet: i female and 1 male elided stop. ii) stopped: 1 male used gs. 1 female _and 1 male elided stop. iii) fight: no deviance. sentence 17: he asked me to make a bid. 9 females and 10 males read with all final stops. i) asked: 2 males used gs. 10 females and 8 males elided stop. ii) make: no deviance. iii) bid: 1 female used gs. sentence 18: you should put a stop to the fight. 188 j legan journal of the humanities volume 21 (2010) kari dako and george frimpong kodie 3 females and 5 males read with all final stops. i) should: 14 females and 12 males used gs. 3 females and 3 males elided stop. ii) put: no deviance. iii) stop: no deviance. iv) fight: no deviance. sentence 19: cut the cord! 18 females and 15 males read with all final stops. i) cut: 2 females and 4 males used gs. 1 male elided stop. ii) cord: no deviance. sentence 20: take the next street left! 14 females and 15 males read with all final stops i) take: 1 female used gs. 5 females and 5 males elided stop. ii) next: no deviance. iii) street: no deviance iv) left: no deviance. legan journal of the humanities i 189 kari dako and george frimpong kodie volume 21 (2010) we expected more deviance in male speech than in female speech. we made this assumption based on an earlier study of the presence of dental fricatives in the speech of students at the university of ghana (dako 1995) and also earlier work on female speech (chambers 1992; milroy and milroy 1993) that show that females tend to be more prestige conscious than males in their speech and thus more likely to regard speech habits as social determinants. at the end of our survey, we came to realize, however, that the use of the glottal stop and the elision of final stops were considered prestigious speech elements in the university. discussion from the breakdown of the findings of these sentences, we can make the following observations: 1. · there is no definite pattern of glottal stops or elisions, i.e., a word might have a glottal stop or elision in one sentence and no glottal stop or elision in the next sentence in the same environment. 2. elision or the glottal stop was not salient when the stop was followed by a vowel sound, but again, no definite pattern could be determined as seen in the following: bii: not a (10 gs, 1 es) 8:ii : put it (2 es) ll:ii: look at (1 es) 12:ii: book away (no deviance) 13:ii: sat on (1 gs) 13:iii: mat and (1 es) 13:v: jumped into (no deviance) 14:i: get it (no deviance) 14:iv: top and (no deviance) 14:v: anda (no deviance) 15:ii: bought a (no deviance) 15:iii: set of (1 es) 17:ii: make a (no deviance) 18:ii: put a (no deviance) 190 / legan journal of the humanities volume 21 (2010) kari dako and george frimpong kodie 1. final alveolar stops often assimilate to the place of articulation of the following word initial consonant. this has been noted by early english phoneticians (jones, gimson, abercrombie). we would therefore expect that a final stop followed by a consonant sound would be assimilated, i.e., eljded. but if we look at the final alveolar sounds followed by a word initial consonant sound, the pattern is highly irregular: l:ii: but not (15 gs, 2 es) 2:ii bad wolf (no deviance) 2:iii ate the (no deviance) 3:i could not (28 gs, 4 es) 3:iv internet last (no deviance) 3:v last night (1 es) 4:i but what (14 gs) 4:ii what does (19 gs, 2 es) 4:iii it mean (1 gs) 6:i liked kwesi (2 gs, 5 es) 6:ii but did (7 gs, 1 es) 7:i don't kick (8 es) 8:i asked him (8 es) 8:iii it down (no deviance) io:i must pat (1 gs, 22 es) io:ii pat thf! (1 gs) ll:i would you (io gs, 3 es) ll:iii at thaf (1 gs) ll:iv that great (3 gs) ll:v great red (3 gs) ll:vi red bud (1 es) 12:i put the (2 gs, 3 es) 12:iii and could (4 gs, 3 es) 12:iv could sit (6 gs) 12:v sit down (no deviance) 13:i cat sat (no deviance) 14:v bit fad (1 gs) 15:i just bought (2 gs, 16 es) 16:ii stopped the (1 gs, 2 es) 17:i asked me (2 gs, 18 es) 18:i should put 16 gs, 18 es) 19:i cut the (6 gs, 1 es) . legan journal of the humanities i 191 kari dako and george frimpong kodie volume 21 (2010) 20:i take the (1 gs, 10 es) 20:ii next street (no deviance) 20:iii street left (no deviance) note the three examples with but: but did (7 gs, 1 es), but what (14 gs), but not (15 gs, 2 es). we would have expected but did to show a high rate of elision since it/ and /d/ are both alveolar sounds and thus easily coalesced, but both but what and but not show higher rates of substitution. note the instances of /ti followed by the dental fricative: ate the (no deviance), pat the (1 gs) put the (2 gs, 3 es), cut the (6 gs, 1 es). it was initially thought that ate the showed no deviance possibly as a result of the diphthong preceding the alveolar stop which makes it distinct from the other three examples: pat the, put the, cut the, but it was realized that ate was pronounced let! and thus exhibited no vowel features distinct from the other words. the rate of deviance: 01-57 can therefore not be explained phonetically. bilabial stops are not very likely to be elided or be replaced with a glottal stop. l:iv: drop( to) (3 gs) 2:iv: sheep(-) (no deviance) 5:ii: lab(somewhere)(no' deviance)14:iii: tip (lop)(l es) 14:iv: top(and) (no deviance) 18:iii: stop (to)(no deviance) note that drop to had 3 gs whereas stop to had no deviance. ·velar stops are also not very likely to be elided or replaced with a glottal stop: 6:iv: like (me) (no deviance) l:v: drink (no deviance) 192 i legan journal of the humanities volume 21 (2010) 2:i: big (bad) (1 gs) 7:ii: kick (the)(no deviance) 17:ii make (a) (no deviance) 10 es) · ll:ii: look (at) (1 es) deviance) 3:iii: log (onto) (no deviance) kari dako_and george frimpong kodie but 9:i: lick (the)(4 gs, 5 es) but 20:i: take (the) (1 gs, but 12:ii: book (away) (no and 7:iii: dog (no deviance) 6. the mqdals could, would, should also exhibited curious results. we had two examples of could: 3: 'i could not log onto the internet l~st night.' (28 gs, 4 es) i.e 32/40 students did not articulate final stop. s.12: 'he put the book away and could sit down.' (6 gs) i.e. 6/40 students did not articulate final stop. the one example of should: 18: 'you should put an end to the fight.' (14 females and 12 males gs, and 3 males es) i.e. 29/40 the one example of would: 11: 'would you look at that..' (5 female~ and 5 males gs, 1 female and 2 males es): 13/40 must as in: s.10: 'you must pat the dog gently.' (1 male gs, 9 females and 13 males es)-23/40. legon journal of the humanities i 193 kari dako and george frimponlf kodie volume 21 (2010) just as in: s.15: 'i just bought a new set of books.' (2 females gs, 7 females and 9 males es) 18/40. concluding remarks from these findings, and supported from our recordings, we can conclude that female students use more glottal stops than male students, as the ratio was 89% of females to 77% of males. male students, on the other hand, used more elisions: females, 55% and males 80%. we can also note that whereas student pidgin (sp), which is a male code, elides final consonants, not only stops, the glottal stop is hardly noticeable in sp. this new speech trend is idiolectal rather than gender specific. it might be of interest to mention that we taped the chief vandal (the head student of commonwealth hall) in informal conversation. he did not exhibit one single case of either glottal stop or elision of final stop. some female students, however, when asked, said they started using glottal stops when they came to legon. we did not find any evidence that we are dealing with transference phenomena. the glottal stop is not a salient feature in the bigger ghanaian languages, and even though these languages do not have a consonant coda, elision of final consonants is not apparent in educated ghanaian english speech. the inclusion of the glottal stop and the elision of the final stop are obviously fashion trends among our students. it is possible that it is a language feature that has its roots in the london dialect, cockney, and is acquired by our students during stays in london. the distribution of both the glottal stop and the elided final stop is not systematic, but random, as our examples show. endnote we are grateful to prof. l. boadi who pointed out that glottal stops do indeed occur in asante twi. we checked whet~er the students who favoured glottal stops were in fact asante and sp~ke asante twi, but saw that this wa:s not the case. 194 j legan journal of the humanities volume 21 (2010) kari dako and george frimpong kodie references: abercrombie, david. 1982. elements of general phonetics. edinburgh: eup. chambers, j.k. 1992. 'linguistic correlates of gender and sex' english world wide 13:2 173-218. christopher frueh, & becker, judith a. 1992. 'the effect of gender-role appropriate language on listener attributions.' journal of pragmatics 18, 505-520. gimson, a.c. 1972. an introduction to the pronunciation of english. london: edward arnold ltd. holmes, janet. 1991. 'language and gender.' language teaching oct. 24:4, 207-220. jones, daniel. 1960. an outline of english phonetics. london: heffer. katamba, francis 1996. an introduction to phonology. harlow: addison wesleylongman ltd. milroy, james and milroy, lesley. 1993. 'mechanisms of change in urban dialects: the role of class, social network and gender.' international journal of applied linguistics, vol.3, no.1, 57-77. strevens, p.d., 1965. "pronunciation of english in west africa", papers in language and language teaching. oxford university press. udofot, inyang. 2004. 'varieties of spoken nigerian english' in ed. segun awonusi & e.a. babalola the domestication of english in nigeria. lagos: ulp legan journal of the humanities i 195 kari dako and george frimpong kodie volume 21 (2010) appendix i: 1. the students came from the following schools: 2. upper west region: nandom secondary school, francis xavier seminary. 3. eastern region: pope john seminary, ofori panin secondary school. 4. upper east region: bolgatanga secondary school 5. greater accra region: achimota scool, akosombo international secondary school, accra high school, terna secondary school, nungua secondary school. 6. volta region: anlo secondary school, 7. western region: fijai secondary school, takoradi secondary school. 8. central region: adisadel college, holy child secondary school, mfantenian secondary school, st. augustine secondary school. 9. ashanti region: st hubert seminary, opoku ware secondary school, toase secondary school, kumasi secondary technical school, kumasi academy, dwamena akenteng secondary school, 10. brong ahafo region: st james, sunyani secondary school, 11. northern region: tamale secondary school. lqi'> / f,pqnn jnurnnl nfthp httmantttf.<:: volume 21 (2010) kari dako and george frimpong kodie appendix ii: sentences 1. water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink. 2. the big, bad wolf ate the sheep. 3. i could not log onto the internet last night. 4. but what does it mean? 5. he works in a lab somewhere. 6. i liked kwesi, but did he like me? 7. don't kick the dog! 8. i asked him to put it down. 9. if you are still hungry, lick the plate! 10. you must pat the dog gently. 11. would you look at that great, red bud! 12. he put the book away and could sit down. 13. the cat sat on the mat and jumped onto my lap. 14. do you get it? be tip top and a bit fad. 15. i just bought a new set of books. 16. i bet he stopped the fight. 17. he asked me to make a bid. 18. you should put a stop to the fight! 19. cut the cord! 20. take the next street left! legan journal of the humanities i 197 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 37 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v25i1.3 language choice in multilingual communities: the case of larteh, ghana1 mercy akrofi ansah research fellow, institute of african studies, university of ghana, legon abstract in a multilingual community, the multilingual speaker needs to make the right language choice which principally depends on the domain of usage and the linguistic repertoire of speech participants. this paper investigates factors that govern language choices that multilingual speakers make in larteh, a multilingual community. the study is informed by insights from the markedness model, developed by myers-scotton (1993, 1998). larteh is a non-reciprocal bilingual community, where the people speak leteh 2 and akuapem twi (johnson, 1973, p. i). english is the third language for those who have had formal education. in this paper, three domains of language use are examined: education, tradition, and religion. data from an interview survey on language use and participant observations are employed. the paper notes that due to changes in various spheres of life in larteh, current language use patterns in the community differ from what pertained about three decades ago (johnson, 1973, 1975). subsequently, factors that determine language choice are gradually undergoing some modification. keywords: language choice, multilingualism, education, tradition, christianity this paper explores factors that inform language choices that are made by multilingual speakers in larteh. people who speak more than two languages are often confronted with making the right language choice within a particular domain. language choice is informed by the kind of participants in a communication situation, the topic, social distance, and also location. studies on language use in multilingual communities in africa abound (see yakubu et al 2012; kamwangamalu, 2000; ncoko et al 2000; 1 this research was funded by the american council for learned societies (acls), under the african humanities programme (ahp). 2 in this paper, leteh is the spelling adopted for the language of the people of larteh. elsewhere in the literature, the language is also known as larteh or lɛtɛ. ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 38 bodomo et al 2009 among others). brokensha (1966) and johnson (1973, 1975) constitute significant research on language use in larteh. whereas brokensha (1966), an ethnographic study, briefly discussed the subject of language use in larteh in his introductory chapter, those by johnson are thorough studies of the subject matter. in his introductory chapter, brokensha presented an overview of the linguistic situation of larteh, and also the functional distribution of the three major languages: leteh, twi, and english. leteh was described as a domestic language, which was learnt by children as their first language. english was learnt at school and school lessons were taught in twi. to some extent, twi was considered to be a prestigious language, and associated with education and christianity. in church, english was used out of necessity, especially when there were non-africans in the congregation. brokensha further commented that the language used in church was twi even when the congregation was made up of only leteh speakers. in this regard, he cited the example of the pentecostal church at larteh where all the worshipers were leteh speakers and yet, twi was used. besides the use of english in school, it was spoken by educated adults in conversation. school children who wished to practise their oral skills or impress non-literates also used english outside the classroom setting. the present study will verify if the functional distribution of the three languages as described by brokensha still persists in larteh. johnson (1973) was an in-depth study of the patterns of language use in larteh, as an example of a bilingual community. the work described all aspects of language use in the larteh community, and his findings corroborated those by brokensha (1966). johnson further stressed the domestic function of leteh by commenting that although school children spoke twi and english for practice at home, it was often considered rude and disloyal, especially when spoken in the presence of adults. the author commented that the home was essentially a monolingual environment at larteh. with regard to language choice at church, the author further noted that twi was the language of the bible, hymnals, and prayer books. english was used only when visitors were present, as was the case when the author and his wife visited the larteh presbyterian church as part of his field trip. with regard to education, the basel missionaries supported the use of twi, and made it the foundation of their educational system. twi was the medium of instruction, and larteh children only learnt it at school. some attempts were therefore made by the gold coast educational authorities to post teachers who could speak leteh or kyerepong (guan language) to larteh to teach the lower primary classes. in school, the use of leteh was permitted, but not encouraged. codeswitching between leteh-twi was also not encouraged as it was believed to have the potential of impeding the learning progress of school children. during traditional ceremonies, leteh was the primary choice. however, in some instances of libation pouring, orations, and speeches, some twi phrases were heard. in ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 39 these instances, english was not used except among the audience. finally, johnson (1975) discussed the triglossic relationship among leteh, twi, and english. he described the language situation as one characterized by a division of communicative functions among the three languages, a situation which is the result of a gradual change over a long period. the author asserted that the functional distribution of languages in larteh was not random, and proposed a set of rules which could be used to predict language choice in a multilingual community such as larteh. these were repertoire rules, situational rules, and metaphorical rules. changes in the various spheres of life in a community are very likely to affect language use. broad areas which are susceptible to change include education, technology and social interaction. undoubtedly, conditions which prevailed during the period of previous research (brokensha (1966); johnson (1973, 1975)) have changed; hence transformations in the patterns of language use in larteh are to be expected. it is in light of these changes that this study is undertaken. this paper will therefore investigate factors that impact language selection in larteh with respect to these changes. the paper is organized as follows: after the introductory section, sources of data and collection methods are discussed in section two. myers-scotton’s markedness model (1993, 1998) and its application to the study are dealt with in section three. in section four, a sociolinguistic background of larteh is given. in the three sections that follow, patterns of language choice in the three domains of language usage are discussed. the discussion is summarized, and conclusions are drawn in section eight. data and methods an interdisciplinary method of data collection was used for the study; linguistic and anthropological. a linguistic survey of larteh (lisl) was conducted to collect information on individual and societal linguistic repertoires. the survey was conducted from september 5 september 9, 2011 with 12 research assistants: 6 locals, paired with 6 national service personnel from the university of ghana. one research assistant helped with data analyses. results of the survey also gave indication of patterns of language use in larteh. in all, 418 interviews were conducted to specifically determine language types that are used in the community. this number represented about 5% of the total population of larteh 8,310 (ghana housing and population census, 2000). the interviewees who were randomly selected were aged 10 years and above. furthermore, primary 1 classroom teaching sessions in three public schools in larteh were observed. the schools were the anglican primary school on september 12, 2011; the presbyterian primary school on september 14, 2011; and the methodist primary school on september 15, 2011. funeral activities and church services were also observed. two funeral sessions were observed on october 29, 2011 and november 26, 2011. with regard to language choice in the ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 40 church, notes taken at the presbyterian church and lighthouse chapel on january 22, 2012 and february 5, 2012 respectively are used for illustration. these exercises enabled the researcher to investigate the choices that teachers, family spokesman, and church leaders make in multilingual contexts such as the classroom, funeral gatherings, and church services. theoretical framework this study is done within the framework of myers-scotton’s markedness model (1993, 1998). markedness, according to myers-scotton (1998, p. 4), relates to the choice of one linguistic variety over other possible varieties. myers-scotton (1993, p. 84) further posits that each language in a multilingual community is associated with particular social roles, which she calls rights-and-obligations (ro) sets. the speaker-hearer signals her understanding of the current situation by deciding to speak a particular language. the choice of a particular language is also an indication of her relevant role within the context. the markedness model is stated in the form of a principle, the negotiation principle, and three maxims. the negotiation principle presents the theory’s central idea. hence myers-scotton’s assertion: “choose the form of your conversational contribution such that it indexes the set of rights and obligations which you wish to be in force between the speaker and addressee for the current exchange” (1993, p. 113). three maxims emerge from this principle: the unmarked choice maxim; the marked choice maxim; and the exploratory choice maxim. the unmarked choice maxim states, “make your code choice the unmarked index of the unmarked ro set in talk exchanges when you wish to establish or affirm that ro set” (myers-scotton, 1993, p. 114). the marked choice maxim directs, “make a marked code choice…when you wish to establish a new ro set as unmarked for the current exchange” (myers-scotton, 1993, p. 131). finally, the exploratory choice maxim states, “when an unmarked choice is not clear, use cs (codeswitching) to make alternate exploratory choices as candidates for an unmarked choice and thereby as an index of an ro set which you favor” (myers-scotton, 1993, p. 142). in this sense, social meanings of language choice, as well as the causes of alternation, are defined completely in terms of participant rights and obligations. the markedness model uses the marked versus unmarked distinction to explain the social and psychological motivations for making one language choice over another. what community norms would predict is unmarked; what the community norms would not predict is marked (myers-scotton, 1998, p.5). as kieswetter (1995, p. 15) explains, the unmarked choice is considered as the expected choice within that particular context, whereas making a marked choice often carries extra social meaning. the markedness model (1993, 1998) is appropriate for the present study as it relates to the choice of one linguistic variety over other possible varieties in a speech context. in this paper, marked and unmarked choices that speech participants make in the educational, traditional, and ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 41 religious domains in larteh will be matched against the rights-and-obligations (ro) sets. in the present study, the rights-and-obligations sets may be likened to the known functions of the three major languages which co-exist in a triglossic relationship in larteh. in this sense, the choice of a particular language is viewed with reference to the extent its use matches community expectations for the domain or type of activity. sociolinguistic background of the larteh community larteh is a town in the south-east of ghana, located on the akono hills, the range of hills which cross akuapem from south-east to the north-west. it is bordered in the north by the mamfe-akropong road; in the south by the shai hills, in the east by the towns of abonse and aseseeso, and in the west by the apopoano hill near dodowa. the closest neighbours are mamfe and akropong where akuapem twi is spoken, and dodowa and ayikuma, where dangme is spoken. the population and housing census of ghana (2000) put the population of larteh at 8,310. this clearly does not represent the exact number of speakers because of the presence of immigrants in the town. yet another difficulty in arriving at a specific number stems from the fact that there are many leteh speakers who reside outside larteh. larteh is a neighbour of language communities like the akan and dangme. her closest guan community is abiriw, about 10 kilometers away, where kyerepong is spoken. interactions among these language groups are through inter-marriages, celebrations of traditional festivals, trade, and education. consequently, on a typical market day in the town, the multilingual skills of the traders within larteh and those from neighbouring towns are utilized. during the celebration of traditional festivals, it is common to find people from neighboring communities in attendance to lend support. short distances between larteh and neighboring towns allow school children to enrol in schools outside larteh. this has further exposed young school children to other languages besides leteh, their first language. additionally, the use of twi as the language of instruction at the lower primary level makes it mandatory for school children in larteh to pay attention to twi. contact with english and twi has resulted in remarkable phenomena such as borrowing, codeswitching, and diglossia within the larteh community. the basel mission established the first school in 1858 with 12 children. presently, the town boasts of 6 pre-schools, 7 primary schools, 7 junior high schools and 3 senior high schools. in addition are 2 privately-owned commercial schools. many children have therefore had the opportunity to go to school, at least to the junior high level, thus enhancing their competence in akuapem twi which is the medium of instruction at the basic level of education and also, a school subject in larteh and the surrounding akuapem towns. the number of schools presently, is in sharp contrast to johnson’s report of 1973 when there were 6 primary and 5 middle schools at larteh. according to his report, larteh had 1 private commercial school and 1 governmentansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 42 assisted secondary school. the increase in the number of schools has therefore led to a corresponding increase in the use of english as a greater number of larterians (my own coinage for the inhabitants of larteh) have now been exposed to english through the school system. the basel mission was the first missionary body to gain roots in larteh, establishing the presbyterian church in 1853. this was followed by the wesleyans (methodist) in 1879 and the anglican church in 1913. after the establishment of these churches, other churches usually referred to as pentecostal churches also sprung up. churches in larteh may therefore be broadly categorized into two: orthodox churches and charismatic churches. the major orthodox churches are the presbyterian, methodist, catholic, and anglican churches. the church of pentecost, the apostolic church of ghana, jesus generation church, and lighthouse chapel international fall under the umbrella of pentecostal churches in this study. funeral ceremonies in larteh are communal where family members are expected to make donations in cash and in kind to finance the funeral. a typical funeral ceremony in larteh covers three days, and regardless of the society being male-dominated, women play significant roles in funeral activities. previous studies have recorded that in larteh, leteh is the first language of almost everyone, and akuapem twi is spoken by almost everyone as the second language, a phenomenon which is corroborated by the present study. a study by stewart (1972, p. 83) reports that the use of a second language in larteh is a common mark of guan speakers, and that “except in the case of gonja, it seems that most speakers of guan languages speak a second language as a lingua franca.” the use of akan as a second language by leteh speakers may be explained by geographical factors, first and foremost, and secondly by the effects of national educational policies which stipulate that akuapem twi be used as the medium of instruction at the basic level of education in larteh and surrounding towns. educated larteh people speak english in addition to leteh and twi since english is the language of education, administration, and trade in ghana. leteh is unwritten and does not possess an official orthography. the language is mostly used in the homes, among the speakers, and also as a means of communication at traditional gatherings, such as funerals, festivals, marriages, and naming ceremonies. brokensha (1966, p. xvi) sums up the linguistic situation in larteh in the following words three languages are in common use in larteh-guan, twi and english. guan is generally the domestic language, children learning it as their first language and using it in their early years. at school, children learn english and they also have lessons in what is called ‘vernacular’, which is in fact twi, for guan is not taught at any school. twi to some extent occupies the position of a prestige language, as does english on other occasions, being for example used in church. it is common knowledge that multilingualism is the norm in africa, and in many communities in africa, it is significant to find out what criteria multilingual speakers ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 43 employ when they need to choose between various languages. it is reported, for instance, that in kenya, there are more than forty languages which are spoken besides english and kiswahili, the official languages and the main lingua francas (kamwangamalu, 2000). an urban dweller therefore needs to master the use of more than one language in order to communicate effectively in the various speech domains (kamwangamalu, 2000). it is, however, noted that community multilingualism does not always imply individual multilingualism, but in the case of larteh, available data indicate that monolinguals are almost non-existent (table 2). in table 1, languages that are reported as being used in the community are recorded. a sample size of 418 inhabitants which represented about 5% of the total population of 8, 310 (ghana population and housing census, 2000) was used. table 1 larteh community linguistic repertoire languages claim use leteh 322 269 twi (akuapem) 362 354 english 227 102 ga 81 8 dangme 29 3 hausa 11 3 ewe 19 1 french 10 7 bono 1 1 dagaare 2 2 frafra 1 1 kyerepong 6 4 wala 1 1 krakye 1 1 gonja 1 1 gwa/ anum 1 1 nzema 1 1 yoruba 1 1 wassa 1 1 sehwi 1 1 data in table 1 distinguish between people who claim knowledge of leteh from those who actually use the language in their day-to-day activities. according to the data, there are about 20 languages spoken in larteh. of this number, three languages are dominant: ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 44 leteh, twi, and english. 322 of the sample claim that leteh is their first language, but 269 of this number use leteh whereas 53 of them prefer to use twi and other languages. out of the 418 respondents, 362 claim they can speak akan whilst 354 of the number actually use twi effectively. in the case of english, 227 claim that they are able to communicate in english whereas 102 of the number use english in some of their interactions. the scenario confirms the multilingual nature of the community. individual multilingualism in larteh is also attested by data in table 2. in order to investigate individual linguistic repertoire, the 269 respondents who indicated that leteh was their first language were considered. in this study, this number represents larterians, i.e., the people of larteh; people who consider larteh to be their hometown. table 2 individual linguistic repertoire language number of speakers percentage representation leteh only 1 0.3% twi only 3 1.12% leteh and twi only 265 98.51% leteh, twi, english 252 93.68% leteh, twi, english & other 113 42.01% out of the population sample, only one person is a leteh monolingual. this is a75-yearold woman who has had no formal education. similarly for twi, three people claim that it is the only language they speak. these people had leteh as their first language; they previously spoke leteh when they were children, but lost their proficiency when they migrated to live in northern ghana for a greater part of their lives. as many as 265 people are bilingual in leteh-twi. a little over 90% of the population sample is multilingual in the three major languages spoken in the community. furthermore, 113 of the population sample spoke other languages apart from the three major languages, representing about 42% of leteh speakers. the data therefore substantiate a community where almost everyone is multilingual. language choice in a multilingual classroom the current educational language policy of ghana supports the use of mother tongue in teaching at the lower primary level. the policy stipulates that the majority of instructional time is spent on l1 (90% in kindergarten and 80% in grade 1) while time for english gradually increases to 50% by grade 3. the use of english as a medium of instruction is expected to take effect from grade 4 (national literacy acceleration ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 45 programme (nalap 3 baseline assessment 2009). teaching sessions in primary 1 of three public schools were observed to explore how teachers manipulate the three major languages used in the community. it was ascertained that all the pupils were bilingual in english and twi. secondly, the teachers who taught in these schools were also multilingual in three or all of these languages: english, akan, leteh, and anum. table 3 illustrates the multilingual background of the pupils. table 3 linguistic repertoire of pupils school presbyterian primary anglican primary methodist primary number on roll 40 38 17 english 40 38 17 english, akan 40 38 17 english, akan, leteh 38 35 14 three teaching sessions were observed. the first lesson was in environmental science at the anglican primary school, and the topic was ‘dental care’. the topic was mentioned in english and then translated into akan. the following is an excerpt of the teaching session. figure 1 language choice in an environmental science lesson teacher: everybody, let me see your teeth. what are the uses of your teeth? dεn na wode wo se yε? 1st pupil: chewing 2nd pupil: mede we nam i use it for chewing meat teacher: are our teeth useful then? class (chorus): yes! teacher: today, we want to learn how we can take good care of our teeth. yebesua sεnea yebetumi ahwε yεn se so yiye. teacher: what is the first thing you do in the morning? 3rd pupil: we wash our face, we brush our teeth. teacher: what do we use for brushing our teeth? 3nalap was formed to address the literacy crisis in primary education in ghana. ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 46 4th pupil: duawa chewing stick 5th pupil: brush ne pepsodent and teacher: how many times do we have to brush our teeth in a day? mpεn ahe na εsε sε yetwiw yεn se dabiara? 6th pupil: two times teacher: good, well done! the teacher introduced the topic in english, and translated it into twi. after the lesson had been introduced in both english and twi, the pupils answered questions using either twi or english, whichever they were proficient in. when the questions required one-word answers, the pupils spoke english otherwise twi was used. the teacher did english-akan codeswitching throughout the teaching session. the second session which was observed was a mathematics lesson. language choice of pupils was quite different, with english language dominating in the answers that pupils gave. the use of english dominated in the answers, because the questions did not demand complete statements. when the teacher had introduced the topic “simple division”, she went ahead to explain the concept in akan using objects. figure 2 language choice in a mathematics lesson teacher: nnipa baanu kyε akutu anan a, obiara benya ahe? when two people share four oranges, how many will each have? 1st pupil: two teacher: nnipa baanu kyε kwaadu asia nso ε? and when two people share six fingers of bananas? 2nd pupil: three, three teacher: and when three people share nine pencils? na nnipa baasa kyε pencil akron nso ε? 3rd pupil: three the third lesson that the researcher observed was in religious and moral education where the teacher taught the “creation story” from the holy bible. the bible was read in english, after which the teacher narrated the account in twi. all the questions were asked in twi, and the responses from pupils were mostly in twi. after the lesson, there was a memory verse taught in english. below is an excerpt of the class session. ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 47 figure 3 language choice in a religious and moral education lesson teacher: dɛn na onyankopon bɔ dii kan? “what did god create first?” pupil 1: star, nsoroma teacher: nna ahe na ɔde bɔɔ biribiara? “how many days did he use in creating everything?” pupils 2: nnansa “three days” teacher: dabi “no.” pupil 3: 6 days teacher: good! the teacher narrated the story in twi after reading from the english holy bible, because she intimated that biblical english was sometimes difficult to understand. she could not read the twi bible so she read passages in english and then explained them in twi. pupils gave some one-word answers in english, especially where it was a loan word or lexical items which were better known in english. in most of the instances, the answers were in twi. the memory verse was taught in english, because it gave the pupils a sense of pride to recite bible verses in english. during school open days and children’s day in the presbyterian church, for example, school children were made to recite english bible verses to the admiration of unlettered parents. for the parents of these school children, the ability to recite bible verses in english was evidence of literacy. the three preceding teaching scenarios present language choices in the primary 1 classroom. in each case, the teacher’s language choice may be described as unmarked. the bilingual strategy adopted by the teacher is what is expected from a primary 1 teacher as per the government of ghana’s educational policy on language. the teacher’s speech was therefore characterized by codeswitching. the type of lesson also determined the teacher’s language choice. in this case, the appropriate language had to be selected in order to achieve teaching and learning objectives as seen in the religious and moral education lesson. on the other hand, the pupils’ choices stemmed from their competency levels in the two prescribed languages of instruction. the institutional factor may be likened to johnson’s situational rule (1975) which stipulates that it is a situation type that determines the choice of language. in the classroom situation therefore, the language (s) is/are prescribed, and the teacher does not have much control over the language of instruction. applying the markedness model, we can assert that the teacher’s unmarked choice of language was dictated by the educational language policy of ghana. the ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 48 choice was therefore normal and matched community expectations. for the pupils who may have had very little knowledge or none at all about language policy, their englishtwi bilingualism was exploited. the language choices that pupils made in answering questions indicated their proficiency levels in the two languages: english and twi. again, one would describe their language choices as unmarked since they were expected. it must be noted that leteh, the first language of the majority of the pupils was not used in any of the teachings sessions. if any of the speech participants had spoken leteh, that would have been a marked choice, and would have carried “extra social meaning” (kieswetter, 1995, p. 25). this pattern of language use in education is similar to what pertains in some multilingual communities in africa. for instance, ncoko et al (2000, p. 239, p.231) reporting on the benefits of codeswitching for teacher education, recommended that in the multilingual schools in south africa, codeswitching could be used as a teaching strategy since it had communicative functions such as translation, checking comprehension, giving instruction, and clarification. similar to observations made in the present research, the study by ncoko et al also established that learners utilize their linguistic ability and resources to control their conversations according to content and circumstances. table 4 summarizes the three scenarios of teaching sessions. in each session, the language which predominates is listed first. table 4 patterns of language choice in primary 1 classroom domain setting speaker addressee subject topic language education school teacher pupils integrated science dental care english/ akan mathematic -s simple division english/ akan religious and moral education creation twi/ english language choice at funerals funerals at larteh are public, and are characterized by the attendance of many mourners and sympathizers. as sympathizers may be of diverse language backgrounds, language choice is made with care so that communication goals are realized. to a large extent, language choice is dependent on the acceptable social roles of each language, the rights-and-obligations (ro) sets (myers-scotton, 1993, p. 84). for each sub-activity of the funeral therefore, participants expected a particular language choice. in larteh, funeral activities normally span three days, friday-sunday. the dead body is laid in state ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 49 from friday late afternoon to the morning of the saturday. in the evening of the friday, close relatives of the deceased gather in the family house to keep wake. the tradition is that any sympathizer who comes around to greet the family is given an update or a briefing on the cause of death, which is usually done in leteh first, and then summarized in twi. on the following day, the family head performs a rite to select a successor for the dead person. the gathering is usually made up of close family members who are mostly larterians. it is a short ceremony during which leteh is largely spoken. the following is an extract of a funeral session for a deceased relative who had lived and worked in kumasi, a town in the ashanti region of ghana. on this occasion, leteh (l) is spoken and then interpreted into twi (t). figure 4 language choice at a funeral (i) (sympathizers enter the funeral grounds to greet the bereaved family; the family spokesman introduces them). family spokesman: agoo! attention! ɛsε ne debiakε a twu kumase pεε. amo gyi papa… esumitese. amo debεboaokunafo a, ne ahurε mo kuru.(l) adɔfonom, nnipa yi a wogu so rekyia yi fi kumase pεε. wɔyε agya…adwumayεfo. wɔaba rebεboa okunafo no asie ne kunu.(t) “the people who are greeting used to be the co-workers of mr…. they have come all the way from kumasi to help the widow bury her late husband.” (e) during the funeral, various announcements are made. these announcements are meant to direct visitors to venues of funeral activities, and also to inform the gathering of donors. announcements are made in all the three major languages: leteh, twi, and english due to the diverse language backgrounds of mourners and sympathizers. a scenario is illustrated in figure 5. figure 5 language choice at a funeral (ii) family spokesman: ɛne debεna asɔretsa nte. ene ntwu asiei mbε a, εne bebunkyi bε mfe ara (l) ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 50 yεrebεkɔ asɔredan mu. se yefi amusiei a, yεbεsan abehyia wɔ ha bio. (t) we shall go to the church from here. from the cemetery, we shall come back here. (e) in the first instance (figure 4), the family spokesman used leteh and twi. he interpreted his statements into twi for the benefit of the sympathizers who had arrived from kumasi. this scenario differs from the one during which only leteh was spoken, the selection/election of a successor. in figure 5, all the three languages are used in order to reach a larger audience. the family spokesman assumes the role of host and ensures that his “guests” do not lose their way whilst they are in town. it is also important to mention the names of donors so that they are well appreciated. the spokesman therefore uses leteh, twi, and english. an interaction of marked and unmarked language choices was observed. although it was expected that during a traditional ceremony, leteh would be the unmarked choice, this was not always the case due to the diverse language backgrounds of speech participants. the use of english in the traditional domain does not match community expectations, and as a result the choice may be described as marked so far as domain type was concerned. nevertheless, leteh, the unmarked choice was used in performing some exclusive traditional rites. the mourners and sympathizers used various languages among themselves, according to their linguistic repertoire. in selecting a language to address the mourners and sympathizers, the speaker always considered their linguistic repertoire; he therefore used all the three major languages. the alternate use of unmarked and marked languages confirms the assertion that within the markedness model, code choices are intentional in that they are made to achieve specific social ends. in this sense, the speaker will choose one language variety over another, because it has more benefits than costs (myers-scotton, 1998, p. 19). the repertoire rule as proposed by johnson (1975) dictated marked language choices to a large extent in the traditional domain. table 5 is a summary of patterns of language choice during the various subactivities of a funeral in larteh. for each of the activities, the predominant language is listed first. ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 51 table 5 patterns of language choice at funerals domain speaker addressee setting activity/ topic language tradition family spokesman mourners and sympathizers funeral introduction of sympathizers leteh, twi reporting cause of death leteh, twi electing a successor leteh announcements leteh, twi, english language choice in the church for the purposes of the present study, churches at larteh were categorized into two: orthodox and pentecostal churches. the classification is necessary because the mode of worship in these two types of churches differs significantly, a disparity which has the potential of influencing language choice. in the case of orthodox churches, the presbyterian church service and the catholic mass were observed. language choice as observed in the two churches did not differ significantly. during a normal sunday morning service at the presbyterian church, the language of worship was predominantly twi. biblical references were, however, read in english. there were a few cases of akanenglish codeswitching in sermons. leteh was not used in the course of the church service. this differed from special occasions, for example, a funeral service where the congregants had various language backgrounds. during such funeral services, the sermon was delivered in twi and then a summary given in english. the following field notes which were taken on january 22, 2012 illustrate language choice in a normal sunday worship service in the presbyterian church. call to worship was done in twi by the senior minister. a prayer was said in twi, and hymns were also sung in twi. when a hymn was introduced, the reference was first mentioned in twi, then in english. bible readings were done in twi, and similarly the references were said in both twi and english. the choir and the singing band sang in twi. the congregants used twi hymn books. the session clerk (church secretary) read the announcements in twi. the senior minister said the closing prayer and pronounced the ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 52 benediction in twi. after the church service, interactions among the congregants were in both leteh and twi. language choice in the orthodox churches may be accounted for by their history. in the case of the presbyterian church for instance, the basel mission which introduced christianity in larteh had as its basic policy concerning missionary work, the utilization of ghanaian languages. missionary work started at akropong-akuapem; akuapem twi was therefore adopted as the literary standard for use in the churches where twi is spoken. other factors accounting for the predominant use of twi over leteh in the church are that many christian ministers who are posted to larteh to head the orthodox churches are nonlarterians. in addition, all christian materials are printed in twi and english, and none in leteh. it was, however, gathered that whenever the chief of the town attended church service, and he was given an opportunity to address the congregation, he spoke leteh. language choice in the orthodox churches, typified by the presbyterian and catholic churches, is governed by factors like domain-type and occasionally by the linguistic repertoire of speech participants. in the first place, the unmarked choice was twi, because it is the language of the christian religion in larteh and the surrounding akuapem towns in ghana. secondly, the varied repertoire represented during special services, such as a funeral service, required the use of english in addition to twi. the recourse to english, an unmarked choice, is therefore said to carry additional meaning. finally, the choice of leteh over twi by traditional leaders who visited the church occasionally may be described as figurative. by using leteh, a marked choice, the chief built solidarity with his subjects. johnson’s rules on situation, linguistic repertoire and metaphoric are applicable to language choice in the orthodox churches in larteh. language choice in the pentecostal churches was quite different. the following are field notes taken at the lighthouse chapel international church branch at larteh on february 5, 2012. the church service began with a prayer led by the assistant pastor. the assistant pastor whose first language is ewe used english. during the prayer time, members prayed mostly in english. this was followed by a period of singing. the songs were in twi. the song leader did english-twi codeswitching to urge the congregants to sing and praise god. congregants were heard praying in both english and twi. when it was time for church members to share testimonies of god’s intervention in their lives, they used twi with a few english phrases such as “praise the lord”; “my sister encouraged us; everybody encouraged us.” although the two speakers were larterians, they spoke twi mainly. the sermon was characterized by twi-english codeswitching (figure 6). both the twi and english bibles were read. the senior pastor welcomed visitors using twi and english. at the close of the church service, members recited a prayer (gracea scriptural verse which has been memorized by members) to one another in english whilst they shook hands. ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 53 figure 6 codeswitching in a sermon pastor: i told you that sε wofa bible a, baabi a εyε kɔkɔɔ no, yesu na ɔkaeε… “i told you that when you pick a bible, the red parts are the direct sayings of jesus…” enti this year, we have all decided that this year we want to make it. okristoni, nneεma bebree wɔ hɔ a εsε sε yεyε. “so this year, we have all decided that this year, we want to make it. christian, there are many things which we ought to do.” unlike the presbyterian church, the lighthouse church had a membership which was younger, generally between ages 10-40. the members were mostly pupils and students, a fact which accounts for the comparatively widespread use of english. the predominant use of english also stems from its foundation; the founders of the church encouraged the use of english right from the onset. in the pentecostal church, there was a combinatory use of unmarked and marked choices. from the perspective of the visitor who has no knowledge of the ro sets of the church, the expected language choice was akuapem twi. however, the church members who shared the ro sets of the church would consider akuapem twi to be a marked choice as opposed to the expectations in the orthodox church. although the majority of the worshippers were larterians, leteh was not used. tables 6a and 6b summarize language choices that are made in the church. table 6a patterns of language choice in the presbyterian church, larteh domain speaker addressee setting activity language christian religion pastor worshippers presbyterian church call to worship twi church leader, church members prayer twi congregation, singing groups singing twi church members bible reading twi ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 54 pastor sermon twi church secretary announcements twi pastor benediction twi table 6b language choice at the lighthouse chapel, larteh domain speaker addressee setting activity language christian religion assistant pastor worshippers lighthouse chapel preparatory prayer english singing twi senior pastor sermon twi /english church members bible reading twi/ english church members testimonies twi/ english senior pastor announcements twi/ english worshippers sharing of grace english summary and conclusion the paper set out to explore factors that dictate language choices made by multilingual speakers in larteh, a multilingual community. the study was conducted within the framework of markedness model (myers-scotton, 1993, 1998). three domains that were investigated are education, tradition, and christian worship. the results of this study are founded on data gathered from a linguistic survey, interviews, and participant observation. research done on language choice in multilingual communities has established that among many considerations that multilingual speakers make in selecting a language for communication are the domains of language use, topic/activity, and the language background of speech participants (kamwangamalu, 2000). within the framework of markedness, the social and psychological associations that speakers attach to languages inform choices that are made. a language choice may therefore be perceived as unmarked or marked, depending on the extent to which it matches community expectations. in this study, community expectations are aligned with the set functions of the three major languages, typical of a triglossic community. in this paper, these expectations which are ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 55 shared by members of the leteh community represent myers-scotton’s rights-andobligations sets. johnson’s set of rules (1975) for predicting language choice were also applied to the data where relevant. this study has shown that in addition to factors of language choice documented in the literature, national language policies play significant roles in determining language spoken in some speech domains. in the educational domain, it was found out that the teachers’ choice of both english and twi in teaching primary 1 is largely dictated by the ministry of education’s policy on language. on the part of pupils, their proficiency level in either of the two languages governed their language choice during classroom interactions. the ro set in the educational domain, therefore, accounts for language choices. language choice in the domain of tradition, for example at funerals, was based on the linguistic repertoire of addressees. a combination of marked and unmarked choices was observed. accordingly, it came out that all the three major languages: leteh, akuapem twi, and english were employed during funeral activities. finally, in the religious domain, whereas akuapem twi was the unmarked choice in the orthodox churches, it was regarded as the marked choice in the pentecostal churches. in the pentecostal church, the history of its establishment was such that english was accepted as the unmarked language choice. church services were also characterized by english/akuapem twi codeswitching. language choice in the orthodox churches was largely governed by the type of domain, whereas in the pentecostal church, it was a combination of factors. the functional distribution of the three languages: leteh, twi, and english as reported by earlier researches, brokensha (1966); johnson (1973, 1975), has changed with regard to the use of english. in the educational domain for instance, english is combined with twi as languages of instruction as directed by the language policy on education at the basic level. again, the use of english at traditional ceremonies, such as funerals, is also noteworthy. this is contrary to johnson’s report (1973, p. 122) that leteh is the principal language at traditional ceremonies. similarly, with the founding of pentecostal churches, english has been introduced as a key language in the christian religious domain. the introduction of english in some domains, as well as the comparative increase of its use may be accounted for by a corresponding growth in education in the larteh community. in conclusion, i make the following assertions: i. social change in larteh over the past three decades has influenced factors that dictate language choice. ii. domains where english is used have increased to the detriment of leteh, thus posing threats of endangerment. ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 56 iii. in the face of the multifaceted changes that have taken place in larteh, which have also affected language use in the community, johnson’s (1975) assertion of “stable triglossia” is contestable. iv. in view of the above, it is recommended that conclusions that are drawn from studies on language use in multilingual communities need to be reviewed periodically in line with global and local changes. ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 legon journal of the humanities, 25 (2014) p a g e | 57 references bodomo, a., anderson, j., & dzahene-quashie, j. (2009). a kente of many colours: multilingualism as a complex ecology of language shift in ghana. sociological studies, 3 (3), 357-379. brokensha, d. (1966). social change at larteh, ghana. oxford, uk: clarendon press. ghana statistical service. (2002). 2000 population and housing census: summary report of final results. accra, ghana: ghana statistical service. johnson, b. c. (1973). language use at larteh, ghana: a sociolinguistic study of a bilingual community. (unpublished doctoral thesis). northwestern university, chicago, usa. johnson, b. c. (1975). stable triglossia at larteh. patterns in language, culture and society: sub-saharan africa. osu wpl, 19, 93-102. kamwangamalu, n. m. (2000). languages in contact. in v. webb & kembo-sure (eds.). african voices. an introduction to the languages and linguistics of africa. cape town, south africa: oxford university press. kieswetter, a. (1997). code-switching amongst african high school pupils. university of witwatersrand occasional papers in african linguistics, 1, 3-96. leherr, k. (2009). national literacy acceleration program (nalap) baseline assessment document. accra, ghana: ministry of education. myers-scotton, c. (1993). social motivations for codeswitching: evidence from africa. oxford, uk: clarendon press. myers-scotton, c. (1998). a theoretical introduction to the markedness model. in c. myers-scotton (ed.), codes and consequences: choosing linguistic varieties (pp. 18-40). new york, ny: oxford university press. ncoko, s. o., osman, s. r., & cockroft, k. (2000). codeswitching among multilingual learners in primary schools in south africa: an exploratory study. international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, 3 (4), 225-241. stewart, j. m. (1972). the languages. in d. brokensha (ed.), akwapim handbook (pp. 80-90). accra, ghana: ghana publishing press. yakubu, a., matu, m. p., & ongarora, d. (2012). language use and choice: a case study of kinubi in kibera, kenya. international journal of humanities and social science 2 (4), 99-104. ansah, a. m./ legon journal of the humanities 25 (2014) 37-57 on the structure of the qualifier system in qkq-qsanyen akeem segun salawli* abstract the paper identifies the different types of qualifiers in qk9-qsanyen, one of the endangered african languages spoken in ogori-mag6ngo local government in nigeria. it also examines and explains in detail the sequential co-occurrence of the qualifiers within the noun phrases. the paper believes that the language still retains the relics of the old patterning of the qualifier-qualified sequence of the proto-language to the african languages under the sub-phylum of west-benue-congo which it belongs. 1. introduction qkq-qsanyen is a member of the west benue congo of the sub-phylum niger-congo family of the african languages (heine and nurse 2001:31). it is the main language of the qkuro and qsanyenro people living at ogori-mag6ngo local government area in kogi state of nigeria. it is one of the endangered languages in the world and it has received a little recent serious scholarly academic attention. (chumbow 1982a&,b; adegbija 1993, 2001, salawli 2005, 2006a&b). the data for this study are drawn from many native speakers who served willingly as our informants. the purpose of this paper is to look at the qualifier system in qkqqsanyen by identifying different types of qualifiers in the language and discussing the sequential co-occurrence of these qualifiers in phrases. 2. headhood and qualifier qkq-qsanyen is a svo language and it is a head-first language. the head parameter within the theoretical framework of principles and parameters as propounded by chomsky (1981, 1986) deals with the position of heads within the phrases (np, vp etc). a particular language consistently has its heads on the same side of the complements in all its phrases. in fact, head has been employed to divide the languages of the *dr. akeem segun sfilawu is a senior lecturer in the department of linguistics and african languages, obafemi awo!owo university, lie lfe, nigeria. 163 world into two. a language can be head-first or head-last. chomsky (1981 :6) has this to say: ideally, we hope to find that complexes of properties differentiating otherwise similar languages are reducible to a single parameters, fixed in one or another way. chomsky & lasnik 1993: 527 comment further on the issue: the phrase structure system for a particular language is largely restricted to specification of the parameters that determine the ordering of head-complement, head-adjunct and spec-head. for instance, while ebira and english are head-first languages, japanese is ahead-last language. (1) shows this clearly. (1) a. ebira (i) np: 6hin6yyii okene 'kingofokene' king okene (ii) vp: re qch<)ku 'buy rice' buy rice b. english (i) np: kingofengland ii. broughtthechair c. japanese (i) vp: hon -o katta 'he bought a book' book buy 164 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) (ii) pp: [fune] ni 'on the boat' boat on qkq-qsanyen is a head-first language as shown in (2). (2)a. np: fpi/~sq 'the eight car' ·car eight b. vp: wan ududo 'kill.slaughter a sheep' kill sheep (2b) assumes that the noun (n) qualifier (q) sequence should be the pattern in any qkq-qsanyen noun phrase that consists of a qualifier and a qualified item. but it seems that there are some exceptions to this general format. this will be discussed fully in the next section of this study . .. 3. noun qualifiers in qkq-qsanyen the focus of this section is to identify and discuss different types of qualifiers for the nouns in qkq-qsanyen with relevant data. aw6buluyi (1978:30) defines a qualifier as follows: any word or grammatical (i.e. acceptable) combination of words which qualifies a noun is a qualifier. therefore the actual work of qualifiers is to narrow down the conceptual range of meanings of nouns. from this definition, one can deduce first, that any linguistic item that will be classified as a qualifier cannot occur in isolation in any sentence containing it. second, a qualifier co-occurs with nouns only. third, a qualifier in a noun phrase can be represented by a single word, or a phrase or by a clause. both semantic and syntactic criteria can be employed to classify the qualifiers in qk9-qsanyen into different groups. all these observations shall be substantiated with relevant data as we progress in this paper. akeem segun salciwiti 165 3.1 adjectival qualifier in qkq-qsanyen, adjectives are usually used to qualify nouns. unlike many african languages such as yoruba, ed6 where their adjectives begin with consonantal segments, it is discovered that all qk9-qsanyen adjectives start with vowels and end with vowels. the language has an open-ended syllabic structure system. (3) presents the data for the adjectival qualifiers. (3) a. ¢sa cloth b. ubo house c. 6wlin .soup d. agan hoe e. emumu orinrin black large . qrcinrcin sweet <jyanyan red akitkitrn book white 'black cloth' 'large house' 'sweet soup' 'red hoe' 'white book' the italicized words are the qualfiers following the qualified nouns: ~sa, ub6' 6wun, agan and emumu. 3.2 numeral qualifier numerals in qkq-qsanyen can be grouped under two main headings namely cardinal and ordinal. we present these numerals in ( 4). 166 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) 4. a b 6ir~ 'one' o~6ro 'first' $b<?r¢ 'two' ububuoro 'second' $ta 'three' ¢t~taro 'third' (¢)¢na 'four' <?n~naro 'fourth' upi 'five' upupiro 'fifth' qpqnqqr¢ 'six' qpqnqqr¢r<? 'sixth' uf<?mb¢r¢ 'seven' ufqmb9r¢r<? 'seventh' qnqkqnqkqnq 'eight' <)nqkqnqkqnqrq 'eighth' ubuore 'nine' ubuorero 'ninth' gulef<?/¢f<? 'ten' ~fqrq 'tenth' the cardinal numerals are the ones under column a and they are used to indicate the exact quantity or number of nouns that they occur with. the data in (5) illustrate this: (5) a. ubo 'two houses' house two b. 'three fish' fish three c. agan <?n<?k<?n<?k<?n<? 'eight hoes' hoe eight akeem segun salawid 167 the numerals in column bare the ordinal ones which generally indicate the exact position of an object in a series. the phrases illustrating this are in(6). ( 6)a. emumu c)t~taro 'the third book' book third b. ujun upupiro'the fifth door' door fifth c. c)s~n ufombc)r~rc) 'the seventh month' month seventh the structural position of these numeral qualifiers (both cardinal and ordinal) in relation to nouns they are qualifying is that the nouns the head-words, occur in the initial position, then the qualifiers come after them. in addition; the ordinal qualifiers have different phonological structures from their cardinal ones. looking at the data in ( 4) very closely, one can inf er that some ordinal qualifiers are formed from the cardinal qualifiers through the morphological processes of reduplication, suffixation and prefixation as shown in (7) (7) root partial reduplication suffixation prefixation result a. ¢ta 'three'-> t¢ta -> t¢ta +-ro-> 9-+t¢taro-> qt¢taro b. ¢na 'four' -> n¢na -> n¢na +-ro -> q-+n¢na+-ro-> c)n~naro c. upi 'five' -> pupi -> pupi + ro -> u-+pupi+-ro -> upupiro meanwhile, some are formed only through the process of suffixation as presented in (8). 168 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) (8) root suffixation result a. qp6.nq(m; 'seven -> qpqnqqri; + r6 -> qpqnqqri;r() 'seventh' b. ()nqkqnqkqnq 'eight' -> ()nqkqnc)kqnq + ro -> qnqkqnqkql)qtq 'eighth' c. ¢f9 'ten' -> ¢f9+r6 -> ¢f9r()'tcnth' 3.3 demonstrative qualifier demonstrative qualifiers in qkq-qsanyen are specifiers of number. they indicate the number in terms of singular or plural. they are few in number. they are presented in (9). (9)a. ub6 'this house' house this b. ub6 'these houses' house these c. erunro <)nab¢ 'that farmer' farmer that d. erunro ~nabe 'those farmers' farmer those from the data in (9), it is shown clearly that c)n~ and c)nab~ are the singular demonstrative qualifiers while ~nan~ and ~nab~ are the plural demonstrative qualifiers. also, the structural position of these demonstrative qualifiers in relation to the nouns is such that the nouns being qualified occur before these qualifiers. in addition, this language has only one definite article ay~. akeem segun sa/awiti 169 (io)a. iya ay¢ yin uw6 ay¢ 'the mother buys/bought the goat mother the buy goat the b. ~tqla me ni erum~kaay¢ 'tqla sleeps/slept in the afternoon' tqlasleep in afternoon the 3.4 appositive qualifier , , appositive qualifier is one of the qualifiers in qk9-qsanyen. quirk and greenbaum (1973:276) outline the criteria for appositive constructions as follows:. four units to be appositives, they must normally be identical in reference or else the reference of one must be included in the reference of the other ... in many cases, the co-reference and grammatical similarity will permit the omission of either appositive unit with a resultant acceptable and synonymous sentence. from this explanation, it means that for a constituent to be regarded as an appositive, it must satisfy the criteria of co-reference and similarity in syntactic status. yye p:r;esent the data in ( 11) to show-case the appositive constructions in qk9-qsanyen. (ll)a. ijim<? yin isuru, igila ¢k¢ka jimq buy a type of bitter edible tuber yam big 'jim¢ buys/bought isuru, a big yam'. b. oki, ~n'mro ay~ su ibimpe oki, farmer the marry bimpe c. audu, ik6gi $g6mina pila ~a ke audu kogi governor amve come has •audu, governor ofkogi state has arrived' 170 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) in al! the e~amples in (11), isuru, igila qk~ka, oki, ~runro ay~, audu and lk~gi. f;g6p:iina are !he appositives but they have different syntactic status. lsuru, oki and audu are the head-words of the noun phrases where the appositives: igila qk~ka, ~runro ay~ and ik6gi f;g6mina function as their qualifiers. using the criterion of co-reference as hinted by quirk and greenbauum (1973), we can generate two different sentences having the same semantic output from thedatain(l l) asin(12). (12)a. ijim<) yin 1suru b. c. ijim<) yin oki su igila<)k~ka ibimpe' $runro ay~ su ibimpe audu pila $a ke ikogi i;:g<?mina pila $a ke 'jim<) buys/bought and edible yam' 'jim<) buys/bought a big yam' 'oki marries/married bimpe' 'the farmer marries/married bimpe' •audu has arrived ' 'governor of kogi state has arrived' 3.5 relative clause qualifier , another qualifier of the nominal items in qkq-qsanyen is the relative clause qualifier. the markers of the relative clause qualifier in the language are n~ or n~n~. all constituents that can perform the functions of subject, object or qualifier can be relativized in this language as presented in (13). (13)a. aye) su idele 6gben aye) marry dele child 'aye) marries/married dele's child akeem segun salizwui 171 b. ayq n¢(n¢) su idele ogben ayq rel marry de le child 'ayq who marries/marrieddele's child' c. fdele 6gben n¢(n¢) ayq su de le child rel ayq marry 'dele's child whomeayq marries/married' d. idele n¢(n¢) ayq su y6gben de le rel ayq marries his child "dele whoseayq marries/married his child" · (13a) is the kernel sentence. it is the subject of (13a) that takes the relative clause qualifier in (13b ); while the object of (13a) is qual_ified by the relative clause qualifier in (13c). and, the nominal qualifier ideie in (13a) takes the relative clause qualifier in (13d). in (13b-d), the relative clause qualifiers follow their head-words: ayq, ldele, ogben and idele· respectively. 3.6 genitival qualfier qkq-qsanyen has some grammatical items that do function as genitival qualifiers in noun phrases. they have grammatical categories of number and person as presented in (14). (14)a. singular plural 1st person m¢¢ka t¢¢ka 2nd person w¢~ka n¢~ka 3rd person y¢~ka b¢~ka 172 legon journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) b. 1. ikiba m¢~ka 11. ikiba t¢~ka lll. ikiba w¢~ka iv. ikiba n¢~ka v. ikiba y¢~ka vl. ikiba b~¢ka as shown in ( 14b ), the structural position of these genitival qualifiers in a noun phrase is that they always follow the nouns (head-words) to be qualified. another observation is in the morphological composition of these genitival qualifiers. they are composed of the short pronouns in the language such as mq, ti, wq, n~, y~, b~ and the lexical item '~ka' in the language. 3.7 pronoun qualifier in qkq-qsanyen, there are two types of pronouns: short and long ones. either of the two can be used as qualifiers in the language. on the short pronouns functioning as qualifiers, they are monosyllabic and they also have allomorphic variations as a result of the operation of the vowel harmony in the language. (15) displays these pronoun qualifiers while ( 16) contain their usage in grammatical constructions. (15) singular plural seta setb seta setb 1st person mi m9 t i t~ 2nd person wu wq ni ne. 3rd person yu y~ bi b~ akeem segun salawili 173 (16)a. i. 6ki gba mi emumu 16ki sees/saw my book' 6ki see my book ii. oki gba mq 'oki sees/saw my friend' oki see my friend b. i. oki gba ti egbele 'oki sees/saw our cutlass' oki see our cutlass on the long pronouns functioning as qualifiers, they are bisyllabic and they have no allomorphic variations like the short pronoun because the harmonic constraints on or the tenseness· or laxness of the vowel of the verbs do not have any influence on them. they have a system of number like their short counterparts. these long pronouns are presented as follows in (17): (17) singular plural !st person am¢ atq 2nd person awq anq 3rd person ay¢ ab¢ the following sentences in (18) will reveal their structural positions in relation to the nouns that they are qualifying. (18) a. iya be. at<? isuda 'a mother beat/beats our brothers' mother beat our brother b. am~ ~~a ay~ i;~ade jq 'it is my cloth that sade sold' my cloth foc sade sell 174 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) there is one glaring observation to be noted in the data in (16) & (18) as regards the structural position of the short and long pronouns. the n-q sequence is not followed at all. we have an inverted version of sequence. the qualifier mi, mq, ti tf, atq and amf are placed before the nouns 'emumu, qrf, egbele, ~sa, isuda and ~sa the head words of the noun phrases where the qualifiers function. 3.8 nominal qualifier as in other languages, qkq-qsanyen does permit some nouns to qualify other nouns. these are labeled in this paper as nominal qualifiers. they may be human or non-human nouns. anytime, we have grammatical structures involving these nominal qualifiers and qualified nouns, the n q sequence order is changed to q norder as we have in (3.7). (19) presents the data to buttress this syntactic observation. (19) a. owun qt~l¢ 'the soup's pot' soup pot b. qtun (>dqr¢ 'the ear's hole' ear hole c. uwo qmqdqr¢ 'dog's nose' dog nose d. ihisi iwa 'bisi's behavour' bisi behaviour e. ikoko oti 'cocoa's tree' cocoa tree f. eko 6gben 'lagos child' lagos child akeem segun salawiii 175 g. ¢sa 'kemi's cloth' k~mi cloth one may try to find o\lt the, genesis of the difference in the qualifier qualified sequence in qk9-qsanyen. this paper subscribes to salawli's (2006a) reconstruction proposal to the effect that the proto-language to the afrjcan !anguages under the sub-phylum of west benue-congo which qk9-qsanyen belongs to (heine & nurse 2001:31), must have permitted the n-q and q-n patternings at one time before. this suggestion is a prodlfct o( analysis of the, cross-linguistic data. jn all languages relating to qk9-qsanyen such as igbo, yoruba, i;:d6 and ebira, the n-q seque:qce is generally chosen as shown in (20) (20) a. ebira ire hi ami 'my house' house my ¢nu ozoza 'good yam' yam good qnqru ~papa 'first man' man first b. yoruba a:;;q m1 'my cloth' cloth my obinrin pupa 'a fair woman' woman red ile ow6 'a bank' house money 176 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) c. edo akaka m¢ 'my grasshopper' grasshopper my qhil egh6sa 'egb6sa's wife' wife egh6sa am~ iwin 'coconut's water' water coconut d. nwanyin ge 'your wife' wife your ulq egwo 'a bank' house money qf(( nmanu 'oily soup' soup oil our assumption is that qkq-qsanyen still retains the relics of the old patterning in the short and long pronoun qualifies and the nominal qualifiers. 4. the sequential co-occurrence of the noun qualifiers in qkq-qsanyen the focus of this section is to show the distributional patterning of the different noun qualifiers discussed in (3-3.8). aw6buluyi (1978):42 has this to say on the sequence of the qualifiers in language: the order in which qualifiers occur with themselves is partially free and partially fixed. akeem segun salawiti 177 it is possible in the language to have a cluster of qualifiers in an orderly manner after a noun that will be functioning as the head-word of a phrase. we shall use the ta,ble i~ (21) to explain the sequential co-occurrence of these qualifiers in qkq-qsanyen. (21) descriptive numeral' relative clause· demonstrative• a descriptive, + + + + b numeral2 + + + c relative clauses3 + + d demonstrative, + + (21 a) says that if the descriptive· qualifier follows the head-word closely then descriptive, numeral, relative clause and demonstrative qualifiers can co-occur with it as shown in (22). (22) a. i'.1w6 c)yanyan c)¢f9 'a tall red dog' dog red tall b. uw6 c)yanyan ~ta 'three red dogs' 2 dog red three c. uw6 c)yanyan n~(n~) ayq su 'a red dog which ayq has' 3 dog red relayc)have d. uw6 c)yanyan c)n~b~ 'that red dog' 4 dog red that 178 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) e. igila qlqlqr~ t¢¢r¢ ufqmbqr¢ 'seven long thin tubers of yam' 1 1 2 yam long thin seven (21 b) introduces numeral qualifiers as being the closest to the head-word and requires it to be followed by descriptive, relative clause and demonstrative qualifiers. it cannot be followed by another numeral. the distributional patterns are presented below: (23)a. ub6 upupiron¢ ay¢ yin 'the fifth house that ayq bought' 2 3 house fifth rel ay¢ buy b. ub6 upupiro <?nab¢ "the fifth house" 2 4 house fifth that (21 c) introduces the relative clause qualifier immediately following the head-word and states that it can only be followed by another relative clause and demonstrative qualifiers. the data in (24) buttress this cooccurrence. (24 )a. ade n¢ f (>, n¢ ti ye eguru, $'1 enran ade rel tall rel smg song come yesterday 'ade who is tall, who sang, came yesterday' b. alak¢ta n¢ olli yin cassavarel olu buy this akeem segun satawui 179 'this cassava which olu bought' (21 d) introduces the demonstrative qualifier immediately following the head-word and stipulates that it can only be followed by relative clause and demonstrative qualifiers as shown in (25). (25) a. umu <)nab~ n¢ t¢ wan 'that goat that we killed' goat that rel we kill b. 6gben <)nab~ g¢d¢g¢d¢ child that exact the table in (21) does not account for the pronoun and nominal qualifiers because of their own parametric positioning. in addition, we must state categorically that not all demonstrative qualifiers can co-occur. the demonstratives such as ay~, c)n~, c)bab~, ~nab~, ~nan~ can not function together as shown in (26) * umu ¢nab~ ay¢ goat that the 5. conclusion in this paper, we ,have looked at the eight different types of noun qualifiers in qkq-qsanyen and also we have been able to discuss the sequential co-occurrence of these qualifiers within the noun phrases in the language. 180 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) references abifarin, j.b. 1983. 'comparative structures of ogori syntax'. unpublished b.a. long essay university of ilorin, ilorin. adegbija, e.1993. 'the graphicization of a small language: the case of qkq' international journal of the sociology of language. 10(3): 153-173. adegbija, e.2001. 'saving threatened languages in africa: a case study of qk9' can threatened languages be saved in j. fishman ( ed) canada: multilingual matters. akqlade, b.1982. a short history of ogori yoruba. ilqrin: kwara sttate printing and publishing corporation. alao, a.o.f.2001. a brief history of magongo. il9rin: qlqrunt6bi press. am(.>ran, 0.0. 1979. 'aspects of pgori ,phonology' unpublished b.a. long essay, university ofllqrin, ilqrin. aw6buluyi, 0.1978. essentials of yoruba grammar ibadan: oxford university press. aw6buluyi, 0.1992. 'aspects of contemporary standard yoruba in dialectological perspective' in a. is(.> la( ed) new findings in yoruba studies lagos: j.f. qdunjq memorial lecture organizing committee, 3: 1-79. ayank(.>gb~, b.o. 2001. 'noun formation in edo' ihafa: a journal of african studies. 4, 1:57-70. bamgb6se, a.1980. 'pronouns concord and pronominalization 'afrika und ubersee, xiii: 189-198. chomsky, n. 1981. lectures on government and binding. dordrecht: foris. chomsky, n. 1986. barriers. cambridge, mass: mit press. chomsky, n. and h. lasnik. 1993. 'principles and parameters theory: in j. jacobs, a. von strechow, w. sternefeld and t. vennemann ( ed) syntax: an international handbook of contemporary research. berlin: cfegruyter: 506-569. chumbow, b.s. 1982a. 'contraction and tone polarization in ogori'. journal of west african languages. xii (1):89: 103. chumbow, b.s. 1982b. 'an autosegmental perspective of vowel harmony in ogori' linguistic analysis. 10(1): 61-93. durowaiye, a.f. 1995. 'bilingualism and competence among the ogoriakeem segun salawili 181 magongos: a sociol_inguis!ic study'. unpublished b.a. long essay, university ofllqrin, il9rin. greenberg, j.h. 1963. languages of africa. the hague: mouton & co. haegeman, l 1994. introduction to government and binding theory. oxford: blackwell publishers. heine, b. and d. nurse (ed) 2000. african languages: an introduction. cambridge: cambridge university press. il<)ri, j.f.2000. 'analysis of anaphors in yoruba' unpublished m.a. thesis. department of african languages and literatures, qbcif~miaw61¢w<) university, ile-if¢. p6p69la, r.0. 1980. 'aspects of ogo~i morphonology'. unpublished b.a. long essay, university ofilqrin, ilqrin. quinn, h. 2005. the distribution of pronoun case forms in english: linguistics today 82. new york: johnbenjamins. quirk, r. and s. greenbaum. 1973. a university grammar of english. london: longman. salawli, a.s. 2005. linguistic nationalism among the qk9-qsanyenspeaking communities in nigeria' papers in english and linguistics. 6:95-105. salawli, ,a.s. 2006a. afiwe irnpal¢ sinl taasi ede yoruba ati qk99sanyen (a comparative analysis of the syntax of yoruba and qk9-qsanyen). unpublished ph.d. dissertation, department of linguistics and african languages, qbaf~mi aw6l<?w<) university, ile-if¢. salawli, a.s. 2006b. notes on the comparative study on yoruba and qk9-qsanyen: phonology and morphology in a. fak<)ya (ed.) an encyclopeadia of arts lagos: lagos state university, 12, 1:61-78 www.cardinetnigeria.com/las/arts/publicaitons/contents/salaw u.pdf. welmers, w. 1973. african language structure. berkeley: university of california press. yusuf, a. 2001. 'ebira noun phrase: a preliminary study' ihafa: a journal of african studies. 4(1):123-138. yusuf, 0. 1998. fundamentals of syntax and the study of nigerian languages. ij¢bu-6de: shebi6timq publications. 182 legan journal of the humanities volume 19 (2008) legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 19 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v26i1.2 language of power: pidgin in the colonial governance of northern nigeria philip atsu afeadie lecturer, department of history university of ghana, legon abstract pidgin was indispensable as a working language of colonial governance in northern nigeria, epitome of the distinct and continuing role of pidgin as a language of the workplace in west africa. the study is largely based on archival materials and oral interviews of some former african employees. notably, british colonial authorities adopted pidgin as a language of government in northern nigeria, as they lacked a wider medium for inter-ethnic communication. african political agents were employed as intermediaries, based on their knowledge of pidgin and other local languages, enabling them bridge communication between government and chiefs. and pidgin was hard to replace. keywords: intermediaries, pidgin, colonial administration, northern nigeria, evolution pidgin is english modified by another language or multiple other languages. in the evolution of pidgin, the original english is termed the superstrate language, denoting the language of the influential people, and the non-english language known as the substrate language. accordingly, english would be the superstrate language in west africa, as the beginnings of pidgin were associated with english traders regarded as the influential group relative to africans, in terms of technological prowess and their capacity as employers. over time, however, the grammatical innovations introduced in pidgin from various languages of west africa would diminish the intelligibility of pidgin to anglophone european officials. in west africa, mafeni (1971) notes that pidgin essentially constitutes a language group composed of varied dialects of pidgin and related creole forms (nativised pidgin), with a creole serving as pidgin outside its spoken area of mother tongue (pp.95-96). thus pidgin prevails throughout west africa, particularly the coastal cities and towns of anglophone countries. as the language group differs in grammatical system, however, the regional varieties are less mutually intelligible. afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v26i1.2 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 20 this paper examines the role of pidgin as a working language of colonial government in northern nigeria. of its organisation, the paper provides background information, including the functions of pidgin in the pre-colonial period. then, the paper examines pidgin at the workplace of british colonial administration in northern nigeria, exploring the themes of english language requirement in colonial rule; tasks of governance performed by african service assistants who spoke pidgin; political influence associated with the tasks of governance; and government efforts to control the power of african service assistants. the concluding theme explores the functions of pidgin in nigeria today. early pidgin english in west africa pidgin in nigeria developed largely out of the krio language of sierra leone1, and partly from other local english-based jargons on the coast, which had emerged by the late 17th century out of a portuguese trade jargon in existence during the previous century (mafeni, 1971, p.97; huber, 1999, pp.44, 128). among its early functions, pidgin served primarily as a language of trade, a medium of inter-ethnic communication between africans and european traders, particularly english traders. similarly, european officials on board ships largely communicated through pidgin with their fort slaves who could not speak any form of english (huber, 1999, p.54). in association with pidgin as a language of trade, there emerged a distinct group of africans serving as mediators or brokers between the european traders and africans. these intermediaries included ‘gold takers’ who adjudicated trade disputes between africans and european officials. according to dantzig (1999), the intermediaries also involved linguists or ‘interpreters’ who were largely drawn from local chiefs and related political officials, synonymous with the tradition of ɔkyeame among local societies on the gold coast and elsewhere in west africa (p.84). by the second half of the 19th century, pidgin had assumed the status of a language of social communication, becoming a lingua franca and functioning as a third-party means of communication between differing indigenous language groups on the west african coast (huber, 1999, p.116) 1 according to huber (1999), krio itself derives from the new world creole languages involving either one or a combination of three scenarios: gullah, creolised english of the slave plantations of carolina and others of the southern states of usa, as spoken by nova scotians who were shipped to sierra leone; and the jamaican english-based creole of the maroons (escaped slaves) who also settled in sierra leone; and the language of soldiers of the 4th west india regiment, discharged from their headquarters in april 1819 and settled in sierra leone (pp.62-63). afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 21 in the era of european colonisation of africa from the last quarter of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th century, pidgin would develop on its role of transaction between africans and europeans, becoming institutionalised as a medium of communication in the governance of british colonial establishment in northern nigeria. english language requirement in colonial rule in july 1886, british colonial rule began in northern nigeria with the chartering of the royal niger company, a british trading enterprise which had been operating in the region, and thence assumed authority to administer the region on behalf of the british government. as a trading concern, the major objective of the royal niger company always involved securing the cooperation of the traditional rulers of northern nigeria in ensuring peaceful conditions for trade (mockler-ferryman, 1892, pp.254-255; fremantle, 1925, p.5). now equipped with a charter, the company chose to administer the region through the traditional rulers and their political institutions. but the company officials could not conduct effective relations with the traditional rulers because they lacked knowledge of local conditions and languages. company officials could therefore not collect adequate information to develop effective administration for their dominion. they needed brokers or assistants who possessed knowledge of the local conditions as well as english, and who could communicate between the company and the indigenous people. thus, company officials elevated some of the local people to the position of political agents, the term denoting distinguished messenger-interpreters. as intermediaries, political agents assisted government diplomacy and helped to establish and maintain relations between the company and the traditional rulers, reminiscent of africans who served as brokers between european traders and african merchants during the pre-colonial period. political agents also gathered information that was needed for policy-making in administration, while some served as district agents and administered company stations. agents were recruited on the basis of their qualifications, the most important of which was linguistic competency, essentially involving fluency in pidgin together with proficiency in some indigenous language, such as hausa, yoruba or nupe. in the prevailing conditions of limited standard english available to africans, company officials adopted pidgin as a language of government in their territory. for the company officials, many of whom could not speak any local language, pidgin was a suitable medium of communication with the indigenous people. political agents were fluent in pidgin, in addition to their native tongues. accordingly, they were suitable as intermediaries between the people and the company officials. on the one hand, they could communicate in indigenous languages with the people. on the other hand, they could speak with the company officials, many of whom had acquired pidgin. for instance, john flint (1960) notes that when the town of kabba was conquered during the niger sudan campaign of 1897, george goldie, the governor of the afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 22 company territories, addressed the people ‘in the most inimitable pigeon english (which was then translated by interpreters into yoruba and nupe)’ [p. 250]. perham and bull (1963) also observe that the would-be high commissioner, lugard, could as well pick out some pidgin (p.148). during the 1890s, company administration was progressively superseded by a new imperialism that would require even more political agents and the entrenchment of pidgin in the governance of northern nigeria. after 1895, british colonial policy in west africa changed in response to the european scramble for african colonies; the british government revoked the charter of the company, and declared a protectorate over northern nigeria, beginning 1st january 1900. the protectorate administration aspired to colonial development, seeking to promote economic development in northern nigeria for the mutual benefit of the local people and their british rulers, although this objective would quickly change to economic exploitation for the colonial state. in order to realise its objective, however, the new administration had to establish authority over the local polities and organise effective government. by 1906, the entire region had been subdued; the protectorate was divided into provinces, and a system of administration established. protectorate administration, developing on the company practice, was essentially indigenous, involving the adoption of local political structures. essentially, the protectorate administration was a two-tiered system. the upper tier comprised a hierarchy of colonial rulers or colonial civil service, which was responsible for the central administration of the protectorate. the civil service was organised into several departments, of which the political department was the pivot of government. the political department was composed of expatriate governing officials, such as the high commissioner and his private secretary; the secretary to the administration; political officers or residents and their assistants; indigenous service assistants, such as clerks and political agents. the residents served as senior government officials and representatives of the high commissioner in provincial administration; they were assisted by district officers in the various divisions of the provinces. among their major functions, residents and district officers conveyed all government orders to the provincial functionaries; they also supervised ‘native administration’ or the indigenous hierarchy which formed the subordinate tier in the protectorate government. the subordinate administration was modelled on the emirate system of local government prevailing in the region, and it evolved over the years. essentially, it was composed of the indigenous ruling elite; emir, his councilors and district heads administering the various districts. below them were village heads placed in charge of villages in the districts. traditional courts existed at the various levels of government. there, traditional law and customs were administered and government proclamations enforced. a provincial afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 23 court existed at the capital of each province. headed by the resident, it handled cases outside traditional jurisdiction. political activity in the protectorate administration was largely informed by patronclient relations. interaction between the two hierarchies of government involved brokerage of colonial authority, and that required political agents. they were hard to find, largely because of the financial cost involved as well as the stringent requirements for their employment, including personal resourcefulness, geographical knowledge of the territory and linguistic ability, in particular.2 agents in the protectorate régime had to demonstrate good language skills. in fact, the protectorate government, unlike its predecessor, developed a language policy for its agents. this is not surprising considering that agents were needed for a greater variety of tasks than hitherto. the language skills involved fluency and literacy in standard english; proficiency in hausa, a lingua franca of the region; and knowledge of other indigenous languages, such as kanuri in borno, or yoruba in ilorin.3 the language requirement was used by the colonial officials as the basis for the recruitment and classification of agents. accordingly, candidates were tested in language examinations and graded into three classes.4 the examination in english was classified into lower and higher standards. the lower standard test was an oral examination that involved conversations in standard english between a candidate and an examining board, composed of british colonial officials. each candidate was expected to engage in ‘six different conversations as far as possible with different europeans each on different subjects, lasting about 10 minutes.’5 in order to pass the lower standard test, a candidate was expected to demonstrate clearly, an understanding of the examiners’ statements, and earn a grade of forty per cent. a candidate needed a grade of eighty per cent to pass the higher standard examination. such a candidate was expected to be fluent in english, with good pronunciation and knowledge of a fairly large vocabulary. in addition, the candidate was required to read english in manuscript and in print. the candidate was further obliged to ‘write accurately from dictation and compose a fairly grammatical and intelligible letter.’6 agents’ proficiency in the indigenous languages was also assessed. candidates were examined orally by one or more of the best agents in the presence of the examining board 2 snp 1/1 4 (238/1904) high commissioner, northern nigeria, to secretary of state, zungeru, 26 january 1904; also (afeadie, 2008, pp.43-50). 3 snp 7 42/1902 examinations in english, enclosed in language gratuities; snp 1/1 vol.4 high commissioner to secretary of state. (n.n.40 238/1904) 4 co 446/6 p.609. colonel lugard to colonial office (received, 11 may 1899), civil establishments estimates for 1900-1901. 5 snp 7 42/1902 language gratuities. 6 snp 7 42/1902 language gratuities. afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 24 that awarded the marks. many candidates, particularly personal attendants of political officers, were initially engaged without the language test. however, in 1902 lugard demanded that those candidates should present themselves for examination and if successful, be given a certificate showing the number of marks obtained. this certificate would largely determine their chances of promotion and increase of pay. agents who obtained high grades in the language examinations belonged to the firstclass division. as the high commissioner directed in 1902, any candidate ‘who can pass the higher standard in english and who can also read and write arabic letters will rank in the first grade.’7arabic literacy for political agents was essential because the language was the means of correspondence for the predominantly muslim rulers of the region. a few agents were, indeed, proficient in english. kiari and j.k. davies were literate in english and arabic, besides being competent in hausa and other local languages; they therefore qualified for the position of first-class political agents. kiari was lugard’s best political agent. born in borno, kiari was kanuri in ethnic origin and language, and proficient in fulfude, a fulani language.8 j.k. davies, originally a malam and trader was also fluent in yoruba and nupe, his father being a west indian freed slave, and the mother, yoruba.9 agent yusuf, of nupe ethnicity, was ‘a man of great presence, extremely capable, and [possessed] a good command of english. a great knowledge of history, geography, local politics.’10 he also spoke yoruba, nupeand hausa. agents who passed the lower standard examinations belonged to the second-class division. they possessed a passable knowledge of standard english, and some of them were literate in arabic, as well. all of them were presumably proficient in hausa and other native tongues. momo lafia, who served in kontagora province in 1906, spoke english ‘fairly, and also nupe and hausa, yoruba and kakunda.’11abaji gidda, a veteran agent in borno 7 snp 7 42/1902 g.m. moloney, resident lower benue, to the secretary to the government, lokko, 27 january 1902, language gratuities. 8 co 446/30 (no.15493) p.669.lugard to the secretary of state (confidential despatch), kano, 7 march 1903, kano expeditionary force; snp 7 1355/1906 lugard, lokoja, may 16, 1906, approved political native staff, sokoto province, 1906-7. 9 nak/o/arli/vol.iii/204 abadie to high commissioner in jebba, wushishi, 13 may 1902; also (staudinger, 1992, pp.32, 39). 10 arewa house archives, kaduna (ahak) confidential reports on chiefs, ilorin, acting resident hermon hodge, 21 january 1921. 11 snp 7/7 1351/1906 (no.512/06) resident kontagora, w.s. sharpe, to the high commissioner, northern nigeria, enclosed in approved political native staff, kontagora province, 19061907. afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 25 province, also spoke english quite well. in addition, he was literate in arabic and fluent in fulfude, hausa and kanuri.12 many good agents and would-be agents ranked in the third class, because they barely knew standard english.13 as high commissioner, lugard lamented in 1904, ‘sufficient interpreters do not exist to supply each of these [political] officers with one; such as obtainable are almost without exception exceedingly bad, and do not understand sufficient english to grasp the meaning of even a simple sentence.’14 despite their imperfect knowledge of standard english, third-class agents could still work effectively because they, as well as their senior colleagues, were proficient pidgin. for the colonial officials, just as their company counterparts, pidgin was convenient as a working language of government. temple (1968), a former resident and lieutenant-governor of northern nigeria, aptly observed that ‘in west africa “pidgin english” is a language that has to be acquired. it is not “broken” english. and it is a capital asset for a british officer who wishes to be certain of not being misunderstood’ by agents (p.246). the pidgin jargon included such elements as ‘daddy’ (father), ‘mammy’ (woman), ‘pikkin’ (son, boy), ‘yabash’ (onion), ‘savve’ (to know), ‘he no fit’ (cannot, he is not able to), ‘he pass, pass all’ (he is better than, he excels), ‘all my skin hot me’ (i am hot, i have a temperature), ‘you savve god?’ (are you christian?) [staudinger, 1992, vol. i, p.84]. other elements are ‘kuku boy’ (steward), ‘kuku meti’ (cook meat), ‘ruge’ (rogue), ‘parashi’ (price) [interview, alhaji garba saidu, kano, 22 june 1993]. george hazzledine (1904), who was for some time private secretary to high commissioner lugard, relates the language of a government interpreter, musa, who was remonstrating a domestic servant; musa heard the boy complaining about being whipped for stealing “‘a tin of lard holding forth… on the cruelty of the white man…,” musa, “catching the fat youth by the ear, said: “you be one big fool, you! if de white man no come, you be slave and carry brick for de fulani all day. you no savvy dat? you be one big fool!”’ (p.83). mediatory tasks of governance equipped with pidgin and other resources, political agents performed a variety of tasks in colonial governance, with many of the duties overlapping, the major ones being 12 interview, alhajigarbamuhammadusaidu, 23 june 1993, kano; snp 15 acc.19 hewby, report no.3 of 28 february 1903, enclosed in bornu reports, 1902-1903. 13 as of 1928 only a few people were receiving education in english in nigeria, some 100,000 out of a population of over 20 million. relating to that, only 10,000 out of over 10 million people were receiving education in english in northern nigeria. this condition did not change much until world war ii (spencer, 1971, pp.21-22). 14 snp 1/1 4 (238/1904) high commissioner, northern nigeria, to secretary of state, zungeru, 26 january 1904. afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 26 the conduct of government diplomacy, intelligence gathering and administrative tasks. diplomacy was crucial to british policy in northern nigeria and political agents were essential to colonial diplomacy, by reason of their knowledge of local culture and languages of communication, primarily pidgin. throughout the company régime and the early years of the protectorate administration, political agents were the ones largely responsible for establishing and managing government relations with traditional rulers. agents dominated the process of negotiating and maintaining political and commercial treaties with the indigenous ruling elites, and agents interpreted and transmitted messages between colonial officers and enemy troops on the battlefield, parleying with the enemy troops for peaceful solution to their problems.15 conduct of government diplomacy was a difficult task for political agents, because many of the chiefs resented colonial rule. nevertheless, many agents performed effective service and helped to secure peace in the region. intelligence gathering was a major duty of political agents in colonial administration. agents produced intelligence in both peace and war times. in civil intelligence, agents were initially preoccupied with gathering information on the structure of the local politics, because the colonial authorities needed such information to determine basic policy objectives in the region (heussler, 1968, p.30; lugard, 1965, p. 140, p. 195). in wartime, political agents informed the colonial authorities about the military resources of the local rulers and on public opinion. agents were particularly effective in intelligence gathering during the planning and operation of the kano-sokoto campaign of 1903.six outstanding agents served in the british conquest of kano; ibrahim, mainasara, kiari, maimaina, auta and adamu jakada all participated in the battle of kotor kwashi, and captain george abadie would commend ibrahim for his part in tracking down the fugitive emir aliyu during the campaign. as abadie noted: my best spy, and the only one i can trust, whom i had sent on the 5th [of february 1903] to ascertain where alieu and his party were staying and also what had happened to the people who ran from kano when we entered, returned and has given me the following and apparently reliable information. alieu is at magamma m’didi and the rest of his brothers and his sons are dotted about in small towns all round. he has a screen of mounted men on the w. edge of the large tract of bush (about kurrofi) ... the whole of the people who ran from here and the headmen of the towns above mentioned with their horsemen are collected at sauri which is just across the kano-katsina boundary and 15 nak/snp 6/3 95/1907 instructions for the control of expeditions, patrols and escorts. (based uponresidents proclamation 1900; g.s.o. 1, sections 18, 88, 89; political memo 7; w.a.f.f. regulations 103 to 109). afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 27 about 4 miles n of the place marked duru on the old intelligence map. there are at this place some 1000 to 1500 horsemen and i am of opinion that from all i can hear, if this large force is dispersed, alieu's party will also disperse when they hear news of it.16 not only did agents conduct local intelligence operations, they also spied for the colonial government in foreign territories adjoining the protectorate. such agents provided their superiors with information, especially on political unrest, military resources and activities of the occupying colonial powers as well as on geographical features (lugard, 1965, p.33). predictably, there were many double agents, as some agents gathered information simultaneously for the colonial government and the indigenous ruling elite. political agents usually conveyed information to their employers orally and largely through pidgin, but some agents transmitted information in writing, through arabic and hausa.17 and there was the rare record of written pidgin, involving the letter of agent audu momo, which resident david carnegie enclosed in a correspondence with his sister in england in august 1900 (o’hear, 1992, pp.112-113).information transmitted by agents, either in writing or by word of mouth, was not always accurate, however. it occasionally suffered distortion and deficiency (afeadie, 2008, p. 90). however, colonial authorities were not always deceived by the inaccurate information transmitted by some agents, because they possessed several means of processing data. in one method, as temple (1968) notes, political officers who spoke some indigenous languages avoided excessive reliance on their pidgin-speaking agents by sending informal agents who were non-pidgin speakers together with the pidgin-speaking agents on each assignment (p.246). by this means, the political officers obtained adequate data to sift through, the data differing according to the investigators and in the language of transmission. on some occasions, political officers who spoke the indigenous languages worked quite independently of agents. they consulted with traditional authorities and the ordinary people, and picked up information to verify the credibility of agents’ reports. the methods, however, had their drawbacks, as the colonial authorities often suffered a shortage of political agents. besides, only a few political officers spoke hausa or other indigenous languages, and they could hardly afford enough time from their onerous duties. when they did so, they could consult with only a few people because they inspired fear and resentment in the general populace. thus, information produced by agents could not be purged of all inaccuracies. 16 snp 17/2 (16976), pp.11-12. from the resident, kano province, to the high commissioner (kano 1/1903), 12 february 1903, historical documents on the capture of kano. 17 interviews, alhajigarbamuhammdusaidu, kano, 22 june 1993; alkali alhaji ali waziri, kano, 6 july 1993; also (temple, 1968, pp.40-41). afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 28 in addition to their diplomatic and intelligence duties, political agents, proficient in pidgin, performed administrative functions in northern nigeria, which functions evolved over time. initially, agents served as administrative auxiliaries to the political officers, as they managed company’s trading stores and enforced commercial regulations.18 upon the establishment of the protectorate administration, agents were deployed into the political education of the people, an aspect of colonial pacification. as administrative auxiliaries, agents also waited on political officers; they received visitors, both indigenous administrative officials (hakimai) and ordinary people (talakawa), and handled their transactions with the political officers.19 in another capacity, agents served as messengers and ran messages between political officers and indigenous ruling officials. typically, pidgin featured prominently in the mediation process. for instance, east (1965) relates that agents who served among the tiv people delivered and, in addition, interpreted messages between the political officers and the staff-chiefs, the latter of whom spoke neither hausa nor english and therefore, needed translators and interpreters (p.392). in the period 1906-14, many political agents were directly engaged in administration as opposed to their previous role as mere auxiliaries. this development reflected the change in colonial policy, as the period witnessed the consolidation of colonial conquest, characterised by the development of provincial administration and effective government. many agents were appointed to positions in the indigenous administration in the interests of the colonial authorities. as afeadie (2008) points out, the agents participated in local government and served in varying capacities; as district head; as treasurer, supervising financial administration of community native treasury (beit-el-mal); and as district judge (alkali), assisting the administration of justice (pp.105-117). all these were crucial domains of colonial governance. derivative power of pidgin political agents occupied a crucial position in northern nigeria, primarily by their command of language and their intermediary role in administration. owing to their position, agents commanded political influence and occupied a high status in society. inevitably, agents had influence with the traditional authorities and the people. a complainant or visiting official could not meet a political officer without passing through a political agent. as to the 18 these involved collection of export and import duties from foreign traders, administration of trade licenses, and the adjudication of local disputes brought before the company’s courts (flint, 1960, pp.92-98, and 144-146; pedler, 1974, pp.125-128). 19 interview, abdulkadir, majasirdin kano, kano, 17 august 1993. according to the informant, hakimai (officials of the indigenous administration) or talakawa (ordinary people) who wanted to see a political officer had to go through agents like tanko. a similar statement was made by another informant, mallambasikujibrinzarewa but he referred to adamujakada to exemplify the agents. (kano, 18 july 1993). afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 29 traditional rulers including emirs (sarakuna), afeadie (2008) notes that a political agent could be sent to collect an emir’s staff of office, in the event of the emir’s misconduct (p.118). in consequence, the friendship of agents was cultivated by the traditional authorities. many agents were known to receive gifts, such as expensive gowns and horses from the indigenous ruling officials; they also had marriages arranged and financed for them by the officials.20 according to kano traditions, some agents who were muslim often participated in private prayers with some indigenous rulers during off-hours while some of the indigenous elite were known to pay home visits to some political agents. on the other hand, agents had influence with the political officers; run-away slaves sought refuge with political agents, and political officers entrusted in some agents the guardianship of the freed slaves.21 given these cases of entrustment, agents exploited their influence for several purposes. they could have people arrested for offences on their own authority (afeadie, 2008, p.121). some of them engaged in extortion, manipulating the people’s fear of being reported or misrepresented to the colonial authorities for real or supposed offences.22 also, many agents would misinform political officers who relied on them because of their limited knowledge of the indigenous languages. resident temple (1968) characterised a political officer in such a situation as a “domestic slave” to his agent (p.246). not surprisingly, a political agent was held in awe by the general populace, because of his influence and how he exploited it. the traditional authorities held the british conquerors in high regard; accordingly, they dreaded political agents because they worked closely with the colonial authorities, and they could poison relations between the colonial officials and the chiefs.23 district officer, arthur t. weatherhead, is noted as having observed that ‘no one in nigeria understood the british so well as the messengers, “the eyes and ears’” of a political officer (heussler, 1968, p.118).for their part, the people (talakawa) considered their british conquerors to be as powerful as their traditional rulers. as emir abbas informed a british journalist, e.d. morel, in 1912, ‘all white men are “sarikis” (chiefs) and the people cannot help so regarding them’ (morel, 1912/1968, p.134). as officials who communicated directly with the colonial authorities and who mediated between them and the indigenous rulers, political agents were regarded by the people as powerful in their own right. 20 interviews, alhajigarbamohammadusaidu, kano, 22 june 1993; alhajiinuwa wada, kano, 29 june 1993. 21 northern nigeria gazette, no.19, 1900, p. 131. quarterly list of liberated slaves registered 15 march to 30 march 1900; northern nigeria gazette, august 1901, p.112. 22 annual reports, northern nigeria, 1900-1912, p.268. also, resident temple aptly observed that ‘the extraordinary impertinence of which a sophisticated native can be capable, the preposterous requests which he can make in his master's name must be actually experienced before they can be believed’ (1968, p.126). 23 interview, mallamda'u, kano, 13 july 1993. afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 30 controlling communicative power political agents were generally distrusted by their employers, because of the illegitimate ways they used their influence. but there were other reasons as well. government resentment of some agents was based on a misunderstanding of their conduct, as some agents subscribed to the ideology of pretended cooperation with the colonial regime; and also, government distrust of agents arose from racial prejudice.24 naturally, agents were subject to control in the colonial administration, especially when they used their political influence in illegitimate ways. one important means of control was the protection of natives proclamation, enacted in 1901 to deal with impersonation of government officials and amended in 1903 to include the acceptance of bribes and presents.25 such offences were punishable by imprisonment, fines and flogging. under the proclamation, the penalty for receiving bribes or improper presents was imprisonment with hard labour for six months or a fine or both.26 as to flogging, the amended act authorised court officials to administer a minimum of 36 lashes to culprits immediately on conviction and sentencing. this was intended to provide moral effect on the convicts and on the court. other agents could be demoted or dismissed, on conviction. in converse to punishing agents for their misconduct, colonial officials encouraged good behaviour in their trusty agents. such persons were rewarded with increased salaries, gifts, special benefits or medals of honour. although reliable political agents existed in the colonial administration, they were few in number. moreover, agents could not be adequately controlled through the existing system of reward and punishment. in the prevailing conditions of agents’ scarcity, the ineffective control system manifested in the re-employment of some agents who had been dismissed for offences against the colonial government (afeadie, 2008, p.135). in view of the limitations in their control system, the colonial authorities sought other means to reduce the intermediary role of agents and restrict their influence. to this end, they instituted a policy of language training for political officers in a bid to promote direct communication between them and the people. the general objective of the language policy was to deprive political agents of the power derived from pidgin and arabic, which were working languages of government. agents enjoyed speaking pidgin with the confident sense of african ownership, because it 24 afeadie, 2008, p. 39. also, during the colonial period expatriate officials held to a body of subjective opinions about the african people (cohen, 1970, pp.427-431). according to alan burns (1948), a former governor of nigeria, ‘colour prejudice is present, even when not consciously felt, in the relations of white traders, teachers, missionaries and officials, to the coloured inhabitants.’ (p.12) 25 snp 1/1 3 (no.44) high commissioner to the secretary of state for colonies, zungeru, 30 january 1903, protection of natives (amendment) proclamation 1903. 26 northern nigeria gazette, february 1904, pp.11-12. afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 31 served them very well. political officers, for their part, were not comfortable with pidgin, as they resented agents’ control and abuse of the language. thus, political officers sought a language of administration that would accord them direct contact with the traditional authorities and the people. they chose hausa and consequently compelled all political officers to learn it. resident temple (1968) advised: it is extremely improbable that a political officer will not find in any village of the northern provinces of nigeria a man who does understand hausa enough to interpret. even if he cannot find a man of that village it is easier for him to find some native who understands the language spoken in that village and haussa as well, than to find anybody who understands that language and even the most elementary ‘pidgin’ english. so that an officer if he knows haussa is at all events likely to be independent of his own ‘english’ speaking interpreter, instead of being his ‘domestic slave’; he will at all events have a choice of interpreters, and be able to use first one and then another, so that the villagers may see that he is capable of exerting his free-will in some respects, and is not entirely at the beck and call of one ‘tarprinta’ [the pidgin term for ‘interpreter.’]. (p.246) thus, knowledge of hausa in particular, and any other language (yoruba, nupe, kanuri, bassa or okpoto) which was widely spoken in the territory of a political officer, became requirements for promotion.27 accordingly, language examinations were conducted for interested candidates, the hausa language examination being predominant. revealingly, political officers were entitled to language gratuities ranging from £15 and £30, on the successful completion of the hausa language examination.28 to reduce the role of agents, the language policy also sought replacing arabic with hausa as the official language of correspondence for the people, especially the indigenous ruling elite. prior to the advent of colonial rule, arabic was the medium of correspondence in the region. arabic scholarship exploded with the spread of islamic education, in the wake of the jihad of uthmandan fodio, launched in 1804. the teachers who were known as malamai acquired competence in arabic after years of training, which began in youth. thus arabic scribes abounded in the region, and many of them, indeed, served as agents in the 27 snp 7 42/1902 g.m. moloney, resident lower benue, to the secretary to the government, loko, 27 january 1902, haussa language examinations (188/1902), enclosed in language gratuities; snp 1/1 4 (238/1904) high commissioner, northern nigeria, to secretary of state, zungeru, 26 january 1904. 28 snp 7 42/1902 haussa language examinations (188/1902), and examinations in english, enclosed in language gratuities. afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 32 colonial administration. agents sani and jafaru, for instance, were arabic scholars.29 many of the scribes, however, lacked literacy in english and could not conduct direct correspondence between the colonial officials and the traditional authorities. conversely, the colonial authorities were largely reluctant to promote literacy in arabic among the colonial officials.30 meanwhile, christian missionaries had been promoting writing in hausa by encouraging the development of ajami, hausa written in arabic characters.31 but lugard objected to the spread of ajami which he described as ‘spurious arabic’ and unintelligible to political officers. instead, he wanted to introduce hausa in roman characters, the new script considered more suitable in expressing hausa sounds, and readable by political officers (graham, 1966, p.27). accordingly, a school was established at bida for the training of students in the new script. in lugard’s estimation, the language policy for political officers was progressive, as those who passed the examinations made use of their language skills to control agents. thus lugard noted in 1904: it was owing to dr. cargill's knowledge of hausa that he was able to detect a widespread scheme of extortion and slave dealing in the muri province, carried on in the name of government by the interpreter [issakada]. later he discovered that it had been due to malpractices and misrepresentation on the part of captain moloney’s interpreter [abdu tintin] which had led to that officer’s sad death, and lately mr. webster, who had acquired a fair knowledge of hausa, was able thereby to avert a needless war and convict the real culprit.32 in fact, political officers who knew the indigenous languages were few in numbers.33 in effect, their achievements were of little avail to the control of the relatively predominant political agents and their instrument of pidgin. besides, the indigenous people did not readily adopt the roman script in writing hausa. for their part, indigenous rulers continued to write official letters in arabic, reflecting the resilience of cultural tradition. as such, the colonial 29 ahak h. hale middleton, d.o.ii, 31 december 1917, native staff confidential report, kano, 1917; ahak resident gowers, native staff confidential report, kano, 1918. 30 christian missionaries and colonial officials in northern nigeria were known to detest islam and arabic influence in the region, owing to the colonial experience with the jihad movements in india, as well as urabi pasha’s revolt in egypt and the mahdist rising in the sudan (robinson, 1999, p.405; ayandele, 1966, p.126) 31 snp 7 42/1902 language gratuities. 32 annual reports, northern nigeria, 1900-1912, pp.215-216. 33 they included g.w. webster, w.f. gowers, h.r. palmer, c.l. temple, e.j. arnett, w.s. sharpe and h.h. hermon-hodge (heussler, 1968, pp.123-126; kirk-greene, 1988, p.6; graham, 1966, p.36) afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 33 authorities continued to recruit arabic scholars into the colonial service, and interested political agents were allowed to sit language examinations involving the study of arabic. obviously, the language policy was failing. political agents, therefore, remained crucial to colonial administration. colonial authorities, nevertheless, continued to dislike the influence of pidgin and the position of political agent, and accordingly sought the abolition of the post in subsequent years. in the 1920s, as heussler notes, ‘kaduna first issued a directive against the use of informers and then abolished political agents; but not before a certain amount of harm had been done in preventing more direct communication between d.o.s and n.a.s [district officers and native authorities].’ (1968, p.119). in practice, colonial officials could not abolish the post of political agents in its entirety; they merely changed their title to ‘messenger’, as their service remained indispensable and valuable. according to mcclintock (1992), the ‘messengers’ who supposedly replaced political agents possessed the same characteristics and identity as the political agents, and they performed similar duties and wielded influence as political agents (p.16). of the language policy, it was well on the decline, as political officers who sat the examination were very few, and the numbers continued to dwindle over the years, in spite of incentives. by 1962 the policy had become redundant. with the spread of standard english, and the africanisation of the public service underway, the demand for expatriate political officers and their need to learn the local languages largely diminished (kirk-greene, 1988, p.10). the commanding influence of pidgin had also waned with the ending of colonial rule. pidgin today in the post-colonial period, pidgin would serve a complementary role to burgeoning standard english and indigenous nigerian languages. in that regard, pidgin would expand its function as lingua franca, serving nigerians, especially southerners in many important contexts. as mafeni (1971) notes, the condition of multilingual family settings in many urban areas of nigerian enabled the adoption of pidgin as a major medium of communication for husbands and wives and children at home (pp.98-99). further, at primary and secondary schools among immigrant communities in northern nigeria as well as cities of multilingual populations in southern nigeria, pidgin was the primary means of communication in school compounds and outside the classroom. similarly, pidgin served as a convenient lingua franca among uneducated people in multilingual working contexts. in the niger delta region of benin city, calabar, port harcourt and warri, aziza (2006) observes, the nigerian pidgin (np) is virtually indispensable in its communicative function in the home, school, church, market place, office – in fact, for most afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 34 interpersonal communicative needs, including inter and intra-ethnic communication. it eases the language barrier that the many languages in the area would have created. in the mass media np is extensively used in the radio and television for both entertainment and educational purposes.34adverts are common in the language and even government announcements are regularly relayed in np for a wider reach. there are also pidgin columns in a number of periodicals. (pp.184-185) the army and police would also adopt pidgin as a language of wide communication and instruction in the junior ranks, noted achebe (1987, pp.191-194) this practice developed from the establishment of the west india regiments in sierra leone in the first half of the 19th century, through the operation of the british colonial army, the west african frontier force (waff), where pidgin and hausa were spoken among the soldiers. as with other west africans today, pidgin is intelligible to educated nigerians, including university lecturers and government officials, but they would rather speak the language in informal settings such as entertainment spots and among friends. predictably, pidgin prevails at the workplace, particularly among urban dwellers in west africa. conclusion pidgin in west africa emerged as a language of trade, a medium of communication between africans and european traders. soon, pidgin developed as a lingua franca between the multi-ethnic groups on the west african seaboard. in the absence of a wider means of inter-ethnic communication at the workplace, the british authorities adopted pidgin as a working language of colonial government in northern nigeria. this enabled african employees who spoke pidgin to perform important tasks in governance, and thereby acquired political influence, which they often abused, thus challenging british colonial hegemony in northern nigeria. as a result, colonial authorities resented that influence, but they could not effectively control it. the status and influence of political agents would only diminish in the twilight years of colonial rule, with the spread of english language as a wider medium of inter-ethnic communication. today, pidgin has developed as a major lingua franca in multilingual settings such as homes, schools and working places in many urban areas of anglophone west africa, particularly in nigeria. pidgin is widely spoken, not just among people lacking proficiency in standard english but also among formally educated anglophone west africans. as such, pidgin facilitates the vertical and horizontal communication process. 34 novelists, playwrights and musicians also communicated to their audiences in pidgin. afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 35 remarkably, pidgin has retained its unique characteristic and usefulness as a language of the workplace in west africa today, albeit suffering from the colonial legacy of resentment in the ambivalent attitudes of the elite in post-colonial contemporary africa. afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 36 references achebe, c. (1987). anthills of the savannah. london, uk: heinemann. afeadie, p. a. (2008). brokering colonial rule: political agents in northern nigeria, 1886-1914. saarbrucken, germany: verlag dr. muller. ayandele, e. a. (1966). the missionary impact on modern nigeria 1842-1914. london, uk: longmans. aziza, r. o. (2006). the pidgin factor in the development of the niger delta region of nigeria. in e. n. chia(ed.), african linguistics and the development of african communities (pp.184-190). dakar, senegal: codesria. burns, a. (1948). colour prejudice. london, uk: g. allen and unwin. cohen, w. b. (1970). the colonized as child: british and french colonial rule in africa. international journal of african historical studies, 3(2), 427-431. dantzig, a. v. (1978). the dutch and the guinea coast, 1647-1742: a collection of documents from the general state archive at the hague. accra: ghana academy of arts and science. dantzig, a.v. (1999). forts and castles of ghana. accra, ghana: sedco publishing limited. east, r. (1965). akiga's story. london, uk: oxford university press. flint, j. e. (1960). sir george goldie and the making of nigeria. london, uk: oxford university press. fremantle, j. m. (1925). gazetteer of muri province. london, uk: waterlow. graham, s. f. (1966). government and mission education in northern nigeria 1900-1919. ibadan, nigeria: ibadan university press. hazzledine, g. d. (1904). the white man in nigeria. new york, ny: negroe universities press. heussler, r. (1968). the british in northern nigeria. london, uk: oxford university press. huber, m. (1999). ghanaian pidgin english in its west african context. amsterdam, netherlands: john benjamin’s publishing company. kirk-greene, a. h. m., & newman, p. (1971). west african travels and adventures. two autobiographical narratives from northern nigeria. new haven, ct: yale university press. kirk-greene, a.h.m. (1988). examinees, examiners and examinations: the hausa language requirements of the northern nigerian government, 1902-1962. in g. furniss & p.j. jaggar (eds.), studies in hausa language and linguistics. london, uk: kegan paul. long, d. (2007). english on the bonin (ogasarawa) islands. durham, nc: duke university press. afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) p a g e | 37 lugard, l. (1965). the dual mandate in british tropical africa. london, uk: archon books. mafeni, b. (1971). nigerian pidgin. in john spencer (ed.), the english language in west africa (pp.95-112). london, uk: longman. mcclintock, n.c. (1992). kingdoms in the sand and sun. london, uk: radcliffe press. mockler-ferryman, a.f. (1892). up the niger. london, uk: g. philip & son. morel, e. d. (1912/1968). nigeria: its peoples and its problems. london, uk: f. cass. norregard, g. (1966). danish settlements in west africa 1658-1850. boston, ma: boston university press. o’hear, a. (1992). letters from nigeria 1899-1900. david wynford carnegie. madison wc: university of wisconsin press. pedler, f. (1974). the lion and the unicorn in africa: a history of the origins of the united african company 1787-1931. london, uk: heinemann educational. perham, m., & bull, m. (1963). the diaries of lord lugard, iv. evanston, il: north western university press. robinson, f. (1999). the british empire and the muslim world. in j. m. brown &r. w. louis (eds.), oxford history of british empire, vol. iv (pp.398-419). oxford, uk: oxford university press. spencer, j. (1971). west africa and the english language. in j. spencer (ed.), the english language in west africa (pp.1-34). london, uk: longman. staudinger, p. (1992). in the heart of the hausa states, 2 vols. athens, oh: ohio university center for international studies. temple, c. l. (1968). native races and their rulers. london, uk: cass. submitted: march 15, 2015 / published: may 30, 2016 afeadie, p. a. / legon journal of the humanities 26 (2015) 19-37 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 95 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v27i1.5 mother tongue eclipsing in the linguistic repertoire of yoruba/english bilingual children in nigeria kehinde a. ayoola senior lecturer, department of english, obafemi awolowo university, ile-ife, nigeria taiwo o. soneye reader, department of english, obafemi awolowo university, ile-ife, nigeria abstract this paper examines a trend in nigeria whereby children of yoruba-speaking parents acquire english as their first language and yoruba as their second language. it assesses the socio-cultural implications of this practice on the country’s socio-political development. forty school children and their parents were purposively selected and administered questionnaires aimed at eliciting their language preferences in different domains. the results showed that english was the preferred language used by the children in eight out of the twelve domains of language use. the paper concluded by recommending that indigenous languages be used for legislation, administration, and education in nigeria. keywords: bilingualism, domain, yoruba, language policy, mother tongue the institutionalization of english as nigeria’s official language and language of education is a major consequence of nigeria’s colonial history, multi-ethnicity, and multilingualism. while the choice of english as the country’s official language seemed logical, inexpensive, and convenient at the time of the nation’s independence in 1960, a critical look at what obtains in developed nations and emerging economies across the globe ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 96 shows that the time is ripe to revisit this choice. according to egbe (2014, p. 58), the institutionalized use of english in nigeria has contributed to the decline in the use and development of most indigenous nigerian languages. indeed, the rate at which english, in partnership with pidgin, is strangulating and snuffing the life out of indigenous nigerian languages has reached alarming dimensions in many southwestern nigerian cities. aside from english being the language of opportunity and achievement in nigeria, the language is also the country’s official and national language. this reality has resulted in the predilection by many educated nigerian parents to propel their children towards the mastery of english at the expense of their native languages. according to setati (2008, p. 106), it is “the preferred language for schools and businesses, as it is a passport to social goods, tertiary education, fulfilling jobs, and positions of influence and power.” notwithstanding nigeria’s national policy on education (2004) which stipulates that “the medium of instruction in the primary school shall be the language of the environment for the first three years,” english has taken over, not only in many nursery and primary schools in nigeria, but also in many homes. consequently, many yoruba city children acquire english as their first language (l1), thereby effectively displacing their mother tongue(s) or the language of the immediate environment (lie).this linguistic experience can be described as “subtractive bilingualism” instead of “additive bilingualism”, which is the ideal as it enables children to acquire both english and the language of the immediate environment (lie) simultaneously. for cummins (2000, p. 246), cited by phaahla (2014, p. 35), additive bilingualism occurs when the l1 of a child “continues to be developed and the first culture to be valued while the l2 is added”. in subtractive bilingualism, on the other hand, the second language is used at the expense of the first language and culture; not only does the l2 displace the l1, but it also eclipses the child’s culture. the children used as respondents for this study grew up in a peculiar speech community where many parents speak yoruba, ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 97 the lie and mother tongue of southwestern nigeria, between themselves, but switch to english when communicating with their children. this trend started with the educated elite and it is now being mimicked by the lower classes in the yoruba-english bilingual speech community. although yoruba is one of nigeria’s three major languages (the other two being hausa in the north and igbo in the south-east and south-south), a good number of yoruba parents refuse to expose their wards to the language apparently because they believe it is in the children’s best interest not to do so. indeed, too many nigerian children and youths are generally not keen on using their indigenous language. most of the members of this group of nigerians are incapable of reading and writing in their native language. according to soneye (2003, p. 9), nigerian youths “sometimes feign ignorance of their native tongue and confirm that ignorance with pomp and pageantry”. isola (2000) also bemoans the relegation of the nigerian native languages when he observes that only few nigerians can converse in the mother tongue for a reasonable length of time without (un)consciously or embarrassingly code-mixing and codeswitching. for omego (2014, p. 148), in a bilingual or multilingual family, “a child develops a ‘first’ language rather than a mother tongue.” soneye and ayoola (2015, p. 120) observed that the use of the lie by children is almost a taboo in many homes and nursery-primary schools in lagos, a major southwestern nigerian metropolis and the former capital of the federal republic of nigeria. in their words, children from lower-middle class and middle class homes often have access to satellite television, computer games, playstations, cartoons, videos, storybooks, and other educative materials most of which are usually produced in english. the consequence of this is that the children (and wards) of educated elites, more often than not, use english naturally amongst themselves when they are at play. (soneye & ayoola, 2015, p. 120). ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 98 moderately-educated parents, adults, teachers, and pastors, as an unwritten rule, opt for english when communicating with preschool and primary school-age children. this is the pivot on which many southwestern nigerian nursery-primary schools base their practice of using english instead of the children’s native languages or lie to teach pre-school and school age children. this situation has led to a huge imbalance in nigerian bilingualism to the extent that many educated nigerians are not fluent in their native language. this paper examines the growing preference for the use of english by yoruba-speaking nigerian parents for their children and assesses the implications of this practice on the development of the children as nigerians or africans. it also draws attention to the implications of this practice on the future of indigenous nigerian languages. literature review and theoretical framework adegbite (2010, p. 48) observes that “a human being without competence in his or her mother tongue is deprived and dehumanized.” he attributes nigeria’s language problem to lack of a comprehensive language policy. in his view, where there is a policy, it is either not well formulated or well-implemented (adegbite, p. 42). in his assessment of what he describes as the “overuse” of english and “underuse “ of the mother tongue in the linguistic repertoire of nigerians, adegbite blames “elitist interests” for the “inferior status” of the mother tongue in nigeria (see also oyelaran, 1988; oyesakin, 1992; oyetade, 2001; bamgbose, 2006). this explains why many nigerian parents, especially those in southwestern nigeria, “forbid their children from speaking the native language at home,” even when both parents speak the language to each other (adegbite, 2010, p. 37). he further observes that less educated parents in the lower classes, who are often incapable of speaking good english, emulate this practice in their homes. very much like other respected nigerian linguists and scholars before him (e.g. essien, 2003, 2006; fafunwa, 1982; bamgbose, 1990; afolayan, 1994, 2001; jibril, 2007), adegbite asserts that nigeria has very little chance of ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 99 survival in the globalized economy if she fails to give primacy to the development and use of the mother tongue in the educational and socio-political spheres (adegbite, p. 41). he continues: in addition to the need for government authorised long-term sustained efforts, a combined effort of individuals and groups to promote, develop and utilize the language resources of the nation appropriately, through microand macro-policies, planning and action measures, is a sine qua non-of qualitative and quantitative education, positive socio-cultural dynamism, creative technology, vibrant economy, social justice, medical innovations and political sovereignty (adegbite, p. 41). the above can be summarized by essien’s observation that the power of developed nations is rooted in their ability to develop their languages and utilize them gainfully (essien, 2003; 2006). like adegbite, nnolim (2007) notes that the current status enjoyed by the english language in nigeria has an adverse effect on nigerian child. he argues that the continued education of nigerian children in a foreign language will continue to produce children and adults who can neither read nor write in their indigenous languages. according to him, no matter how indigenized, “vernacularized”, or “pidginized” english is adapted in nigeria, its undiluted use as the nation’s official language at all levels of government means “perpetual bondage to a foreign power” (p. 3). nnolim further suggests that for nigeria to develop its indigenous technology and make its mark as an independent nation, the present role of the english language will have to be deemphasized and the indigenous nigerian languages given greater prominence. notwithstanding adegbite and nnolim’s africanist ideologies and idealistic arguments in favor of the mother tongue, their views run at cross-purposes with the dream of parents for their children. this latter view is captured accurately by baker (1998) who argues that in a country where opportunities for ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 100 improving one’s life are minimal, insisting on education in the country’s dominant official language becomes the order of the day because it empowers children to utilize available opportunities better. according to an empirical study carried out by olaolorun et al (2013, p. 35), parental attitudes towards the mother tongue or the lie largely determine the choice of english as their children’s l1.the study investigated parental attitude to the mother tongue in relation to their choice of english as their children’s l1 and how this had influenced the children’s negative perception of their mother tongue. according to them, contrary to the parent’s expectation, such children often perform poorly even in the english language paper in public examinations. reacting to the widespread practice of relegating the mother tongue to the background in most southwestern nigerian private nurseryprimary schools, olaolorun et al (2013, p. 36) argue that enforcing the nigerian national policy of education (federal ministry of education, 2004) is in the best interest of the children and the nation as a whole. they predict that this move will meet with some resistance from parents who prefer that their children are taught in english, on the one hand; and private school proprietors whose phenomenal success was built on thwarting the policy, on the other hand. olaolorun et al and other nigerian linguists and educators who champion the cause of adopting the mother tongue as the language of education in nigeria tend to gloss over the fact that most major nigerian cities, including those in southwestern nigeria such as lagos ibadan, osogbo, adoekiti, and akure, have a good mix of hausa, igbo, ijaw, and other nigerian nationals who do not speak yoruba fluently. while it will be impracticable to teach the children of such residents in their parents’ language, there is the challenge of imposing the lie as the language of education on the children of such citizens in a country that takes pride in the intermingling of people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. in their investigation of the domains of language use and choice by the kinubi-speaking community in kibera, kenya, ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 101 adams, matu, and ongarora (2012, p. 99) observe that in spite of kenya’s linguistic diversity, kinubi, a minority language in the country, has remained the natural choice in most homes in the kinubi-speaking community. according to them, the kinubi indigenous group has retained and maintained the richness of their linguistic heritage over the years, in spite of the dominance of english and kiswahili in kenya. the three researchers referred to the sociolinguistic notion of “domain” used by fishman (1972) that different settings characteristically call for the use of different languages in a multilingual society. domain, according to egbe (2014, pp. 56-57), refers to “institutional contexts in which one language is more likely to be appropriate than another and are to be seen as constellations of other factors such as topic, location and participants”. according to adams, matu, and ongarora (2012, p. 99), the home is the “anchor” domain; other domains are social events, cultural events, education, business matters, travel, writing, neighborhood, religion and so on. in the case of the kinubi-speaking community, the home, neighborhood, religion, and business matters are the key domains in operation (adams, matu & ongarora, 2012, p. 103). the reality on the ground in southwestern nigerian cities is that english, the language of britain and the us, the dream-countries of many southwestern nigerians, has so penetrated most of the domains of language use in the region. consequently, one cannot use what obtains in the kinubi-speaking community in kenya to generalize for yorubaspeaking cities in southwestern nigeria. webb (2012) also examines the impact of the english language on the teaching experience of teachers in the eastern cape, south africa, who are compelled to teach mainly in english, a language that is not their home language. the study reports how multilingual teachers are encouraged to write poetry in their home languages about their perceptions of the dominance of english in their lives in order to elicit their inner voices on language conflicts and contradictions in their classrooms. the poetry collated in the study revealed the teachers’ perception of english as a powerful and dominant outsider that subordinates the home languages. ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 102 webb argues that the fact that school teachers in eastern cape are under compulsion to teach in english does not establish excellent performance of their pupils in terms of the acquisition of english; even if they are taught through the medium of english from the outset. according to him, the pupils they teach become culturally disintegrated, such that serious social and educational problems occur. the reason being that they lack native (or native-like) competence in both the l1 and l2 which is detrimental to their cognitive development and academic performance. and lastly, such children are often incapable of expressing deep indigenous thoughts and nuances of meaning in the foreign language (2012:c). omego (2014) undertook a study on the patterns of language acquisition exhibited by children born in multilingual environments. his study attempted to ascertain the influence of the child’s immediate environment on the acquisition of a second language and the ultimate effect of this acquisition on the child’s native language. he argued that “language as a living organism grows if it is being spoken, but dies if people stop speaking it” (p. 148). he observed that so long as african environments do not favor the use of indigenous languages in homes, schools, and businesses, the future of african indigenous languages is very bleak (p. 148). in a study that centers on predicting the future of the english language in nigeria, egbe (2014, p. 53) discusses nigerian university undergraduates most preferred language for communication and interaction at home. the main languages in question are english, indigenous nigerian languages and nigerian pidgin. egbe explains that language choice and preference arise when a speaker in a bilingual or multilingual geo-political domain has competence in more than one language being spoken in his/her environment and has to choose when to use any of the languages in his or her daily interactions. citing adams, matu and ongarora (2012, p. 100), he asserts that people who are proficient in two or more languages often make a choice as to when and where to use any of the languages in their repertoire. the choices such speakers make can be explained by their attitude to the language (egbe, 2014, p. 53). his paper concludes that the new generation of ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 103 nigerians prefers the use of english as first language in a non-host second language context and that this group of nigerians is advancing in the direction of “monolingual english-only proficiency”. this conclusion resonates with the present authors’ observations with respect to primary school pupils who speak english only in almost all domains of language use in the southwestern nigerian yoruba/english bilingual community. scholars, such as fafunwa (1982) and afolayan (1994; 2001), have demonstrated the cognitive advantage of educating children in their mother tongue through the “ife six-year primary project”. other nigerian linguists and educators, such as bamgbose (1990), essien (2003), nnolim (2007), jibril (2007), and adegbite (2010), have all argued in favor of encouraging the use of nigerian mother tongues in education and governance. scholars like olaolorun et al (2013) have highlighted the negative attitude of parents towards the use of the mother tongue by nigerian primary school pupils, while egbe (2014) has shown that nigerian tertiary institution students’ preference for english as l1 over their mother tongue. in spite of the compelling research findings and sound arguments in favor of using the mother tongue in many more domains in nigeria, the new generation of southwestern nigerian children seems to be advancing towards english-only proficiency. while most studies have focused on nigerian authorities, schools, and grownups for empirical data on the challenges confronting the use of the mother tongue in nigeria, this study seeks to establish why the mother tongue is becoming increasingly unpopular with yoruba/english bilingual children. this is with a view to describing the roles played by parents and schools in the declining use of the mother tongue by primary school children in nigerian cities where yoruba is the dominant language. this is the knowledge gap the study intends to fill. research methodology the study is a qualitative research that investigated the preferred linguistic choices of a homogenous group of yoruba /english bilingual children and their parents, all of whom are of ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 104 yoruba extraction, in different domains of language use. the children’s parents had to be involved both for ethical reasons and the purpose of validating the children’s responses in view of the children’s tender age. the study, which focused on urban centers, sought to know why children of yoruba extraction spoke english naturally instead of yoruba in domains outside the classroom or school environment. hence the study sought to answer the research question: why do some yoruba/english bilingual children acquire english as their first language (l1) and yoruba as their second language (l2). data was gathered from yoruba/english bilingual communities in three southwestern nigerian cities, namely lagos, ibadan, and ile-ife. these cities were chosen because english and yoruba are used freely by many residents and the population has a good mix of people with diverse educational, linguistic, and socio-cultural backgrounds. data was collected through the participant observation method and the administration of questionnaire. participant observation enabled the researchers to identify children who spoke english amongst themselves in natural situations outside the school environment. forty children, all of yoruba extraction aged between eight and ten (8 and 10) years old, who were observed to be speaking english naturally amongst themselves at play, were purposively selected as respondents for the study. the term “children”, in this study, refers to pre-school and primary school pupils whose age falls between three (3) and ten (10) years old. this age bracket, according to osanyin (2002), is crucial to the individual’s intellectual, emotional, social, and physical development. this is the stage at which children are most impressionable and the foundation for the development of their basic language skills is laid. two sets of questionnaire were designed for the study: questionnaire a was for the children’s parents; questionnaire b was for the children. the children’s parents were contacted for the family’s participation in the study. after their willingness had been obtained, the parents were administered questionnaire a, while the children were administered questionnaire b. the ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 105 questionnaire sought to elicit the language(s) used for communication by the children and their parents in different domains, such as at home, leisure or play, and during religious activities. it also sought to know the language of the children’s reading materials and favorite television programs. this was with a view to identifying the reasons for the children’s preference of english over yoruba. the responses to the questions in the two questionnaires were collated and this formed the basis for the ensuing discussion on the children’s language preference. the results were used to elicit the implications of the study after which recommendations were made and conclusions drawn. findings and discussion this section, which centers on data analysis, supplies answers to the research question: why do some yoruba/english bilingual children acquire english as their l1 and yoruba as their l2? forty parents and forty children duly filled in and returned the questionnaires making a total of 80 respondents in all. the summary of the responses of both groups are presented in figures 1 and 2 below. the data analysis opens with a summary of the parents’ responses in figure 1 below: ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 106 figure 1: language preference of yoruba/english bilingual parents a cursory glance at figure 1 above shows that english is the preferred language (medium of communication) in eight out of the twelve domains presented to the parents. using simple percentage, one notices that the parents’ language preference for their children can be summarized as follows: english = 66.6%; indigenous language = 33.3%. while 60% of the parents agreed that they use their mother tongue to communicate with each other, 70% of them admitted that they use both english and their mother tongue to communicate with their children in the home environment. 95% of the parents admitted to making their children attend schools where english is the sole medium of instruction and the only language permitted in the school environment. 92.5% of them observed that their children’s favorite television programs are broadcast in english and 82.5% admitted that their children’s leisure reading materials are also written in english. only 35% of ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 107 the parents admitted that yoruba is taught as a school subject in their children’s school. in view of the above scenario, it is not surprising that the parents indicated that 87.5% of their children speak english instead of yoruba while at play with their peers in the community. aside from the dominance of english usage in the school and home environments, 68.5% of parents responded that it is the language used for teaching their children in churches and mosques. it did not come as a surprise, therefore, that 71.9% of the parents admitted that their children are more fluent in english than yoruba. in sum, it can be deduced from the general response of the parents that the children did not have sufficient exposure to their parents’ native language to make them develop fluency in it. it is therefore safe to conjecture from the above that some yoruba/english bilingual parents place english above yoruba; hence their choice of english for interacting with their children at home. figure 2, below, summarizes the response of the children and it largely corroborates the response of the parents in figure 1. ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 108 figure 2: language preference of yoruba/english bilingual children figure 2 reveals a dismal picture of the use of yoruba by the yoruba/english bilingual children who served as the main source of data for this study. in spite of the fact that all their parents were of yoruba extraction and notwithstanding the children’s ethnic origin, 68.2% of them claimed that they were more fluent in english than yoruba; 28.95% claimed to be fluent in both english and yoruba, while only 2.63% claimed to be more fluent in yoruba. this response is further reinforced by the dominance of english in the children’s response in respect of other domains of language use. according to them, english is the language used for communicating with them in 92.5% of their homes. they also declared that the language of their favorite reading materials is 100% english and that they speak only english when at play with friends. they indicated that the language of their favorite television program is 97.5% english, while the medium of teaching in their churches or mosques is 80% english. the summary of the above is that the main avenues for lang(s) in which you are fluent lang(s) spoken with parents at home lang(s) spoken with friends at play lang(s) of favourite tv programmes lang(s) of leisure reading materials lang(s) as medium of instruction at school language(s) taught as school subjects lang(s) used as medium of instruction at church/mosque lang(s) permitted at home lang(s) used in running errands at home 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 yoruba english yoruba &english ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 109 first language (or mother tongue) learning and reinforcement available to the children such as interaction at home, leisure reading activity, audio-visual media, religious activities, and playground activities are mostly in english. it is only natural to expect yoruba/english bilingual children to have preference for english in their linguistic repertoire. the findings also revealed that while all the children were taught english as a school subject, only 25% of them claimed that they were taught yoruba as a school subject. the children also claimed that the medium of instruction in the churches and mosques they attended was mainly english (80%), except in a few instances where both english and yoruba were used simultaneously. perhaps, mention could be made at this juncture of the fact that the multilingual mix of the membership of religious associations in southwestern nigerian cities often makes it an uphill task for many churches and mosques to adopt yoruba for teaching the children and for worship. in sum, the findings of the study revealed that the children surveyed chose english over yoruba because it is the dominant language in most of the domains of linguistic opportunities available to them. another reason for the children’s preference for english is the prevailing multilingual context of many southwestern nigerian cities that play host to millions of nigerians from other parts of the country. unlike most of northern nigeria where hausa is the lingua franca and much of the southeast and south-south nigeria where pidgin dominates, the lingua franca in southwestern nigeria is a mixture of standard/non-standard english and nigerian pidgin. implications of findings a major finding of the study is that the psychological, linguistic, and situational contexts of lagos, ibadan, and ile-ife, all in nigeria, representing different points on the continuum of urbanization in the yoruba/english bilingual southwestern nigerian community, generally favor the choice of english over yoruba by yoruba children. this implies that if the situation is not reversed, succeeding generations of yoruba children and youths ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 110 who grow up in urban and suburban yoruba/english bilingual cities and towns in southwestern nigeria are likely to select english instead of yoruba as their l1. this development will effectively point yoruba in the direction of irrelevance, probable extinction, and death in less than one hundred years. a corollary of this implication is that if yoruba, or any other indigenous nigerian language for that matter, is not empowered in its domain to share in (or assume) some of the socio-political and economic functions associated with english, subsequent generations of nigerians will find their native language moribund and irrelevant; hence more nigerians, especially those that grow up in cities, will advance in english-only proficiency. a pertinent question that arises from this study is that if ethnic yoruba children and youths living in lagos, ibadan, and ile-ife grow up with english as their l1, what are the chances that native hausa, igbo, and people from other ethnic groups resident in southwestern nigerian cities will learn or use yoruba? a related question is: if yoruba, the major language in nine2 out of nigeria’s thirty-six states, is being eclipsed by english in a vast geographical domain that plays host to at least a quarter of nigeria’s 175 million people, the trend has serious implications for the future of hausa, igbo, and nigeria’s over-250 other indigenous languages. as already observed in this paper, in spite of the sound arguments in favor of using the mother tongue, the reality on the ground is that the new generation of yoruba/english bilinguals seems more interested in developing their children’s proficiency in english, the world’s foremost global language, than their native language. for the sake of argument, if yoruba were adopted today and enforced as the language of primary education in the yorubaspeaking region of nigeria as recommended by nigerian linguists and educators (e.g. afolayan, 1994; fafunwa, 1982), will such an act not amount to an infringement on the fundamental human 2 yoruba is the major language in the following states in nigeria: ekiti, kwara, lagos, ogun, ondo, osun, oyo, parts of edo and kogi states. ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 111 rights of nigerian citizens who may not want the language to be used as their children’s medium of education? the same question can be posed for hausa, igbo, or any other nigerian language that is being put forward as the language of education or as the regional or national language. the final implication that we wish to draw from the findings of this study is the need for nigeria to faithfully implement the provisions of its national policy on education (2004), which stipulates that the language of the environment shall in the first three years of the primary school be the medium of instruction. unless this provision is enforced, nigerian parents will always find reasons why their children should not be educated in a language other than english. this is without prejudice to the fact that nigeria’s federal structure rests on the foundation of free movement of citizens from one part of the country to another. this scenario raises a few difficult questions. for instance, what will happen to children whose parents happen to be civil servants or company personnel, are transferred to regions where a language other than their mother tongue has been instituted as the state or regional language or the language of education? if yoruba, for instance, were adapted as the state language or language of education in lagos, oyo, and osun states, the location of lagos, ibadan, and ile-ife, respectively, will this decision not have a negative effect on nigeria’s socio-political integration? english-speaking yoruba children grow up with the mindset of second class global citizens who have to spend a life time struggling for recognition and acceptability by native speakers of english. it is socio-culturally unsafe for the future leaders of a developing nation like nigeria to grow up with indifference or disdain for their mother tongue. such children grow up placing a higher premium on foreign ways of life and overrating foreign cultural values. the inferior status given to nigerian mother tongues by the nigerian authorities has serious implications for the children who grow up with the mindset that nigerian languages do not count. not only do they run the risk of ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 112 losing their identity and sense of loyalty and commitment to nigeria, but that they will discover too late in life that they are neither accepted as authentic europeans/americans nor seen as legitimate africans. recommendations the most significant finding of this study is that the children used as respondents for the study are more fluent in english than yoruba because parents speak english to them at home, their leisure-reading materials are in english, their favorite television programs are invariably in english, and they attend schools where english is the only language used. this implies that if yoruba people are sincerely desirous of making their children use their mother tongue, they would do things that would motivate their children to develop interest in the language. for instance, they could sponsor the extensive production and dissemination of books and films that tickle the fancy of different categories of children; encourage the elite class to interact with their children in the language; make their children participate in socio-cultural activities involving the use of yoruba at the communal level; and institute awards for good performance in yoruba, among others. the growing tendency to despise nigerian mother tongues can be arrested not only by a change of attitude, but by firm legislation. the following are some recommendations:  the nigerian national assembly should enact a law that makes the language of immediate environment (lie) the language of instruction for all the nine years of universal basic education (ube) in nigeria;  the nigerian national assembly should enact a law that would mandate all states and local government councils to conduct all their businesses and keep all their records primarily in the lie as approved by their respective state houses of assembly;  state houses of assembly and local government legislatures should identify the lies in their domain and legislate on the aspects of social and public life where each language will be used; ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 113  examination bodies in nigeria should be compelled to come up with a time table for the conduct of all their examinations in the three major nigerian languages by year 2025;  the primary language for conducting the affairs of law enforcement agencies, such as the police and civil defense corps, and all magistrate courts in all states of the nigerian federation should be the lie;  every state should establish a bureau of translation that will take charge of promptly translating text books, world classic literary texts, leisure reading materials, educative videos and materials of interest to young people into as many indigenous nigerian languages as possible. conclusion nigeria has to brace up to the challenge of nationhood and nation-building by anchoring its educational, social, and economic values on its indigenous languages. the arguments that have been used for the elevation of english as nigeria’s national/official language can equally be deployed for its relegation. the death of an indigenous language is tantamount to the death of a civilization and the loss of the culture and identity of a people. the widely held notion that the english language is so inextricably tied to the destiny of nigeria and that it cannot be replaced by indigenous nigerian languages as the country’s official language and language of education is a fallacy. no matter how good nigerians are in their use of english, it is not in their collective or individual interest to uphold a foreign language to the detriment of their native languages. the consequence of the apathy towards the use of indigenous languages for instruction in southwestern nigerian primary schools is that an increasing number of yoruba children are growing up without communicative competence in their native language. this assertion also applies to children from other parts of the country with similar experiences. the paradox whereby children born of yoruba parents, living in southwestern nigerian cities and attending school there acquire english as l1 and yoruba as l2 calls for a decisive review and firm enforcement. although ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 114 it requires much investment and determination to enact and enforce laws on using indigenous nigerian languages, it is in the best interest of nigeria to raise the status of its indigenous languages by using them for serious activities, such as education, governance, and business, at least in their primary domains. with this, children and youths will be compelled to acquire their native language and subsequently discover the value one’s native language adds to one’s cognitive and socio-cultural development. ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 legon journal of the humanities, 27 no. 1 page | 115 references adams, y., matu, p. m., & ongarora, d. o. 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(2012). conflicting perspectives of power, identity, access and language choice in multilingual teachers’ voices. 12th international congress on mathematics education program (pp. a-j). seoul, korea: coex. submitted: december 28, 2015 / published: october 31, 2016 ayoola k. a. and soneye t. o./ legon journal of the humanities (2016) 95-118 issue 34.1.indd legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 36 fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation: war metaphors in presidential update speeches and their eff ect on attitudes to covid -19 (patients) in ghana emma kusuoba pedavoah phd candidate department of english university of ghana, legon, ghana email: ekpedavoah@st.ug.edu.gh gladys nyarko ansah associate professor department of english university of ghana, legon, ghana email: gansah@ug.edu.gh submitted: september 14, 2022/ accepted: april 26, 2023 / published: june 29, 2023 abstract ghana’s president has used war-framed metaphors in announcing and explaining both the notion of covid-19 and the measures his government outlined to curb its spread. this paper explores the potential eff ects the various conceptual mappings in the war-framed communication by the president had on the general public in dealing with a global pandemic in a local context. this is achieved by linking the mappings in the war-framed communication to the attitudes and practices among the ghanaian public. data were drawn from 8 presidential covid-19 updates between march 15 and may 31, 2020. findings indicate that the use of war-framed communication successfully evoked fear among the general population. however, this transcended the virus to covid-19 patients (and their families), provoking a cause of action among the general public to fi ght not only the virus but also covid-19 patients (and their families). this appears to have caused stigmatisation of covid-19 patients, and led to a situation where covid-19 positive patients pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v34i1.2s legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 37 pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation became unwilling to declare their positive status and thus caused further community spread. keywords: covid-19, communication, conceptual metaphor theory, war metaphor, stigmatisation, global pandemic. introduction corona virus disease, covid-19, is an acute respiratory disease. this disease is caused by a new strain of a deadly virus that has recently infected many people across the world. in ghana, the disease had infected over 48 thousand people with 320 deaths and 620 active cases as of november 3, 2020 (ghanahealthservice.org). covid-19 has generated much worry among world leaders and people across the world. news of the virus fi rst broke when an unidentifi ed fl u-like but fastkilling and fast-spreading disease was reported in the wuhan province in china in november, 2019 (ellis, 2020 february 4). reports from authorities in wuhan indicated that by the time the deadly nature of the virus was known and reported, it had spread widely among humans. many myths about the nature and mode of spread of the virus circulated in the media through offi cial and other social media platforms (bolsen et al., 2020). nevertheless, it was not until january, 2020, that the world health organisation (who) for the fi rst time declared covid-19, as a public health emergency of international concern (pheic). on the 12th march, 2020, however, the director-general of who, tedros adhanom ghebreyesus, declared the disease a pandemic: the who has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we’re deeply concerned about the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of infection. we have therefore made the assessment that covid-19 can be characterised as a pandemic. pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. it is a word that if misused, can cause unreasonable fear legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 38 pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) or unjustifi ed acceptance that the fi ght is over leading to unnecessary suff ering and death (who webpage, 2020). since the director of the who declared covid-19 a pandemic using the war frame, “the unjustifi ed acceptance that the fi ght is over”, as indicated in the excerpt of his above, other world leaders have run the war metaphor in conceptualising and communicating diff erent aspects of the pandemic to their general publics. for instance, whereas donald trump, the president of usa, called himself the “war time president”, the secretary-general of the united nations, antonio gutierrez, declared that “we are at war with a virus”. again, while governor andrew cuomo, governor of new york, declared that health professionals are the soldiers in the fi ght, the president of ghana, nana addo dankwa akufo-addo, has described health workers as ‘frontline workers” at diff erent times. lakoff and johnson (1980) opine that metaphors are a cognitive phenomenon in our everyday thinking and speech. they added that how people think, understand and talk about the world around them is infl uenced by metaphors that they receive consciously and unconsciously. following their publication, conceptual metaphor theory (cmt) has been applied to many studies to examine the use and impact of metaphor in various social contexts. metaphor has since been established to provide ideological and conceptual structures for communication. nevertheless, musolff (2017, p.13) observes that the ideological bias of metaphors does not always determine their impact but their real consequences are visible only in hindsight and are dependent on the uptake by their audience. in health communication studies that focus on metaphor, as observed in koller et al. (2008); semino et al. (2017), it is believed that the use of metaphors in conceptualising disease causes and persuades people to understand and react appropriately. in these studies, disease has been metaphorically conceptualised in terms of many source domains including journey and war/ legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 39 battle. even though war metaphors are common in social and political life in general, the metaphorical conceptualisation of disease as war appears to be dominant health discourses (otieno et al., 2016). the ubiquitous nature of war metaphors across discourses has led to theorising the eff ects of war metaphors on language users in the literature. in this regard, there are two main lines of the argument. on the one hand, war metaphors are believed to have the ability to cause the audience to construct vivid pictures of opposing concepts and are reliable and readily available to the speaker (flusberg, 2018, p.25). on the other hand, they are believed to cause negative reactions in terms of attitudes towards the source domain. for instance, “critics suggest that war metaphors are misleading at best, and harmful at worst, resulting not only in increased political and cultural polarisation, but in risks to personal and social well-being as well” (flusberg, 2018, p.6). also, hartmann-mahmud (2002); larson (2005); wiggins (2012); cespedes (2014); simons (2015); and huckins (2016) are of the view that the war metaphor should not be used since it aff ects people negatively when they hear about it in any form of communication. in the spirit of the second line of argument, this paper submits that the use of war metaphors in ghana’s presidential covid-19 update speeches produced a negative emotion (fear/panic) that caused stigmatisation of covid-19 patients instead of the desired expectation. the eff ect of this among the general public seemed to have jeopardised the nation’s eff orts at stopping the spread of the virus. the paper reviews empirical data from the covid-19 update speeches delivered by the president of ghana between march 2020 and may 2020 in order to identify the specifi c conceptual mappings of the war metaphor that characterised ghana’s offi cial communication of the global pandemic. again, based on shutova et al.’s (2013) argument that “besides making our thoughts more vivid and fi lling our communication with pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 40 richer imagery, metaphors also play an important role in our cognition” (p.1218) and how we form our attitudes, the paper explores the attitudes that the war metaphor and its mappings evoked among the ghanaian public as observed in their practices. in this regard, the paper examines public discourses where the attitudes and emerged practices of the general public about covid-19 virus/disease and its infected patients are discussed in order to determine the eff ects of the war metaphor on the general public. metaphor and communication in lakoff and johnson’s (1980) defi nition of conceptual metaphor, the systematic structuring of one conceptual (target) domain in terms of another (source) domain is believed to be achieved through conceptual mapping, i.e., the projection of aspects of a source domain unto aspects of the abstract domain. through this process, speakers are believed to be able to cause listeners to act in a particular way by creating a reality which the listener can relate to. it is also believed that the appropriate use of metaphor can add emotional weight to what is being discussed by evoking shared knowledge between the speaker and the listener. in this regard, metaphors are said to have the potential to self-fulfi l what the speaker intends to use them for where the speaker and the listener try to reach a common ground through their shared knowledge of the source domain and its link to the target domain (thibodeau and boroditsky, 2011/2013). thus, the use of metaphors may infl uence attitudes towards a particular subject either positively or negatively because it brings concreteness to abstract subjects as observed in landau et al. (2018); prashast et al. (2020). the potential ability of metaphors to evoke emotions has been studied by many scholars including citron and goldberg (2014); horton (2007); and thibodeau et al. (2016). according to flusberg (2018), there have been many publications in recent years with focus on the war metaphor not only in public discourse but also in health/disease discourses. pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 41 it has been argued that the use of war metaphor appears ubiquitous in illness/disease communication because it helps in the expanding and bettering of our conceptual knowledge or schema (ortony, 1975; hendricks and boroditsky, 2016; thibodeau et al., 2017; gibbs, 1994; 2017; flusberg et al., 2018). in other words, there seem to be very good reasons for the use of war metaphors in illness discourses as they appear to have the ability to catch the listener’s attention and evoke strong emotions which enable people draw on their existing schema to form opinions. this notwithstanding, other researchers have argued that the use of war metaphors in disease/illness communication is limiting in many ways especially when the “enemy” seems to be winning and people are dying from the illnesses. for instance, gaguon and holms (2008) have argued that hiv/aids as a disease has not received a positive response because of the [in]appropriate use of metaphors such as war metaphors. again, chakraborty et al. (2020); prashast et al. (2020) have drawn attention to the extreme danger in using the war frame in communicating information about covid-19 because the frame calls for a total mobilisation against a human enemy. in this regard, the use of war metaphor in disease/illness communication may be akin to hopson’s (2000) argument as cited in nyakoe and adams (2017), that when language is selectively used, it “can trivialise an event or render it important; marginalise some groups and empower others; defi ne an issue as an urgent problem or reduce it to a routine one” (p.78). one of the earliest studies to highlight the use of metaphors in illness/disease communication was susan sontag (1978) which compared the language that characterised tuberculosis (tb) and cancer discourses. while she observed in her 1978 work and subsequent works (1981/1999) that it is diffi cult to avoid the use of metaphors in communication, she argued that using “military metaphors contribute to stigmatising certain illnesses and, by extension, of those who are ill” (1981/1999, p.99). in a similar pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 42 vein, gwyn (1999, p.207), as cited in demjén and semino (2016, p.392) have argued that “the military metaphor provides us all (and the mass media in particular thrive on this) with an identifi able evil that is all too easily transferred onto the persons who are subject to the illnesses themselves”. in discussing the eff ect of the war metaphor on covid-19, prashast et al. (2020) submit that the war narrative has made india’s response to the pandemic problematic on varied fronts. this contributed to the stigmatisation of patients, and instability within the healthcare system leading to the neglect of non-covid patients. similarly, boyte and throntviet (2020) point out that the use of war metaphor in covid-19 communication sparked attacks on people suspected to be carriers of the virus and caused xenophobic attacks on asian americans in the us. similarly, chen (2020) reports that stigma and unjustifi ed hostilities against minorities and covid-19 patients abound because of the use of war metaphors. in addition, craig (2020) revisits sontag’s argument and concludes that the rhetoric of the discourse of the pandemic must be reassessed as it has lethal implications. thus, the use of war metaphor to conceptualise disease in health communication may produce both positive and negative reactions. for instance, in the case of covid-19 and its treatment, the use of war metaphors may evoke power in health workers as they are seen as soldiers and the treatment regimes as weapons, and even empower some patients to recover as they are seen as a part of the fi ght. however, the use of war metaphors may also create enemies out of patients who may be seen, and/or see themselves as victims. methods the study combined corpus methods and the conceptual metaphor theory (cmt) to analyse the data. using microsoft word and a manual search, sentences that contained single word metaphors expressed by the verb or other items as prescribed pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 43 by metaphor identifi cation procedure (mip) as described in pagglejaz group (2007), were selected from the corpus that was built from the selected speeches. identifi ed metaphorical linguistic expressions were then tabulated, analysed and interpreted qualitatively. again, these metaphors were interpreted in relation to the context within which the metaphors occurred as well as other facts and statistics contained in the selected texts. inferences were then drawn from the extra linguistic texts, for instance, government interventions and people’s reactions (as reported in the news), to bring a comprehensive interpretation to the data. the data were mainly sourced from 8 selected speeches out of the 18 covid-19 update speeches presented by the president of ghana from the onset of the pandemic in the country till the beginning of the phased easing of the lock down and other restrictions. the choice of these 8 speeches was informed by the fact that they were delivered within the period when ghana for many years after the 1979 coup d’état and 1981 coup was experiencing restrictions in free movement for the fi rst time. the period is signifi cant in terms of ghana’s history when it comes to freedom of movement, a constitutional right of the sovereign people of ghana. while the fi rst speech merely announced two cases of the pandemic that were recorded in the country, the second speech did not just announce an increase in the case count (four new cases) but also declared “war” on covid-19. consequently, we pitched our data collection period from the president’s second covid-19 update speech. the other speeches take us through the period of restrictions and partial lockdown to the lifting of the partial lockdown and a phased easing of restrictions. these speeches were delivered between march and june 2020. each of the selected speeches ranged between 600-3000 words. the speeches gave total updates of the pandemic as pertains to ghana, including its spread, prevention and public health measures in response to the pandemic. government’s pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 44 interventions as well as collaborations with the ministries of health and information, and the ghana health service were also covered in the updates. because these speeches address all issues pertaining to the pandemic in ghana, they are a rich source of data for identifying how covid-19 was conceptualised in the country, at least offi cially. the texts were downloaded from the ghana health service covid-19 update webpage. in line with the mip approach to metaphor identifi cation (pragglejaz group, 2007), the selected speeches were thoroughly read and metaphorically used words as well as their source domains were identifi ed. then we determined the lexical units in the text-discourse. for each lexical unit in the text, we established its contextual meaning or attribute in the situation evoked by the text. we also took into account words that collocate with the particular lexical unit. this was done to determine if the lexical unit had a more basic contemporary meaning in other contexts than the one in the given context. basic meanings are not necessarily the most frequent meanings of the lexical unit. if the lexical unit has a more basic contemporary meaning in other contexts than the given context, we established whether the contextual meaning contradicts that of the basic meaning but can be understood in relation to it. a lexical unit was therefore identifi ed as metaphorical if its contextual meaning contrasted with the basic meaning but could also be understood in comparison with it. to answer the question of whether or not the president’s speeches, particularly the war-framed metaphors they contained potentially had any eff ect on people’s attitudes and behaviour, we conducted a small-scale level survey on the university of ghana campus. there were 63 voluntary respondents aged 18 years and above. there were thirty (30) males and thirty-three (33) females. of the 63, three (3) had had only basic education, seven (7) secondary education and fi fty-three (53) had had tertiary level of education. respondents were asked four (4) main questions including how excerpts (audio versions) of the pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 45 president’s addresses/speeches they were compelled to listen to made them feel. a sample questionnaire is attached as appendix a. the responses are incorporated into the analysis section below. findings and discussion on the whole, the data revealed that the president of ghana, president nana addo dankwa akufo-addo, in the face of the pandemic, uses the strategic logic of real military confrontation as invoked by other presidents such as donald trump of the us, boris johnson of the uk and tedros adhanom ghebreyesus of who to talk about his position on ensuring the safety of all ghanaians in the face of the global pandemic. musolff (2016) points out that “the strongest evidence of conceptual framing occurs and emerges from the corpus sample in the form of whole data bases being shaped by a metaphor” (p.17). in the 8 selected speeches on covid-19, nana addo used 12 diff erent linguistic units that belong to the war domain in 42 instances to describe diff erent aspects of the pandemic. as illustrated in table 1 below, the linguistic units (of war) with the highest frequencies are: fi ght, defeat, battle and combat. table 1: list of metaphorical linguistic units for the conceptual metaphor disease is war verbs frequency nouns frequency defeat 9 war 1 fi ght 12 frontline 1 combat 5 enemy 2 attack 1 battle 7 battle 1 forefront 1 win 1 confront 1 pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 46 examples 1-6 below are tokens from the corpus that illustrate how the president, nana akufo-addo framed the entire offi cial government communication on covid-19 on a war metaphor: (1) i have, fi rst of all, to tell you how proud and privileged i am to be your president, not just to fi ght for you, but also to fi ght with you, and to help shepherd our country out of this crisis. (2) however, this fi ght is not yet over, and we are by no means out of the woods yet. the fi ght against coronavirus has served as a humbling reminder of the things that matter, the things that cannot be bought, and the things that, all too often, go unappreciated, as a result of the stress of daily life. (3) as we continue to battle this pandemic, it is imperative we plan to restore ghana onto a sound economic footing, and create a path towards growth and transformation. (4) we have to win this battle. we have to defeat the virus. (update 7: 19th april 2020) (5) the truth is that this will be a long war, broken up into several battles. (update 8: 26th april 2020) (6) fellow ghanaians, ultimately, the battle is the lord’s, and, with faith in him, we will emerge from this greater than before. update 10: 31st may 2020) based on the abundant use of war vocabulary in the president’s speeches, we concluded that the president, nana addo, conceptualised covid-19 in terms of war. we identify the conceptual mappings and discuss those that are highlighted, citing tokens from the corpus to exemplify them. pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 47 covid-19 is a war source domain (war) target domain (covid-19) enemy/invading/attacking force virus (its host?) master military strategist government/president war strategies public health measures battle ground public space soldiers/warriors ghanaians frontline soldiers health workers defence force hygiene protocols weapons of defence ppes / lock down/stay at home war casualties covid-19 patients/victims corona virus is an attacking/invading force or enemy in announcing the confi rmed covid-19 cases (which were imported) in ghana, the president, nana addo, conceptualised the virus as a powerful enemy who has invaded the nation and who should be fought fi ercely as illustrated in examples 8-10 below: (8) “i have come into your homes, again, this evening to provide an update, as i promised, on the measures taken by government to combat the coronavirus pandemic.” (update 2: 15th march 2020) (9) “i have put the health workers and the security services, including the police service and the armed forces, on standby, to co-ordinate a rapid response of human and logistical resources, if necessary, to cordon, impose a curfew, trace, test, and treat infected persons in the aff ected community.” (update 7: 19th april 2020) (10) we will not let our guard down, as the fi ght against this virus has to progress. we will pursue vigorously our strategy pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 48 of enhanced 3ts, i.e., tracing and testing to allow us identify infected persons, and isolating and treating them. it is the surest way to root out the virus. (update 8: 26th april 2020) the use of war vocabulary such as combat, guard, fi ght and pursue, together with the invocation of the nation’s security forces, i.e., military and police in the president’s update speeches clearly sets a war tone in dealing with covid-19, a global public health situation in ghana. government/president is master war strategist in declaring war on the virus/disease which he conceptualised as a powerful force/enemy that has invaded/ attacked the country, nana addo-dankwa akufo-addo, the president of ghana and the chief of defence of the country, presented himself as the master military strategist in the war as he outlined the nation’s combat readiness. for instance, he invoked the powers vested in him as the nation’s chief of defence to impose restrictions similar to that of a curfew in a war situation as part of measures in “fi ghting” the invading virus as illustrated in example (11) below: (11) “so eff ective 1am on monday, 30th march, some fortyeight hours from now, i have imposed, pursuant to the powers granted the president of the republic, under the imposition of restrictions act, 2020 (act 1012), restrictions on movement of persons in the greater accra metropolitan area (gama, which includes awutu senya east), and the greater kumasi metropolitan area and contiguous districts, for a period of two (2) weeks, subject to review.” (update 5: 5th april 2020) by invoking the constitutional power as the master military strategist, people in areas that were described as epic centres were restricted in their movement at certain times of the day. in this exercise, both the military and police were mobilised to enforce the restrictions on movement -they were pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 49 given the mandate to arrest and prosecute people who violated the restriction orders. this is how ‘fi erce the fi ght’ against covid-19 was. public health measures are war strategies once the president acknowledged the invasion by the virus and announced himself/his government as the master military strategist, he outlined his strategies (public health measures) to win the war. first, the battle ground (public space) was established (example 12). (12) for the next two weeks, i urge all of you, especially residents in the aff ected areas of greater accra and greater kumasi, to be reminded every day, that the frontline of the fi ght against coronavirus is your front door. if you cross it, you and your family will likely be infected. so, please, stay at home. like real war situations, war leaders outline their strategies to win the war. the strategies that were announced by nana addo to ‘win the battle against the virus’ included defensive, off ensive and communicative strategies. in this regard, public health measures, included movement restrictions (e.g., stay at home, internal travel ban), restrictions on social/public gatherings, (e.g., school, church, mosque, funerals, conferences, parties, weddings, sports, festivals), and external travel ban (air/ sea/land border closure). while the aforementioned strategies are preventive in nature, nana addo also announced strategies that were curative in nature. other strategies, included, compulsory quarantine, testing, contact tracing and treatment, what nana addo called the 3ts, were both preventive and curative. what these strategies had in common was their framing in military language as illustrated in examples 13-16 below: (13) however, it has become necessary to take additional measures to stem the spread of the virus, and protect the lives of our people. we must do everything within our power to contain pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 50 the spread of the virus. the ministry of health is mobilising new and retired healthcare professionals to augment our preparedness in dealing with a possible surge in infections. (update 3: 25th march 2020) (14) to enhance command and control, more senior offi cers have been deployed at the operational level, and each member of our security services participating in the exercise has been handed an aide-mémoire highlighting, essentially, the guidelines for the operation. (update 4: 5th april 2020) (15) fellow ghanaians, it is vital that we protect the lives of our frontline health workers, who are risking their lives every day to battle this virus. (update 8: 26th april 2020) (16) we will pursue vigorously our strategy of enhanced 3ts, i.e., tracing and testing to allow us identify infected persons, and isolating and treating them. it is the surest way to root out the virus. (update 8: 26th april 2020) ghanaians are warriors/soldiers, health workers/security services are frontline soldiers in conceptualising the space outside the front door of every ghanaian as the battle ground, the president was framing all ghanaians as warriors/soldiers while health workers, immigration offi cials, customs offi cials, the law enforcement agencies as front liners. they were framed as front-line warriors/soldiers in the war against covid-19, the invading/ attacking enemy. examples (17-23) below are instantiations of this conceptualisation from the data: (17) i applaud the eff orts and courage of ghanaians in the forefront of the fi ght against the virus – health workers, immigration offi cials, customs offi cials, civil aviation offi cials, pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 51 airport staff , port health offi cials, police and military personnel, and other essential service providers – for the yeoman’s work you are doing. our nation is deeply in your debt. (update 3: 25th march 2020) (18) fellow ghanaians, it is vital that we protect the lives of our frontline health workers, who are risking their lives every day to battle this virus. (update 8: 26th april 2020) (19) i have, fi rst of all, to tell you how proud and privileged i am to be your president, not just to fi ght for you, but also to fi ght with you, and to help shepherd our country out of this crisis. (20) however, this fi ght is not yet over, and we are by no means out of the woods yet. the fi ght against coronavirus has served as a humbling reminder of the things that matter, the things that cannot be bought, and the things that, all too often, go unappreciated, as a result of the stress of daily life. (21) these are the blessings of normalcy that we are fi ghting to restore, blessings that we must hold onto with a deeper sense of appreciation, once this pandemic has passed. (update 6: 9th april 2020) (22) as we continue to battle this pandemic, it is imperative we plan to restore ghana onto a sound economic footing, and create a path towards growth and transformation. (23) we have to win this battle. we have to defeat the virus. (update 7: 19th april 2020) pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 52 hygiene protocols are the weapons of defence against covid-19 in his covid-19 update speeches, nana addo has often stated that his strategies are anchored in science and data. scientifi c studies on the corona virus suggest that the virus spreads through droplets of an infected person, and that even though there is no known cure for covid-19, hygiene protocols, such as washing of hands with soap and under running water, and the wearing of personal protective equipment (ppe), for example, nose/ face masks/shields, and gloves as well as use of alcohol-based sanitizers could protect one against being infected. interestingly, these hygiene protocols and ppe became the weapons needed to disarm and defeat the virus in president nana addo’s war framed covid-19 update speeches. examples 24-26 are tokens from the data that illustrate this conceptualisation. (24) it is vitally important that each one of us, in all parts of the country, continues to observe the social distancing and enhanced hygiene protocols, for they are the weapons of our defence against the virus. (update 4: 5th april 2020) (25) to defeat the virus, and get there, we have to accept that we have to wash our hands, maintain good hygiene, refrain from shaking hands, wear our masks, and practice social distancing in all of our engagements (update7: 19th april 2020) (26) the ghanaian people have largely embraced the principles of social distancing, the wearing of masks, and the enhanced hygiene protocols, which are our most eff ective defences against the virus. (update 10: 31st may 2020) covid-19 patients are war casualties in every war there are often some casualties suff ered on both sides. in nana addo’s war-framed update speeches, pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 53 people infected with covid-19 were seen as war casualties as illustrated in example 27: (27) the health workers, who are working day and night to care for the stricken, must continually be in our prayers. their eff orts will be in vain if we, at home, do not support them. (update 8: 26th april 2020) while there were not many instantiations of this conceptualisation in the data, its import seems to be far more reaching than the frequency of use. according to flusberg (2018), the use of war metaphors in conceptualising diseases can lead to fear, the politicisation of the disease and other unintended consequences such that after a while, people begin not to be too bothered about the consequences of the disease. in what follows, we look at the eff ect that the war-framed presidential updates had on the ghanaian citizens, particularly with regard to their attitude towards covid-19 patients. eff ects of war metaphors on people’s attitudes the fi rst update speech on the pandemic was delivered by the president on 12th march 2020 when there were no confi rmed cases in ghana. the fi rst two (imported) cases of covid-19 were confi rmed on 15th march 2020 and that occasioned the president’s second update on the same day. in the president’s second update, he called on ghanaians to adhere to government interventions and other attempts at curbing the spread of the virus. these measures included the closure of all schools and a ban on all religious and other social gatherings, e.g., church, mosque and funerals. by the fi fth update when partial lock down was imposed on the people in the country, the president had used metaphorical expressions that instantiate all the mappings in the war-framed metaphor discussed in this paper. soon after the presidential updates began, there were stories in the media about how persons who had recovered pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 54 from covid-19 (and their families) were stigmatised in their communities. there were reports which suggested that some recovered covid-19 patients and families were either attacked or avoided (ostracised) in their communities. interestingly, the number of confi rmed cases continued to surge through community spread around the same time. by the tenth update on 31st may 2020, the country had recorded over 10,000 confi rmed cases with over 80 deaths as reported by the president. the nation was gripped with fear. why were infections spreading despite government’s measures to ‘fi ght/combat’ the virus and its spread? this was when we began to question the potential impact the war-framed communication may be having on the attitudes, perceptions and actions among the general population. our hypothesis was that the war metaphor appeared to have succeeded in creating an enemy out of not only the virus but also its hosts, covid-19 patients, and leading to actions (among the general population) that did not support government’s eff ort to ‘fi ght’ the pandemic. for instance, for fear of stigmatisation by their friends and neighbours, some covid-19 positive patients refused to go into isolation or indeed, follow other public health protocols. a point in case is a report in the media of a state minister engaged in public political activities without observing the outlined public health protocols even though he had tested positive for covid-19. indeed, it was reported in the media that he had infected several of his close work associates one of whom had died of covid-19. following these reports, the government and other ngos began anti-stigma campaigns that ran alongside the covid awareness creation and prevention. for instance, in his seventh update, president nana addo stated the following with concern: (28) i have noticed, with great concern, the stories of some persons, who have recovered from the virus, now being confronted with another problem, i.e., stigmatisation. this is not right, as it will rather drive people away from getting screened, tested, and treated. the stigmatisation of recovered persons must pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 55 stop, because if the virus did not end their lives and livelihoods, the stigma from members of their communities should not… the enemy is the virus, and not each other. (update 7: 19th april 2020) the president’s explicit description of the virus as the enemy suggests his recognition that the citizens had failed to correctly interpret his conceptual mapping of who the enemy is in his war-framed updates. in other words, his call on ghanaians to see the virus as the enemy and not the patients is evidence that the war-framed communication on stopping the spread of covid-19 had not achieved the desired expectation. instead of fi ghting the virus, people were (and still are) fi ghting both the virus and its host, covid-19 patients. despite the president’s clarifi cation of who the real enemy is in this fi ght during his seventh update, the interpretation of both the virus and covid-19 patients as the ‘enemy’ in the covid-19 fi ght did not cease. it rather led to labelling, stereotyping, and discriminating against and even stigmatisation of not only persons infected with or recovered from the virus but also their families, and sometimes associates. one such recovered patient, mr. frederick debrah, shared his story on tv3, one of the most watched television stations in ghana. though his story won him some admiration for winning “the fi ght against covid-19”, it also exposed him to public ridicule. following his story on tv, a news team from another tv station, citi news team, visited his home for further interaction during which period he made the following revelation: “i even wish, maybe, i could go back to the [quarantine] camp again. people have seen the face of my family on television and so on, so now when you go out to buy things, it becomes diffi cult [because of the stigma]. the stigma in the area, when [my wife] pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 56 goes to buy something or she sends the children to buy something, is becoming a diffi cult thing for us. we have almost run out of everything in the house.” in other covid-19 stigmatisation reports, some recovered patients had been rejected and ejected from their rented homes and their children had been prevented from playing with other children in their shared (compound) homes. in some extreme cases, whole communities had come against covid-19 recovered patients as reported in several news media, such as dw news (2020). again, on may 14, 2020, the association for catholic information in africa, aicia, published an article in which catholic professionals in ghana were warning of mental issues amidst covid-19 stigmatisation surge (aci africa, 14th may 2020). the article reported and recounted several stories and episodes where covid-19 recovered patients and their families, as well as families of persons who had died of covid-19 were being marginalised and/or ostracised by their communities. in some cases, even health workers, e.g., nurses, suff ered stigmatisation, e.g., taxi and uber drivers refused to pick them as passengers because of their possible interaction with covid-19 patients. there are even stories about patients of covid (or not) who could have been saved either by friends or even health workers were left to their fate to suff er or die because they exhibited symptoms similar to those of covid-19. there was the sad story of a secondary school student who died in school, which is only a few kilometres away from a university hospital because his friends and teachers who feared that he had the virus refused to send him to hospital. (see https://www. dw.com/en/ghana-covid-19-survivors-stigmatized/av-53418720 for more covid-19 stigmatisationrelated stories in ghana). the stories about stigmatisation of covid-19 recovered patients and their families became so widespread in the country that it became an issue of concern that attracted a lot of media and government attention. in his 14th update speech, the president pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 57 shifted his focus from fi ghting the virus as the enemy to fi ghting stigmatisation of covid-19 patients as the enemy in the fi ght against covid-19: (29) our fi ght against the stigmatisation of persons, who have contracted covid-19, continues in earnest. those engaged in this anti-social act should stop, as stigmatisation drives away people from getting screened, tested and treated”. (14th update speech). soon, there was a vibrant campaign in the country against the stigmatisation of patients of covid-19. the antistigmatisation campaign became more intense when celebrities and prominent members in the society who had recovered from the disease openly declared their status and became brand ambassadors for the #stopthestigma campaign in ghana. for instance, on july 18, 2020, charles nii teiko tagoe, a presidential staff er who had recovered from the disease shared the following post on his facebook page: “it is unimaginable what one has to go through for the 14 days living with covid”. in trying to test the hypothesis – whether or not the president’s war-framed communication contributed to stigmatisation of patients of the virus – we analyse the responses from the small-scale survey we conducted on the university of ghana campus. first, majority of the respondents (66.6%) said they heard about the covid-19 in 2019, long before the president began his addresses in march 2020; only 27% said they heard about it in 2020. the rest gave invalid dates, e.g., january 2019 when covid-19 was not known. again, of the 63 respondents, 29 (46%) said they heard about covid-19 from one social media platform or another; 19(30%) heard about it from tv; 9(14%) heard about it from other sources, e.g., friends, family, 3 (4.7%) heard about it from the radio; 1(1.5%) newspaper, and 2(3%) heard about it from multiple sources. what this means is that potentially, misinformation about the pandemic may have been spread on social media. pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 58 to further test our hypothesis, we played excerpts (audio versions) of the president’s war-framed addresses to respondents individually and asked them to tell us how they felt about the virus. from the responses, 35 (55.5 %) of respondents indicated that the president’s speech created fear in them with explanations such as shown in the brackets (he is adding to the fear we already have; it’s scary,; i am afraid of the virus; it [the speech] creates extremely scary images; words like ‘fi ght’ creates fear in me; it [the speech] causes panic]; i am scared because he said covid-19 was going to be a long battle). for the remaining 44.5% of respondents, the president’s speech either created more awareness (provided more factual information) or simply made the disease real to them. finally, when we asked respondents to tell us how they would behave around a covid-19 positive person, 32(50.7%) indicated that they would adopt an avoidance posture (i will avoid them; prevention is better than cure; i will not allow them anywhere near me); 6 (9.5%) of the respondents said they would be indiff erent because they know how to protect themselves from being infected; 11(17%) indicated that they would be empathetic towards covid-19 positive patients because either they themselves or family have had the virus at one point or another (i will feel sorry for them; i feel pity for them but not stigmatise them). finally, 14(22%) of respondents indicated that they would take practical steps (keenly observe all the protocols) to ensure that the infected person does not spread the virus to them. it is important to note that some of our respondents already knew about covid-related stigmatisation in the country and made direct/indirect references to the phenomenon in their responses. thus, while it is plausible to argue that these acts of stigmatisation may have arisen from misconceptions, it is not easy to say what the source of this misconception was exactly. again, while some may be quick to blame it on misinformation and lack of proper understanding of covid-19 issues, we would like to suggest that this line of argument may not be tenable. in pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 59 our opinion, the fear of the virus (and its host) does not appear to have emanated from lack of understanding of the nature of the virus. instead, the fear of the virus emanated from the warframed communication about the disease that conceptually mapped the virus to an enemy that had to be fought ‘fi ercely’, as the president said. while the president’s war-framed communication appeared eff ective in creating the expected fear (of the virus) among the public, his selective use of language which identifi ed some elements in the mapping process (virus is enemy) but not others (covid-19 (recovered) patient), the public conceptually maps this unmapped element (covid patient) to the closest element, the virus since the patient plays host to the virus. again, since the target enemy (the virus) is less clearly delineated, it appears conceptually more reasonable to identify the patient, a palpable being that can be fought physically as the enemy. conclusion in this paper, we have discussed the conceptual mappings that were highlighted in ghana’s war-framed presidential covid-19 update speeches and how the conceptualisation of the mappings appears to have aff ected the attitudes and actions of the ghanaian public in dealing with a global pandemic in their local context. we have argued that while conceptualising covid-19 as war helped the general public to properly understand the deadly nature of the novel virus by creating fear among the population, it appears the fear was not only of the virus but also of infected persons and their families. the paper therefore concludes that war metaphors may not be eff ective for crisis communication such as communication about a pandemic. this is because metaphor interpretation is potentially ambiguous conceptual elements in a source domain may be mapped unto more than one element in the target domain (as when ‘enemy’ is mapped unto both virus and its hosts). in such situations, the metaphor can create negative (undesired) eff ects. pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 60 in ghana, the ambiguity in the war-framed communication on covid-19 appears to have resulted in acts of stigmatisation, marginalisation and discrimination against covid-19 (recovered) patients and their families who were wrongfully conceptualised as the ‘enemy’, a situation which may have led to community spread of the virus as infected persons denied or refused to declare positive status or practise public health measures for fear of stigmatisation. research fi ndings suggest that because war metaphors tend to be very conventional both in culture-specifi c contexts and across cultures, many people tend to have schemas to support the mappings required to link the salient conceptual structures in source and target domains to create a particular shared meaning. in this regard, hauser and schwarz (2015) have argued that war metaphors make persuasive arguments. however, because war metaphors tend to evoke schemas of prototypical war situations as polarity, e.g., us vs them, or ally vs enemy, and a fi ght or fl ight situation, they appear not to be eff ective in disease communication. for instance, bates (2020), argues that: by locating the enemy as a chinese virus, trump not only activates a gratuitously xenophobic rhetoric, but also risks harming international research, information, and trade relationships that may be necessary for responding to sars-cov-2. naming sars-cov-2 a chinese virus also distracts attention from a shared enemy to reinforce divisions between the united states and the people’s republic of china. (p.17) again, conceptualising disease as war may, on the one hand, trigger emotions of threat, fear, panic and even violence (marginalisation and stigmatisation). on the other hand, stigmatised patients of the disease may regard themselves as failures or carry guilt for getting infected. hauser and schwarz (2015) argue that in such situations, depending on what the pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 61 concept of war the metaphors have evoked, some people may become adamant in testing for a disease since being infected could mean irresponsible behaviour on their part. the use of war metaphors in disease communication often brings with it the burden of identifying who the enemy is and the resources required to go into combat. in the case of ghana’s presidential covid-19 update communication, the invisible enemy, the virus, is given a palpable representation in humans (covid patients) which leads to their stigmatisation and marginalisation undesirable conditions for dealing with a global pandemic in a local context. this paper, therefore, agrees with earlier research that called for the use of alternative metaphors in communicating disease and other public health concerns of a pandemic nature. we also recommend the use of interviews and other ethnographic instruments to explore public narratives on the eff ects of war metaphors in disease/illness communication. acknowledgement the authors wish to acknowledge the andrew w. mellon foundation,university of ghana, for funding data collection for this project. pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 62 references aci africa (2020, may 14). https://www.aciafrica.org/news/1330/catholic professionals-in-ghana-warn-of-mental-issues-amid-covid-19 stigma-surge). annas, g. j. 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(2012). stop using military metaphors for disease. bmj, 345. pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 65 appendix questionnaire fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatization: war metaphors in presidential update speeches and their eff ect on attitudes towards covid-19 (patients) ghana. a. background: tick where applicable sex: male female age grouping: 18 -29, 30-49, 50+ education: elementary / secondary / bachelor’s degree / master’s degree / or higher occupation: manual labour / offi ce work / sales or service / health sector / student, educational sector / unemployed / others, b. responses i. when did you fi rst hear about covid19? ii. through what media? tv radio newspapers social media iii. listen to the audio and respond appropriately: after listening to the audio by the president on covid 19, how do you feel about the virus? why? iv. how will you behave around someone who has the virus? why? pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation issue 34.1.indd legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 3 koller, v../legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v34i1.1s crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic: a case study of the ghanaian president’s fourth update on coronavirus veronika koller professor department of linguistics and english language, university of lancaster, uk email: v.koller@lancaster.ac.uk submitted: april 6, 2023/ accepted: may 4, 2023/ published: june 29, 2023 abstract the covid-19 pandemic was a testbed for crisis communication, leading to recommendations on how to meet communicative goals and several individual case studies. this paper contributes to the latter by engaging in a detailed three-level analysis of an early, pivotal address to the nation by ghana’s president nana akufo-addo. in terms of infection rates and deaths, ghana has been much less severely impacted by the pandemic than other countries, making it worthwhile to look at the role of offi cial communications. this study investigates how the president addressed the public at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, in what ways the linguistic features of his address refl ected the specifi c political context, and what potential impact his language use had on the behaviour of the public. findings show that linguistic and, to a lesser extent, visual elements represent the president as powerful, authoritative, but somewhat detached from the audience. however, this is balanced by direct appeals to the same audience, whose cooperation he seeks to win rather than enforce. this balance refl ects the political and sociocultural context of the text, as further evidenced by comments on the address on akufo-addo’s facebook page. keywords: covid-19, crisis communication, ghana, language use, legitimation legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 4 introduction in this paper, i analyse a public address by ghanaian president nana akufo-addo, which he delivered in march 2020. at the start of the pandemic, he had proclaimed various measures to contain the virus, like calling on citizens to stay at home, explaining contact tracing and requiring people to wear masks; the address analysed here was selected because in it, the president announced the most severe covid 19-related restrictions to date. it therefore marks a pivotal moment in the ghanaian government’s crisis management, with potentially farreaching consequences for public health. my focus is on what tools of crisis communication he uses to inform and convince the public and what linguistic form these take. to this end, i apply a three-level framework of discourse analysis (fairclough, 2010), which starts with a data-driven text analysis at the micro-level to see what tools from crisis communication the speaker has used and how he employs language and, to a lesser degree, visual features to represent actors, events and entities, and to position himself in relation to his audience. findings from the textual analysis are then interpreted with recourse to the meso-level of the discourse practice context, asking who produced, distributed and received the text and under what conditions. finally, the macro-level of the wider socio-political context allows the analyst to understand how features of the text are infl uenced by factors such as culture and system of governance. whether measures to control the spread of covid-19 are successful depends on compliance by the general public. the address analysed in this paper therefore has the two-fold purpose of informing and persuading the audience, and it is important to analyse what crisis communication tools and language features the speaker employs to meet these purposes. understanding the possible consequences of his words has implications for the linguistically oriented study of crisis communication beyond the case study presented here. koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 5 at the time the address was delivered, the fi rst two deaths from covid-19 had been confi rmed in ghana. this led to the government imposing a ban on gatherings and international travel, while the bank of ghana implemented fi nancial measures. as of 21 march 2023, 44 people per million had died of covid-19 in ghana. although countries around the world recorded covid deaths diff erently and more or less exhaustively, one list (mathieu et al., 2020) sees ghana as 209th among the world’s countries and territories, i.e., indicating remarkable success in crisis management. nevertheless, the measures and communication by the ghanaian government have attracted a mixed response, ranging from a cautiously positive evaluation (zhang et al., 2020) to criticisms about misusing presidential addresses on covid-19 for election campaign purposes and about neglecting rural communities and minority indigenous language (nyarko et al., 2021). in view of these diff erent evaluations, this paper will seek to answer the following research questions: rq1: how did nana akufo-addo address the public at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic? rq2: in what ways do the linguistic features of his address refl ect the specifi c political context? rq3: what potential impact did his language use have on the behaviour of the public? covid-19 communications have been studied for several individual countries, and there are a few multi-country studies as well (see section 2, crisis communication and covid-19). the present study engages in a detailed linguistic and legitimation analysis of one pivotal address to the public. the rest of this paper is structured as follows: in the next section, i review the main tenets of crisis communication and how it relates to covid-19, both in general and in terms of what we know from case studies of individual countries. in reviewing the latter, the focus is on democracies, including ghana’s. that koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 6 section is followed by an introduction to the data and the methods to analyse them. the penultimate section presents the fi ndings of the analysis, while the research questions are answered and conclusions drawn in the fi nal section. crisis communication and covid-19 crisis communication: goals and tools according to coombs (2019, p. 156), crises can be divided into three clusters depending on how much responsibility an organisation has for them. in what he calls the “victim cluster”, the organisation (here: government) fi nds itself having to manage a crisis that is not of its making, such as a natural disaster or indeed a pandemic. in the “accidental cluster”, only low responsibility can be attributed to the organisation; examples are accidents and harmful products due to technical errors, e.g., faulty personal protective equipment for healthcare workers. in the “preventable cluster”, however, the organisation does bear responsibility for crises, due to human error or misdeeds of its members. whatever type of crisis an organisation deals with though, the objective of its communication should be to “ensure the physical safety and psychological well-being of stakeholders aff ected by the crisis” (coombs, 2019, p. 137). in the case of a global pandemic, those stakeholders are the general public, and it is the task of the world health organisation and national governments to keep citizens safe from infection while preventing negative mental health consequences of measures such as lockdowns. governments also need to cushion the economic and social eff ects of the restrictions they impose. for covid-19, the scope of the crisis, and hence crisis communication, was huge, ranging from preventing the spread of the virus to pivoting healthcare systems and workers to dealing with sometimes large numbers of cases and deaths. in addition, offi cials had to communicate non-medical interventions such as travel bans, develop test-andtrace systems and later vaccine rollouts, and koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 7 confront misand disinformation (the so-called “infodemic”). in analysing a central public address by the ghanaian president, this paper focuses on the role of crisis communication strategies and related language features in informing citizens about restrictions and persuading them to comply with them. crisis communication needs to be eff ected through available, accessible and appropriate channels, considering the media use, literacy and language profi ciency of various parts of the population. moreover, communication teams during a crisis need to consider what type of spokesperson may best convey a message. for example, the taiwanese president, tsai ing-wen, made sure to have the media present when she was vaccinated against covid, while the director-general of health in new zealand, ashley bloomfi eld, became an almost cult-like fi gure in his country (de bres & dawson, 2021). in italy, the government appointed general francesco paolo figliuolo as covid commissioner, who appeared in public wearing military fatigues, thus embodying the war metaphor that was so popular in the early stages of the pandemic (olza et al., 2021). at the beginning of the covid-19 crisis, a positive eff ect of the war metaphor may have been to convey the severity of the situation and make drastic measures more acceptable to the public (castro seixas, 2021, p. 4). indeed, perceiving a threat to be severe and relevant to oneself are two factors needed in making sure that people engage in behaviours to control the danger. in addition, the addressees of crisis communication messages need to believe that they can act to reduce the threat and that proscribed or recommended actions will be eff ective (coombs, 2021, p. 992). within these parameters, the covid-19 pandemic presented various demands on crisis communication. according to published recommendations (coombs, 2021; hyland-wood et al., 2021), messages needed to convey the threat and discredit low risk beliefs, e.g., by choosing communication channels used by young people. at the same time, however, communication also had to persuade the public that measures taken by the koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 8 government work and that everyone can contribute to them. in this respect, particular behaviours had to be established as social norms. crucially, messages had to be short, clear and simple, not least because people were likely to receive them in a state of heightened anxiety. further, communicators are required to be credible, which explains why health offi cials such as chief medical offi cers or scientifi c advisors took part in press briefi ngs in many countries. another demand on communicators was to balance empathy, i.e., showing understanding for people’s concerns, with honesty, including about uncertainty being inevitable during a developing pandemic. lack of certainty breeds disinformation and conspiracy theories; these continue to be rife for aspects of covid-19 such as vaccination, meaning that communication must also debunk such beliefs. a pandemic is a long drawn-out and dynamic context – a marathon rather than a sprint, as many politicians put it (collins and koller, forthcoming) –, which can lead to message fatigue, a phenomenon that calls for creativity and variation (pérez sobrino et al., 2022). finally, any crisis communication, including on covid-19, needs to acknowledge diverse audiences and their specifi c needs by choosing the right media mix, engaging community leaders (e.g., through the national commission for civic education in ghana), accounting for diff erent languages and levels of (health) literacy and numeracy, and tailoring messages to how severe an impact a community faces. the following sub-section reviews case studies from europe, new zealand and africa to see how crisis communication guidelines have been applied in both offi cial and unoffi cial messaging. covid-19 case studies several studies on individual countries have applied a crisis communication lens to describe, assess and interpret government communication during the covid-19 pandemic. for koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 9 example, christensen and lægreid (2020) identify a paternalistic communication strategy in how the norwegian government met the task to “formulate and communicate a convincing [message] and enabling understanding of what has happened and what should be done” (p. 715) at the beginning of the pandemic. their particular interest is in the government’s reputation management, i.e., how policy makers convey that they are competent and eff ective as well as compassionate and honest. in the context of a “transboundary mega crisis” (ibid., p. 716), the reputation of the communicator is important, as a good reputation is linked to legitimacy for, and trust in, measures to contain the spread of the virus. looking at press briefi ngs by ministers and health offi cials along with media interviews and articles, the authors, writing in summer 2020, state that the norwegian government was eff ective in controlling the pandemic. they relate this to a form of crisis communication “characterized by rather clear, timely and repeating messages and [advice] ... informed by expert knowledge and delivered by credible political and administrative executives and experts” (ibid., p. 725). three important factors were a) the public’s high pre-pandemic trust in the government, which further increased in the early weeks of the pandemic, b) frequent appeals to solidarity, and c) a collaborative approach which saw central government work with opposition parties, central and local government, and public and private sectors alike. despite some disagreement between policy makers and experts and notwithstanding some unpopular measures, the government’s paternalistic communication strategy was largely successful. given its low rates of viral transmission, the crisis management of new zealand has attracted much media and scholarly attention. prime minister jacinda ardern’s communication strategy during the fi rst two months of the pandemic, i.e., march and april 2020, is the focus of a content analysis of her statement to the nation, statements in parliament, daily briefi ngs, press conferences, live broadcasts on facebook koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 10 and podcasts (mcguire et al., 2020). the new zealand government imposed lockdowns and international travel bans early on, and the prime minister’s communication during the fi rst three weeks of march 2020 was realised through formal genres, “focus[ing] on a proactive decisiveness and reassurance to the public that expert advice ha[d] been taken” (ibid., p. 368). right from the start, ardern emphasised shared responsibility, “the importance of unity and … strong communitarian values” (ibid., p. 370). this communicative strategy was encapsulated in the phrase ‘team of fi ve million’ to refer to new zealand’s population and backed up by all members of the government and public service workers taking a 20 per cent pay cut. starting in late march, ardern added more dialogic and informal media channels, taking part in live broadcasts on facebook to update citizens and answer their questions. like the norwegian government (see above), new zealand’s prime minister emphasised social solidarity and set store by kindness and compassion. in late april, some restrictions were eased but the public was reminded why it was still important to comply with the remaining rules to continue to keep transmission of the virus very low. overall, ardern’s “person-centred approach” (ibid., p. 372) shifted from early decisiveness to positioning herself as being on one level with other new zealanders. while the works reviewed so far engage in the analysis of content and communication strategies, hunt (2021) employs corpus-assisted discourse analysis to study the language used in the televised addresses to the nation by the south african president, cyril ramaphosa, between march and december 2020. those addresses, metaphorically referred to as ‘family meetings’, were afterwards uploaded to the state broadcaster’s youtube channel and the president’s facebook page. in contrast to ramaphosa’s use of media more generally, there was no interaction with the public or journalists. nevertheless, his language use minimised both power asymmetry and social distance between himself and citizens, not least through the koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 11 family metaphor, by means of which ramaphosa cast himself as “a protective authority fi gure in the form of a father” (ibid., p. 4). metaphoric references to ‘family’ were particularly frequent in the openings and closings of his speeches as well as in their “cohortative” section, which serves to “secure compliance by constructing a shared nationhood, a unity of identity and of purpose” (ibid., p. 7). interestingly, this section became longer as the crisis continued, perhaps to counter “pandemic fatigue” (bernard et al., 2021, p. 6). by contrast, the section providing news and statistics had an informative function and as such featured lexis related to the disease and pandemic, along with comparisons with other countries. this was followed by announcing new measures. although the function of that section was to direct or even command, ramaphosa avoided verbs such as ‘prohibit’ or ‘ban’, preferring ‘call upon’ and ‘encourage’, or opted for nominalisations and passive voice “to play down power diff erences between state and citizenry, and to replace them with a relationship of care and protection” (hunt, 2021, p. 6). the author moreover establishes that the fi rst-person plural pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ were used with higher frequency in ramaphosa’s covid-19 addresses to the nation when compared to both general written south african english and speeches by his predecessors. a slight majority of the uses of ‘we’ referred to the south african government, especially in the sections of the speeches providing news and numbers or new measures, where the focus is on what the government did and decided. first person plural pronouns were used to refer to south africa in the cohortative parts of the president’s addresses and were mostly followed by modal verbs indicating what the nation will, can and must do. this inclusive ‘we’ sits alongside noun phrases like ‘our country/people/ society/nation’ and ‘our eff orts’ as well as uses of ‘let us’ “to emphasise group membership … and spur individuals on to act in concert with others in the interests of their country” (ibid., p. 11). hunt (2021) concludes that “[b]y positioning himself as one with the rest of the country, ramaphosa increases the sense of koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 12 unity in the group” (p. 10) while at the same time issuing quasiparental guidance. she interprets this discursive reduction in power and distance as an attempt to ensure compliance despite social control measures, e.g., curfews and travel bans, being associated with the apartheid past of south africa. south africa is thus an example of how crisis communication is infl uenced by “individual countries’ histories, their collective memories and traumas and national traditions of governmental rhetoric” (wodak, 2021, p. 326). not all communication during a public health crisis comes from offi cial channels. while it is important that citizens further disseminate public communications privately, unoffi cial messaging bears the risk of misinformation. in contrast to malignant disinformation, misinformation is inadvertent and often well-intended. in the nigerian context, for example, fake news on covid-19 was mostly shared for altruistic reasons (apuke and omar, 2021), because people wanted to warn or inform friends and family. however, the panic that doing so can cause undermines the eff orts of governments and health care offi cials, who, while needing to convey a sense of threat, also have to reassure the public. in their online survey of just under 400 social media users in nigeria, apuke and omar (2021) found that seeking information was another motivation to engage with covid-related misinformation on social networking sites and messaging services. this is indirectly corroborated by a survey of 200 young social media users in the greater accra region in ghana (eyifah, 2021): more than 80 per cent of respondents turned to the government’s and health service’s social media platforms for information, but also reported challenges with fi nding suffi cient, reliable and non-contradictory information. no such problems have been identifi ed for a diff erent form of unoffi cial crisis communication, namely songs (thompson et al., 2021). as a communication channel for public health messaging, music has been used across the african continent to inform about hiv/aids, ebola and covid-19 alike. in a koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 13 thematic analysis of 28 songs by ghanaian artists, thompson et al. (2021) show how the musicians educate the public about the symptoms of covid-19 and inform their audience about safety and preventive measures. indeed, public health guidelines were the most frequent theme, followed by the notion that the disease needs to be taken seriously, its infectious nature and the need for a collective eff ort to overcome it. acknowledging that the pandemic triggers diffi cult emotions while still inspiring hope were additional themes, as were calls to prayer and verbally expelling the virus. together with the fact that the lyrics came in a variety of languages – mostly english, ghanaian pidgin english, akan, ga and dagbani –, songs and other forms of edutainment thus have “relevance for the development of culturally appropriate health messaging” (thompson et al., 2021, p. 10). finally, berrocal et al. (2021) note that the covid-19 pandemic has led to offi cial crisis communications in which heads of government worldwide constructed in-groups, outgroups and affi liated groups in line with their country’s historical and geopolitical context. in their analysis of the statements by 29 presidents and prime ministers from europe, north and south america, asia and africa, delivered within two weeks of the who’s offi cial declaration of a pandemic on 11 march 2020, the authors set out to “test how this macroevent has been translated into local micro-events” (ibid., p. 2). they observe that solidarity was a central concept, between individuals and between groups – and, one could add, within groups – as well as between government and citizens. crucially, solidarity could both bolster and contrast with nationalism. next to constructing the covid-19 virus as an enemy through the war metaphor and as a threat through spatial proximisation (cap, 2013), out-groups were non-compliant members of the public, as they were presented as violating in-group solidarity, norms and values. those spreading disinformation could also be cast as out-group members as could, in some cases, people koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 14 who questioned government policy. in-groups, “discursively constructed by means of personal and possessive pronouns, noun phrases, and metonymic references” (berrocal et al., 2021, p. 7) were the nation, often referred to metaphorically as a team (see also mcguire et al., 2020). the values associated with these ingroups were responsibility, generosity and solidarity. more specifi c in-groups were often healthcare workers as well as national medical and scientifi c experts. lastly, transnational solidarity was invoked in many speeches by constructing certain other countries as affi liated groups; these could be neighbouring countries and/or those severely aff ected by the pandemic or, conversely, managing it particularly well. the authors conclude that “the crisis situation has not only strengthened national geopolitical identifi cations but has also reinforced pre-existing geopolitical alliances in terms of affi liated groups or in-groups” (berrocal et al., 2021, p. 9). the above literature review has summarised what we know about communication during health crises in general and what insights have been gained through studies of individual governments’ communication strategies. the next section will introduce the data against their background and the analytical parameters used to further contribute to understanding the language aspects of covid-19. data and methods by the end of march 2022, ghana’s president akufoaddo had given 28 televised addresses to inform citizens about measures taken against the spread of the coronavirus causing covid-19. these updates were arguably the most important part of a communication strategy that also involved press briefi ngs by ministers along with the director of the ghana health service, a dedicated website, social media campaigns and englishlanguage billboards (antwi-boasiako & nyarkoh, 2021; nyarko et al., 2021). citizens further spread announcements and updates through messaging services (tandoh, 2021). as was the case for koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 15 the south african president (hunt, 2021), the addresses were afterwards uploaded to the national broadcaster’s youtube channel as well as akufo-addo’s facebook page. the address analysed in this paper was delivered relatively early in the pandemic, on 27 march 2020. by then, the who had declared covid-19 a global pandemic (11 march) – a declaration that prompted akufo-addo’s fi rst address to the nation on the same day – and the fi rst two (imported) cases were discovered in ghana a day later. by mid-march, public gatherings had been banned and visitors from abroad were no longer permitted to enter ghana. on 21 march, the fi rst death from covid-19 in ghana had been reported, leading to the closure of beaches and borders and the disinfection of markets. on the day of the fourth update, which is analysed below, 137 cases of the disease were recorded, including the fi rst outside the accra region, and parliament enabled a bespoke fund.1 in his fourth address, akufo-addo announced the most severe restrictions to date, namely lockdowns in the cities of accra and kumasi. while this means that the address marks a pivotal point in the government’s crisis management, the success of the measures relies on compliance by the public. it is therefore important to analyse what crisis communication tools the speaker uses and how he realises them linguistically in order to understand the potential impact of his words. the analysis of the selected address follows the tri-partite model of discourse analysis proposed by fairclough (2010; see also koller, 2012). its three levels and guiding questions for the analysis are represented in figure 1. 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/timeline_of_the_covid-19_pandemic_in_ghana_ (march%e2%80%93july_2020)# koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 16 figure 1: levels and guiding questions of discourse analysis (adapted from fairclough, 2010, p. 133) starting at the text level, the analysis in the next section will focus not so much on the content of the address but identify if and how akufo-addo uses language and, to a lesser extent, visuals to realise the seven tools of crisis communication outlined above: convey a threat, convince the audience that the announced measures work, be clear, be credible, balance empathy and honesty, be creative, and acknowledge diversity in the audience. that part of the analysis helps answer the fi rst research question (how did nana akufo-addo address the public at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic?). drawing on and supplementing previous studies, i fi rst give an overview of the diff erent parts of the address and their respective communicative purpose, before identifying the linguistic features that realise the crisis communication tools. this is done in a data-driven way, i.e., rather than starting with a pre-defi ned set of analytical parameters, the text is examined for all relevant features, including some that may not have been anticipated (norris, 2019, p. 123). koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 17 the analysis then proceeds to the meso-level of the discourse practice context. this part of a discourse analysis asks who produces what kind of texts, who distributes them and via what medium, what audiences a text is designed for and who can receive it under what conditions. certain conditions give some discourse participants preferred access, or block access, to means of production and distribution on a large scale. moreover, speakers are endowed with a greater or lesser degree of credibility and power. an additional focus will therefore be on how the speaker positions himself vis-à-vis his audience, especially through speech acts and legitimation strategies. that part of the analysis draws on speech act theory (austin, 1962) and on taxonomies of legitimation developed for political discourse (van leeuwen, 2007; reyes, 2011). the latter comprise the following strategies: 1. authorisation: reference to tradition, custom and law, experts and role models 2. moral evaluation: reference to positive values 3. rationalisation: reference to the goals that are seen as valid 4. mythopoiesis: narratives whose outcomes reward (punish) (non-)legitimate actions 5. emotions: eliciting emotions in the audience, especially fear 6. hypothetical future: reference to possible outcomes if an action is (not) taken 7. altruism: constructing the speaker as acting in the interest of others legitimation serves persuasive purposes and as such is highly relevant for instances of crisis communication in which the audience needs to be convinced to comply with a course of action. the second research question (in what ways do the linguistic features of [akufo-addo’s] his address refl ect the specifi c political context?) relates to the macro-level of how koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 18 the address refl ects the wider cultural and political contexts in which it was delivered. as the three levels of text and contexts are interrelated, the analysis of the macro-level context also needs to be taken into account to interpret the fi ndings of the textual analysis. questions at this level ask about the situation in which a text is embedded, any institutional factors that impact on it and details of the social formation and what roles it allocates to people. finally, the third research question asks what potential impact akufo-addo’s language use has on the behaviour of the public. the second and third research question are both interpretative and as such will be discussed in the fi nal section of this paper. analysis structure of the address nana akufo-addo’s fourth update on the covid-19 crisis in ghana was broadcast at 11pm on 27 march 2020. it lasted around 21 minutes and ran to 2,314 words. after greeting his audience and stating the topic of his address, the president reviews the covid-19 situation in ghana. this is followed with another informative section on measures taken so far, before he argues why additional measures are now necessary. these are then announced in a long and detailed informative section. for the remainder of the address, akufo-addo alternates between persuasive sections in which he appeals for compliance and informative sections on, briefl y, the consequences of noncompliance and, in more detail, fi nancial relief, before closing his address. just over 60 per cent (61.45) of the address is informative, while 20.4 per cent have a persuasive function, with the remainder accounted for by the opening and closing and one argumentative section. micro-level analysis: language and visual features the president opens with the greeting ‘fellow ghanaians’,2 and this phrase is repeated throughout, functioning 2 throughout the analysis, shorter quotes from the public address will be reproduced within single quotation marks, while longer quotes are numbered and indented without quotation marks. koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 19 as a discourse marker to start a new section. (in fact, the phrase took on a life of its own, being used as a hashtag on twitter to metonymically refer to the president’s updates.) in doing so, he echoes fellow presidents cyril ramaphosa of south africa (hunt, 2021, p. 6) and alassane ouattara of côte d’ivoire, as well as the then heads of government of austria, italy and the united states (berrocal et al., 2021, p. 8). while such demonymics, i.e., references to the citizens of a country, help build national solidarity, they exclude people of other nationalities living in the country. elsewhere, new sections start with adversative or cause-eff ect conjunctions to develop an argument (‘however, prevailing circumstances mean that stricter measures have to be put in place’; ‘so … i have imposed … restrictions on movement’). in terms of pronoun usage, it is worth distinguishing between informative and persuasive sections. as shown in figures 2a and 2b, the pronouns that akufo-addo used most frequently when passing on information are fi rst person singular ones (‘i’, ‘me’, ‘mine/my’), followed by inclusive ‘we’ (and ‘our’, ‘us’), ‘you’ and exclusive ‘we’. it has been observed that “[s]tronger group identity, where behavior is about ‘we’ and ‘us’ rather than ‘i’ or ‘you’, will make more public-spirited responses likely” (lunn et al., 2020, p. 5). indeed, the inclusive ‘we’ is most often used in persuasive sections, before ‘i’ and ‘you’, with exclusive ‘we’ again coming last. overall, it is noteworthy that the overall occurrence of fi rst and second person pronouns per one hundred words is three times higher in the persuasive than in the informative sections (9.32 compared to 3.16), suggesting that the speaker is doing more interpersonal work when appealing to the audience to comply with restrictions. koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 20 figure 2a: akufo-addo’s pronoun use in informative sections of his address, based on occurrence per one hundred words figure 2b: akufo-addo’s pronoun use in informative sections of his address, based on occurrence per one hundred words koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 21 qualitatively, the speaker presents himself as active throughout, only once acting on himself (‘i dedicate myself to the service and well-being of you’) and otherwise acting either on the audience (e.g., ‘i am urging all of you to bear with these additional measures’) or on other offi cials, or engaging in actions without a goal (e.g., ‘i am confi dent that ghanaians will comply’). the exclusive ‘we’, referring to the government, is likewise almost always active, but, in contrast to the speaker, mostly in material processes, which make an impact on the physical world, e.g., acting, using, providing. together, these two patterns cast the president as exerting power through his words and the government implementing his decisions and orders. the inclusive ‘we’, which “represents the speaker as a central in-group member speaking on behalf of the whole group” (berrocal et al., 2021, p. 8), features as a benefi ciary of the government’s actions and god’s blessings.3 where the wider in-group is presented as active, it is mostly in what it is (united, together) than in physically impacting on the world. the least active group is the audience (‘you’), who is mostly positioned as the recipient of the president’s verbal processes (e.g., ‘i assure you’, which is repeated three times) and otherwise discouraged from defying the covid-19 restrictions. akufo-addo makes ample use of deontic modality in his address to convey obligation. indeed, this type of modality is predominant in both the informative and the persuasive parts of the speech (figures 3a and 3b). 3 the deeply religious nature of ghanaian society is refl ected in formulaic phrases from religious discourse throughout akufo-addo’s address, e.g., ‘god richly bless them’, ‘by the mercies of god’. koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 22 figure 3a: akufo-addo’s use of modality in informative sections of his address, based on occurrence per one hundred words figure 3b: akufo-addo’s use of modality in persuasive sections of his address, based on occurrence per one hundred words koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 23 in the informative sections, deontic modality markers account for 86 per cent of all modality, followed by dynamic modality, i.e., references to ability, at a mere 14 per cent. in comparison, the percentage of deontic modality markers in the persuasive parts of the address is 60, followed by epistemic modality, i.e., expressions of likelihood, at 30 per cent and dynamic modality at 10 per cent. as with pronouns, we can see that akufo-addo uses more modality markers overall when trying to persuade the audience (2.12 per one hundred words compared to 0.98 for informative sections), thereby emphasising interpersonal meanings. deontic authority rests overwhelmingly with the president and is directed at the audience and other members of government (e.g., ‘i urge all of you … to be reminded … that the frontline of the fi ght against coronavirus is your front door’, ‘the minister for finance has been directed by me to prepare ... a coronavirus alleviation programme’). in the informative sections, deontic modality can also be presented as an agentless rule (e.g., ‘riders of motorbikes are not allowed to carry any additional person’), whereas the persuasive parts feature obligation directed at the inclusive ‘we’ (e.g., ‘we must be united in our determination’). epistemic and dynamic modality are mostly found in appeals to the audience, where they function to either paint hypothetical futures (‘should the virus continue to linger for the rest of the year, the eff ects on our economy would be dire’) or convey self-effi cacy (‘we can defeat this virus’). the attentive reader will have spotted a few instances of the war metaphor in the preceding paragraph, which is indeed the most frequently realised one in akufo-addo’s fourth update. however, it is restricted to the persuasive parts of the address, where it can function to alert people at the early stage of the pandemic, make them take action and – possibly – create solidarity. in the context of covid-19 though, the problem is that the required “action” is not to do something; some uses of war metaphors can therefore discourage restraint where such behaviour would lead to better health outcomes (hendricks et koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 24 al., 2018). in addition, the war metaphor has the potential to increase anxiety and divide a society, which may be why the president reminds his audience that ‘[t]he enemy is the virus, and not each other’. the linguistic analysis of akufo-addo’s address has shown him as an active leader imbued with the authority of his offi ce. this image is reinforced through the visuals and music of his televised update, which begins with a lead-in of almost a minute during which the national anthem can be heard. viewers fi rst see the presidential emblem and then follow the path of an airborne camera moving slowly towards the presidential palace. the movement becomes faste r and the image blurred as the camera seems to move through a corridor in the palace. the lead-in ends with a stylised image of the palace and the line ‘president addresses the nation’. the image then cuts to akufo-addo standing at a rostrum between the national and presidential fl ags, with the low angle of the now stationary camera reinforcing his status and the medium long shot creating some distance between him and the audience (figure 4). while delivering his address, he looks directly at the viewer, a “demand gaze” (kress and van leeuwen, 2021, p.117) that complements the deontic authority he invests himself with in his language use. he does not gesture during the speech – perhaps so as not to interfere with the sign language interpreter – and only leans forward slightly when greeting his audience. the insignia of the nation and his power are again invoked in the fi nal 15 seconds, during which the camera slowly moves away from the palace and the closing bars of the anthem are played. koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 25 figure 4: still from nana akufo-addo’s address to the nation, 27 march 2020 this set-up is reminiscent of the covid-19 “family meetings” convened by south africa’s president cyril ramaphosa (hunt, 2021, p. 2), except that akufo-addo wore shirts with west african patterns rather than formal suits for his updates.4 in sum, linguistic and visual elements, especially patterns of agency, speech acts, modality, symbols and camera angle work together to represent akufo-addo as powerful, authoritative and somewhat detached from the audience. however, that position is balanced by direct appeals to the same audience, whose cooperation the speaker seeks to win rather than enforce. meso-level analysis: the speaker’s self-positioning the text under analysis was, if not written, then certainly commissioned by the speaker, making him both its principal and its animator (goff man, 1981), i.e., the person in whose name the speech is delivered and the person to deliver it. coming from the president of ghana, akufo-addo’s words are imbued with authority, and he enjoys immensely privileged access to discourse distribution: his updates on the covid-19 pandemic were broadcast on national television before they became available on social media channels. while a countrywide 4 for an example, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=legaur1a0jg. ramaphosa announced a national lockdown in the same week as his ghanaian counterpart gave the update analysed here. koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 26 broadcast ensures a broad reception, its timing at 11pm has been criticised as being too late to reach a maximum number of ghanaians. as a result, later addresses were moved to an earlier time in the evening (antwi-boasiako and nyarkoh, 2021, p. 1181), while press briefi ngs were always held in the morning (tandoh, 2021, p. 59). finally, a televised address is an example of a monologic genre, with citizens’ reactions being limited to comments on the subsequent online video.5 nevertheless, the speaker positions himself in relation to the audience to achieve interpersonal goals. while most of the addres s at hand is informative, the persuasive sections show a higher density of interpersonal markers such as pronouns and modality. the appeals also include several legitimation strategies that position the president as reliant on the audience’s acceptance of, and co-operation with, the restrictions, and thus complicate his position of power. nowhere is this more obvious than in the fi nal persuasive section, in which the president pleads with the people in the indigenous languages akan and ga.6 legitimation even spills over to otherwise informative sections. thus, he introduces information on previous measures as follows: (1) fellow ghanaians, the oath of offi ce i swore on 7th januar y, 2017 demands that i dedicate myself to the service and well-being of you, the ghanaian people. it is my job to protect you, and i am determined to do just that. here, it is the president who is under obligation, namely, to act for the benefi t of the audience. measures curtailing the freedom of the public are thus legitimated through moral evaluation and altruism (van leeuwen, 2007; reyes, 2011). when arguing for and announcing the partial lockdown, akufoaddo invokes the authority of the ghana health service and 5 all but one of the comments available at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0wljbo7yhok&t=3s are positive, and many repeat the request to comply with the lockdown restrictions. the one exception is a factual question. 6 my thanks go to dr gladys nyarko ansah for translating this passage. koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 27 the law, respectively. on occasion, appeals are developed in persuasive sections and carried over to the beginning a subsequent informative part: (2) fellow ghanaians, i am urging all of you to bear with these additional measures. they are being done in the interest of all of us. they are, hopefully, only for a short while. these additional measures, together with those earlier announced, are what will help us defeat the virus. and, we must be united in our determination and eff orts to overcome this challenge. in this appeal, the president uses a performative speech act (‘urging’) that puts the audience under obligation but recognises that compliance can only be sought, not forced. other speech acts include announcing, assuring, directing, ordering and thanking. due to its semantic profi le, the verb ‘bear’ in example (2) implicitly acknowledges hardship, and the measures are further justifi ed as being benefi cial for the in-group (‘in the interest of all of us’, ‘will help us’) and minimised as being time l imited. the appeal is completed with a call for unity. similar themes reoccur at the beginning of the next informative section: (3) fellow ghanaians, we are in this together, and government will stand by you. we are aware that there will be discomfort and diffi culties for all of us over the next couple of weeks. as a responsive government, we will continue to implement bold measures to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus on businesses and households and ensure that job losses are minimised. an appeal to solidarity among the in-group (‘we are in this together’) echoes the earlier appeal to unity and while hardships are now made explicit, they again pertain to all of the in-group. however, the inclusive ‘we’ alternates with thirdkoller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 28 person references to the government that interacts with the audience (‘stand by you’), making for a lesser or greater distance between the government and those it represents. another persuasive strategy used by akufo-addo is to create a national in-group. this is not only realised through the repeated phrase ‘fellow ghanaians’, but also by appeals to a shared patriotism (‘the love of country is deeply embedded in all of us’) and self-reliance during the pandemic, and by setting the nation apart from others: (4) [w]e cannot aff ord to copy blindly and do all the things some other well-developed countries are doing. there is no one-size-fi ts-all approach to this pandemic. we have a unique situation in our country, and we must take it into account in dealing with the disease. throughout the address, the speaker strikes a balance between enacting authority and seeking to persuade. that balance is tipped towards the former when the president invokes fear, for example, by referring to negative hypothetical futures (e.g., ‘if we act now purposefully, we have a chance of preventing an escalation of our numbers’) that can be averted by adhering to the restrictions. occasionally, there are even veiled threats to those who are not ‘the overwhelming majority’ but refuse to follow social norms: ‘i am confi dent that ghanaians will comply with [the measures], and the security services will not have to intervene, with extraordinary means, to enforce them.’ since negation is frame-preserving, the second clause evokes the very intervention that is declared unnecessary. earlier in the address, the speaker had affi rmed the consequences of non-compliance: ‘anyone … who is found to be fl outing them will be dealt with fully in accordance with law. the security services have been clothed with the necessary power to enforce these measures’. while the overall aim of government communications was to ‘spread calm, not fear’ of covid-19, the president partly relied on fear of law enforcement to secure compliance. koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 29 macro-level analysis: the wider context as mentioned above, akufo-addo’s public address on 27 march 2020 came at a point in the pandemic when infections were rising. in reaction, the government decided on the most severe restrictions so far to avoid a possible public health disaster of the kind that had already been witnessed in other parts of the world at that time. uncertainty and anxiety would have been high, making clear information and reassurance two central goals of offi cial crisis communication. institutionally, a nationwide address by the president is an example of asymmetrical communication from one speaker to a potential audience of millions, delivered as a monologue and invested with authority. powerful though he may be, the president is bound by a democratic system of government. indeed, ghana was the fi rst african colony (south of the sahara) to gain independence and is often celebrated as “a vibrant multiparty democr acy, [with] some of the most robust liberal-democratic institutions on the continent” (paller, 2019, p. 12), especially since the start of the fourth republic in 1992. however, the diverse socio-cultural fabric of the country also includes strands of “traditional views of authority” (ibid.), together with a rather formal public discourse that sets store by symbols of power and appreciation. within that context, akufoaddo is part of an elite family of politicians and son of a former president. this privileged background may further contribute to a certain elevation of himself. finally, he is the leader of the centre-right new patriotic party, whose liberal-conservative ideology is more likely to uphold than question tradition. the fi nal section summarises the fi ndings of the threelevel analysis, answers the research question and provides an outlook on further research. discussion and conclusion crisis communication scholars have recommended seven tools for use during the covid-19 pandemic (coombs, 2021; hyland-wood et al., 2021); namely, convey a threat, koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 30 convince the audience that the announced measures work, be clear, be credible, balance empathy and honesty, be creative, and acknowledge diversity in the audience. checking the language use in the ghanaian president’s fourth update on coronavirus against those recommendations, it can be said that he manages to convey the threat inherent in the situation during which he gave the address. he does so by invoking a negative hypothetical future and drawing on the war metaphor. however, the latter also shows that the speaker has a fi ne line to tread between communicating how serious the situation is and increasing fear in his audience. he seeks to ward off any fatalism by assuring citizens that the government’s measures work. importantly, he also conveys a sense of effi cacy, using language features such as pronouns and modality to suggest that everyone can help in the eff ort against covid-19. grammatically, however, this is at odds with the fact that the audience is the least active group in the address. it should also be noted that the long and detailed address, while clear, is the opposite of a short and simple message. it may have been more advisable to stick to the key points to be communicated and open channels for further detail, e.g., online platforms and community leaders. on the plus side, president akufo-addo represents himself as an active, credible authority both linguistically and visually. in addition, he refers to the dual authority of the ghana health service and the law; law enforcement is even invoked in veiled threats to ensure the public’s compliance. however, the asymmetrical communication of the updates, along with the president’s elite background, risk turning credibility into aloofness. countering that risk is the fact that the speaker conveys both empathy and honesty by acknowledging, at least implicitly, the hardship that the anti-covid restrictions will bring. a study of all the updates could establish how much variety and creativity featured in later addresses to counter “pandemic fatigue”, while a broader study across diff erent koller, v./crisis communications at the start of the covid-19 pandemic legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 31 communication channels could establish if diff erent parts of ghana’s diverse society were accounted for (see nyarko et al., 2021 for a critique). in his fourth update at least, the president does use indigenous languages for his key message, but otherwise seems more intent on creating a national in-group to overcome political partisanship during the crisis. this leaves the question what potential impact the president’s language use can have on the behaviour of the public. while it is notoriously diffi cult to establish a causal relation between public discourse and people’s (lack of) compliance, a brief look at the comments on akufo-addo’s facebook page next to a video of the address allows for some insights.7 one caveat is that comments are likely to be from followers rather than detractors of the president and indeed, most of the comments positively evaluate the address, congratulating the president and wishing god’s blessings upon him (see also footnote 5). deferential forms of address like ‘excellency’ and ‘daddy/papa’ chime with his self-presentation as powerful yet protective. as one communications expert put it, the presidential addresses during the pandemic conveyed the impression that “the father of the nation was with us” (quoted in tandoh, 2021, p. 56). although there are a few comments lambasting the president for incompetence and corruption, most criticism is prefaced by positive appraisal and framed as a ‘humble request’. importantly, positive comments also reiterate the appeal to follow the covid-19 measures, even if commenters express some concern that not everyone may do so. a comparison with how the address was received by followers of samuel ofosuampofo, the leader of the oppositional national democratic congress, could show in how far compliance is partisan. this paper has focused on only one, albeit important, public address by ghana’s president, and much remains to be done to get a more complete picture of covid-19 crisis communications in the country. nevertheless, the detailed, 7 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1354287184756321 koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) 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[blog post] retrieved from https://bit.ly/3zrryl8 koller, v./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 36 fighting a global pandemic and local stigmatisation: war metaphors in presidential update speeches and their eff ect on attitudes to covid -19 (patients) in ghana emma kusuoba pedavoah phd candidate department of english university of ghana, legon, ghana email: ekpedavoah@st.ug.edu.gh gladys nyarko ansah associate professor department of english university of ghana, legon, ghana email: gansah@ug.edu.gh submitted: september 14, 2022/ accepted: april 26, 2023 / published: june 29, 2023 abstract ghana’s president has used war-framed metaphors in announcing and explaining both the notion of covid-19 and the measures his government outlined to curb its spread. this paper explores the potential eff ects the various conceptual mappings in the war-framed communication by the president had on the general public in dealing with a global pandemic in a local context. this is achieved by linking the mappings in the war-framed communication to the attitudes and practices among the ghanaian public. data were drawn from 8 presidential covid-19 updates between march 15 and may 31, 2020. findings indicate that the use of war-framed communication successfully evoked fear among the general population. however, this transcended the virus to covid-19 patients (and their families), provoking a cause of action among the general public to fi ght not only the virus but also covid-19 patients (and their families). this appears to have caused stigmatisation of covid-19 patients, and led to a situation where covid-19 positive patients pedavoah, e. k. & ansah, g. n./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1 (2023) doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v34i1.2s issue 34.1.indd legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 118 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v34i1.5s language blending in tanzanian adverts: codeswitching between swahili, english, and kiswahili cha mtaani josephine dzahene-quarshie associate professor department of modern languages university of ghana, legon email: jdzahene-quarshie@ug.edu.gh felix kwame sosoo lecturer department of modern languages university of ghana, legon email: fksosoo@ug.edu.gh submitted: february 14, 2023 /accepted: march 13, 2023 /published: june 29, 2023 abstract this study interrogates the strategic use of code-switching involving standard swahili, english, and kiswahili cha mtaani in audio-visual advertisements by telecommunication companies (telecos) in tanzania. a purposive sampling method was used to gather the data: codeswitched advertisements for the purpose of demonstrating the blending of codes. the data on advertisement was gathered from audio-visual advertisements by selected telecos in tanzania on social media platforms. underpinned by theories of codeswitching, this study establishes that beyond codeswitching between kiswahili and english as a language choice for advertising by telecos in tanzania, an emerging trend is the use of codeswitching between standard kiswahili and kiswahili cha mtaani (an urban youth variety of kiswahili); also, some adverts feature three-way codeswitching involving standard kiswahili, english and kiswahili cha mtaani. the study further argues that codeswitching in the advertisements is carefully thought of, intentionally blending the languages in a strategic way to attract customers from diff erent legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 119 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts linguistic, economic, and sociological backgrounds as well as diff erent age groups, making this kind of codeswitching distinct from codeswitching which occurs in natural conversation. keywords: codeswitching, kiswahili cha mtaani, language blending, intra-sentential codeswitching, codeswitched advert introduction advertisements are a medium for promoting products and marketing services to people. according to okoro (2005), the term advertising originated from the latin word ‘ad vertere’ which means, ‘to turn the mind towards’. several studies in the literature have established that codeswitching has evolved as a language choice for advertising in many parts of the world. often in the instances of codeswitched adverts in various countries where english is not indigenous, local languages are codeswitched with english, simply because english is the most-wide-spread language, prestigious, and often referred to as a global language (crystal, 1997). in addition, in many non-native english-speaking countries, advertisers are making strong eff orts to target and persuade bilinguals. advertisers are highly creative and innovative in producing code-switched and code-mixed adverts which simultaneously manipulate and appeal to bilinguals to a great extent. over the past few decades, codeswitching between kiswahili and english in advertisement texts has become a norm especially in advertisements by multinational organizations (dzahene-quarshie, 2013). although codeswitching is usually an oral phenomenon, its usage in advertisements in the print media has become a norm in tanzania. thus, codeswitching features in advertisements in many kiswahili language newspapers as well as billboards (dzahene-quarshie, 2013). codeswitching between kiswahili and english has also increased in audio-visual advertisements over the years (dzahene-quarshie and csajbok-twerefou, 2016). in recent times another trend that has emerged in the world of advertising, especially in africa, is the use of urban youth legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 120 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) languages in advertising (mungai, 2008; kariuki, kanana and kebeya, 2015). mutinga (2013) observes that many commercial advertisers have turned to an extensive use of sheng, an urban youth language in kenya to market their products. he posits that the entrepreneurial class in kenya has now woken up to the economic advantages that sheng presents as the language of the youth. likewise in tanzania a similar trend has emerged where kiswahili cha mtaani, an urban youth language, has emerged in the domain of advertising in addition to english mixing. thus, increasingly, codeswitched adverts are becoming the norm in tanzania, where codeswitching involves swahili and english, standard swahili and kiswahili cha mtaani or all three of them. this shift in language choice for advertising is signifi cant especially when the products and services target particularly the youth. this trend is popular in advertisements of multinational companies, especially telecommunication companies. it is the dynamics of this kind of codeswitching that we refer to as blending. the present study seeks to examine the blending of codes as a language choice for advertising selected products and services in tanzania. the use of these three distinct codes in advertisement stems from the fact that all the three codes play vital roles in specifi c domains in tanzania. for advertisers, it is important to reach the widest range of customers, thus they use blended language in order to appeal to all categories of customers (the old, the young, the middle-class, the masses); on the side of customers, they are attracted to the beautifully blended language of the world of advertisements. the key objective of the study is to demonstrate through the analysis of a corpus of ten advertisements that unlike normal codeswitching where the switching occurs as a necessity due to the speaker’s inability to use one code due to one or more of several reasons, in codeswitched advertisement, switching which may be between two or three codes (standard kiswahili, english and kcm (street swahili) is deliberate and planned. it is executed in such a way legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 121 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts that the overall eff ect appeals to and attracts customers to the advertised product or service. in the following sections, we fi rst discuss the conceptual framework underpinning the study. this is followed by a discussion on the relationship between standard kiswahili, english and kiswahili cha mtaani. next, we describe the methodology adopted by the study, then we analyse and discuss the data. thereafter, we briefl y discuss the fi ndings of the study and conclude. conceptual framework multilingualism refers to the phenomenon of conversing with two or more languages alternately and bilingualism is conversing by use of two languages. titone (1993) defi ned bilingualism as one’s ability to speak a second or third language using structures and concepts that diff er from the mother tongue. to aid the analysis and discussion of the data on the use of two or all three of the languages identifi ed in advertisements in telecos in tanzania, the study employs the concept of code-mixing and codeswitching. hoff man (1991) describes code-mixing as the most creative aspect of multilingual and bilingual speech which is a normal phenomenon for multilingual and bilingual speakers. usually, for multilinguals and bilinguals it is easier to communicate certain topics in one’s dominant language than a less dominant one. poplack (2001) explains code-mixing as the integration of more than one language in discourse by bilinguals or multilinguals between and among persons engaged in a particular conversation, within a particular group of people or even on a specifi c subject or theme. according to bauer (2010), code-mixing refers to the “linguistic behavior of a bilingual speaker who imports words or phrases from one of his/ her languages into the other one. in brief, code mixing can be defi ned as the code-alternation of words or phrases from language a into language b within a single utterance. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 122 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) myers-scotton (1988) defi nes this kind of language alternation as constituting intra-sentential codeswitching. intra sentential switching thus occurs within the sentence boundaries or also in a clause. in this sense, bilingual or multilingual speakers switch part of clauses, morphemes, or lexical items in a sentence. again, according to her, code-switching is “the use of any two or more linguistic varieties in the same conversation, whether they are diff erent languages, styles, or dialects” (p. 201). hoff man (1991) and poplack (2001) categorize codeswitching into inter-sentential switching, and emblematic switching or tag switching. however, myers-scotton (1988) uses codeswitching as an umbrella term for all types of code alternations and distinguishes between intra-sentential switching and inter sentential switching. inter-sentential switching involves switching at the sentential level where one sentence is in a particular language and the subsequent sentence is in another language (myers-scotton, 1988). tag switching occurs where a tag or short phrase is inserted from one language into a sentence in another language (hoff man, 1991). considering that code-mixing (intra-sentential codeswitching) allows the change of code, it is important to know factors that trigger it. according to chaer and agustina (2010), code-mixing is triggered by several factors such as: the speaker, the addressee, the setting, the change of situation from formal to informal, and the topic. li (1996) cited in bi (2011, p. 61) states that “topics like family, school, workplace, pop music, fashions, and politics are most often talked about in a code-mixing way”. a functional model for codeswitching is proposed by appel and muysken (2006) who state that codeswitching is used to attain diverse functions in interactions. according to myers-scotton (1988), code-switching is “the use of any two or more linguistic varieties in the same conversation, whether they are diff erent languages, styles, or dialects” (p. 201). code-mixing (intra-sentential codeswitching), inter-sentential and tag switching are exemplifi ed in our data. for the sake of legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 123 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts uniformity, we will use the terms inter-sentential codeswitching, intra-sentential codeswitching (in lieu of code mixing) and tag switching in this study. dynamics of kiswahili, english and kiswahili cha mtaani in tanzania currentlly, kiswahili is spoken by most people in tanzania as a fi rst or second language and it plays very important roles in many domains in the country such as, schools, market and home. english continues to compete with kiswahili in domains such as secondary and tertiary education, the high courts among others. for over four centuries swahili has been shaped by many factors (chiraghdin & mnyampala, 1977; nurse & spear, 1985; shariff , 1973; whiteley, 1969) and has played and continues to play an important role in east africa in general and tanzania in particular. during the colonial period and advent of european missionaries to africa, kiswahili which had emerged as a trade language was developed to play important roles such as an administrative language during the german colonial administration and as a medium of instruction in primary education by european missionaries who pioneered formal education in east africa. in 1930, a standard orthography of kiswahili was adopted by the british colonial administration (whiteley, 1969). shortly after independence, kiswahili was declared as the national and offi cial language of tanzania. the implementation of its establishment as a national language was given a high priority by the government since it was considered a crucial factor in the process of unifi cation and nation-building. over the years, various policies have been initiated to ensure the sustenance and continuous development of the language in tanzania. as mentioned above, english still wields power in tanzania as it continues to be the medium of instruction in secondary and tertiary education and many private basic schools use it as medium of instruction. even in swahili legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 124 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) medium newspapers, english still features in the domain of advertisement such as white-collar job vacancies and tender notices (dzahene-quarshie, 2013). again, although there are over fi fty swahili medium newspapers in tanzania, several english medium newspapers are also available. other domains that swahili shares with english is parliamentary discourse where although offi cially the medium of communication is kiswahili, code-switching between kiswahili and english is a regular phenomenon (dzahene-quarshie, 2011). kiswahili cha mtaani is an urban youth variety of kiswahili that has emerged among the youth in town quarters where swahili is spoken. as far back as 1958, gower reported the existence of swahili slang, which, according to his observations was “born in towns” with young men being “the most prolifi c manufacturers of slang” (gower, 1958, p. 250). according to reuster-jahn and kießling (2006), in the eighties, it was common to call colloquial forms of swahili “lugha ya mtaani” (“language of the town quarters”, or “street language”). recently, there has been an increase in the rate at which people, especially the youth use lugha ya mtaani. this development of kiswahili cha mtaani refl ects the social, economic, and political liberalization in tanzania, which started in the late 1980s. in this study, we acknowledge the existence of variants of kiswahili cha mtaani, however, we will use kiswahili cha mtaani as a cover term for all varieties. it is also worth noting that some elements of kiswahili cha mtaani henceforth kcm are also gradually becoming unmarked and are being diff used into daily usage of kiswahili, and where they are used persistently, they eventually become part of the standard language1. this claim can be substantiated when the listings in the fi rst and second editions of the kamusi ya kiswahili sanifu (dictionary of standard swahili, tuki 1981 and 2004) are compared. in the latter, several words that were hitherto identifi ed as kcm have now been listed, thus they 1 ohly makes a similar statement with respect to “standard colloquial language” (1987a, p. 4). legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 125 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts are acknowledged as part of the standard language. examples of such words are mchecheto ‘worries, pressure, confusion’, changudoa ‘prostitute’, and kasheshe ‘mayhem’. blommaert (1990) referred to speech which had these non-standard forms as “kiswahili cha mtaani”, which he characterised as, (…) a complex of english-interfered kiswahili variants, appearing in most of the urban areas of present-day tanzania. it is assumed to be the medium of popular amusement through music and comic books, and seems to be the jargon of fashionable youngsters. here, english interferences are mostly idiomatic in nature (…) and are heavily integrated” (blommaert, 1990, p. 24). in tanzanian, kcm is contrasted with lugha fasaha or kiswahili fasaha (standard swahili). kiswahili sanifu or fasaha (standard swahili) is rarely used in contrast with kiswahili cha mtaani, except by swahili scholars. kiswahili fasaha is described as swahili as is taught at school, and as can be found in books. in addition to the term kcm or lugha ya mtaani, the term kibongo (language of bongo, i.e., dar es salaam) is also used. the term bongo implies that dar es salaam is the center of linguistic creativity. one functional aspect of kcm is its use as grouplanguage of youths. according to reuster-jahn and kießling (2006), even in former times the most creative agents in forming lugha ya mtaani; referred to in our context as kcm were youths, and they have become dominant in recent years in the creative process of coining terms and expressions as well as transferring items from english, which often originate in the slang of some sub-cultural group in america or elsewhere. others recognize kcm as enriching standard swahili, which is seen as rather bookish (ohly, 1987). it has a lot in common with other urban youth languages found in africa. thus, it is typically learned by adolescents in peer-groups and used in informal settings to communicate the meta-message of solidarity and toughness. in legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 126 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) some youth-groups, it seems to be important to be able to speak it as fast as possible (böhme 2004: 38), probably to ‘jargoozle’, i.e., confuse outsiders – which shows that demarcation and secrecy to some extent can be one of its functions (reuster-jahn and kießling, 2006:13). a fundamental prerequisite for the fl ourishing of kcm is the fact that swahili has truly become the primary language of its speakers. as ohly (1987) emphasizes, with respect to swahili slang: “profi ciency enables the correct employment of slang, but it is full competence in swahili which makes it possible to creatively coin slang expressions” (p. 6). looking into the linguistic makeup, it is quite clear that kcm is not an independent language, but a sociolect or register of kiswahili. it is defi nitely derived from kiswahili, since, generally, it adheres to kiswahili grammatical rules. nevertheless, it deviates from standard kiswahili in its lexicon and its phrasemes (idiomatic expressions), which are constantly being renovated by strategies of deliberate manipulation. considering that all these three codes play a role in tanzania, it is not surprising that advertisers fi nd it expedient to employ a combination of two or all three of them in the crafting of their adverts depending on the type of product or service and the target audience. methodology the study employed purposive sampling in collecting the necessary data while a qualitative approach to data analysis was adopted. it was deemed that the best approach for analysing the data to meet the objectives of the study was a qualitative approach. furthermore, in line with the objective of the study, data from telecommunication companies with specifi c details were targeted. the data consisted of audio-visual advertisements by telecommunication organisations which were accessed via youtube and facebook. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 127 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts data the study looked at video advertisements from four major telecommunication companies in tanzania namely airtel, tigo, tanzania telecommunications company limited (ttcl) and vodacom. first, we watched the various adverts by the telecommunication organizations chosen on their youtube and facebook platforms and we sorted those that use a combination of two or all three of the codes, namely a blend of standard kiswahili and english, standard kiswahili and kiswahili cha mtaani or a blend of standard kiswahili, english and kiswahili cha mtaani. ten audio-visual adverts that met the objectives of the study were considered for this research. firstly, the adverts were classifi ed into the following types namely: those code-mixed with standard kiswahili and english; standard kiswahili and kcm; and english, standard kiswahili and kcm. after the categorization, we transcribed the words in the video and translated those codemixed or codeswitched with standard kiswahili or kcm. this is to ensure that the meanings in the original adverts remain even in the translated versions. the adverts are coded according to the name of the organization and the number of adverts from each of them for easy tracing and referencing. the following abbreviations are used to label them: airtel – at; vodacom – vd: tigo – ti; and ttcl -tc. analysis and discussion in the next section, we analyse each advert in terms of the number of languages used as well as the types of codeswitching that are featured in them and how they are blended together eff ectively. we do this by displaying in a tabula the entire advert side by side with the english translation and a brief narrative on the content of the advert, then we go on to discuss the types of codeswitching it features. it must be noted that usually these audio-visual adverts feature both written and oral texts, thus our transcriptions include both. we begin the analysis with adverts that exemplify codeswitching between standard legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 128 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) swahili and english; this is followed by adverts that illustrate codeswitching between standard kiswahili and kiswahili cha mtaani, then fi nally, those which demonstrate the blending of all three codes, standard kiswahili, kiswahili cha mtaani, and english. for easy identifi cation, the parts of the advert that are in standard swahili are in italics, tag switching are in bold italics and kcm are in bold. the analysis which describes the lexical and syntactic patterns of switching, namely, inter-sentential codeswitching, intra-sentential codeswitching (code-mixing), and tag switching is based on the frameworks of poplack (1988) and hoff man (1991). however, myers-scotton’s (1988) labels; intra-sentential codeswitching (hoff man and poplack’s codemixing), inter-sentential codeswitching and tag switching are used for uniformity and convenience. codeswitched adverts with standard swahili and english the fi rst advert in this category, ati, is about a 4g product from a multinational telco, airtel, airtel super 4g. the text employs inter-sentential code-switching between standard swahili and english, intra-sentential code-switching, and tagswitching. codeswitched adverts with standard swahili and english airtel 4g (at1) (screaming) help! help!! help!!! (screaming) help! help!! help!!! kasi juu ya kasi. hamia airtel supa 4g. peruzi, strim na download kwa spidi topmost speed. move to airtel super 4g. browse, stream and download with speed. the aim of the audio-visual is to demonstrate the speed of airtel super 4g. in the audio-visual, a thief snatches and tries to run away with the bag of a lady who is shopping in the legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 129 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts market. the lady immediately screams “help! help!! help!!!”. her screams attract the attention of a uniformed security offi cer, and he begins to run after the thief. during the chase, there was no talking but there was music in the background. the thief bumps into several items on sale as he tries to outrun the security offi cer. the security offi cer speeds up and snatches the bag from the thief and speeds ahead of the thief, almost immediately, two security alsatian dogs begin to chase them. the scene is cut but the advert continues with an utterance that says “kasi juu ya kasi…. hamia airtel supa 4g. peruzi, strim na download kwa spidi”. the advert goes back to the market scene where the security offi cer is seen returning the bag to the lady. the speed with which the security offi cer runs to retrieve the lady’s bag and to get ahead of the thief while the dogs chase, is used as a scenic illustration of the speed of the airtel super 4g product. thus, in terms of verbal content, the advert is made up of just a few sentences. it is observed that the fi rst part, ‘help! help!! help!!!’ is in english. this is followed by a sentence in kiswahili, ‘kasi juu ya kasi’. these two sentences constitute inter-sentential codeswitching between english and standard swahili. the next two sentences feature intra-sentential codeswitching (codemixing) between kiswahili and english. in these, the matrix language is kiswahili, and the embedded language is english. hamia airtel supa 4g. in this sentence the predicate hamia ‘move’ is swahili and the complement, “airtel supa 4g.” is english. in addition, the word supa which represents the english word, ‘super’ constitutes a tag switch. in the sentence, “peruzi, strim na download kwa spidi.” which is made up of three clauses and an adjunct, the fi rst two clauses which are verbal items are swahili while the third clause “download” is english. here again the sentence features intra-sentential codeswitching where the fi rst two verbal constructions are swahili and the codeswitched item is ‘download’. again, in addition the english verb “stream” is represented with a tag switch strim and ‘speed’ is also represented by a tag switch spidi. thus, the text of the legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 130 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) advert at1, is a blend of standard swahili and english, featuring both inter-sentential and intra-sentential codeswitching and tag switching. these codes are blended in an intentional manner to achieve an appealing rendition of the language of the advert. the tag switched items, ‘supa ‘super’; strim ‘stream’; and spidi ‘speed’ are categorized as such because they do not represent english items and they are not standard swahili because they are not found in current standard kiswahili dictionaries. the peculiarity here is the use of kiswahili orthography instead of english, as would be expected. since there are a lot of borrowed words from english in kiswahili sometimes making a distinction between a codeswitched item and a borrowed item proves diffi cult. at the end of the advert, the inscription ‘airtel the smartphone network’ appears on the screen; it constitutes another incidence of inter-sentential code-switching, in relation with the last sentence of the text. it is important to note that the use of spidi, is for an aesthetic purpose because the swahili word for speed was used in the second sentence of the text. thus, sometimes using a tag switched or a codeswitched item is not as a result of limited code capacity. another example of an advert with codeswitching between standard kiswahili and english is at2 below. the commercial is about an airtel product, my airtel app. it seeks to encourage subscribers to invite their friends to use my airtel app. the text of the advert is displayed on the screen during narration. there are no characters in the video. the advert narrates the step-by-step process of inviting one’s friends to use the app. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 131 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts codeswitched adverts with standard swahili and english my airtel app (at2) wasambazie marafi ki my airtel app wafurahie mb 200 bure share with friends my airtel app so they enjoy 200 mb for free nawe ufurahie mb 50 bure pale kila rafi ki atakapopakua na kusajili my airtel app and you enjoy 50mb for free for every friend that downloads and registers for my airtel app fanya hivi, fungua my airtel app do this, open the my airtel app bofya sehemu ya refer and earn click on refer and earn itafungua sehemu ya pili it will open to a second section bofya tena sehemu ya refer and earn na msambazie rafi ki link click the ‘refer and earn’ section again and share the link with friends rafi ki akipokea link anatakiwa kubofya na kupakua na kusajili my airtel app when your friend receives the link, they are expected to download and register for the my airtel app kila rafi ki atakayepakua na kusajili atapata mb 200 bure each friend who downloads and registers will receive 200mb for free na wewe utapokea mb 50 za bure and you will receive 50mb for free rudia hatua hii kuwasabazia my airtel app kwa marafi ki zaidi kufurahia mb za bure. repeat these steps to share with more friends the my airtel app to enjoy free data. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 132 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) the advert is made up of ten sentences. out of the ten sentences, 9 feature intra-sentential code-switching involving standard swahili and english. the code-switched items typically are phrases such as ‘my airtel app’ and ‘mb 200, link’ etc. in these sentences we can observe that english words like ‘my airtel app’, ‘refer and earn’ and ‘link’ are codeswitched together with other standard swahili codes, the switching occurs within the sentences, so they constitute intra-sentential codeswitching. comparing at1 with at2, it is observed that there is no consistency in the use of codeswitched items. in the at1 above, the english word ‘download’ is used but in at2 the swahili word kupakua which originally refers to offl oading is being used to represent downloading from the internet. this constitutes a vocabulary expansion phenomenon referred to as a semantic extension (winford, 2003). another diff erence is that there is no case of tag switching in at2. it can be argued that the focus of the two adverts from the same company are diff erent. while care is taken to blend the codes to engineer some auditory aesthetics in at1, at2 appears to go straight to the point giving a step-by-step instruction in very clear swahili, only resorting to using codeswitched items which do not have equivalents in swahili, hence using kupakua instead of download which is used in at1 from the same teleco. a third advert featuring inter-sentential codeswitching of standard swahili and english at3 below also from airtel, is a product known as airtel yatosha ‘airtel suffi ces’. the message of airtel yatosha, at3 is that subscribers can receive enough talk time to call any network, as well as enough data bundle to browse the internet. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 133 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts codeswitched adverts with standard swahili and english airtel yatosha at3 ahh yayaya, ah! ahh yayaya, ah! una charger? una charger? do you have a charger? do you have a charger? tatu, nne, tano, sita, saba, nane, moja, mbili… three, four, fi ve, six, seven, eight, one, two… mna charger? do you have a charger? huh? huh? mida hii ilikuwa ya lunch mzee. ila unajua nini nimesahau chakula sasa hahah… this time was for lunch sir. but you know what i have forgotten about food hahah… hello…ahyaaa una charger? hello…ahyaaa do you have a charger? eeh nilimwambia ahamie airtel eeh i told him to move to join airtel lakini… anafail… but…. he has failed to…. ngoja nikuwhatsapp, niko na familia wait let me whatsapp you, i’m with the family. ahhh, mna charger? do you have a charger? charger! charger! kila saa wee vipi? si ununue tu betri every hour charger! charger!! why? why not just buy a battery? unafi kiri ni betri? nimepewa zaidi na yatosha bandoo la airtel. do you think it’s about the battery? i have been given more than enough airtel bundle. na kama nikikupigia nakupigia mtandao wowote ule, na hapo bado kuna cha kudownload na kuchat. and i can call you and any network, and still have enough to download and chat. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 134 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) the advert commences with a man on a treadmill in a gym watching a video on his phone. soon his battery runs low, and he begins to ask those around him if they have a charger. he goes on to switch the speaker off in the gym so everyone can hear him ask for a charger. everyone looks perplexed as they shake their heads to say ‘no’ in response to his question. the next scene is an offi ce where the man is seen speaking on phone, as he takes a seat. his phone displays a low battery signal which causes him to ask his colleagues if they have a charger. with confused looks, his colleagues shake their heads. the next scene is outside a house where a family is gathered at a table. a man is seen speaking on phone as he strolls around and a low battery signal shows on his phone. he proceeds to ask his family for a charger. this time multiple chargers are thrown at him as everyone laughs at him. a lady at the table comments that he is always asking for a charger and asks him why he does not just buy a new battery. he responds that his battery does not have a problem. rather, it is because he has been given more than enough airtel bundle which he can use to call any network as well as to download and to chat. the advert clearly demonstrates the use of several counts of standard swahili intra-sentential codeswitching with english. for instance, in the sentence ‘una charger?’ the noun charger is english whereas the rest of the question is standard swahili. several more of the utterances in the advert feature intra-sentential codeswitching with charger as the codeswitched item. another codeswitched noun is ‘lunch’. also, the sentence ‘…na hapo bado kuna cha kudownload na kuchat’and kufail in another sentence, also illustrates the use of standard swahili and english in intra-sentential codeswitching whereby the infi nitive verbs have english stems. another codeswitched item is the interjection ‘hello!’. although eff orts are made by the national kiswahili council to coin kiswahili words to represent new words, terms and concepts, there is still the issue of lack of code capacity in swahili. thus, it is not surprising that for technical legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 135 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts terms such as ‘charger’ and ‘chat’ in at3 and app in at2, advertisers tend to use codeswitched items when the equivalent swahili terms are not readily available. thus, the use of some english labels such as exemplifi ed is purely pragmatically motivated. that notwithstanding, the use of some catchy english items such as ‘hello’, ‘lunch’, ‘-fail’, and – ‘whatsapp’ (as a verb) are for aesthetic eff ects. another example is seen in vd1 below, which is about the product vodacom dailee, of vodacom which gives customers one-hour free talk time. it features a famous tanzanian musician, diamond platnumz. the advert is made up of a number of intersentential codeswitching between standard swahili and english as well as inter-sentential codeswitching. codeswitched adverts with standard swahili and english vodacom dailee (vd1) fans wangu ni watu wangu. my fans are my people. asikwambie mtu. you don’t need to be told. dailee lazima niwe karibu na watu wangu, wanangu, kuwa karibu na mama yangu, na hata wadau wangu, and of course, my baby. i have to be close to my people daily, my children, and be near my mother, friends, and even my colleagues and of course my baby. kabla ya kupanda stage wana fanya saaa before mounting the stage they do sir, we are ready sir, we are ready nampigia mwanangu i call my child (on phone) bye honey kuwa karibu na watu wangu kwa dakika kumi tu. niko nao hewani saa moja zima bure dailee… to be around my people just for 10 minutes, legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 136 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) hello tanzania! hello tanzania! ongea saa moja bure. talk free for one hour. maisha ni murua. life is gracious. vodacom, kazi ni kwako ! vodacom, work is yours. the advert begins with platnumz getting ready backstage to mount the stage for a performance. the video shows the productive team including platnumz the performing artiste busy with preparation before start of the show. as he rehearses playing his guitar, he talks about being close to his fans, close family and friends, ‘his people’. as he does this, there are scenes of these people talking to him on their phones. then in the next scene, he is prompted by one of the production team members who tells him “sir, we are ready.” but before he goes on to the stage, he calls his wife and child and speaks to them, and he goes on to state that to be close to his people for just 10 minutes, he stays on the line daily for free for one hour. then he goes on stage and greets his waiting audience and fans, “hello tanzania!” and the advert continues with swahili, telling viewers to talk for free for one hour, daily. the advert contains a number of instances of both intrasentential and inter-sentential codeswitching between standard swahili and english as well as a tag switch. the fi rst sentence of the advert is a case of intra-sentential codeswitching. the sentence begins with an english noun, ‘fans’ and continues with standard swahili. the next sentence is purely swahili but it is followed by a sentence which features both intra-sentential codeswitching and tag switching. the english codeswitched item is ‘and of course, my baby’ the use of this english slang is intended to create a perception of youthfulness and ‘eliteness’. and the tag switch dailee, is the catch phrase in the advert emphasizing on the deal of the advert which is a one-hour free talk time daily. the next four sentences feature inter-sentential switching between swahili and english. however, in this legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 137 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts situation platnumz speaks swahili and the stage director prompts him using english ‘sir, we are ready’, this is followed by another sentence in swahili by platnumz and his wife responds in english ‘bye, honey’. so, the switches are not utterances from the same speaker as is usual with codeswitching. listening to the advert, it gives the impression of a deliberate manipulation of kiswahili and english to create an appealing utterance to the ear. another inter-sentential codeswitched item ‘hello tanzania’ is platnumz’s way of greeting his audience who receive him with much excitement. the advert ends with a couple of sayings in swahili. ‘life is gracious’, and ‘work is yours’ which can be interpreted as ‘life is great’ and ‘the ball is in your court.’ overall, this advert is very pleasant to the ears and, visually, it features people of all ages enjoying the service, emphasizing further the target audience for the advert. and of course, using a famous music artiste of platnumz’s status adds to the overall charm of the advert. codeswitched adverts in standard swahili and kiswahili cha mtaani from our investigation, the use of kcm has progressed from being limited to comic books and music to almost all communicative domains including advertisements. the primary characteristic of kcm in general is that it deviates from standard kiswahili by its special lexicon which can be described as lucid since it is in a constant process of rapid reconstruction. these lexicons are created by deliberate manipulation of existing lexical items to represent expressions of attitudes of jocular and provocative violation of linguistic norms. this property is characteristic of urban youth languages in general and in africa in particular (kießling & mous, 2004), e.g., sheng (abdulaziz & osinde 1997; mazrui 1995; moga & fee 1993; mbaabu & nzuga 2003). it is a recent trend in colloquial speech practice in tanzania to blend standard swahili and street swahili (kcm) with english terms and expressions to demonstrate being up to legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 138 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) date in a globalized world. as blommaert (1990, p. 24) puts it, “the use of english idiomatic expressions serves as a mark of worldliness, of being young and daring”. in this section, we examine adverts that feature codeswitching between standard swahili and kiswahili cha mtaani. this is done in such a way that the intended meaning of the advert to the target audience is achieved. in such instances where the sentence is made up of words and phrases from both standard swahili and kcm only, the fact that they involve codeswitching is not readily obvious except when one is profi cient in the kiswahili language and also conversant with kcm, since in terms of structure, standard swahili and kcm are rather similar. the fi rst advert of this category, ti1 is about the wide network coverage of tigo. the advert professes that the tigo network is available everywhere in tanzania. the text of the advert is mainly standard swahili codeswitched with kcm. codeswitched adverts with standard swahili and kcm tigo tumefi ka (ti1) dereva, mzigo huu ufi ke kwa mzee malubalu magorofani driver, this load should get to mr malubalu at magorofa. kama nilivyokuelekeza nusu saa uwe hapa as i have directed you, in half an hour you should be here. nimekupata vizuri bosi, kwa mzee malubalu maghorofani i undersand you very well boss, to mr. malubalu at maghorofa. una uhakika hutapotea? are you sure you will not get lost? usiwe na wasiwasi ushafi ka don’t worry, it will arrive. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 139 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts wee! weee! youuu! youuu! ushafi ka bosi usiwe na shaka. it will arrive boss don’t worry. bhana nikuulize? sir may i ask? kuuliza jero, kuelekeza buku. mjini hapa hakuna vya bure. asking is 500, directing is 1,000. in this city nothing is free. kwa mzee malubalu wapi? what is the direction to mr malabalu’s? nyosha moja kwa moja, usiende kushoto wala kulia. nitie buku jero. go straight, do not turn left or right. give me 1,500. narudi… safari inaendelea i am coming… the journey continues in the advert, a woman (a man dressed in a woman’s clothing) hands over a package to a driver and instructs him to deliver it to mzee malubalu in maghorofani and be back within 30 minutes. she then questions the driver if he is sure he would not get lost. the driver addressing her in swahili uses ‘bosi’ which is a vocabulary from kcm, assures her that he can do the task and asks her not to worry and that the package would be delivered. the driver begins his journey to mzee malubalu’s. on his way, he stops and asks a man on a bicycle for direction. the man tells him to go straight and to not turn right nor left and requests for the driver to pay him ‘buku jero’ kcm for one thousand, fi ve hundred tanzanian shillings in standard swahili. the driver lets him know he would pay him on his way back. the driver continues driving till he receives a call from the woman. he addresses her bosi once again and informs her that he had arrived. then unexpectedly, he sees mount kilimanjaro in his rear-view mirror and exclaims ‘i am lost!’. in the next scene, the map of tanzania is shown while a voice begins to announce that legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 140 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) tigo is available everywhere in tanzania and urges viewers to buy a tigo line to enjoy talking with family and friends wherever in tanzania as far as kilimanjaro! the advert features several instances of intra-sentential codeswitching between standard kiswahili and kcm. the strategy here is that kcm nouns are blended into standard kiswahili to give the language a streetwise tint with the intention to attract the attention of people of all statuses. for instance, a sentence like ‘nimekupata vizuri bosi, kwa mzee malubalu maghorofani’, the word bosi is a street term used mainly by the youth to refer to a person of higher status than them. bhana is the kcm word for bwana, ‘sir’. here, the blending constitutes an intra-sentential codeswitching of standard swahili with kcm. likewise, in ‘…nitie buku jero’. buku jero is a street term for one thousand, fi ve hundred shillings. just like vd1, the advert features both young and old people. in fact, the man who assisted the driver was an old man and he used the kcm term buku jero a pointer to the fact that the old generation is also part of the target audience of the advert. the advert at4, on a product known as airtel zone also employs intra-sentential codeswitching standard swahili and kcm. this advert’s aim is to convince individuals to subscribe to airtel zone, a service which off ers 99% discount. codeswitched adverts with standard swahili and kcm airtel zone (at 4) mambo dada? what’s up? poa. cool hii ndo mchongo yako ujue this is your style mi naiona mwanangu i can see that friend halafu kitakukaa design bcbg… it would be like designer fi t eee umeanza ee! you have started! legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 141 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts ‘nipe bei ya jioni mwanangu’ give me an evening (good) price. kwani una sh ngapi? how much shillings do you have for it? mi nakupa buku tano tu… i’ll give you only fi ve thousand… pata punguzo get a discount the advert commences with a lady approaching a shoe shop. she exchanges greetings with the shop attendant. the shop attendant selects a shoe and hands it over to her saying, “this is your style”. the lady agrees with the attendant saying “mi naiona mwanangu”, meaning “i can tell, friend”. the attendant tells her it would fi t her well. the lady replies by saying “eee umeanza eer”. she then tells the attendant to give her a low price by saying “nipe bei ya jioni”, ‘give me the evening price’. the shop attendant asks her how much she has, to which she replies “mi nakupa buku tano”, ‘i will give you fi ve thousand shillings.’ the attendant exclaims ‘aahh!” in disbelief. this advert ends with a narrator saying that one could get up to 99% discount on airtel zone. then it goes on to provide the short code for subscribing to airtel zone. the advert is observed to have a blend of standard kiswahili and kiswahili cha mtaani. for instance, ‘hii ndo mchongo yako ujue’, ‘nipe bei ya jioni mwanangu’ and ‘mi nakupa buku tano tu…’ the above sentences illustrate codeswitching between standard swahili and kcm. here again we observe that similar to ti1, the codeswitched items in kcm are single or compound nouns, but nicely blended with standard swahili. instances of codeswitching between standard swahili and kcm featuring similar kcm items are found in tc1 and ti2 (see appendices a and b). legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 142 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) codeswitched adverts with standard swahili, english and kiswahili cha mtaani the last type of codeswitching in the selected adverts is those that feature a blend of standard swahili, english, kcm. the fi rst example is another version of the airtel zone product that off ers subscribers up to 99% discounts, airtel zone (at 5) codeswitched adverts with standard swahili, english and kiswahili cha mtaani airtel zone (at 5) duka limejaa, hapa nitapata kila kitu. the shop is full. here i will get everything. karibu mdogo wangu nikusaidie nini? welcome my young brother, how may i help you? hiyo body spray bei gani? how much is this body spray? kumi na tano fifteen okay, feni? okay, fan? hiyo panga boy hapo juu elfu hamsini this “panga” boy up here is fi fty thousand. panga? panga? duh hatari hee! dangerous unaandika lakini? hope you are recording? si ndo hapo naorodhesha hunioni? is it that you do not see me? malapa? slippers? malapa ni sh. elfu moja. slippers is one thousand shillings nishamaliza. jumla sh ngapi? i am done. total price in shillings? jumla inakuwa ni kama sitini na tano elfu na mia tano the total is around sixtyfi ve thousand, fi ve hundred shillings. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 143 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts aaah mangi toa benti bhana, punguza aaa “mangi” remove “benti”, reduce. mbona unalia lia. kwani we umejipangaje? why are you lamenting. how did you prepare yourself? mangi mi nina buku. mangi i have thousand shillings. buku! ndo robo wewe… thousand shillings! you, its quarter…… the advert begins with a young man heading to a shop to buy things. at the shop, the attendant welcomes the young man and asks him what he wants. the young man enquires about the prices of a body spray, a fan, and slippers as the shop attendant writes in a book. the young man asks for the total sum of the items he enquired about and is given an estimate. he exclaims and expresses shock at the estimate and requests a discount. and the advert continues with a voice announcing the product that gives a discount of 99%. the text is made up of mainly standard swahili featuring instances of both intra-sentential codeswitching between standard swahili and kcm as well as codeswitching between standard swahili and english. however, there is no instance of the three codes all occurring in one sentence. both the codeswitched items english and kcm are mainly single nouns. the items in english are, body spray, okay, and boy and the kcm items are malapa ‘slippers’. bhana ‘sir’, and buku ‘thousand shillings’. bhana and buku, were used in the previous adverts. the codes are blended in a way to make the language appealing to the ears. this advert ends with a narrator saying that one can get the best reduction on airtel zone and provide the short code for airtel zone , a complete contrast with the situation in the advert where the shop attendant is horrifi ed at the request for an unrealistic reduction. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 144 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) the fi nal advert of this structure is another advert from airtel money. in this advert, mr. money (at6) the inter-sentential structure is covered by all three languages. codeswitched adverts with standard swahili, english and kiswahili cha mtaani mr. money (at6) mabibi na mabwana tunawaletea mr. money. tuma pesa kiuhakika ladies and gentlemen, we bring you mr. money send money reliably ongeza salio kiuhakika top up airtime reliably lipa bili kwa nafuu pay bills comfortably airtel money kiuhakika airtel money is reliable tuma pesa kwa spidi. send money fast usalama ni guarantee. safety is guaranteed haijalishi ulivyombali. it doesn’t matter how far you are ni salama salimini it’s absolutely comfortable papo hapo lipa luku. instantly pay for pre-paid electricity usilale gizani don’t sleep in the dark lipia king’amuzi pay for decoder ongeza salio chap chap kweli. mambo vipi? mimi ni mr money top up airtime quickly how’s things? i’m mr. money ninawaletea airtel money kwa njia nafuu, haraka na salama. i bring you airtel money, an easy fast and safe way. kutuma pesa, kulipa bili, kuongeza salio na mengineyo sending money, paying bills, topping up airtime and many others ukiwa na airtel money unaweza kufanya mengi zaidi kiuhakika if you have airtel money you can reliably do a lot. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 145 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts this advert is about how easy, fast and benefi cial it is to use airtel money. airtel money is an electronic service that enables its users to store funds, send and receive money, make payments and do a number of other transactions simply by using their mobile phones. the advert begins with a voice saying “mabibi na mabwana tunawaletea mr. money!” as the lights shine on a stage revealing three characters; two females and money (mr. money) in a red suit. the two female characters begin to dance as mr. money starts singing about the benefi ts of using airtel money. in the song, we get to know that it is safe to transact on airtel money and that distance is not a barrier when using airtel money. as the song ends, mr. money says he wants to introduce airtel money, an easy, fast, and safe way of sending money, paying bills, topping up airtime, and many other things. he goes on to say that when you are on airtel money you can reliably do so much. he ends by giving out the code for airtel money. we observe that the name of the product is in english, airtel money. although the advert advertises a diff erent product from at5, it has a similar structure. the text is made up of mainly standard swahili featuring instances of both intrasentential codeswitching between standard swahili and kcm as well as codeswitching between standard swahili and english. again, there is no instance of the three codes all occurring in one sentence. examples of these intra-sentential codeswitching are sentences such as ‘mabibi na mabwana tunawaletea mr. money.’, ‘usalama ni guarantee’ and ‘mimi ni mr money’ which have the structure of standard swahili codeswitched with english, while the sentences ‘ongeza salio chap chap kweli’ and ‘mambo vipi?’ are made up of mainly standard swahili codeswitched with kcm. there is one instance of tag switching represented by spidi. however, there is no instance of all the three codes occurring in one sentence. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 146 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) further discussion in this section, we briefl y discuss our fi ndings about the nature of language blending as demonstrated in the data. the above analyses of adverts have demonstrated that it is a norm for adverts of the telecos in tanzania, which are mainly multi-national to use more than one language in composing their adverts. as illustrated from the analyses above, usually the matrix language in these adverts is standard swahili and the codeswitched items are either english or kcm. three types of blending are identifi ed: standard swahili codeswitched with english, standard swahili codeswitched with kcm or standard swahili codeswitched with both english and kcm. these languages are carefully woven together in the various compositions in such a way as to attract the target audience. the nature of codeswitching in the adverts is simple. there are mostly instances of intra-sentential switches. in at1, unusually, the fi rst line of the advert is uttered in english “help! help! help!”. typically, the codeswitched item or sentence is embedded in the matrix language. the codeswitched items in these telecos adverts are standard terms or catch-phrases in the domain of telecommunication. they consist of nouns, verbs, interjections or noun phrases. this conforms to hamers and blanc’s (1989) cited in bi (2011, p. 60) statement that “the majority of mixings are lexical in nature and nouns are most often the substituted words.” there are also a few cases of tag switching where english words are used with swahili orthography such as ‘strim’ for stream and ‘supa’ for super in at1 and ‘dailee’ for daily in vd1. there are very few instances of codemixing where swahili affi xes or stems are used with english or kcm stems, such as in at3 ‘anafail’and kuchat. another observation is that sometimes codeswitching occurs between utterances of two speakers rather than utterances of one speaker. a typical example is vd1 where the switches to english are between platnumz’s, stage director and platnumz’s wife. the observations above reiterate the fact legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 147 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts that language blending in these adverts are carefully thought of and arranged for specifi c eff ects. they are not coincidental as with the case of naturally occurring conversation. conclusion the paper has demonstrated that most of the telecos in tanzania use intra-sentential codeswitching and inter-sentential codeswitching and some cases of tag switched items in their advert texts. the switching occurs in mainly three diff erent intra and inter-sentential codeswitched structures: standard swahili and street swahili (kiswahili cha mtaani), standard swahili and english, and standard swahili, street swahili (kiswahili cha mtaani) and english. an important observation is that where codeswitching in an advert involves all three codes, only two are combined in a sentence at a time. inter-sentential codeswitching also occurred mostly between the utterances of two speakers. all these peculiarities point to the fact that codeswitching in these adverts is not spontaneous, but carefully planned. another important observation is that apart from the language choice, other strategies are employed to reach the target audience. these strategies include the characters used; that is, featuring people who represent diff erent age groups as well as diff erent sociolinguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds. thus, there is the eff ort to blend language in such a way that all categories of consumers can identify with the advert. acknowledgment this study forms part of the school of languages (university of ghana) research project on language and communication in specifi c domains: negotiating multilingualism and constructing identities, funded by a grant from the mellon foundation. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 148 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) references abdulaziz, m. h., & osinde, k. 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(1969) the rise of a national language. london: methuen. hyperlinks to adverts: 1. https://youtu.be/3wt8_24reyo airtel zone (at2) 2. https://youtu.be/z8xz855pmaq ..... 5.2.1 tigo tumefikakila kona (ti1) 3. https://youtu.be/fldkjppfvbo tigo okoa pesa (ti2) 4. https://youtu.be/uo1esfg91iu mr. money (at6) 5. https://youtu.be/ibgktzehnxw airtel zone (at 5) 6. https://youtu.be/5jz33sgg2da ttcl rudi nyumbani (tc1) 7. https://youtu.be/naesr7uekg4 vodacom deilee (vd1) 8. https://youtu.be/uzunqwtyuws airtel yatosha at 3 9. https://youtu.be/mqh5hdsksug airtel 4g (at 1) 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r9u1nhcqck my airtel app (at4) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 151 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./language blending in tanzanian adverts appendix a this advert, tc1 is an advert from ttcl, where standard swahili is codeswitched with kiswahili cha mtaani. codeswitched adverts with standard swahili, english and kiswahili cha mtaani ttcl rudi nyumbani (tc1) wapi tena? where to? ahh washkaji, naenda kuserereka. aah friends, ... habari yako dada? how are you? poa. mambo? good. whatsup? poa. niserereshe. cool…. cha mia tatu eeh? that of 300 tsh right? kama kawa. as usual tayari. done okay, poa. okay, cool poa, karibu. cool, you are welcome appendix b codeswitched adverts with standard swahili, english and kiswahili cha mtaani tigo okoa pesa (ti2) in the example below, we observe that the sentences are made up of either pure swahili or standard swahili codeswitched with kcm. mpenzi, najua leo ni siku muhimu sana ya kumbukumbu ya ndoa yetu my love, i know today is a very important day of memory of our marriage. ila hii ni elfu kumi tu. this is only ten thousand. naomba unielewe mke wangu i want you to understand my wife. uwe na siku njema have a good day. legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 152 dzahene-quarshie, j. & sosoo, f./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) mke wangu, japo sikufaulu hesabu najua nguvu ya buku kumi my wife, even though i failed the calculation i know of the power of ten thousand shillings huu mzigo huu sio ya buku kumi. this is not ten thousand shillings. hebu tulize nafsi wangu, mke wako nimeacha kununua vifurushi vya kila siku, nanunua vya wiki. yaani badala ya kutumia elfu kumi na nne kununua vifurushi vya elfu mbili kila siku, nanunua vya tigo kwa shilling elfu kumi tu. na hiyo elfu nne niliyosave kila wiki ndo nilitumia baba. let’s ask ourselves, your wife has stopped buying daily packages, i buy weekly packages. that is, instead of using fourteen thousand to buy two thousand packages every day, i buy tigo for just ten thousand shillings. and that four thousand that i saved every week, i send it to dad. issue 34.1.indd legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 66 les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne : le cas de l’université du ghana james kofi agbo lecturer department of french university of ghana, legon, ghana email: jkagbo@ug.edu.gh elias kossi kaiza lecturer department of french university of ghana, legon, ghana email: ekkaiza@ug.edu.gh submitted: september 17, 2022/ accepted: april 26, 2023 / published: june 29, 2023 résumé l’étude s’ambitionne d’analyser les défi s des évaluations semestrielles en ligne chez les étudiants en licence au département de français à l’université du ghana. l’évaluation joue un rôle primordial dans le processus de l’enseignement/apprentissage en éducation. aujourd’hui, l’évolution des technologies, ainsi que l’arrivée de la pandémie de covid-19 depuis plus de deux ans, a provoqué un changement du système scolaire où les cours en présentiel sont transformés à une formation à distance (fad) et où les évaluations numériques sont plus privilégiées. au moyen d’un questionnaire destiné aux étudiants via google docs, les données nécessaires ont été collectées pour une analyse des diffi cultés rencontrés par les étudiants lors des évaluations en ligne. les résultats soulignent beaucoup de facteurs dont : le type d’outils numériques utilisés à l’usage inapproprié du système lms de l’université. l’étude propose aux étudiants de suivre une formation adéquate sur l’usage de lms sakai et de s’engager dans une autoformation afi n de surmonter les défi s relevés. mots clés : défi s, évaluation, outil numérique, enseignement/apprentissage, formation à distance agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v34i1.3s legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 67 agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne abstract the study aims at analysing the challenges of online semester assessments administered to undergraduate students in the french department at the university of ghana. assessment plays a vital role in the teaching/learning process in education. today, the evolution of technologies as well as the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic for more than two years has caused a change in the school system where face-to-face lessons are transformed remotely and where digital assessments are more preferred. by means of a student questionnaire via google docs, the necessary data were collected for an analysis of the challenges faced by students during online assessments. the results highlight many factors from the type of digital tools used to the inappropriate use of the university’s lms system. the study proposes an initial adequate training for students by the authorities on the use of lms sakai and student self-study engagement in order to overcome the challenges encountered. keywords: challenges, evaluation, digital tool, teaching and learning, remote/distance learning introduction l’évaluation des cours et la promotion de l’évaluation des cours sont des composantes importantes d’un système de valorisation de l’enseignement qui contribuent à la qualité de l’expérience des étudiants. l’évaluation des cours est un outil important de rétroaction pour les professeurs; c’est dire que lorsque le professeur évalue les apprenants après un cours, le résultat de cette évaluation donne une opportunité au professeur de voir le progrès de son enseignement et de prendre des mesures appropriées pour améliorer ses actions didactiques. c’est un acte pédagogique pratiqué au quotidien par les enseignants et faisant partie de la réalité scolaire actuelle (chapuis, 2011). les formes d’enseignement et d’évaluation qui s’eff ectuaient en présentiel dans les amphithéâtres connaissent une révolution aujourd’hui. ces formes se sont métamorphosées de même que les infrastructures et les outils pédagogiques. en eff et, l’arrivée imprévisible de la pandémie de covid-19 aujourd’hui, oblige presque toutes les institutions publiques legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 68 agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) comme privées à s’adapter à l’usage du numérique dans leurs fonctions quotidiennes. ainsi, les institutions de l’enseignement supérieur au ghana, y compris l’université du ghana, adoptent l’enseignement/apprentissage et l’évaluation à distance via diff érents lms (learning and management system). l’université du ghana (désormais ug), pour sa part, utilise le système dénommé sakai pour le processus d’enseignement/ apprentissage numérique. les cours théoriques et pratiques sont dispensés et toutes les évaluations semestrielles de l’année universitaire 2020/2021 ont été faites sur sakai. les cours, les forums de discussion entre enseignants-étudiants et les évaluations formatives et sommatives s’eff ectuent par le biais d’internet et des outils numériques (smartphones, ordinateurs, tablettes etc.). est-il possible de partager la question de lahire (1997) que le numérique change-t-il les « manières d’étudier » ? les étudiants devaient donc s’approprier les ressources off ertes par les établissements d’enseignement supérieur et dans ce contexte, sakai. cependant, nous avons constaté que la performance des étudiants de français lors des évaluations écrites de fi n de semestre sur sakai laisse beaucoup à désirer. autrement dit les examens semestriels faits en ligne par ces derniers ne produisent pas de bons résultats. la réfl exion sur la qualité de leurs performances écrites nous amène à poser quelques questions. questions de recherche 1. qu’est-ce qui explique la mauvaise performance des étudiants lors des évaluations semestrielles écrites en ligne ? 2. quel enseignement ont-ils reçu? à distance ou en présentiel? 3. les étudiants disposent-ils des outils numériques appropriés pour eff ectuer un apprentissage à distance ? 4. les étudiants maîtrisent et s’approprient-ils vraiment des ressources off ertes par l’université pour écrire des évaluations semestrielles en ligne? legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 69 objectif partant de l’hypothèse que la non-maîtrise des ressources numériques contribue à la mauvaise performance des étudiants. cette étude cherche à analyser les opinions des étudiants de la dernière année de licence (l4) par rapport aux diffi cultés rencontrées à l’évaluation écrite à distance via sakai dans une classe de français langue étrangère (fle). il s’agit ici des étudiants de niveau intermédiaire (b1/b2) selon le classement du cadre européen commun de reference pour les langues (cecrl, 2001). pour atteindre cet objectif, cette étude présente le contexte de la recherche partant de la notion d’évaluation scolaire en général, de l’intérêt croissant des outils numériques aux apprentissages et de l’évaluation des acquis en ligne. enseignement, apprentissage et évaluation scolaire enseignement/apprentissage de fle à ug au département de français de l’université du ghana, legon, la langue française est enseignée du premier cycle au troisième cycle. la langue française est principalement le moyen par lequel les professeurs enseignent et c’est par ce même code que les étudiants démontrent ce qu’ils ont appris. l’acquisition de cette langue est l’objectif pédagogique principal de l’enseignement et l’apprentissage de français langue étrangère. le programme d’enseignement au département est reparti en unités d’enseignement (ue) obligatoires à tous les niveaux. en troisième et quatrième années viennent s’ajouter des unités d’enseignement facultatives telles que la didactique du français langue étrangère (dénommée fle), le français des aff aires, l’introduction à la linguistique française et la littérature au choix des étudiants. la grammaire française & traduction semi-spécialisée i et ii, la littérature française et francophone ii, et les interactions orales basées sur des textes sélectionnés constituent les unités d’enseignement obligatoires pour les étudiants en quatrième année. quelle que soit l’unité agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 70 d’enseignement suivi, les étudiants sont évalués soit à l’écrit soit à l’oral pour apprécier leurs compétences acquises selon la description de chaque unité. ainsi, l’oral et l’écrit constituent les deux codes que les enseignants et les étudiants de fle utilisent la plupart de temps pour communiquer au département surtout en classe. l’enseignement, l’apprentissage et l’évaluation dans le département ont été en grande partie en présentiel jusqu’en 2020. c’est pendant les périodes de covid-19 où les institutions ont dû migrer vers la formation à distance que l’université du ghana commençait à utiliser zoom meeting, microsoft team, et autres systèmes de gestion de l’apprentissage comme sakai. ce nouveau mode d’enseignement et d’apprentissage pose des défi s initiaux aux enseignants aussi bien qu’aux apprenants, et ces défi s, par extension, interfèrent dans les processus d’évaluation des acquis par des étudiants. concept de l’évaluation scolaire la qualité de l’enseignement/apprentissage et ses diff érentes évaluations scolaires demeurent le noyau important d’une éducation de qualité. pourtant, le nombre et la qualité des évaluations, des pratiques pédagogiques et le mode d’évaluation sont confrontés à travers le monde à de graves diffi cultés systémiques liées à la pandémie sanitaire du covid-19 qui a presque converti le système présentiel de l’éducation en une formation à distance. dans l’enseignement/apprentissage classique traditionnelle, l’enseignant dispense ses cours et eff ectue des évaluations en présentiel avec les étudiants sauf pour des devoirs de maison. les contenus de chaque unité d’enseignement au niveau universitaire sont enseignés dans les salles de classe afi n de préparer les étudiants à une évaluation semestrielle encore appelée évaluation scolaire. sur la notion de l’évaluation scolaire, chapuis (2011) conçoit que l’évaluation est un concept répandu ayant déjà fait l’objet de nombreuses recherches en sciences de l’éducation agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 71 et, plus largement, en sciences humaines. il soutient que certains chercheurs se sont par exemple penchés sur la question de l’objectivité de la notation, démontrant par diff érentes expériences l’aspect subjectif des notes et le caractère souvent aléatoire de la réussite ou de l’échec qui en découle. dans cette perspective, piéron (1963) propose une étude sur la docimologie et la défi nie comme l’étude systématique des examens qui met en valeur les modes de notation, la variabilité interindividuelle et intra-individuelle des examinateurs, les facteurs subjectifs, etc. en eff et, certaines recherches ont par exemple montré qu’une même copie obtenait des notes très diff érentes d’un enseignant à l’autre, ou parfois avec le même enseignant, à quelques mois d’intervalle. bressoux & pansu (2003) soutiennent l’idée de chevallard (1992) selon laquelle la note a une fonction didactique de transaction car ce dernier admet que l’attribution d’une note n’est pas un acte mesurage mais un moment essentiel d’un processus plus large, celui de la négociation didactique. l’évaluation donne généralement des informations essentielles sur le travail et les compétences des apprenants aux enseignants d’où son caractère de classement, de sélection et d’orientation des apprenants en fonction des résultats et des moyennes obtenus. a priori, l’évaluation scolaire semble être une action plutôt réglementée et institutionnalisée mais, du fait qu’elle peut avoir des conséquences importantes sur l’avenir des apprenants, elle se trouve également au cœur des enjeux relationnels et aff ectifs majeurs, ne laissant jamais totalement indiff érents les protagonistes de l’école. faisant partie intégrante de l’éducation, l’évaluation se situe même au cœur de tout processus d’apprentissage (ceri, 2008), car quel qu’il soit, on s’attache toujours au résultat de l’apprenant dans l’enseignement. par conséquent, tout comme le souligne porcher (2004, p.79) l’évaluation est : « la clé qui permet de contrôler tout un système d’enseignement ». elle comprend, selon dietel et al (1991), toute méthode utilisée pour mieux comprendre les connaissances que possède un étudiant, soit pendant le programme d’apprentissage agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 72 ou à la fi n d’une séquence d’apprentissage. si bien que la notation peut devenir une source de manipulation, de marchandage, de bricolage ou d’arrangement ; elle demeure le refl et d’une négociation portant notamment sur le niveau et les savoirs que l’enseignant souhaite faire acquérir aux élèves. selon chevallard (1992), cela explique pourquoi les notes ne peuvent avoir une moyenne ni trop haute (maintenir un certain niveau d’exigence) ni trop basse (rester crédible), de même que leur dispersion ne peut elle-même être ni trop grande (ne pas se retrouver avec des niveaux trop diff érents dans la classe. de façon générale, il y aurait une tendance à surévaluer les bons élèves et à sous-évaluer les élèves réputés faibles si par exemple une même épreuve de français est corrigée par un certain nombre d’enseignants. pour perrenoud (1998), la réussite et l’échec scolaires sont des réalités socialement construites, dans leur défi nition globale aussi bien que dans l’attribution d’une valeur à chaque élève, à travers des pratiques d’évaluation qui suivent, pour une part, des échelles instituées et qui relèvent, pour le reste, de l’arbitraire de l’enseignant ou de l’établissement. perrenoud (idem) avoue que les notes n’ont donc rien d’objectif et sont vues comme des représentations fabriquées par l’école, qui défi nit des formes et des normes d’excellence, fi xe des seuils et des niveaux et distingue, en fi n de compte, ceux qui réussissent et ceux qui échouent. même si cette assertion de perrenoud refl ète la réalité scolaire, les notes d’évaluation demeurent quelque chose d’intérêt capital pour les étudiants surtout au niveau de l’enseignement supérieur. les étudiants se servent de ces notes d’évaluations pour mesurer leur progrès sur l’échelle des mentions à la fi n du programme d’études, ainsi, une faible note obtenue à une séance d’évaluation peut avoir un impact négatif sur l’étudiant. tout comme des institutions de l’enseignement supérieur, l’université du ghana conduit des évaluations des acquis des étudiants chaque semestre. l’université dispose de diff érents types d’évaluation y compris les évaluations formative et agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 73 sommative. d’une part, l’évaluation formative constitue de 30 à 40% de la note fi nale semestrielle de l’étudiant. cette évaluation prend en compte la participation des étudiants en classe, des présentations ou des séminaires eff ectués par ces derniers, des devoirs de classe ou des projets à réaliser selon l’unité d’enseignement, des examens de misemestre. d’autre part, l’évaluation sommative qui est de 50 à 60%, tient compte des examens de fi n de semestre. notons que des examens de misemestre sont communs à tous les cycles (du cycle 1 au cycle 3) alors une semaine du chaque semestre est allouée pour ces évaluations intermédiaires qui étaient, jusqu’à l’arrivée de la covid-19, en présentiel. à l’heure actuelle, l’enseignement/apprentissage prend des formes variées : présentiel, distance et hybride à cause des intérêts croissants des outils numériques. cependant, dans le contexte de cette étude, seule l’évaluation semestrielle écrite en ligne est en compte. cadre conceptuel l’évolution de l’usage des outils numériques le contexte de cette enquête est marqué par l’évolution de l’usage du numérique à l’aide de diff érents outils tels que l’internet, le smartphone, la tablette pour des buts divers y compris le but pédagogique. dans cette perspective, l’unesco (2013) résume l’apport des tic dans l’éducation en ces termes : les tic peuvent contribuer à l’accès universel à l’éducation, à l’équité dans l’éducation, à la mise en œuvre d’un apprentissage et d’un enseignement de qualité, au développement professionnel des enseignants ainsi qu’à une gestion, une gouvernance et une administration de l’éducation plus effi caces. (unesco). les chercheurs comme robitaille et maheu (1993) mettent en relief le développement des pratiques enseignantes et agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 74 l’identité professionnelle. ndibnu & kaiza (2018), en s’inspirant de varga et caron (2009), reviennent sur la conservation des acquis scolaires, les réseaux sociaux et la construction des passerelles entre les plateformes de formation publiques et les environnements technologiques privés. en fait, le web 2.0, par sa constante évolution, off re une opportunité ou plateforme de choix pour l’enseignement des langues et l’autonomisation des apprentissages par les apprenants. dans ce sens, les chercheurs comme béché (2012), ne manquent pas de souligner les nombreux apports de l’intégration des tic pendant les cours. les étudiants peuvent à tout moment lire, relire, voir, écouter et s’exercer sur les plateformes lms, utiliser les forums et chats pour collaborer et interagir avec leurs camarades et leurs tuteurs. des plateformes naissent pour améliorer la formation des étudiants en fle ou en tice, surtout, ceux qui désirent compléter ou accroître leurs connaissances. la croissance de la formation par internet est largement liée au progrès des technologies pour des services scientifi ques et didactiques qui impliquent les évaluations des formations. l’évaluation des acquis en ligne l’évaluation peut être tant en présentiel qu’à distance à travers le numérique. le numérique qui se réfère parfois « en ligne » couvre une gamme de réseaux (internet, facebook, youtube, etc). au cours de ces dernières décennies, l’évaluation en général et plus précisément des langues, a connu une évolution rapide sur le plan numérique. parlant du numérique, il recouvre à la fois les sciences et technologies de l’information et de la communication (informatique, électronique, télécommunications). le périmètre du numérique est donc plus large que celui de l’informatique et modifi e les activités humaines et sociales. ainsi, le numérique off re et peut off rir beaucoup de possibilités par rapport à l’enseignement/ apprentissage. il peut servir à dispenser et à suivre un programme de cours à distance, à accéder et à partager des informations agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 75 scientifi ques, travailler en collaboration et participer aux conférences parmi tant d’autres. des chercheurs (michaut, 2017; guibert & michaut, 2011) relèvent que la multiplicité des matériels connectés (ordinateur, smartphone, tablette, etc.) et des ressources numériques peut conduire les étudiants à adopter des usages diff érents de ceux prescrits par l’institution ou par les enseignants : se servir d’un smartphone comme calculatrice ou pour envoyer des messages textes (sms), télécharger les cours produits par d’autres étudiants plutôt que prendre des notes durant les enseignements ou encore plagier des documents. pour soutenir le point de vue de ces chercheurs, nous pouvons ajouter que la mauvaise maîtrise, la pratique inadéquate et/ou le manque de compétence des outils numériques peut également engendrer des conséquences néfastes sur la performance des apprenants si les examens sont eff ectués en ligne. comme l’affi rme audet (2011), les environnements d’apprentissage en ligne, maintenant courants, incluent tous des outils de soutien à l’évaluation et à la réalisation d’activités en réseau et en stimulent, en conséquence, l’usage. en fait, l’évaluation en ligne est surement favorisée par le développement rapide même de la formation par l’internet. l’étude de meunier et al. (2007) sur les avantages et les inconvénients que présentent le numérique auprès des étudiants québécois met en exergue la collaboration avec les collègues étudiants, la communication facile avec les enseignants, et la recherche supplémentaire sur les notions discutées en classe. cependant, fusaro et couture (2012) postulent que les étudiants et les enseignants utilisaient peu les outils « collaboratifs » tels que wiki, blog, journal de bord etc. mais ils se contentaient des outils technologiques « standard » comme des courriers électroniques, des outils de traitement de texte etc. dans leur étude, dahmani et ragni (2009) cherchent à mesurer l’eff et des technologies de l’information et de la communication (désormais tic) sur la performance des étudiants en licence. ils indiquent que l’usage de l’internet a une infl uence contrastée sur la performance des résultats aux examens. agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 76 dans leur étude, amadieu et tricot (2015) énumèrent le but, l’attente de réussite, le sentiment de contrôle exercé sur l’apprentissage aussi bien que le sentiment de compétence dans le domaine comme des variables psychologiques qui infl uencent la motivation des étudiants. de cette assertion, il convient de dire que les étudiants doivent avoir ce sentiment de compétence non seulement dans la matière évaluée mais aussi dans la manipulation des outils numériques utilisés par l’institution pour pouvoir passer des examens à distance. le manque de cette compétence technologique peut conduire à une mauvaise performance lors des évaluations à distance. toutes ces études portent sur les étudiants d’un pays développé (le canadaquébec). il est diffi cile de trouver des études sur les évaluations scolaires à distance dans le contexte ghanéen ; ce qui sert de motivation à réaliser ce travail sur l’impact des évaluations semestrielles sur les étudiants du niveau 400 au département de français à l’ug. méthodologie de l’enquête le lieu d’enquête de cette étude est précisément le département de français de l’université du ghana. c’est l’une des universités publiques du ghana. la licence couvre une période de quatre ans. le département est composé de quatre niveaux (niveau 100, 200, 300 et 400) et de diverses unités d’enseignement (ue). la population cible de cette étude est le niveau 400, c-à-d la quatrième année de licence. ces étudiants sont en fi n de cycle. un questionnaire a été adressé aux étudiants en ligne via google docs entre le 25 et le 28 juin 2021. sur les 300 étudiants de français au niveau 400, 96 ont répondu au questionnaire. le cadre du questionnaire était tel que le répondant ne peut pas répondre à la question suivante si la présente demeure sans réponse. cet échantillon représente 32% des étudiants en 4e année de licence en fle à l›université du ghana. nous avons choisi d’administrer le questionnaire et de collecter les données au travers google docs puisque tous les cours et les agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 77 examens semestriels de l’année 2020/2021 s’eff ectuent via les outils numériques. soulignons que la diff usion du questionnaire sur les diff érentes plateformes whatsapp des étudiants et son remplissage n’ont pas été sans diffi culté. l’étude s’appuie sur la méthode quali-quantitative pour aboutir à son objectif. d’une part, la méthode qualitative nous a servi à expliquer les opinions partagées des étudiants concernant leurs expériences des évaluations semestrielles face à l’usage du sakai. d’autre part, la méthode quantitative a servi à analyser les données statistiques obtenues du questionnaire par les répondants. présentation et analyse des données information sur le profi l des répondants cette partie se consacre à la présentation des données sociodémographiques des participants. les informations personnelles des répondants ont été présentées dans cette partie. tableau 1 : répartition des répondants par sexe sexe fréquence pourcentage femme 82 85.4 homme 14 14.6 total 96 100 le tableau 1, ci-dessus montre que le pourcentage des étudiantes de sexe féminin (85,4%) dépasse largement celui de sexe masculin (14,6%). l’enquête a donc regroupé un nombre inéquitable des étudiants au niveau des sexes. agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 78 tableau 2 : répartition des répondants par âge âge fréquence pourcentage 16-20 3 3.1 21-25 91 94.8 26-30 2 2.1 31-35 0 0 total 96 100 le tableau 2 ci-dessus indique qu’il y a 96 étudiants au total qui ont participé à l’enquête. en ce qui concerne leur âge, nous avons constaté que l’âge des étudiants varie de 16 à 30 ans. il est à noter que la plupart d’entre eux, ont entre 21 et 25 ans, ce qui constitue 91 étudiants soit 94,8 %. les enquêtés de 16 à 20 ans sont 3, représentant 3,1% et 2 étudiants sont dans la tranche d’âge de 26 à 30 ans soit 2,1 %. l’âge d’un apprenant de fle est pertinent parce que cela joue un grand rôle dans l’enseignement/ apprentissage d’une langue étrangère. information sur des outils numériques et des sources d’internet utilisés par les répondants cette section porte sur les diff érents outils déployés par les étudiants qui suivaient les études en ligne. tableau 3 : outils numériques utilisés par des étudiants aux examens en ligne outils numériques le plus utilisés à l’examen fréquence pourcentage smartphone 69 71,9 tablette 3 3,1 ordinateur portable 24 25 total 96 100 agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 79 la question posée dans ce tableau 3, cherche à savoir les appareils numériques utilisés par les étudiants pour faciliter leur participation aux examens en ligne. selon les réponses données par les participants, 69 répondants, soit 71,9% utilisent des smartphones tandis que 24 étudiants, soit 25 % se servent des ordinateurs portables. néanmoins, 3 étudiants, soit 3,1 % utilisent des tablettes à l’examen semestriel en ligne. tableau 4 : sources d’internet utilisées par des étudiants pour se connecter à lms (sakai) au campus de ug sources d’internet fréquence pourcentage le wifi de ug au département/campus 29 32,2 ug lan au département/ campus 1 1,1 le wifi de ug à la cité 51 53,1 ug lan à la cité 15 15,6 total 96 100 a cette étape, les opinions des étudiants sont sollicitées concernant les sources d’internet utilisées la plupart du temps pour se connecter à lms (sakai). selon le tableau 4 ci-dessus, 51 étudiants, soit 53,1% confi rment qu’ils utilisent la plupart du temps le wifi de ug à la cité pour se connecter à lms, alors que 29 étudiants, soit 32,2% intiment qu’ils emploient souvent le wifi de ug au département et sur campus pour se connecter à lms (sakai). par contre, 15 étudiants, 15,6% indiquent qu’ils utilisent ug lan à la cité pour la connexion à lms (sakai). seul(e), un étudiant(e), soit 1,1 % signale l’utilisation de ug lan au département et sur campus pour se connecter à lms. agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 80 tableau 5 : evaluation de la source d’internet à ug par les étudiants pour se connecter à sakai vitesse d’internet fréquence pourcentage très mauvaise 17 17,7 mauvaise 17 17,7 moyenne 42 43,8 bonne 15 15,6 excellente 5 5,2 total 96 100 ici, les opinions des étudiants sont sollicitées concernant la vitesse de la source internet ug qu’ils utilisent pour se connecter à sakai. selon le tableau 5 ci-dessus, 42 étudiants, soit 43,8%, affi rment que la vitesse d’internet pour se connecter à sakai est moyenne, alors que 15 répondants, soit 15,6%, stipulent que la vitesse d’internet est bonne. en plus, 5 étudiants, soit 5,2% ont de l’opinion que la vitesse d’internet pour se connecter à sakai est excellente. cependant, 17 répondants, soit 17,7 %, sont d’avis contraire, pour eux la vitesse d’internet de ug pour se connecter à sakai est très mauvaise et 17 étudiants, soit 17,7% aussi intiment que la vitesse d’internet pour se connecter à sakai est mauvaise. information sur la formation relative à l’usage des outils numériques l’enquête cherche à comprendre si les étudiants ont une formation pratique par rapport à l’utilisation des outils numériques d’apprentissage. agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 81 tableau 6 : participation des étudiants à la session de formation sur les outils d›apprentissage en ligne organisée par l’ug formation sur les outils numériques de l’ug fréquence pourcentage oui 13 13,5 non 35 36,5 pas au courant 48 50 total 96 100 dans le tableau 6 ci-dessus, la moitié des étudiants enquêtés (48), soit 50%, indiquent qu’ils ne sont pas au courant d e la formation sur les outils d’apprentissage en ligne sur sakai organisé par l’ugcs (university of ghana computing systems), alors que, 13 étudiants, soit 13,5 % affi rment qu’ils ont participé à la session de formation sur les outils d’apprentissage en ligne sur sakai organisé par l’ug. par contre, 35 étudiants, soit 36,5 % signalent la non-participation à cette session de formation off erte. tableau 7 : fréquence d’utilisation du sakai par les étudiants fréquence d’usage du sakai fréquence pourcentage chaque jour 15 15,6 cinq fois par semaine 68 70,8 quatre fois par semaine 7 7,3 une fois par semaine 6 6,3 total 96 100 agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 82 d’après les données du tableau 7 ci-dessus, 68 étudiants, soit 70,8%, indiquent qu’ils utilisent sakai durant le cours de fle, 15 étudiants ; soit 15, signalent l’utilisation quotidienne de sakai en cours de fle, alors que 7 étudiants ; soit 7,3%, disent qu’ils utilisent sakai trois fois par semaine en classe. néanmoins, 6 étudiants, soit 6,3% confi rment qu’ils n’utilisent le sakai qu’une seule fois par semaine pour le cours de fle. information sur l’application des outils numériques pour passer un examen cette sous-rubrique présente les opinions des étudiants par rapport à la maîtrise des technologies pour passer l’épreuve d’examen semestriel. tableau 8 : evaluation de la passation d’examen en ligne par les étudiants evaluation des passations d’examen en ligne fréquence pourcentage bien 20 20,8 assez bien 57 59,4 passable 17 17,7 pauvre 2 2,1 total 96 100 le tableau 8 révèle les compétences des étudiants par rapport à l’application de la technologie dans l’apprentissage et la passation d’examen du fle en linge. les statistiques dans ce tableau indiquent les diff érents niveaux des compétences des apprenants. la majorité, soit 59,4% des répondants ont une connaissance assez bien dans la manipulation des tâches d’apprentissage en ligne pouvant les aider à l’examen. seul deux étudiants, soit 2,1 % ont une connaissance inadéquate dans l’apprentissage numérique et/ou dans la passation d’examen. agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 83 tableau 9 : opinion des étudiants sur le temps alloué pour les épreuves de français à l’examen deux heures de temps allouées pour les épreuves de français à examens sont suffi santes fréquence pourcentage oui 22 22,9 non 74 77,1 total 96 100 le tableau 9 montre qu’une majorité des répondants, soit 77,1%, indiquent que le temps alloué pour les épreuves d’examens ne sont pas suffi santes, tandis que 22 répondants, soit 22,9% trouvent que le temps alloué pour les épreuves de français est suffi sant. tableau 10 : diffi cultés rencontrées par des étudiants à l’examen en ligne (sakai) diffi cultés à l’examen en ligne (sakai) fréquence pourcentage oui 77 80,2 non 19 19,8 total 96 100 d’après le tableau 10, 80,2% de répondants conçoivent qu’ils rencontrent des diffi cultés lors des examens en ligne, tandis que seule 19,8 % ne trouvent aucune diffi culté aux examens en ligne sur sakai. agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 84 tableau 11 : les type de diffi cultés rencontrées type de diffi cultés fréquence pourcentage temps alloué 40 51,9 problèmes de connexion internet 13 16,9 ralentissement d’internet entraînant un retard de téléchargement des fi chiers avant les délais 24 31,2 total 77 1010 nous avons remarqué que 40 répondants, soit 51,9%, indiquent que le temps alloué lors de la composition des examens en ligne constitue un défi , alors que, 13 répondants, soit 16,9%, signalent plutôt des problèmes de connexion internent. en plus, 24 répondants, soit 31,2% indiquent que le ralentissement d’internet entraîne un retard de téléchargement des fi chiers avant les délais de soumission. agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 85 tableau 12 : suggestions des étudiants pour améliorer l’examen semestriel en ligne pendant la période de covid-19 suggestions pour améliorer l’examen en ligne au milieu de la pandémie de covid-19 fréquence pourcentage il faudrait consacrer plus de temps aux examens 66 68,8 examens en présentiel seraient les meilleurs 10 10,4 clarté des consignes par rapport aux questions d’examen devraient être plus compréhensible 5 5,2 bonne connexion du réseau pendant les examens 15 15,6 total 96 100 en ce qui concerne les suggestions de la part des répondants pour l’amélioration des examens en ligne pendant la période de covid-19, 66 répondants, soit 68,8% suggèrent qu’il faudrait consacrer plus de temps aux examens, alors que 10 répondants, soit 10,4% pensent que les examens en présentiel seront mieux que les examens en ligne. en plus, 5 répondants, soit 5,2% proposent la clarté des consignes par rapport aux questions d’examen en période de la covid-19, tandis que 15 répondants, soit 15,6% ont de l’opinion qu’une meilleure connexion du réseau internet au campus pourra améliorer en période de cette crise sanitaire. discussion et propositions la discussion des résultats présentés nous permet de bien comprendre et apprécier la situation numérique de la agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 86 didactique de langue surtout du français langue étrangère auprès des étudiants de la quatrième année de l’université du ghana. les résultats révèlent que les femmes constituent la majorité d’étudiants en fle et la plupart des répondants ont au-delà de 20 ans. cette information préliminaire suppose que les femmes ont plus de passion ou un fort désir pour l’étude des langues ; ceci confi rme déjà l’assertion de tosuni (2017) que les fi lles manifestent une plus grande motivation pour l’étude des langues étrangères que les garçons. etant donné que la grande partie des participants est très jeune et que la jeunesse s’abonne aux réseaux sociaux, l’on aurait pensé que l’application des technologies dans l’enseignement/ apprentissage numérique ne poserait aucune diffi culté à ces étudiants. cependant, cette perception est très loin de la réalité. il est important de souligner qu’un bon nombre d’étudiants ne possède pas d’ordinateur portable, ainsi plus de la moitié utilise le smartphone. de plus, le problème de réseau et la vitesse du réseau limité constitue une entrave pour la majorité surtout pendant l’examen semestriel en ligne. cette diffi culté peut être attribuée au fait que seule une minorité d’étudiants a participé à la formation tutorale off erte sur l’usage de lms sakai qui est utilisé à l’université du ghana. la nonparticipation des étudiants à cette formation pourrait être due soit au manque d’information de la part de l’institution, soit une attitude de laisser-faire des étudiants concernant les cours et les examens en ligne. cette attitude des étudiants confi rment l’idée que les limites d’une formation font partie de contraintes contextuelles de tout processus d’apprentissage (mastafi , 2014 ; unesco, 2011 ; zhao & bryant, 2006). notons que l’étudiant désireux d’apprendre dans ce monde numérique doit être prêt à se donner à une autoformation même en dehors des cours magistraux. d’ailleurs, comme beaucoup d’étudiants n’utilisent pas régulièrement le lms sakai, il serait sans doute diffi cile pour ces derniers de bien l’utiliser à l’examen semestriel. agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 87 bien que les étudiants soient compétents par rapport aux tâches d’apprentissage en ligne et que les consignes de l’examen soient compréhensibles, les questions posées mêmes semblent un peu diffi cile selon le rapport des enquêtes. en plus, les participants rencontrent des diffi cultés aux examens semestriels en ligne concernant les temps alloués aux épreuves individuelles. nous pouvons attribuer cela au fait que les étudiants démontrent une maitrise insuffi sante de l’usage numérique pour des tâches académiques voire des examens ; ce qui s’aligne avec l’hypothèse de fusaro & couture (2012) que l’ordinateur est, selon eux, plutôt utilisé pour réaliser des exposés ou des textes écrits que pour préparer un examen. toutes ces diffi cultés susmentionnées par des étudiants contribuent énormément à la mauvaise performance aux évaluations semestrielles. en réalité, la performance des étudiants en 4e année en grammaire et traduction semi-spécialisée en ligne au second semestre a été très faible par rapport à leur performance dans la même matière en présentiel au premier. la présence de telles diffi cultés chez les étudiants de l’enseignement supérieur à l’ère numérique nous ramène à partager l’avis de leroux et nolla (2022) sur une émergence de pratiques évaluatives qui intègrent les technologies numériques afi n de répliquer, d’amplifi er et de transformer l’évaluation des compétences des apprenants. pour améliorer ou faciliter les examens semestriels en ligne, les participants pensent qu’un temps maximum doit être alloué à chaque épreuve en tenant compte de la vitesse de connexion du réseau disponible à l’institution. si bien qu’on évolue en numérique, il serait souhaitable de modèles d’évaluation semestrielle tenant comptant des paramètres de connexion et surtout face à un grand eff ectif d’étudiants dont l’utilisation simultanée de l’internet réduit la vitesse du réseau. outre, les questions des examens en ligne doivent être plus compréhensibles du fait que l’enseignant ne sera pas présent pour éclairer les consignes si besoin. agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 88 l’étude propose enfi n que les étudiants participent à la formation off erte par l’université sur l’usage de lms sakai et s’engagent en autoformation pour un enseignement/apprentissage automatisé qui pourrait permettre leur participation facile aux examens semestriels. conclusion l’évaluation des étudiants en ligne est susceptible de transformer non seulement le processus d’examen de fi n de semestre et les façons d’évaluer, mais aussi notre vision de l’évaluation dans l’apprentissage. dans cette étude, nous nous sommes données comme objectif d’analyser les défi s des évaluations semestrielles en ligne chez les étudiants en quatrième année de licence au département de français à l’université du ghana. une enquête descriptive et une approche quali-quantitative ont été utilisées pour traiter le sujet. les informations ont été collectées auprès de 96 participants au moyen de questionnaire via google docs. les résultats révèlent que la majorité (71,9%) des participants utilise les smartphones comme l’un des outils numériques pour composer les examens de fi n de semestre en ligne. un bon nombre d’étudiants, soit 53,1% indiquent qu’ils utilisent la plupart du temps le wifi de ug en cité pour se connecter à lms sakai pendant les examens semestriels en ligne. cependant, de nombreux participants suggèrent que pour améliorer des examens numériques, il faudrait consacrer plus de temps aux épreuves. alors qu’une minorité de répondants pensent que les examens en présentiel seront mieux que ceux dispensés à distance. pour eux, non seulement le problème de connexion d’internet leur empêche de fi nir des épreuves mais aussi ils n’ont pas de maitrise adéquate sur l’application des outils numériques pour passer des examens en linge. de plus, certains enquêtés pensent que la bonne connexion du réseau internet au campus pourra aider à améliorer la passation des examens semestriels en ligne. il y a une admission des diffi cultés lors des examens en ligne. ces agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 89 diffi cultés sont largement attribuées au temps alloué aux examens et à la mauvaise connexion d’internet qui entraîne un retard de téléchargement des fi chiers avant les délais de soumission. il est indicatif que les étudiants ne souhaitent pas utiliser le numérique pendant les examens semestriels. cette façon de penser ou cette orientation des étudiants mérite une étude complémentaire pour déceler leurs véritables intentions dans ce monde émergeant des technologies où l’enseignement/apprentissage se transforme en numérique. agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 90 références amadieu, f. & tricot, a. 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(1993). les réseaux sociaux de la pratique enseignante et l’identité professionnelle : le cas du travail enseignant au collégial. revue des sciences de l’éducation, 19(1), 87-112. tosuni, g. (2017). la question du genre dans l’apprentissage d’une langue étrangère. (mémoire de master), université de fribourg. unesco (2011). tic unesco : un référentiel de compétences pour les enseignants. organisation des nations unies pour l’éducation et la culture. téléaccessible à l’adresse http://unesdoc. unesco.org/images/0021/002134/213475f.pdf. zhao, y. et bryant, f. l. (2006). can teacher technology integration training alone lead to high levels of technology integration? a qualitative look at teachers’ technology integration after state mandated technology training. electronic journal for the integration of technology in education, 5: pp. 53-62. agbo, j. k. & kaiza, e. k./les défi s de l’évaluation du français langue étrangère en ligne issue 34.1.indd legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 92 ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v34i1.4s promoting ghanaian languages: the role of telenovela series yvette akuorkor afowa ussher senior lecturer department of adult education and human resource studies university of ghana, legon, ghana email: yaussher@ug.edu.gh yvonne a. a. ollennu senior lecturer department of ga-dangme education university of education, winneba, ghana email: yaaollennu@uew.edu.gh submitted: september 15, 2022 / accepted: april 26, 2023 / published: june 29, 2023 abstract telenovelas have become an attractive form of entertainment for many ghanaians largely because of the use of local ghanaian languages as voiceovers during telecast. the question that arises is – does the telecast of telenovelas in a local language play any role in the promotion of ghanaian languages? using focus group discussions and in-depth interviews, we explored the role of telenovelas with voice-overs in the promotion of ghanaian languages among residents of some communities in accra, ghana; specifi cally, lapaz, osu and gbawe mallam communities, university students and market women. findings show that due to low english literacy levels, voice-over telenovelas were preferred among residents in lapaz community and the market women. a privately-owned television station, max tv, emerged as the station with a wider audience due to its innovative broadcasting strategy of voice-over telenovelas using the ghanaian (akan) language. overall, the telenovelas appear to be promoting the akan language by exposing viewers to lexical knowledge, facilitating the acquisition of legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 93 new vocabulary items, and shaping children’s learning of akan. this paper, therefore, unearths the signifi cance of glocalization of telenovelas in the promotion of local languages in ghana. keywords: telenovela, ghanaian local language, glocalization, promotion, voice-overs introduction telenovelas originated from latin america and have attracted large viewers from across the globe, transcending age, gender, social class and community (asiamah & oforibirikorang, 2018). the word “telenovela” is derived from the spanish word “tele” meaning distance and “novella” meaning story (stavans, 2010). the stories are crafted in interesting ways to attract a wide viewing audience. telenovelas have made their way into ghana and many ghanaians delight in viewing them. it all started in the mid-nineties, when the state-owned television known as ghana television fi rst showed a telenovela of brazilian origin titled ‘isaura’ (1996). thereafter, a private television called tv3 provided ghanaians with mexican telenovelas like ‘esmeralda’ (in 1997), ‘acapulco bay’ and ‘maria de los angeles’ (in 1998). since the fi rst telecast of a telenovela, it has become a popular programme and has been aired on almost all state-owned and private ghanaian television stations (hlormenyor, 2017). with a multiplicity of diff erent tv stations, ghanaians have viewed many telenovela series which include la usurpadora (1998), rosalinda (1999), the revenge (2002-2003), second chance (2005-2006), storm over paradise (20072008), cursed by the sea (2009-2010), teresa (2010-2011), etc. in most cases, the main character’s name is taken for the title because viewers tend to have peculiar attachments to them. for instance, a telenovela named ‘brothers’ (season one started in the year 2020)1 became popularly known among its viewers as ‘cardo’ (the name refers to the main character in the series). it is quite interesting to see ghanaian viewers caught up in traffi c 1 season 2 of brothers is now being telecast on max tv. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 94 watching the telenovela on their mobile phones because they just cannot aff ord to miss an episode. this refl ects an addiction to telenovelas among some ghanaian viewers. to hlormenyor (2017), telenovelas often carry diff erent storylines such as love and marital relationships that often appeal to their viewers, generating their desire to watch the next episode as one ends. apart from the storylines which attract viewers in ghana, the use of a ghanaian language via voice-overs has made it a popular programme, widening the viewership to include a larger population of mainly illiterate or semi-literate ghanaians. it must be pointed out that the local language translation using voice-overs was initiated by an akan-speaking television station called united television (utv) during the telecast of the telenovela titled ‘wild at heart’ which was popularly called ‘maricruz’ based on the name of the main character (hlormenyor, 2017). other ghanaian tv stations such as adom tv, obonu tv, gtv and max tv followed this new broadcast strategy and popularized the telenovelas. the use of voice-overs in twi, according to dsane-laryea (2019), has led to the coinage of a new television programming lexicon, “twinovela” (a combination of the language “twi” with the lexical item “novela”) among viewers. the use of the ghanaian language through translation has not only led to the indigenization of the content of the telenovelas but also refl ects the localization of a foreign cultural artefact which has gained a global status through broadcasting. such indigenization and linguistic adaption of a foreign programme content refl ect how the world has become a global village (globalization) where transmission of culture, in this case, the telenovela via broadcasting has become so widespread that is has been adapted to suit the viewer’s local context. the process involved here is what has come to be generally known as “glocalization”. glocalization, that is, global mass media often portrayed in a local context, gives people a better sense of identity as well as a familiar lens through which to view global ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 95 media. glocalisation suggests that people need a local context to understand or appreciate global phenomena. the globalisation of media consumption and the need for glocalisation refl ects the cultural similarities and diff erences people across the world share. this interplay of the global and the local is necessary to fi nd an appropriate meaning for the telenovela series (dsanelaryea, 2019). against this backdrop, this paper explores how the indigenization and glocalization of these foreign telenovelas in the context of their prevalence aff ect the promotion of local languages in ghana. to this end, the paper attempts to answer these questions: which tv station is the favourite of voice-over telenovelas of viewers? what are the reasons for watching telenovelas telecast in ghanaian languages? has the indigenization and glocalization of telenovelas promoted ghanaian languages? methodology using a qualitative exploratory research design via indepth interviews and focus group discussions (fgds), data were collected from telenovela viewers from three communities in accra, two major markets and two universities. accra was chosen as a study site since it is the capital of ghana and its residents have access to television and can access the diff erent television channels to watch these telenovelas. within this study site, we purposively selected seven communities where there appeared to be community interest in telenovelas, based on the researcher’s observation. these communities include lapaz, osu and gbawe mallam. lapaz, as an urban area in accra is one of the most popular and busiest commercial areas. it is densely populated and has many households consisting of compound houses2. many residents of this area are seen watching telenovelas throughout the day3. osu community, known for its 2 compound house is a ghanaian english phrase meaning a multi-household house. 3 people tend to congregate at the homes of those who possess television sets or at shops to watch the telenovelas. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 96 busy commercial, restaurant and nightlife activities, is located about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) east of the central business district, accra. gbawe mallam is a peri-urban community located on the main kaneshie-winneba highway. in addition to these three communities, makola and agbogbloshie markets (two major markets in accra) were also selected for interaction with the market women. to further get diverse views for the study, two universities, university of ghana (ug) and university of education, winneba, (uew) students were also sampled for the study. two fgds were conducted in each of the three communities, totaling six. the fgds were conducted in the homes of frequent telenovela viewers. the homes chosen were households with at least three families residing on the compound. two members from each family were selected to participate in the fgds. the fgds comprised 8 members per group. the homes selected in these three communities were based on researchers’ frequent visits to these communities and observed that these homes were frequent viewers and addicted to telenovelas with voice-overs. in the two selected markets, in-depth interviews were conducted with market women who were frequent viewers of telenovelas. these women were identifi ed through the snowball technique. eight in-depth interviews were conducted in each market following the argument of guest et al. (2006) that in studies of more heterogeneous samples, 12 interviews will suffi ce. to this end, we had 16 participants interviewed as data saturation was reached after the 14th interview, at which point no new concepts emerged from subsequent interviews (patton, 2014). our sample size was also deemed adequate as sample size determination is guided by the criterion of informational redundancy, that is, sampling can be terminated when no new information is elicited by sampling more units (lincoln & guba, 1985). to get further insights and diverse views into the research goal, four fgds were conducted among university ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 97 students who were interested in telenovelas with voice-overs. these viewers were identifi ed through the snowball sampling technique. two fgds were conducted in each university among fi rst and fi nal year students. eight (8) members per group from these universities (ug and uew) participated in these fgds. two data collection instruments, namely fgds and indepth interviews, were used to strengthen the reliability and validity of the study. as argued by yin (2011) data triangulated from diff erent sources add to the study’s credibility and trustworthiness. in exploratory qualitative research designs, the views of participants are sought more closely, so that insight can be gained into their thoughts in relation to the question of interest (smith & mcgannon, 2018). in this regard, an interview guide was developed based on the study’s objectives. the guide was delineated into four sections namely: participants’ background, favourite telenovela tv stations watched, reasons for watching voice-over telenovelas and views on whether or not voice-over telenovelas promoted ghanaian languages. due to the covid-19 pandemic, all covid-19 protocols were observed during the data collection in terms of maintaining social distance and wearing of masks. the interviews were conducted from september to november 2021. participants made themselves available at their own convenience. the interview sessions lasted about 30-45 minutes. verbal consent was obtained from participants before interviews commenced, and anonymity was also guaranteed by the decision to use pseudonyms. the interviews were conducted in both english and a ghanaian local language that participants felt at ease with. this approach of using both english and a local language was adopted to make participants feel at ease to answer the questions without having to worry about expressing themselves in english when one is not that capable. these fgds were recorded based on the consent of the participants. the english language was the option chosen by the university students as it is the major language of instruction across all universities and all participants ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 98 could easily communicate in it. the university students’ fgds were conducted online via zoom and were also recorded. the online was opted for by the university students as that made it easier for them to join wherever they were during the interview session which was conducted in the evening (between 7pm and 8pm) on a weekend. the evening and weekends were deemed appropriate as these were the times these students were less busy with academic work and available for the fgds. in all 128 participants (see table 1) were used for the study. table 1: sources of data collection female male fgd 1  lapaz 4 4  osu community 5 3  gbawe mallam community 5 3 total 14 10 24 university of ghana  first year 4 4  final year 7 1 total 11 5 16 university of education  first year 7 1  final year 6 2 total 13 3 16 fgd 2  lapaz community 5 3  osu community 7 1  gbawe mallam community 6 2 total 18 6 24 ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 99 university of ghana  first year students 6 2  final year students 6 2 total 12 4 16 university of education  first year students 7 1  final year students 7 1 total 14 2 16 in-depth interviews  agbogbloshie market 8  makola market 8 total 16 16 total 128 study participants’ background perceived to be of interest to women, telenovelas have, however, also caught the attention and interest of men, particularly in the communities of lapaz and gbawe mallam and students in the university. more than half 4 (82 out of 112) of our participants were females with the remaining being male participants (30). the average age of our participants was 28 with the youngest participants being 18 years and the oldest being 50 years old. about 39.1% of the study participants were married, 42.9% were single, 11.7% were in co-habiting unions and 6.2% were separated. our analysis also shows that apart from the 64 university students having tertiary educational backgrounds, about 31.2%5 of participants from the selected communities and 25% (i.e. 4 out of 16) of market women had tertiary education. the analysis showed that (47.9%)6 of the viewers from the 4 that is 73.3%. the total (112) here excludes the market women (16) interviewed. the total fi gure (112) here includes the interviewees from the three communities and university students. 5 that is 15 out of 48 participants. 6 that is 23 out of 48 participants. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 100 communities and the markets (50%)7 have secondary education (see table 2). this suggests that telenovelas have attracted all irrespective of educational background. table 2: demographic information of participants personal information number gender  male 30  female 98 total 128 level of education tertiary education  students 64  market women 4  three communities (lapaz, osu, gbawe mallam) 15 secondary education  market women 8  three communities (lapaz, osu, gbawe mallam 23 basic education  market women 4  three communities (lapaz, osu, gbawe mallam 10 total 128 marital status  married 50  single 55  co-habiting 15  separated 8 total 128 7 that is 8 out of 16 participants. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 101 data presentation and analysis data from the semi-structured interviews were analysed using refl exive thematic analysis following the six delineated phases (braun & clarke, 2019). these steps were followed in analysing the data collected from the fi eld. given that the research focused on three thematic areas (favourite voiceover telenovela tv station, reasons for watching voice-over telenovelas and role of voice-over telenovelas in ghanaian language promotion), it was necessary to thoroughly examine the data repeatedly and code segments of the data as well as develop themes that addressed the objectives of the study. the fgds and interviews were therefore transcribed verbatim to get a sense of the data, assess the completeness, and identify new themes not initially considered in the interview guides. then initial codes that refl ected the study objectives were generated and sorted into themes creating meaningful units as well as identifying extracts from the data that reiterated the themes. next, the initial codes and themes generated were reviewed as we re-read the transcripts and extracts associated with the codes that were collated. we then developed conceptual themes that relate to the study objectives. based on the interview guide, themes coding categories were identifi ed. finally, descriptive quotes were selected, and extracts were used to represent the interviewees’ views on the study’s focus. all the participant identifi ers used in this study are pseudonyms. discussion of findings after analysing the interviews of study participants, four central themes emerged and were supported by ten subthemes (see figure 1) ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 102 figure 1: emergent themes and sub-themes figure 1 shows the fi nal thematic map generated from the interview data analysed. the four main themes (broadcasting strategy, stress releaser, education, and profi ciency) supported by nine sub-themes will be discussed in the next section. broadcasting strategy in ghana, many private television (tv) stations have emerged apart from the state-owned tv station known as ghana television (gtv). these new tv stations include united tv (utv), adom tv, tv3, obonu tv, metro tv, max tv, kessben tv among others that have programme lineups consisting mainly of voice-over telenovelas. in the bid to answer our main goal of the study, it was expedient to ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 103 explore the favourite telenovela tv stations watched among our participants. our fi nding shows that max tv, utv and adom tv are popular and well-known voice-over telenovela tv stations among interviewees. however, from the narrations, more than half (69.5%)8 of the participants prefer max tv, one of the private tv stations in ghana that predominantly telecasts telenovela in akan (using twi and fante dialects). max tv’s broadcasting strategy (one of the central themes) supported by two sub-themes (telenovela line-up and advertisement) were the reasons that emerged from the data for its preference and wider audience. max tv has coined a term known as ‘double double’ (repetition of episodes) which tends to infl uence their broadcasting strategy. max tv, therefore, telecasts its telenovelas throughout the day during weekdays as the station repeats previous episodes during t h e daytime. it also has omnibus sessions during weekends for all those who missed any of these series during the week to catch up and fi ll in the missing story. the participants argued that their preference for max tv is because of this innovative strategy. they opined that though the telenovela programme line-up is not loaded, interesting advertisements shown during the programme make their station quite unique. telenovela programme line-up participants’ interaction shows that the strategy used by max tv, in terms of the continuous line-up of their telenovela in ‘craving’ order makes it quite appealing. telenovelas shown follow each other with interesting storylines that urge viewers to watch episode after episode. during the interviews, there were three particular telenovelas that were ongoing known as ‘double kara’ (but referred to as ‘kara’), ‘brothers’ (but referred to as ‘cardo’), and ‘the heiress’ that were of immense attraction to viewers. these three telenovelas shown on max tv, could be a 8 that is 89 out of 128 participants. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 104 contributing factor to the preference for the station by most of the market women and families of the selected communities. these voice-over telenovelas provided them with the opportunity to join in the conversation and express their views about the series. such conversations according to participants make one not to be ‘left out’ of the ‘telenovela world’. a participant echoed: ‘you know we discuss these episodes and sometimes even argue about what will happen in the next episode. if you don’t watch telenovela you end up being left out of these conversations’ (market woman, agbogbloshie market). advertisements interviewees opined that their preference for max tv was not only because the station aired all its telenovelas in the local language, but also because it does not show too many advertisements during the telenovela programme. and the few it shows are interesting. accentuating this, a participant said: ‘max tv is doing well, they show many telenovelas in akan, you know they have nice adverts and that’s why i like that station (market woman, makola market). another participant narrated thus: ‘i like max tv, not many adverts during its transmission you know, and they repeat their interesting episode so you don’t miss anything’ (female student, ug). following max tv is utv, another ghanaian private tv station, the fi rst station in ghana to telecast telenovelas in the akan language and, as indicated earlier in the paper, uses a combination of twi and fante dialects which attracted many viewers including the illiterate and semi-literate. the fi ndings showed that about 17.9%9 of the participants mentioned utv as their favourite telenovela station. they argued that utv is the station that excites them with its good storylines and panel discussion after the episode. therefore, they learn a lot from the discussion. a participant echoed: i like the way ‘alagege’ (host of the discussion at utv) asks the questions and even attempts 9 that is 23 out of 128 participants. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 105 to summarize the episode before the next episode is shown (female, gbawe mallam ). another participant said: ‘utv telenovela is nice and i enjoy them, i have heard of the other stations but i think i have gotten addicted to utv programmes so i prefer utv’ (female, lapaz ). adom tv, was the third preference among participants. according to hlormenyor (2017), it is well-known and one of the topmost private stations that telecasts telenovelas in ghanaian language which attracts high viewership. adom tv became popular due to an indian telenovela titled ‘kumkum bhagya’ which was aired in the twi and fante dialects of akan. from these fi ndings, it appears max tv has overtaken utv as the most preferred station for telenovelas. utv has been touted in the literature as being famous and highly preferred among telenovela viewers in ghana on account of its telecast of telenovelas in the local language (hlormenyor, 2017). this implies that the innovative broadcasting strategy adopted by max tv has worked. reasons for watching telenovelas aired in ghanaian language one of the study’s aims was to explore why study participants will opt for telenovelas aired in ghanaian language. from our analysis, two main themes (stress releaser and education) emerged from the data with 6 sub-themes supporting these themes. these themes and sub-themes are discussed in detail below. stress releaser studies have shown that telenovela releases stress among their viewers, hence the reason for watching them (dsane-laryea, 2019; adia, 2014). this was evident in the study as participants argued that watching these telenovelas in a local language eases stress as it is full of fun, humour and entertainment. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 106 fun and humour from the perspective of the majority (75%)10 of market women, the reason why they watch telenovelas in the local language is to ease their stress after a hectic day. for these women, telenovela is for relaxation and fun after a hectic day in the market. these women pointed out that, local names are given to these foreign characters and sometimes the humour attached to the translation of the story makes it full of fun. a market woman reiterated: ‘i feel like watching something in the evening for relaxation after a hectic day, i choose telenovela, you know the way they speak twi and sometimes the exaggeration makes me relax’ (market woman, makola market). about 21.3% of the students also echoed this same view of the market women and narrated that after a hectic day of lectures and learning, they sometimes watch these series to ease off some stress. however, these students pointed out that when school is in session, they watch these series during the fi rst few weeks of the semester, but when studies get tougher in the semester and examinations approach, they catch up with the omnibus series during the weekend. a student at ug thus narrated: ‘you know as they translate, they create jokes which makes it full of fun too, so we prefer to watch’ (female student, ug). entertainment the male participants were of the view that watching these telenovelas entertain them and their families and, in the end, release their stress after a hectic day. this is because they sit together as a family to watch and with the humour created, they are entertained and do not really feel like going out in the evenings to join their friends. for instance, in lapaz community, most of the males who participated in the focus group discussions watch telenovela with their spouses or families at a set time for their evenings’ entertainment which tends to make them relax. a man thus said: ‘as a driver, i join my wife and children as they 10 that is 12 out of 16 market women interviewed. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 107 watch, i do not know all the storyline but just to laugh and relax, i come home to join them to watch it instead of being with my friends’ (male, lapaz ). education education was the second central theme that emerged from the data as we explored the choice of telenovelas in the local language. the majority (i.e., 72.9%)11 of the study participants watch these telenovelas because they learn about love and marriage lives, get insight into foreign cultures, and are updated on global fashion trends. learn about love and marriage life kwode et al. (2020) and adia (2014) have argued that the majority of telenovela telecasts on ghanaian tv stations are about love and marriage relationship. our interaction with the study participants shows that more than half of the students (70.31%)12 and viewers selected from the studied communities (79.1%)13 watched these series because they learn and gain much insight about relationships with respect to love and marriage life. a student echoed: ‘most of the storylines are always about love life, they are romantic, you know, as i am young, i think it makes me know more about love life’ (male student, uew). the same view was expressed by another student who thus: ‘it is interesting, how the love life is portrayed in foreign countries as you watch and try to compare your relationship’ (female student, ug). a young resident female participant also said: ‘telenovela stories are beautiful, it is full of love and romantic matters that i do learn from, sometimes i tease my husband with some of the characters who tend to be romantic and ask him to imitate them and treat me as such’ (female, osu community). this informal education about love and marital life was found to be predominant among participants 11 70 out of 128 12 that is 45 out of 64 students interviewed. 13 that is 38 out of 48 participants interviewed from the communities. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 108 who were young (ages between 18 and 30 years), a refl ection of youthfulness along with the perception of love life as very romantic and beautiful, a phenomenon which is not particularly part of the ghanaian culture. interestingly, the majority (75%)14 o f women do not watch telenovela to learn more about love life. they argued that these series are foreign and thus portray love and marriage in a manner diff erent from our ghanaian culture. they contend further that such romantic love relationship is not a norm in the ghanaian setting, hence they rather get insight and education about the nature of love and marriage life of the countries of origin of these telenovelas. among these market women, voice-over telenovelas make them understand life issues from diff erent perspectives as sentiments are expressed during their discussions of these series. a market woman accentuated this and said: ‘people voice out their sentiments and make me to understand marital life issues better’ (market woman, madina market). about 31.2% of residents in the selected communities shared this same view of the market women as a man narrated thus: ‘we know such beautiful love do not exist here, it is for the white people you know. they can do it, you know what i mean like kissing all over the place to express their love’ (male, osu community). foreign culture exposure the responses from study participants also revealed that watching these telenovelas give them insight into foreign cultures, especially about love and marital life. this view was expressed among majority (83.3%)15 of telenovela viewers in the selected communities (lapaz, gbawe mallam and osu) as well as among the market women. according to these participants, the telenovela storylines inform them about the manner and exhibition of love and marital life in the country that the series originated from, consequently t h e y get much insight into that 14 that is 12 out of 16 market women interviewed. 15 that is 40 out of 48 viewers interviewed from the communities. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 109 country’s culture. this o b v i o u s l y s e t s u p paradigms for comparison: the foreign culture on one hand, and the ghanaian culture, on the other. p anel discussions that take place after an episode as well as conversations that ensue between viewers in the market after an episode aired the previous day provide the opportunity to viewers appreciate further the cultural diff erences. a market woman thus narrated: ‘we get to know the culture of these countries which informs the discussion afterwards, you know during the discussion, they compare our culture with theirs’ (market woman, makola market). another male participant from gbawe mallam echoed: ‘we get to know more about the white people and how they handle their love culture, you know and sometimes our wives try to compare us with them (sighs)…, some of their ways are not our ways and we cannot be like them’ (male, gbawe mallam ). however, less than one-third (29.68%)16 of students also expressed this same view of being educated about foreign cultures with respect to love and marriage life. a student from uew simply said: ‘i get to know more about the way they handle their love lives in other countries like mexico and spain (male, student, uew). learn about global fashion trends according to antwi et al. (2016) and kwode et al. (2020), telenovelas provide the opportunity for viewers to be informed about the latest global fashion trends. this was evident in the study as majority (55 out of 64)17 of interviewees particularly university students pointed out they watch these series to learn more about new fashion trends worldwide. for these students, the characters are beautiful and are often clustered in beautiful outfi ts, hence they sometimes follow a particular character in the series and make choices when buying a dress and making their hairstyles. a ug student reiterated: ‘i sometimes buy a dress by following a particular style a character wore in the series i this is 19 out of 64 students interviewed. that is 85.9%. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 110 watched’ (female student, ug). another student said: ‘did you see the hairstyle used for andeng’s (a character in a telenovela titled a love to last) wedding, i just love it and style my hair as such’ (female student, ug). telenovela and ghanaian local language promotion on the contribution of telenovelas to the promotion of ghanaian local languages, 75% of market women and 62.5% of residents in the selected communities, as well as 31.2% of students agreed to a large extent that ghanaian language is being promoted. in this regard, we further explored which of the ghanaian languages is being promoted. the narration of the study participants showed that the akan language (especially the twi and fante dialects) is at the top of the list as the main local language being promoted. in ghana, there are fi ve major indigenous languages (akan, ewe, ga, dagaare and dagbani) (dakubu, 1996) with english as the offi cial language. the akan language has been noted as a popular language spoken (tindi & ayiku, 2018) in accra and this might be the reason why the tv stations decided to indigenise and glocalise telenovelas using the akan language (twi and fante dialects). majority of the market women argued that not many of the telenovelas are aired in the other ghanaian languages. only one tv station called obonu tv, shows some telenovelas in the ga language which has not attracted higher viewership, probably due to the twi and fante dialects being used by most of the tv stations. a market woman said: ‘i feel twi and fante are being promoted to an extent as children and non-twi speakers are beginning to learn new vocabulary and understand the language’ (market woman, agbobloshie market). a university student also pointed out: ‘not many telenovelas are aired in ga so the ga language is not promoted if i may say, there is a new telenovela in hausa on gtv now, but not popular as not many people watch it. the akan language appears to be on top’ (female student, ug). the interviewees of the three communities selected shared the ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 111 same views expressed by the market women as they also claimed telenovela contributes to the promotion of the akan language. a participant narrated thus: ‘many people watch the twi telenovela because they understand it, unlike the english ones. i believe that twi is being promoted due to telenovela (female, osu community). however, about 29.6% of students interviewed argued that the akan language is not being promoted properly as there is more to the promotion of a local language. these tv stations sometimes do not consider the entire syntax, phonology, and phonetics dimensions of the language as they translate the telenovelas. a student explained that: ‘translating telenovelas into a local language does not successfully promote the language as the syntax, the phonetics and phonology aspects are important to help you to learn the language better’ (male student, ug). more than half (62.5%) of the students have a diff erent view as they opined that airing telenovela in a local language does not necessarily promote the language, it just increases the number of viewers as more illiterate and semi-literate people get the opportunity to watch foreign programmes (such as telenovela) since they can easily comprehend the storylines, which they might not have been able to do had the translation not been done. this fi nding may suggest that illiteracy (in english) contributes to the preference for watching voice-over telenovelas. the interviewees were further asked about various ways in which the ghanaian language is being promoted. the responses of participants generated one main central theme (profi ciency) with two sub-themes (lexicon knowledge and shaping children’s local language learning) and these are discussed in the next section. profi ciency our study fi ndings show that profi ciency with respect to lexicon knowledge and shaping children’s local language learning were ways that contribute to the promotion of ghanaian languages. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 112 lexicon knowledge interestingly, the responses of participants revealed that even native akan speakers tend to learn new vocabulary and get further insight into the phonetic and morphological aspects of the language based on watching these voice-over telenovelas. this was accentuated in the study as an akan female interviewee revealled:’ i am able to learn some words which i previously did not know of ’ (female, lapaz community). a few students (28.1%) explained that with the airing of telenovelas in local languages, some foreigners and non-native speakers of twi have through that learnt and tried to speak twi. a student narrated: i quite remember some foreigners came to ghana and tried to speak twi as they watched the telenovela (female student, ug). another student reiterated: i am not a native speaker of twi, so telenovela gives me the opportunity to learn more vocabulary of twi to enhance my communication (male student, uew). some interviewees also explained that through the local language-based telenovelas, they have been able to learn new vocabulary. another market woman reiterated: ‘frequent watching of a telenovela in a particular language will help you to learn the language if you do not understand it’ (market woman, makola market). this fi nding was also evident in the study carried out by antwi et al. (2016). from these utterances, lexicon knowledge is gained by these viewers, as they begin to improve on their use of the akan language. shaping children’s language learning a telenovela viewer made the following revelation: ‘my children now speak twi because of these series, i do not speak twi with them, we speak ewe, but now due to these series you see them speaking the twi as they play with their friends’ (male, lapaz community). a market woman also pointed out that: ‘it helps me and my children to learn twi, the children ask me the meaning of the twi words as they watch and i get excited as it helps me to teach them the language which they should have ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 113 been nurtured with’ (market woman, agbogbloshie market). these revelations suggest that telenovelas are facilitating the learning of twi by children. conclusion and implication the study investigated voice-over telenovelas and their role in the promotion of ghanaian languages. this was done using multiple data sources (focus groups and interviews) from diverse telenovela viewers (residents of some communities in accra; that is, lapaz, gbawe mallam and osu communities; market women and ug and uew students in ghana) to answer the three main objectives of the study; namely, the favourite voice-over telenovela tv station, the reasons for watching voice-over telenovelas and the role of these telenovelas in the promotion of ghanaian languages. findings from the study suggest that voice-over telenovelas appeal to all irrespective of gender, age and educational background. from the study, private tv stations have attracted the illiterate, semi-literate and the literate and are getting a higher market share due to their telecasting of telenovelas in ghanaian languages. max tv, a private tv station is predominantly preferred among study participants, followed by utv and adom tv. max tv appears to have the highest market share and viewership due to its innovative broadcast strategy which entails frequent broadcast of the telenovelas and avoidance of excessive advertising while making sure advertising interruptions are interesting. evidence from the study further showed that releasing stress and education were the main reasons why participants watch these voice-over telenovelas. these telenovelas serve as a stress releaser for majority of the participants’ families as they get the opportunity to spend time together after their return from work. spending of such time together coupled with humour and fun created by the translators of these voice-over telenovelas make them exciting and entertaining. the study participants, therefore, fi nd the indigenisation of telenovelas a good stress reliever. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 114 on education, the younger viewers (between the ages of 18 and 30 years) indicated that they learn more about love and marital life relationships whereas the older adults (in this case the market women) tend to gather knowledge about the countries of origin and get to understand love and marriage life in a diff erent context. these older adults tend to compare the knowledge thus gained with the ghanaian context. this comparison is refl ected in the panel discussions held after an episode as opportunities are given to viewers to share their thoughts and opinions (via phone calls and social media) about the characters and their behaviour with respect to ghanaian culture. another interesting fi nding of the study with respect to education is the knowledge acquired on fashion trends. study fi ndings showed that younger telenovela viewers (i.e., university students and those from lapaz community) watch these telenovelas to be updated with global fashion trends. to these younger viewers, such fashion update is key as they are informed about the latest fashion styles, thus ensuring that they are abreast of global trends in the fashion. interestingly, the older participants (predominantly market women) were not very interested in updates on fashion trends. the study fi ndings also indicated that viewers, including children, develop their vocabulary by watching the telenovelas. adults get to learn new lexical items because of the breadth of experiences and issues dramatized in the telenovelas while children who have not been brought up learning the local language get the opportunity to do so. from the study, it is evident that telenovelas play a signifi cant role in the promotion of ghanaian languages, especially twi. the study participants felt that this was the case especially considering the exposure that the akan language was receiving in contrast with the other major languages, namely, ga, akan, dagaare, dagbani and ewe. while adults are expanding their lexicon children are learning about the language and developing their fl uency in it. from the perspective of the impact on children, we ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./legon journal of the humanities vol. 34.1(2023) legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 115 project the emergence of a future generation that would appreciate and contribute to the promotion of our ghanaian languages. the glocalization of these telenovelas would also contribute to the development of pragmatic knowledge of akan and the improvement of communicative competence among viewers as they learn the contextual use of certain akan expressions. that said, we also recommend that these tv stations should consider using the other major ghanaian languages as voice-overs for the telenovelas, as that would contribute to their development and valorisation. ussher, y. a. a. & ollennu. y. a. a./promoting ghanaian languages legon journal of the humanities 34.1 (2023) page 116 references adia, e. 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