时间：10月29日（星期一）下午2：00 - 3：30
地点：西溪校区教学主楼259室（语言与认知研究中心会议室）
The role of African languages in expressing personal, social and political identities
Abstract:
Multilingualism – both individual and social – is a fundamental aspect of the African sociolinguistic situation and is in many ways the basis of questions of language and identity in Africa. The talk will discuss different dimensions of the role of language for defining and expressing identity in different African contexts, including 1) how individual speakers can make language choices in specific communicative situations to signal personal or social identity; 2) how individuals and communities typically associate particular function and status with different languages of their repertoire, where local African languages often have low status but high solidarity and identity values, while languages of wider communication and especially ex-colonial international languages have higher prestige and status, and high values with respect to social advancement; 3) how at the level of national identity, African languages are in some cases used as official language (e.g. Swahili), but in most cases play a more symbolic function often related to cultural identity, and 4) how more recently the status and role of African languages have slowly increased, in accordance with wider trends towards regionalisation as a flip-side of globalisation, growing concerns about language endangerment, as well as in relation to new discourses about identity.
演讲人简介：
Lutz Marten is Professor of General and African Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research focuses on African languages and the description and analysis of their structural, social and functional aspects. His current work includes theoretically informed linguistic analysis (morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics) as well as language description, comparative and historical linguistics (especially Bantu languages) and questions of language and identity. He has conducted fieldwork in East, Central, and Southern Africa, working on Bemba, Herero, Luguru, siSwati and Swahili.
