Borrowed Swahili discourse-pragmatic features in Kenyan and Tanzanian Englishes

Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah; Loveluck Philip Muro

doi:10.1515/ip-2022-4003

Article

Borrowed Swahili discourse-pragmatic features in Kenyan and Tanzanian Englishes

Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah
Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah obtained her PhD from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and lectures at the Department of English, Redeemer’s University, Nigeria. Her areas of research include (multimodal) discourse analysis, and (corpus) pragmatics. She has published articles in Discourse & Society, Discourse & Communication, English Text Construction, Pragmatics & Society, Pragmatics, Text & Talk, English World-Wide, World Englishes, Journal of Pragmatics, English Today, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, and Corpus Pragmatics.
and Loveluck Philip Muro
Loveluck Philip Muro is a lecturer of linguistics and Head in the Department of Languages and Literature, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Her areas of teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels include English pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, social and biological aspects of language, social research methods, and communication skills. Dr Muro’s research interests revolve around the language of instruction, classroom talk, language and gender and gender in education.

Published/Copyright: August 22, 2022

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From the journal Intercultural Pragmatics Volume 19 Issue 4

Abstract

This study explores five Swahili discourse-pragmatic features – ati/eti, yaani, pole, sasa and sawa – which are borrowed from Swahili into Kenyan and Tanzanian Englishes, with a view to investigating their meanings, frequencies, positioning, collocational patterns, syntactic distribution and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are extracted from the International Corpus of English-East Africa and the Kenyan and Tanzanian components of the corpus of Global Web-based English, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a variational and postcolonial corpus pragmatic framework. The study reveals that the Swahili discourse-pragmatic features occur more frequently in the Kenyan corpora than in the Tanzanian corpora, except in the case of sasa, which occurred with the same frequency in the online corpus. The paper identifies ati/eti as an attention marker, a quotative marker, a hearsay marker, an inferential marker, and an emotive interjection, yaani as an emphasis and elaborative marker, while pole is an attitudinal marker that expresses sympathy and sarcasm. While sasa is only an attention marker, sawa is an agreement and attention marker. The paper shows that these borrowed discourse-pragmatic features contribute to the distinctive nature of East African Englishes.

Keywords: collocational patterns; discourse-pragmatic features; pragmatic markers; Swahili; variation

Corresponding author: Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah, Department of English, Redeemer’s University, Ede, Nigeria, E-mail: unuabonahf@run.edu.ng

About the authors

Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah

Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah obtained her PhD from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and lectures at the Department of English, Redeemer’s University, Nigeria. Her areas of research include (multimodal) discourse analysis, and (corpus) pragmatics. She has published articles in Discourse & Society, Discourse & Communication, English Text Construction, Pragmatics & Society, Pragmatics, Text & Talk, English World-Wide, World Englishes, Journal of Pragmatics, English Today, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, and Corpus Pragmatics.

Loveluck Philip Muro

Loveluck Philip Muro is a lecturer of linguistics and Head in the Department of Languages and Literature, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Her areas of teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels include English pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, social and biological aspects of language, social research methods, and communication skills. Dr Muro’s research interests revolve around the language of instruction, classroom talk, language and gender and gender in education.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa. The authors also appreciate Dr Tom J. Obengo of Moffat College, Kijabe, Kenya for providing useful comments on Swahili discourse-pragmatic features.

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Published Online: 2022-08-22

Published in Print: 2022-09-27

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2022-4003

Keywords for this article

collocational patterns; discourse-pragmatic features; pragmatic markers; Swahili; variation