“Look me, hwε ha, ofainε kwεmɔ biε aha mi fioo!!”: Codeswitching at inter-ethnic traditional marriage ceremonies in southern Ghana
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Anastasia Nuworsu
Abstract
This paper investigates the use of codeswitching at traditional inter-ethnic marriage ceremonies in the southern part of Ghana. The study site is Accra, the multilingual capital of Ghana which is located in the south of the country, and was selected due to the high frequency of inter-ethnic marriage ceremonies which take place there. The data analysed were audio-visual recordings of interactions at such ceremonies, collected, by (Nuworsu, Anastasia 2015: Language use in inter-ethnic marriage ceremonies in Greater Accra. MPhil. thesis, Department of Linguistics, University of Ghana, Legon.). They were complemented with observations made at the event grounds, as well as follow up interviews with key actors during and after the events. The theoretical framework employed is based on a combination of Giles’ Communication Accommodation Theory, Hymes’s Ethnography of Communication and Myers-Scotton‘s Markedness Model. It is found that bilinguals who speak on behalf of families participating in the ceremonies often use codeswitching in innovative ways to convey various social messages. Significant uses were: (i) speakers use codeswitching to converge toward the speech of their in-laws in a bid to decrease the social and linguistic distance between the two families and (ii) they use it as a divergence strategy to, for instance, increase the social and linguistic distance between them when they wish to accentuate an ideological, or any other, difference between them. Overall, the study contributes towards insights about inter-group language practices in multilingual African settings, especially in urban areas.
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- “Look me, hwε ha, ofainε kwεmɔ biε aha mi fioo!!”: Codeswitching at inter-ethnic traditional marriage ceremonies in southern Ghana
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Being a journalist in a multilingual country: Representations of Dutch among Belgian French-speaking journalists
- “Successful” migration, (English) language skills and global inequality: The case of Bangladeshi migrants to the Middle East
- “Look me, hwε ha, ofainε kwεmɔ biε aha mi fioo!!”: Codeswitching at inter-ethnic traditional marriage ceremonies in southern Ghana
- “Arabic is the mother tongue of Islam”: Religion and the reproduction of Arabic among second-generation British-Arab immigrants in Cardiff, UK
- Language attitudes of young Romanians in Catalonia (Spain): The role of heritage language maintenance programs
