Speakers
Description
Patterns of language choice (or “language shift”) across global multilingual communities demonstrate the importance of community-specific understandings of language use. This is especially important for rural African communities, which have received less attention than, for instance, African urban centers. In this talk we present the results from a language use and attitudes survey in a rural, multilingual village in Botswana and show that, while self-reported language ideologies remain constant across generations, both younger and older speakers perceive a language shift in progress that is marked by younger speakers mixing words and phrases from the national language, Setswana, when speaking local languages. Previous work on multilingualism in rural Africa has focused on diagnosing the “prestige” hierarchy of languages in these contexts (e.g. Moore 2004, Lüpke 2016, Di Carlo et al. 2019). From self-reported language ideologies, speakers don’t (overtly) categorize the languages they speak into such a hierarchy, but when asked about perceived generational differences, they reveal more diglossic (Ferguson 1959, Fishman 1967) attitudes, with younger speakers ranking Setswana above local languages.
The name “Tjhauba” refers to the name of a tribe of Bakgalagadi people and their variety of the Shekgalagadi language (Bantu). Tjhauba is spoken by ~1000 people and is considered endangered (Gunnink 2022, Monaka 2013). We (a linguist from the USA and a Tjhauba community member) conducted 34 sociolinguistic interviews with Tjhauba speakers, ranging from 19 to 91, in Nxamasere. The interview structure largely follows Di Carlo et al.’s (2021). We interviewed participants individually about their linguistic backgrounds, including how many languages they speak. On average, participants report speaking 3.74 languages. For each language, we asked participants to answer questions like “What are the advantages of speaking this language?” We also interviewed participants in small groups to elicit targeted metalinguistic commentary on Tjhauba, such as perceived gender and generational differences in speech.
Cultural affiliation and familial connection to the language are uniformly reported as the reasons why people feel it is advantageous to speak Tjhauba, while performance in school, accessibility to government services, and ability to communicate with people from other regions are the most widely reported benefits of knowing Setswana. For other languages, answers ranged from feeling connected within the community to being able to understand when someone is gossiping about them. Taken at face value, these attitude reports may suggest egalitarian multilingualism (François 2012). Answers to the question, “What do you want people to think or say about you when you speak Setswana?” reveal that younger speakers consider Setswana to mark them as “true citizens” of Botswana, while older speakers either didn’t answer or said they hope people notice that they are fluent in more languages. This difference in language ideologies is further supported by the metalinguistic commentary on generational differences in Tjhauba speech that is marked by younger speakers injecting more Setswana into their Tjhauba speech. We use these results and others to describe a language shift in progress, and highlight the advantages and limitations of self-reported language attitudes to investigate language shift.