Kasper Juffermans

The old man and the letter: repertoires of literacy and languaging in a modern multiethnic Gambian village

Recent developments mark a ‘human turn’ in sociolinguistics, i.e., a move away from languages as linguistic systems used by people, toward language or languaging as a sociolinguistic system performed by people. This article inscribes itself in that tradition and offers a micro‐ethnographic analysis of a literacy event in rural Gambia. The incident relates to a letter that was ‘written’ by an old illiterate villager in the process of arranging a family member’s marriage. Although the event in itself is fairly insignificant and trivial, it is mobilised to gain an insight into the social and cultural organisation of literacy and languaging in this village. The old man’s letter is a typical moment of ‘grassroots literacy’ and is not ‘orthographic’ but ‘heterographic’ (reflecting more than one prescriptive regime) and ‘exographic’ (drawing on imported normativity). Local languaging here is not the sum of the local languages (Mandinka plus Jola plus Fula plus English) but is a complexly regimented repertoire in which different functions of language are distributed differently across languages and individuals.

The discourse of lending aid on small-scale development project websites: Dutch depreciatory diminutives

Abstract This article offers an analysis of the use of language on the websites of Dutch and Flemish small-scale development organisations active in The Gambia. The scope of this research is the websites of 66 organisations found through the hyperlink page http://gambia-hulporganisaties.startpagina.nl. The texts on the websites form a small corpus of around 375 000 words. Methodologically, a discourse-analytical perspective is assumed, heuristically assisted by corpus linguistic software. Thus, the texts are analysed simultaneously from a macro and micro-level: large-scale lexical patterns are combined with smaller-scale, contextualised, individual chunks of text. After a brief outline of the projects’ roots in tourism through self-reported histories of involvement and a cursory review of the literature on meanings and functions of diminutives in Dutch and other languages, the role of diminutives in the representation of the Third- World Other is explored. It is argued that diminutives in this context are used in an ambivalent way: diminutives express a sense of sympathy and at the same time reveal a derogative tone in descriptions of the Gambian side of the projects.

Literacy and multilingualism in Africa

4 Early Developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 5 Problems and Difficulties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 6 Major Contribution 1: African Digital Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 7 Major Contribution 2: African Linguistic Landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 8 Future Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 9 Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 10 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11