Pedzisai Mashiri

Zimbabwe Colonial and Post-Colonial Language Policy and Planning Practices

This monograph focuses on the development of colonial and post-colonial language policies and practices in Zimbabwe, attributing changes to evolving philosophies and politics in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. In colonial Zimbabwe, we argue that the language policies had as one of their key objectives the development of a bilingual white colonial ruling class proficient in both English and at least one African language. Contrary to what some scholars might think, we will show that what was being imposed during the colonial era was not English on Africans but European variants of African languages on Europeans. The monograph also describes how, through linguistic description, Europeans appropriated African languages as a prelude to the imposition of European variants of African languages on Africans under the guise of the promotion of indigenous language. Despite the power and influence of the colonial regime, we demonstrate how Africans still retained a strong sense of agency during the colonial period which enabled them to select, albeit within restricted limits, the nature and type of education they received, the languages through which they were taught, and indeed even the materials which were used in teaching them languages, particularly English.

Shona-English code-mixing in the speech of students at the University of Zimbabwe

Code-mixing (hereafter CM) is a worldwide communicative phenomenon that obtains in language contact situations and is well documented especially in the context of third-world societies. However, little or no systematic attention has been paid to Shona-English CM. Shona-English CM can be found in a number of domains in Zimbabwean society, mostly in the urban areas, and often the younger generation constitutes the most active mixers in informal interactions. This article is concerned with the code-mixing behaviour of Shona-English bilingual students at the University of Zimbabwe. These students have Shona as their mother-tongue (L1) and English as their second language (L2). I will explore how Shona morphosyntactic structure constrains and integrates English lexical items and phrases to form Shona-English mixed constructions. Two major observations are made. First, it is shown that for a Shona-English code-mixed structure to be acceptable the morphosyntactic structure of English must conform to the morphosyntactic structure rules of Shona. Secondly, it is noted that the English the students use is also of considerable lexical and syntactic complexity and retains much of its semantic and syntactic integrity when it appears in mixed utterances of terms. The data collected for this study reveal that CM involves the integration of English descriptive adjectives, nouns, locatives and verbs.