In addressing the dearth in studies on linguistic/semiotic landscapes in orallanguage dominant rural communities, we use the notion of repurposing to show how people from rural areas of Livingstone and Lusaka in Zambia (SouthCentral Africa) extend the repertoire of 'signs' to include faded and unscripted signboards, fauna and flora, mounds, dwellings, abandoned structures, skylines, and village and bush paths (with no written names) in narrations of place. We illustrate how they use the system of signage to transcend the limitations of the material conditions in the rural-scapes by redeploying memory, objects, artifacts and cultural materialities in place to new uses, and for extended meaning potentials. We conclude that focusing on the semiotic ecology in multimodal linguistic/semiotic landscapes helps to accentuate the multisemiotic and diverse processual characteristics of meaning-making, even in areas that do not have scripted place and street names.
The article illustrates a sociolinguistics of language vitality that accounts for ‘minority’ and unofficial languages across multiple localities in dispersed communities of multilingual speakers of Zambia where only seven out of seventy-three indigenous languages have been designated official and ‘zoned’ for use in specified regions. Using signage and narratives of place from selected rural and urban centres of the City of Lusaka and the City of Livingstone, we show how minority and non-official languages (some of which are unofficial and minor in region, but official in other regions) come to be part of the semiotic landscapes and social narratives of place outside legislated language ‘zones’. We problematize intergenerational language vitality and endangerment frameworks and notions of linguistic performative identities and reciprocal bilingualism to suggest that the presence of ‘out of place’ languages in dispersed communities of speakers in multiple localities is indicative of the vitality of the languages concerned. We conclude that language revitalisation frameworks need to consider alternative ways of language transmission focusing on mobile
In this article, we examine the multilingual realities of language contact at the University of Zambia. Using an ethnographic research design, we observe the dynamics of the students’ language practices both in the physical and on the online landscape. As our locus, we use a physical conversation and Facebook narratives in which students drew on English and Bemba to illustrate instances of blending and mixing as multilingual practices arising from translanguaging. We show that the mixing of words and the blending of morphemes from the two different languages gives evidence of how students (re)create, (re)produce, and (re)shape their meaning-making instances.
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