Language, Empire and the World: Karl Roehl and the History of the Swahili Bible in East Africa

Hunter, Emma

doi:10.1080/03086534.2013.836355

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

2013

DOI: 10.1080/03086534.2013.836355

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Language, Empire and the World: Karl Roehl and the History of the Swahili Bible in East Africa

Emma Hunter

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Cited by 3 publications

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“…Whereas in most cases the linguistic and ethnic categorizations that emerged from colonial discourses erased linguistic (and cultural) differences in order to establish clearly delineated ethnolinguistic groups that belonged to distinctly defined territories (Irvine 1993(Irvine , 2008(Irvine , 2015, the colonial standardization of the Swahili language intended to establish a supposedly "truly African" lingua franca that did not belong to any one ethnic group in particular. By erasing all perceived "outside" (Arabic) influences from the existing Swahili lingua franca, colonizers and missionaries alike considered the newly "Africanized" and now "pure" Swahili to be the language that would establish the one language-one nation vision in Eastern Africa (e.g., Hunter 2013).…”

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Reimagining Linguistic Heritage: Or How Mother Tongue Speakers Re‐Create Their Language

Hillewaert

2021

J Linguistic Anthropol

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In this article, I engage the “language as heritage” trope to critically examine a popular belief that underlies it: the idea that a shared language primordially connects an individual to a group of people, a homogenous culture and a particular territory—the notion of the ethnolinguistic group. Judith T. Irvine has long urged linguistic anthropologists to problematize the linguistic side of these classifications, to recognize the ideologies that shape both scholarly language descriptions and speakers’ own interactional practices (often in response to those official depictions). Here, I take on this challenge by considering both the contrived colonial standardization process of East Africa’s Swahili language, and contemporary Swahili speakers’ creative resistances to scholarly descriptions of “their” linguistic heritage. Orthographic and interactional practices from speakers of KiAmu, a Swahili vernacular spoken in coastal Kenya, illustrate how speakers creatively attempt to make their vernacular more “like itself.” Rejecting (post)colonial perspectives of Swahili as a distinctly “African” language, they are reimagining their linguistic heritage and its associated belongings to appeal to alternative identities and histories, that have hybridity and transoceanic interconnectivity at their core.

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Reimagining Linguistic Heritage: Or How Mother Tongue Speakers Re‐Create Their Language

Hillewaert

2021

J Linguistic Anthropol

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The Missionary Movement in African and World History: Mission Sources and Religious Encounter

Maxwell

2015

Hist. J.

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This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 12 March 2014. It highlights the evolution of Ecclesiastical History to include the study of Christianity in the global south and shows how recent developments in the study of African and world history have produced a dynamic and multi-faceted model of religious encounter, an encounter which includes the agency of indigenous Christians alongside the activities of missionaries. Investigating the contribution of faith missionaries to the production of colonial knowledge in Belgian Congo, the article challenges stereotypes about the relations between Pentecostalism and modernity, and between mission and empire. Throughout, consideration is given to the range of missionary sources, textual, visual, and material, and their utility in reconstructing social differentiation in African societies, particularly in revealing indigenous African criticism of ‘custom’.

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When a Wonder Is Not a Wonder: Swahili, Translation, and the Communication of Knowledge

Robinson

2023

Isis

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scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

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Language, Empire and the World: Karl Roehl and the History of the Swahili Bible in East Africa

Cited by 3 publications

References 16 publications

Reimagining Linguistic Heritage: Or How Mother Tongue Speakers Re‐Create Their Language

Reimagining Linguistic Heritage: Or How Mother Tongue Speakers Re‐Create Their Language

The Missionary Movement in African and World History: Mission Sources and Religious Encounter

When a Wonder Is Not a Wonder: Swahili, Translation, and the Communication of Knowledge

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