Local Languaging, Literacy and Multilingualism in a West African Society
Kasper Juffermans
Local Languaging, Literacy and Multilingualism in a West African Society
Kasper Juffermans
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Omschrijving
This book aims to enhance and challenge our understanding of language and literacy as social practices against the background of heightened globalisation. Juffermans presents an ethnographic study of The Gambia, arguing that language should be conceptualised as a verb (languaging) rather than a countable noun (a language, languages).
The book is revolutionary in extolling languaging and ‘grassroots’ literacies as legitimate discourse practices, and as reflecting localised agency with implications for global mobility, in the semiotic landscapes of Africa, and Gambia in particular. In capturing the dynamically integrated multilingual/languaging practices in place, the book highlights the multiple identity affiliations available to the speakers. This book is one solid contribution to the languaging turn in the new sociolinguistics of globalisation.
This delightful book conveys three important points of relevance for anybody interested in language practice in a wider social context in West Africa and beyond: that language use has to be understood as situationally grounded, that it needs to be distinguished from the ideologies of research participants and researchers, and that their critical ethnographic assessment is central, as Juffermans forcefully shows.
Kasper Juffermans is a sociolinguist and Africanist at the Institute for Research on Multilingualism at the University of Luxembourg. His research interests include language-in-education policies; linguistic landscapes; and language in mobility and migration.