Language Policy, Language Choice and Language Use in the Tanzanian Parliament
Abstract
The paper examines the pros and cons of the checkered nature of language use in the Tanzanian Parliament. It focuses on language policy, language choice and the practicality of language use in parliamentary discourse. Right from the eve of independence, the medium of communication in the Tanzanian parliament has been Swahili although the option is between Swahili and English; Swahili has been and still is the preferred choice among parliamentarians. Nevertheless, we observe that language contact phenomena such as various forms of alternation between Swahili and English occur quite regularly in parliamentary debates and submissions. The paradox however is that various forms of documentation in parliament are drafted in English. From data extracted from a corpus drawn from issues of the Tanzanian parliamentary Hansard, the paper attempts an analysis of particular choices, the advantages and disadvantages of such choices and their impact on the Swahili language.Creative Commons License
Attribution-Noncommercial- Noderivates 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0): The license allows others to “download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially” (Source: https:creativecommons.org/licenses).
Copyright
The copyright of all papers published in Legon Journal of the Humanities is vested in the journal. By agreeing to publish the accepted version of the paper in LJH, contributors automatically cede copyright of the manuscript to the journal. This notwithstanding, contributors may use parts of their published articles for non-commercial purposes, e.g., course material, conferences, and academic profile webpage.
Access and Attribution
While LJH published papers (new and archived) can be freely downloaded from its website in compliance with its gratis open access policy, hard copies of current and recent issues as well as offprints of specific papers can only be provided on demand.
Citation of a paper from LJH should include name of quoted author, journal title, volume, number, title of paper, page, year of publication, and Digital Object Identifier (DOI)/Uniform Resource Locator(URL).