230390 African Sociolinguistics (S) (WiSe 2023/2024)

African Sociolinguistics focuses on the study of language and its relationship with society within the diverse linguistic landscape of the African continent. Africa’s linguistic richness presents a unique and dynamic sociolinguistic environment, offering a wealth of research opportunities. This course presents students with an opportunity to explore the interplay between linguistics and social factors on the African continent as well as change within speech communities. In this course, we will investigate how and why linguistic variation occurs, and how it is influenced by social factors such as gender, age, ethnicity, education and urbanization. This class further explores: language contact and the emergence of new linguistic forms; linguistic variation; speech communities; language attitudes; language policy, the relationship between language and culture, cross-cultural communication; language in education as well as language death, shift and maintenance.