Between-language communication in Zambia
1977; Elsevier BV; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/0024-3841(77)90055-9
ISSN1872-6135
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition
ResumoAbstract Building on previous studies in Uganda and Ethiopia, described in some detail in the text, this study seeks as a primary objective to assess the variables which best serve to predict between-language intelligibility among speakers speaking related languages. Secondarily, it aims at repeating the Ugandan and Ethiopian experiments to test whether they have universal applicability. The languages selected for the Zambian experiment were Bemba, Kaonde, Lozi, Lunda, Luvale, Nyanja and Tonga, officially prescribed for use in education, literacy, and broadcasting. The study required participants to listen to prerecorded passages in the seven test languages and then to give appropriate responses in English to questions based on what had been heard. Only responses of participants without prior exposure to other languages and whose answers therefore were presumed to be based solely on their knowledge of their mother tongue were analyzed. The listening-comprehension results suggest that without prior exposure there is very little between-language intelligibility among Bemba, Lozi, Nyanja and Tonga. Secondly, the findings of this study support in the main those of previous studies in Uganda and Ethiopia. They demonstrate that between-language intelligibility can be related immediately to linguistic measures, viz., shared vocabulary and combined root-and-grammatical morpheme correspondences. The non-linguistic variable, geographical proximity, was found not to be a reliable factor for predicting intelligibility.
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