The English language has acquired an important position in the societies of Central and Southern Africa, but for more than 15 million people in Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, Chinyanja or Chichewa has become the most important language of daily life. This edition has more than 43,000 entries from and into English.
This brand new Chichewa (Chinyanja) Grammar will help you master the heart language of Malawi and significant parts of the populations of Zambia, Mozambique and other Central African countries. Chichewa for English Speakers is written in a simple, easy-to-read style and takes you from the basics of pronunciation on into the noun class system and verb tenses.
This book is the revised and enlarged second edition of a biography of the missionary and linguist Johannes Rebmann (1820-1876), a Christian from Germany who worked in 19th-century East Africa. Rebmann was deeply influenced by the Movement of Pietism in his homeland Württemberg. He was trained to be a missionary in Basel, Switzerland, for the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS). From its base in London the CMS sent him to the Muslim-ruled and slavery-ridden Mombasa area of present-day Kenya. There he stayed for 29 years before returning home to Gerlingen near Stuttgart, blind and sick, soon to die. Rebmann was a faithful witness of Christ in word and deed. He experienced a lot of suffering and opposition, but was instrumental in establishing the Church in East and Central Africa. His lexicographical work facilitated succeeding missionaries. He compiled vocabularies of the Swahili and N(y)ika languages. Together with Salimini, a slave captured near Lake Nyasa (now Lake Malawi) by the Swahili Arabs, he made a dictionary of the ‘Kiniassa’, an important language in Central Africa, which is now usually called Chichewa.
In this entertaining and groundbreaking book, Dr. Paul Pimsleur, creator of the renowned Pimsleur Method, the world leader in audio-based language learning, shows how anyone can learn to speak a foreign language. If learning a language in high school left you bruised, with a sense that there was no way you can learn another language, How to Learn a Foreign Language will restore your sense of hope. In simple, straightforward terms, Dr. Pimsleur will help you learn grammar (seamlessly), vocabulary, and how to practice pronunciation (and come out sounding like a native). The key is the simplicity and directness of Pimsleur’s approach to a daunting subject, breaking it down piece by piece, demystifying the process along the way. Dr. Pimsleur draws on his own language learning trials and tribulations offering practical advice for overcoming the obstacles so many of us face. Originally published in 1980, How to Learn a Foreign Language is now available on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Pimsleur’s publication of the first of his first audio courses that embodied the concepts and methods found here. It's a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of the mind of this amazing pioneer of language learning.
Most African languages are spoken by communities as one of several languages present on a daily basis. The persistence of multilingualism and the linguistic creativity manifest in the playful use of different languages are striking, especially against the backdrop of language death and expanding monolingualism elsewhere in the world. The effortless mastery of several languages is disturbing, however, for those who take essentialist perspectives that see it as a problem rather than a resource, and for the dominating, conflictual, sociolinguistic model of multilingualism. This volume investigates African minority languages in the context of changing patterns of multilingualism, and also assesses the status of African languages in terms of existing influential vitality scales. An important aspect of multilingual praxis is the speakers' agency in making choices, their repertoires of registers and the multiplicity of language ideology associated with different ways of speaking. The volume represents a new and original contribution to the ethnography of speaking of multilingual practices and the cultural ideas associated with them.
"Trends in Malawian Literature's departure point is a brief examination of how Malawi's post-independence politics affected Malawi literary landscape and an assessment of the early missionaries contribution to early Malawian literature in the local languages. That done, it discusses messages in the early literature. The conclusion drawn is that the early literature in Malawi, like most African countries, was a potent mouth piece for Christian doctrine and western values. Against this background, Trends in Malawian Literature assesses the concerns of later writers, who although begin to move from the good versus evil dichotomy, still emphasize that socially and culturally one is either an (sic) initially and turns to be good later or vice versa".--Back cover.
There are more than fifteen million native speakers of Chichewa, or Chinyanja, in Malawi, and in parts of Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa; thus Chichewa is probably the most widely spoken African language across the regions of Southern and South-Central Africa, used extensively in the private and public spheres: in the family, schools, government, NGOs and media communications. This is the first authoritative, and most comprehensive dictionary of its kind, a notable scholarly endeavour, and with major practical applications. The dictionary grew from an ad-hoc missionary publication of Chichewa/English translations from the 1970s, but far exceeds the scope of any previous efforts to transcribe the Chichewa language, provide accurate English equivalents, and reach a popular audience. It is a 'live text', taking in native speakers' collections of Chichewa vocabulary, contemporary usage, as well as contributions from scholars in African languages; and it pays heed to the close interaction between Chichewa and English and how the languages influence one another when both are widely spoken. In Africa it aims to be the first popular Chichewa/English dictionary for all levels of language use; outside Africa, it is aimed at foreign visitors and workers dealing with the Chichewa languages in professional and tourist capacities, in government and NGO communities, the media, academia and in specialist fields such as medicine, information technology and the law.
