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Part of
Anthropological Linguistics: Perspectives from Africa
Edited by Andrea Hollington, Alice Mitchell and Nico Nassenstein
[Culture and Language Use 23] 2024
► pp. 202–222

Chapter 8
“They look hostile from afar”

Language ideologies and representations of “Northernness” in Uganda

| Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
This contribution analyzes “small stories” with a focus on language ideologies to shed light on underlying beliefs about how “Northernness” is constructed and negotiated as a persistently significant identity category in contemporary Ugandan discourses. While the ideologies revolving around Northernness mainly reflect colonially established attributions, the article introduces colorism as a further ideological base, alongside purported ethnic and linguistic criteria fostering the marginalization of “Northerners” or those perceived as such. Individuals either strategically employ these ideologies or find them ascribed to them, often resulting from negotiations of Otherness and Sameness from multiple and situated social positions. Furthermore, the paper presents a case in point to show how a focus on language ideologies can link small-scale utterances or narrations with socio-political and historical contexts on a larger scale. Finally, it also reflects on the role linguists’ ideologies have played and continue to play in the production of knowledge in (post)colonial African contexts.
Keywords: colorism, identity construction, language ideologies, Otherness, Uganda
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: The colonial contribution to the construction of ethnolinguistic identities
  • 2.Language ideologies: A historical sketch of a transdisciplinary field
    • 2.1From colonial linguistics to the notion of language ideologies
    • 2.2Identity and linguistic differentiation
  • 3.Selected aspects of Northernness among contemporary Ugandans
    • 3.1“Abidongo iti we” – Northernness appropriated as powerful resource
    • 3.2“The dark Muchope from the north” – Northernness as discrimination
    • 3.3‘Us’ and ‘them’, the eternal persistence of a division?
  • 4.Observations and outlook: Northernness, Otherness, Sameness, and some reflections on researchers’ ideologies
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.23.08kni
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