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Part of
Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger: Issues of documentation, policy, and language rights
Edited by Luna Filipović and Martin Pütz
[IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society 42] 2016
► pp. 351–360

Language shift and endangerment in urban and rural East Africa

Three case studies

| Redcliffe College | SIL International
| SIL International

In this paper we present empirical data on three places in East Africa where language shift is occurring, two urban and one rural. In doing so, we hope that both the similarities and the differences will illuminate some of the underlying factors which influence communal choices about language maintenance and shift. All three case studies are drawn from our own work, and one is part of a larger ongoing project concerning urban language shift in East Africa. Bagamba and Gibson (forthcoming) reports on one other context in the same project, that of the Kisii community in Homa Bay, Kenya.

Keywords: choices, East Africa, ecology, EGIDS, maintenance, Nairobi, shift, Swahili, urban/urbanisation
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: 3 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.42.15gib
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Rosendal, Tove
2017. Identity Construction and Norms of Practice among Bilingual Ngoni in Rural Tanzania. Language Matters 48:2 ► pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
Rosendal, Tove
2018. Speaking of tradition: how the Ngoni talk about value maintenance and change. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 39:9 ► pp. 776 ff. DOI logo

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