A Jurilinguistic Analysis of Proverbs as a Concept of Justice Among the Yoruba

Polemical surveys of the rich cultural heritage of the peoples of Africa, especially before their contact, and eventual subjugation to the western imperialists have continued to reverberate across Africa and beyond. The surveys bemoan the abysmal disconnect between the African societies and their indigenous socio-cultural and institutional values. It has been pointed out, more than three decades ago, by Nkosi (1981) that indigenous languages formed part of a living organism forever changing to accommodate concepts and ideas which, over time, became the common heritage of all those who speak the same language. This paper examines the jurisprudential concept of justice among the Yoruba of South West Nigeria, with examples drawn from Yoruba proverbs. What linguistic instruments were available to canonize the justice systems and how were they deployed? The plethora of examples, it is found, have become etched on people’s consciousness and sensibilities, such that they become canonized into unwritten laws in many of the societies. In strict consideration of jurisprudence as the science of law, the study investigates how Yoruba proverbs constitute a corpus of linguistic materials used in informal administration of law among the Yoruba. Although lacking established benchmarks, many of the proverbs have become the codes in the process of administration of justice, which in many cases is conciliatory and not adversarial. In effect, therefore, the study is a contribution to the growing research on African linguistics and jurisprudential analysis. This viewpoint is ensconced in a metaproverb: “a re ma ja kan o si”. (Disagreements are inevitable amongst folks).

Colonial and Decolonial Linguistics

The discipline of linguistics in general, and the field of African linguistics in particular, appear to be facing a paradigm shift. There is a strong movement away from established methodologies and theoretical approaches, especially structural linguistics and generativism, and a broad move towards critical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology. These developments have encouraged a greater awareness and careful discussion of basic problems of data production in linguistics, as well as the role played by the ideologies of researchers. The volume invites a critical engagement with the history of the discipline, taking into account its deep entanglements with colonial knowledge production. Colonial concepts about language have helped to implement Northern ideas of what counts as knowledge and truth; they have established institutions and rituals of education, and have led to the lasting marginalization of African ways of speaking, codes, and multilingualisms. This volume engages critically with the colonial history of our discipline and argues that many of the colonial paradigms of knowledge production are still with us, shaping linguistic practices in the here-and-now as well as non-specialist talk about language and culture. The contributors explore how metalinguistic concepts and ways of creating linguistic knowledge are grounded in colonial practice, and exist parallel to, and sometimes in dialogue with other knowledges about language.

War and grammar

Disciplines are constructed as sites and topics of canonic knowledge through the texts produced by those who claim membership in them. This chapter describes how such activities helped to implement fields of knowledge production that were deeply rooted in colonial contexts, into different settings, where they seemed to gain new meaning and relevance. Postwar Africanistics as an academic discipline considered specifically German yet also part of the globally present field of African linguistics, emanated, against this background, out of writing about “proper topics” and the outcome of “fundamental research,” about the lives led by its important texts and the ways in which these texts dealt with the lives of the Africanists who engaged with them. This also entails thinking about the notion of experthood in linguistics and about the ambiguous connotations of this word in the postcolonial context in which Africanistics (or African linguistics) is situated.

DES CONSTRUCTIONS IMPERSONNELLES EN KABIYE, LANGUE DU GURUNSI ORIENTAL DU TOGO / ABOUT IMPERSONAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN KABIYE, EASTERN GURUNSI LANGUAGE OF TOGO

La théorisation des constructions impersonnelles (CI) n’est pas nouvelle en linguistique. Thématique assez vaste pour la diversité des problèmes fondamentaux de linguistique générale auxquels elle rapporte (Berrendonner & Sériot, 2000 : 1-ss), la problématique des CI semble mal délimitée, recouvrant des phénomènes hétérogènes (Béguélin (2000), Gaatone (1991)). En linguistique africaine, cette question a jusqu’à présent peu préoccupé la description, surtout celle des langues ouest-africaines. Exceptionnellement, l’on devra reconnaître à Bassene & Creissels (2011), la primauté d’un intérêt aux CI dans une langue atlantique, le joola-banjal notamment. La présente étude part des données de terrain pour analyser, dans une démarche descriptive, les CI en kabiyè, langue du gurunsi oriental du Togo. Il en résulte que l’impersonnalité est rendue en kabiyè par les pronoms pɩ- et pa-. Exophoriques, ces pronoms se caractérisent par leur faible degré d’agentivité et d’animéité. Sur le plan syntaxique, ils n’apparaissent que comme arguments sujets et peuvent en cas d’une double occurrence faire preuve de coréférence ou de disjonction dépendamment du contexte discursif. The theorization of impersonal constructions (CI) is not new in linguistics. A rather vast theme for the diversity of the fundamental problems of general linguistics to which it relates (Berrendonner & Sériot, 2000: 1-ss), the problematic of CIs seems poorly delimited, covering heterogeneous phenomena (Béguelin (2000), Gaatone (1991). In African linguistics, this question has so far been of little concern to description, especially that of West African languages. Exceptionally, Bassene & Creissels (2011) recognize the primacy of an interest in IC in an Atlantic language, the Joola-banjal in particular. The present study uses field data to analyze, in a descriptive approach, the ICs in Kabiyè, a language of the eastern gurunsi of Togo. The result is that impersonality is rendered in Kabiyè by the pronouns pɩ- and pa-. Exophoric, these pronouns are characterized by their low degree of agentivity and liveliness. Syntactically, they appear only as subject arguments and may in case of a double occurrence show co-referencing or disjunction depending on the discourse context. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0760/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Arabic in Africa

Arabic, Africa’s largest language, has an outsized role among African languages. It is internally diverse, with interesting dialectal differences between, e.g., North African, Egyptian, and Sudanese dialects; in many regions it is a language of Islamic culture, leaving its imprint in its many loanwords and writing tradition; sociolinguistically and interactionally, e.g. in code-switching, it is represented by a diversity of configurations, each with its own specific outcomes. Arabic as a minority language (e.g. northeastern Nigeria) shows a different variationist profile than does Arabic-dominant Cairo and relatively monolingual Cairo again from Arabic-French-Berber North Africa. Historically unique events produced one of Africa’s few non-European-based creoles in the South Sudan and East Africa. However, apart from an interest in such cultural domains as script and loanwords, Arabic linguistics is hardly integrated into African linguistics, reflecting more the division of labor between orientalists and Africanists in the West than the language reality in Africa.