This intellectual history of Standard Swahili explores the
long-term, intertwined processes of standard making and community
creation in the historical, political, and cultural contexts of
East Africa and beyond. Morgan J. Robinson argues that the
portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not
only across the African continent but also around the globe. The
book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of
African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable
that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as
standard--a move typically associated with missionaries and
colonial regimes--negatively affected those whose language was
suddenly deemed nonstandard. Before reconciling the consequences of
codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to
understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili
demonstrates how events, people, and ideas move rapidly and
sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social, or
temporal categories. Robinson conducted her research in Zanzibar,
mainland Tanzania, and the United Kingdom. Organized around periods
of conversation, translation, and codification from 1864 to 1964,
the book focuses on the intellectual history of Swahili's
standardization. The story begins in mid-nineteenth-century
Zanzibar, home of missionaries, formerly enslaved students, and a
printing press, and concludes on the mainland in the mid-twentieth
century, as nationalist movements added Standard Swahili to their
anticolonial and nation-building toolkits. This outcome was not
predetermined, however, and Robinson offers a new context for the
strong emotions that the language continues to evoke in East
Africa. The history of Standard Swahili is not one story, but
rather the connected stories of multiple communities contributing
to the production of knowledge. The book reflects this multiplicity
by including the narratives of colonial officials and anticolonial
nationalists; East African clerks, students, newspaper editors,
editorialists, and their readers; and library patrons, academic
linguists, formerly enslaved children, and missionary preachers.
The book reconstructs these stories on their own terms and
reintegrates them into a new composite that demonstrates the
central place of language in the history of East Africa and beyond.
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