Bücher von Josef Schmied

This volume provides the nexus between language and politics in Nigeria, the world¿s most populous Black nation, where civilian rule is slowly but steadily morphing into deliberative democracy. Using a combination of traditional and new models, the contributions adopt linguistic and literary perspectives to analyse and discuss different socio-discursive engagements in the Nigerian democratic experience. New approaches from Digital Humanities show the impact of the ongoing digital revolution and developments in the Humanities. More traditional papers offer compelling insights on both the discursive and non-discursive habits of the contemporary Nigerian political actors in an effort to morefruitfully profile their identity while defining their attitude and level of commitment to delivering ¿dividends of democracy¿. This volume is an ambitious scholarly effort to critically comment on emerging themes and discursive practices in today¿s Nigerian political space, which may be relevant in other socio-political contexts.

The present volume draws on the experience of the pan-African conference in Yaoundé in Summer 2015, where young scholars from Cameroon met young and experienced scholars from Germany, Tanzania, Ghana, and Nigeria. They discussed not only their individual research projects, but also their personal writing experience.This volume records some of the conference presentations supplemented by specially commissioned contributions by experienced research partners in the field. It is particularly useful for young scholars who intend to demonstrate their credibility as researchers in their thesis (BA, MA, or PhD) or in their research and grant applications, in national and international networks. The examples of small projects here try to prove and illustrate that every scholar can profit from the international exchange of ideas and research experience.

The need for a comparative empirical approach to academic writing has become evident during the development of new MA and PhD programmes in the so-called Bologna process, where academic skills components had to be included. This is not only because more and more students even at postgraduate levels seem to lack the skills that have been taken for granted for a long time at European universities or that were considered part of the autonomous efforts of young scholars themselves and not the responsibility of their teachers. This is also because with the further expansion of English as THE language of science and international cooperation during the last few decades, new challenges and opportunities have arisen for English specialists.On the one hand, there seems to be a standardising trend in international writing that discourages national styles and traditions in specific disciplines and genres that scholars need to be aware of, if they want to take part successfully in international science discourse. On the other hand, English departments and English graduates in Europe may be able to prove their ¿usefulness¿ by research and teaching in the expanding field of academic writing.

This paper generally lends support to the arguments advanced by Awonusi (1989, 1990, 2004) and others in favour of an endornormative as opposed to an exonormative standard for English pronunciation in Nigeria. They include the fact that the existing, exonormative standard, British Received Pronunciation (RP), has undergone and is still undergoing changes in its homeland, and is not homogeneous. The heightened social mobility of today¿s world perhaps works against the demarcation and homogenization of language varieties, and this is all the more true of the varieties or lects that have been proposed for Nigerian English when these are related, more or less explicitly, to educational attainment. Major attention is given in the paper to a schema of basilect, mesolect, and acrolect presented by Ugorji (2010), with a focus on his account of vowels and his presentation of a mechanism derived from optimality theory for evaluating vowels in contention. The basilect and the mesolect are found to be so close to each other that they might be combined. There would then be just two varieties. In contrast, the acrolect is close to British RP, albeit with many variants due to the conflict of two standardising forces, i.e. British RP and the basilect-mesolect. The vowel system of an officially adopted endonormative standard ¿ ¿Nigerian RP¿ ¿ would mainly be the same as that of British RP, but the optimality mechanism could be employed to give preference to some of the Nigerian variants for inclusion in it.

The European Conference on African Studies, held in 2017 in Basel, Switzerland, provided a platform for scholars working on African youth languages from bases in Africa, Europe and North America to jointly examine issues relating to the rural -urban divide in African youth languages. This is documented in the current volume. Contributors ponder the virtual absence of indigenous, non-colonial languages of Africa in studied African youth language corpora. They demonstrate that, notwithstanding the surface linguistic appearance of the African youth languages and practices that have engaged the attention of scholars, the languages ultimately bear the mark and intensity of the rural and indigenous as a major and sometimes dominant component. This points to the need for paradigms or models that incorporate rural-indigenous factors in African youth language scholarship.