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Pluricentric Languages and Non-Dominant Varieties Worldwide: Nation, Space and Language

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20 ÖSTERREICHISCHES DEUTSCH This book comprises 30 selected papers that were presented at the 5th World Conference of Pluricentric Languages and their Non-Dominant Varieties (WCP- CL) held at the University of Mainz (Germany). The conference was organized SPRACHE DER GEGENWART by the Working Group on Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages (WGNDV). The authors come from 15 countries and deal with 14 pluricentric Herausgegeben von Rudolf Muhr languages and 31 (non-dominant) varieties around the world. The number of known PLCLs has again been extended. There are now 43 PLCLs in all. Apart from a large number of papers on Spanish, French and Portuguese, “new” and little researched PLCLs are also presented in the contributions: Albanian, Hungarian, Malay, Persian, Somali and Romanian. Rudolf Muhr / Benjamin Meisnitzer (eds.) Pluricentric Languages and Non-Dominant Pluricentric Languages Worldwide and Non-Dominant Varieties · Varieties Worldwide New Pluricentric Languages −Old Problems Rudolf Muhr is Sociolinguist, retired Professor of Linguistics, Founder and Head of the Austrian German Research Centre at the University of Graz and Initiator and Coordinator of the Working Group on Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages (WGNDV). Benjamin Meisnitzer (eds.) Benjamin Meisnitzer Benjamin Meisnitzer is Full Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics at / the University of Leipzig. He was Assistant Professor of Romance Linguistics at Johannes-Gutenberg University/Mainz and Research Assistant at Ludwig- Maximilians University/Munich. He is member of the Steering Committee of the WGNDV, Vice President of the German Association of Catalanists and Vice President of the German Association of Lusitanists. 20 Rudolf Muhr Rudolf ISBN 978-3-631-75623-2 www.peterlang.com Morgan NILSSON1 (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) [email protected] Somali as a Pluricentric Language: corpus based evidence from schoolbooks Abstract Somali is spoken by more than 20 million people in five states in the Horn of Africa. This paper gives a short survey of the development from the first written texts in the late 19th century, through three decades of centralised standardisation in 1960-1989, up to the present day diver- gence into three somewhat differing parallel standards in Somalia, Somaliland, and the Somali Region of Ethiopia; three states where Somali is used in education and administration. At the Swedish Language Bank, electronic language corpora of Somali are presently being compiled. These text corpora are designed to allow a systematic investigation of the relevant historical phases of Somali, as well as the present day regional varieties, and contain a substantial amount of educational and administrative texts. Regional differences can be observed at all levels of the language, such as phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. In this paper, some examples of such variation are presented based on data from schoolbooks in the Somali corpus at the Swedish Language Bank. Basic facts about Somali Somali is an Afro-Asiatic language, today probably spoken by some 22‒23 million people within five states in the Horn of Africa, as well as in the diaspora. The area in the Horn is approximately the size of France and Germany together. There are about 8 million speakers in Somalia2 (without Somaliland), 4 million in 1 In: Rudolf Muhr / Benjamin Meisnitzer (eds.) (2018): Pluricentric Languages and non-dominant Varieties worldwide: Nation, space and language. Wien et. al., Peter Lang Verlag. p. xx-xx. 2 It is difficult to find reliable data that is up-to-date. Linguistic sources (e.g. Ethnologue 2015b, Berchem 2012: 17) still tend to report less than 10 million inhabitants in Somalia as a whole (Somaliland included), whereas the United Nations (UN 2017) now estimate the population to 14.7 million. The linguistic minorities are negligible, with the exception of Maay (Lamberti 1988: 17ff., Appleyard & Owen 2008: 285, Tosco 2012:266f.). This language is sometimes considered a dialect of Somali, but linguistically it is predominantly considered an independent language spoken by close to 2 million (Ethnologue 2015a). 2 Somaliland3 (which declared its independence in 1991, but has not been recognised by any other country), 6.5 million in Ethiopia4, 2.8 million in Kenya5, 0.5 million in Djibouti6, and more than 1 million elsewhere around the globe7. Somali is therefore approximately the 70th largest language in the world, and the 9th in Africa after Arabic, Swahili, Hausa, Oromo, Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, and Amharic. Map 1. The Somali speaking area in the Horn of Africa. Source: Wikimedia. The part of Somalia that excludes Somaliland was colonised by Italy, Somaliland was colonised by Britain, and Djibouti by France, and hence Mogadishu, Hargeisa and Djibouti City are traditional administrative centres. 3 The Government of Somaliland (SomalilandGov 2010: 10) estimated its population in 2009 to 3.85 million. The country is linguistically homogenous (Appleyard & Owen 2008: 285). 4 The Central Statistic Agency of Ethiopia stated in their last census (CSA 2007: 98f.) that 6.2% of the population were Somali speakers. The total population has now reached 105 million (CIA 2017). 5 According to Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, in 2009, 6.2% of the population were ethnic Somalis (Oparanya 2010: 38). The total population has now reached 45.8 million (KNBS 2017: 18). 6 According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA 2017a), 60% of Djibouti’s 0.86 million inhabitants are Somalis. 7 This is just a broad estimate as such data is very difficult to collect and verify. A list on Wikipedia (2018) gives slightly more than 1 million, but this is probably an underestimation of the number of Somali speakers in the diaspora. As an example, the figure for Sweden in Wikipedia (2018) is 63,850. This corresponds to the figure found at Statistics Sweden for persons born in Somalia. There are however also 32,000 persons living in Sweden whose parent(s) were born in Somalia (SCB 2017), and presumably many more Somali speakers with yet another geographical background, e.g. Ethiopia, Kenya or Djibouti. 3 Generally speaking, there is surprisingly little regional variation within the Somali speaking area. The most important reason for this is probably the high mobility of the major part of the population, who traditionally live as pastoral nomads. There is however, a somewhat differing group of varieties around and north of the capital of Mogadishu, referred to as Banadir, and even more distant varieties along the coast south of Mogadishu, as well as around the two big rivers west and south-west of Mogadishu (Lamberti 1984). The most notable such variety is referred to as Maay, which is often considered an independent language, possibly with close to 2 million speakers (Ethnologue 2015a). Map 2: The distribution of Somali dialects. Source: Wikimedia, © by Kzl55, based on Lamberti (1984). The remaining area, i.e. the most wide-spread dialect group on Map 2, exhibits far less variation. It is traditionally referred to as Northern Somali. Northern Somali and the Banadir varieties, second largest on Map 2, are mutually well intelligible, with the exception of certain lexical items (Hared 1992: 17f., Appleyard & Owen 2008). 4 Standardisation process Somali has been written at least since 1880, using both Arabic, Latin and a number of unique Somali scripts (Tosco 2015). Beginning in 1941, Somali was also used in broadcasting from Mogadishu and Hargeisa (Puglielli 2001, Haybe n. d. a). After the unification of the Italian protectorate, in the east and south, with the British Somaliland, into the independent Somali Republic in 1960, language policy and planning played an important role for three decades. Initially, Italian, English, and Arabic became the official languages, and a Language Commission was appointed to resolve the question of a Somali script. A Latin-based script was proposed by the commission, but the government hesitated, possibly in fear of the reaction from religious leaders (Cali n. d., Qutbi et al. 1961). Between 1965 and 1967, commissioner Shire Jama Ahmed published a book and six issues of a journal with what was to become today’s official Somali script (Andrzejewski 1974: 201), and in 1969 a Russian-Somali-Russian dictionary was published in Moscow with the same orthography (Stepanjenko & Osman 1969). Later that year there was a military coup and the Somali Republic became the Somali Democratic Republic. The new government promised to make Somali the official language as soon as possible. A new Language Commission was appointed in order to produce schoolbooks, a dictionary, and a reference grammar (Hared 1992: 33f.). In 1971 the grammar was published, and in January 1973 Somali was introduced as the sole language of administration. Later that year it was introduced as the language of instruction for the youngest pupils. Many new schoolbooks were published, and a huge literacy campaign was launched among the adult population (Haybe n. d. b, Hared 1992: 34ff.). In 1976, the first monolingual dictionary was published, and from the end of the 70’s all primary and secondary school instruction was in Somali. Schoolbooks for all subjects were produced in Somali, together with terminological wordlists (Andrzejewski 1980). The work continued until civil war broke out at the end of the 80’s. Until then, the use of written Somali in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti was marginal, and the public use of spoken Somali was discouraged. In the 70’s and 80’s, language
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