Academic literacy is about far more than just good grammar and sentence structure.
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Academic literacy is a mode of reasoning that aims to develop university students into deep thinkers, critical readers and writers.
Tsitsi Dangarembga, the author of Nervous Conditions, a Zimbabwean classic.
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It reads powerfully in the Shona language, and is one of two of her books newly translated into it.
Portuguese map of the east coast of Africa, 1630.
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The history of the coastal communities of east Africa shows how ethnic groups and their languages were shaped.
Zimbabwean author of We Need New Names, Noviolet Bulawayo.
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Variations of English names reveal the enduring effects of British rule - but there’s also a return to tradition.
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By the 1950s a standard version of the language emerged, today spoken by an estimated 200 million people.
The African continent is home to some of the world’s most multilingual societies.
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Studies of African multilingual contexts are almost non-existent in high-impact scientific journals.
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Novelist Petina Gappah’s call for translators on Facebook has resulted in the publication of Chimurenga Chemhuka.
There are several cognitive processes involved in learning to read.
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Reading fluency and expanding vocabulary are the bridge from decoding to comprehension. Weaknesses in any of these building blocks will limit a child’s ability to read for meaning.
Deaf students at the Khulani Special School learning sign language.
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Making South African Sign Language official is more symbolic than useful in the lives of a very marginalised community.
An illustration of an antique photograph of the British Empire’s mission work among the Zulu people of then-Natal province.
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Missionaries and African translators working on local versions of the Bible divided South Africa’s ethnic groups by language.
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There’s a new wave of indigenous language podcasts that could attract big new audiences.
Descendants of the indigenous San people in the Kalahari Desert.
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The first speech sounds were uttered about 70,000 years ago and not hundreds of thousands of years ago as is sometimes claimed.
Toyin Falola
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Indigenous knowledge, African languages, queer rights and Afrofuturism are some of the issues discussed in the new book.
Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere, a Swahili advocate.
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Over two millennia, Swahili has built bridges among people across Africa and into the diaspora.
Hausa is the most widely known Chadic language, spoken by some 80 million people or more. It’s harder to grasp the history of other, unwritten Chadic languages.
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Reconstructed vocabulary sheds light on cultural items and people’s habitats, including the spread of ideas and the importance of certain concepts.
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There is something beautiful about African languages carrying science, fictionalised of course, into imagined futures.
Street mural by Nomen in Quinta do Mocho, Lisbon, to highlight immigrant experiences in Portugal.
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Students from São Tomé and Príncipe must negotiate being both native speakers of Portuguese and Black Africans. And how they speak Portuguese is perceived as an issue.
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The documentary resulted in the creation of an active translation network.
A mural in Maboneng, Johannesburg.
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A realignment is needed as the current systems have lost the competence to midwife a new nation out of the formative experiences of the last 25 years.
Police officers are expected to take statements without any real training in the process.
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Police officers are also not, and are not expected to be, sworn translators or interpreters. This has serious implications for justice.