"Birth of a National Language provides essential reading for those interested in the development, usage and future of Setswana in Botswana. This well-researched study traces the development of Setswana from the earliest known records to its present status as a national language in Botswana. The complex relationships between nation, language, and society is discussed in detail, with reference to both historical and geographical influences. Special emphasis is placed on the linguistic consequences of the great social changes brought about by independence in 1966, and a chapter is devoted to the very dynamic linguistic situation in the capital city, Gaborone. The Gaborone example leads to a more general discussion of recent semantic and lexical changes. The book concludes with an overview of the evolution of Setswana in Botswana, and a discussion of possible future developments based on comparisons with other languages." --cover page [4].

The Sounds of Language is an introductory guide to the linguistic study of speech sounds, which provides uniquely balanced coverage of both phonology and phonetics. Features exercises and problem sets, as well as supporting online resources at www.wiley.com/go/zsiga, including additional discussion questions and exercises, as well as links to further resources such as sound files, video files, and useful websites Creates opportunities for students to practice data analysis and hypothesis testing Integrates data on sociolinguistic variation, first language acquisition, and second language learning Explores diverse topics ranging from the practical, such as how to make good digital recordings, make a palatogram, solve a phoneme/allophone problem, or read a spectrogram; to the theoretical, including the role of markedness in linguistic theory, the necessity of abstraction, features and formal notation, issues in speech perception as distinct from hearing, and modelling sociolinguistic and other variations Organized specifically to fit the needs of undergraduate students of phonetics and phonology, and is structured in a way which enables instructors to use the text both for a single semester phonetics and phonology course or for a two-course sequence

This is the second in a series in Setswana language, literature and culture, providing a uniquely comprehensive and systematic description of the grammar of Setswana, particularly at sentence level. It is based in the Standard Generative Theory of 1965, and deals with most aspects of the grammar: basic structure rules and rules which are lexical, transformational, semantic and phonological. All new terms and concepts are systematically explained.

This is the very first publication mapping onomatopoeia in the languages of the world. The publication provides a comprehensive, multi-level description of onomatopoeia in the world’s languages. The sample covers six macro-areas defined in the WALS: Euroasia, Africa, South America, North America, Australia, Papunesia. Each language-descriptive chapter specifies phonological, morphological, word-formation, semantic, and syntactic properties of onomatopoeia in the particular language. Furthermore, it provides information about the approach to onomatopoeia in individual linguistic traditions, the sources of data on onomatopoeia, the place and the function of onomatopoeia in the system of each language.

This book is about the design of a Setswana corpus for lexicography. While various corpora have been compiled and a variety of corpora-based research has been attempted in African languages, no effort has been made towards corpus design. Additionally, although extensive analysis of the Setswana language has been done by missionaries, grammarians and linguists since the 1800s, none of this research is in corpus design. Most research has been largely on the grammatical study of the language. The recent corpora research in African languages in general has been on the use of corpora for the compilation of dictionaries and little of it is in corpus design. Pioneers of this kind of corpora research in African languages are Prinsloo and De Schryver (1999), De Schryver and Prisloo (2000 and 2001) and Gouws and Prisloo (2005). Because of a lack of research in corpora design particularly in African languages, this book attempts to fill that gap, especially for Setswana. It is hoped that the finding of this study will inspire similar designs in other languages comparable to Setswana. We explore corpus design by focusing on measuring a variety of text types for lexical richness at comparable token points. The study explores the question of whether a corpus compiled for lexicography must comprise a variety of texts drawn from different text types or whether the quality of retrieved information for lexicographic purposes from a corpus comprising diverse text varieties could be equally extracted from a corpus with a single text type. This study therefore determines whether linguistic variability is crucial in corpus design for lexicography.