Browsing by Subject "Xhosa language"

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    Language variation in the Transkeian Xhosa speech community and its impact on children's education
    (1993) Nomlomo, Vuyokazi Sylvia; Esterhuyse, Jan; Gxilishe, D S
    This study investigates language variation in the Transkei Xhosa speech community, focusing on the different dialects spoken in this geographical area and their impact on the education of children. As the study focuses on children's education, it is hypothesized that there is a possible correlation between the dialect spoken and the student's academic achievement and life's chances. It is the sociolinguistic view-point that there exists an intimate relationship between the relative status of a speaker's language and his socio-political status. The Transkeian Xhosa speech community comprises various tribes with different speech patterns (i.e. Gcaleka, Bomvana, Tembu, Cele, Ntlangwini, Baca, Hlubi, Mpondo, Xesibe). In the educational context some of these speech forms are labelled as dialectal or as deviations from the norm and therefore stigmatised. This implies that children enter the school setting as winners or losers depending on the dialect or variant they speak.
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    Learning South African languages : the historical origins of standard Xhosa , and the uses to which the written form of the language was put c. 1770-1935
    (2000) Mathiesen, Kim Brereton; Harries, Patrick
    This dissertation centres on the social history of the Xhosa language as it became codified into writing during the nineteenth century. My particular is interest is in why efforts were made to learn written Xhosa, and how the written form of the languages was used variously by travel writers, missionaries, converts, interpreters, indigenous speakers, the educated African elite, and professional philologists between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. The outcome of the uses to which the language was put was the construction of a standard form of the language.