What Are the Lasting Impacts of British Colonization on Language Use in Postcolonial African Societies?

Eric Anchimbe

The lasting effects of colonization on African societies have been long acknowledged. In this video, ERIC ANCHIMBE examines the particular effects of British colonization in Africa, focusing on how people use language in their daily lives to make and refuse offers. Employing methods including discourse completion task questionnaires, interviews and participant observation, Anchimbe analyzes the data obtained using the postcolonial pragmatics framework. Concluding that colonization led to a high degree of uniformity across the fundamental base structures of the African societies studied, Anchimbe calls for further research from the perspective of postcolonial societies themselves and urges that more be done to share results with those who provide the data.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21036/LTPUB10765

Researcher

Eric Anchimbe is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth and a Senior Fellow at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS). He completed his PhD at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Anchimbe has also taught at the Universities of Yaounde (Cameroon) and Munich. His research interests include sociolinguistics, varieties of English and postcolonial linguistics. Besides editing several collected volumes, Anchimbe has published two monographs: Language Policy and Identity Construction (2013) and Cameroon English (2006).

University of Bayreuth (Universität Bayreuth)

The University of Bayreuth is a medium-sized campus university which is committed to the highest academic standards. As one of Germany’s youngest universities, it operates in an unbiased, self-confident spirit of academic freedom, scientific progress, and social responsibility. Top priorities are individual supervision, maintaining high academic standards, and creating programmes of study that take current research into account. The innovative collaboration between many of disciplines on the on the ‘Green Campus’ are key features of Bayreuth’s research culture. The University of Bayreuth is dedicated to interdisciplinary research. Its research facilities and infrastructure provide an ideal setting for scientific work. Focus areas – e.g. African studies, Polymer and Colloid Sciences, High Pressure and High Temperature Research, Ecology and the Environmental Sciences – combine the strengths of individual subject areas to address strategically chosen, cross-disciplinary research priorities. Foreign scholars rate Bayreuth as one of the most attractive universities in Germany, consistently placing it among the top institutions in the Humboldt Rankings.