English as the dominat factor influencing local languages’ peculiarities (on the example of east african countries)

Jerome Baghana; Tatiana G. Voloshina; Mariia E. Raiushkina; Ekaterina V. Kovaltsova; Katarina S. Novakova

doi:10.29051/el.v7iesp.7.16277

Authors

Jerome Baghana Belgorod State University, Russia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8561-5650
Tatiana G. Voloshina Belgorod State University, Russia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6839-9631
Mariia E. Raiushkina Belgorod State University, Russia https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4204-1778
Ekaterina V. Kovaltsova Belgorod State University, Russia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1981-1247
Katarina S. Novakova University of Ss. Cyril and Methdius, Slovakia, Trnava https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4488-1482

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29051/el.v7iesp.7.16277

Keywords:

Language situation, Language usage, Survey, Participants, East Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to identify actual language usage and attitudes towards local languages and English in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The article deals with the analyses of language situation’s peculiarities in East Africa, with the English language domination process in various spheres of life: education, economy, politics, mass media. The author stresses that the linguistic diversity of East Africa is very rich: 67 living languages in Kenya, 44 living languages in Uganda and 125 living languages in Tanzania. The choice of language in education is considered to be crucial to literacy outcomes. The article deals with the analysis of data that was collected in the period of March 2018 - September 2019. The survey is based on the model of questions designed and developed by Schmied (1990,1991), M. Susanne and D. Ochieng (2017) and includes some additional questions created in Google Forms. The questionnaire is in English and consists of three parts: socio-demographic information, language usage and language attitudes. According to the results, language choice depends on the age of a person’s interlocutor, more than a half of respondents switch from their mother tongue language into another language in everyday life, English is a reading language and is used less in listening and writing forms, loan words are used to fill in the linguistic lacunae of a language, the participants do not consider English as a replacement of the mother tongue language and admit that their life is closely related to English.

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