Speaking English at the right pace : a Ghanaian experience with the sociolinguistics of mobility

Title data

Dombrowsky-Hahn, Klaudia ; Fanego Palat, Axel:
Speaking English at the right pace : a Ghanaian experience with the sociolinguistics of mobility.
In: Frankfurter afrikanistische Blätter. Vol. 32 (2026) . - pp. 102-118.
ISSN 0937-3039
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21248/fab.i32.21

Project information

Abstract in another language

Language biographical methods used in a study with mobile speakers from Africa reveal the close connection between the speakers’ linguistic repertoire and their migration itineraries. The speakers mention obstacles they have met because of lack of proficiency in a specific local language. They describe disadvantages they have experienced because of a particular way of speaking. These experiences do not only account for the incentives to acquire the prevailing or appropriate resource, e.g. an “ideal” target language in a new environment. They can also be analyzed in terms of indexical processes which attribute social, cultural or economic values to particular linguistic norms of the individual places (Blommaert & Dong 2010).
In this paper we illustrate the potential of language biographies to gain a better knowledge about language ideologies valid in different places by examining the language biography of a speaker from Ghana in more detail. The speaker’s experiences show that it is not perfect proficiency that is required in many contexts. While he usually strives to speak ‘pure’ Twi in his family, he has to insert a lot of English loan words into his Twi discourse to index his membership in a Ghanaian boarding school. To index his role as a Ghanaian it is of no importance that his English became faultless during his study stay in Europe. It is rather the pace of his speech that counts, as he says “If I speak (English) very fast, people think I am not a Ghanaian”.