Kiswahili Language Analysis

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Kenya is a multilingual country which has had a clear language policy since it gained independence from British rule in 1963. English was the official language and was used for communication in offices, the judiciary, the legislature, for instruction in schools and for international communication. Kiswahili was the national language used in inter-ethnic ethnic communication to foster unity. Mother tongues were used for communication at home within the family members. With the promulgation of the new constitution in 2010, both English and Kiswahili became official languages. While barely a quarter of the Kenyan population can adequately use English, it remains the advantaged official language and the medium of instruction in the education system …show more content…

Metaphors are also created by a certain history: either the history of the context or the history of the individual. The history of contexts and individuals vary across time, and these variations in history produce variations in metaphors. The kinds of metaphors used also depend on the diverse concerns and interests that govern people 's lives. For example, crop farming, cattle keeping and pastoralist industry are largely the main concerns and interests of the people of Kenya. Kovecses (2005, p. 286) adds that people 's concerns and interests may be general, that is "built into" their culture, or personal lives. Both significantly influence the metaphors people employ to understand the world around them, and, as seen in this study, the way the different tribes view each other. Goatly (2007) observed that the inseparability of body, mind and world, on the one hand, and cognitive and cultural models, on the other hand, are emerging from body-world interaction, rather than arising purely from the heads of individual people. Consequently, Gibbs (1999, p. 156) agrees that metaphor is a kind of tool that arises from the body-world which we can ’re-experience ' in an embodied way, and is not simply accessed from long-term memory, in different ways in different real-world

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