Fighting HIV/AIDS through popular Zambian music

This paper explores how HIV/AIDS education messages are transmitted through popular Zambian music lyrics. The focus is on the recontextualisation of lived experiences and Zambian cultural practices in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Using multimodal discourse analysis, the paper uses Zambian popular music lyrics to show how Zambian musicians deliberately blend languages, socio-cultural artefacts and knowledge into a hybrid of 'infotainment' in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The paper concludes that although male dominance is still prevalent, choices regarding sex and discussions on sexual matters are no longer a preserve for the men, and that musicians are able to use language to reframe dominant cultural practices and taboos in the process of disseminating HIV/AIDS messages. This has produced altered social conditions, which sometimes distort the intended messages, but allow musicians to operate without fear of government censorship boards or running foul of cultural taboos.DHE

Language policy and orthographic harmonization across linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries in Southern Africa

Drawing on online and daily newspapers, speakers' language and writing practices, official government documents and prescribed spelling systems in Southern Africa, the paper explores the challenges and possibilities of orthographic reforms allowing for mobility across language clusters, ethnicity, regional and national borders. I argue that this entails a different theorisation of language, and for orthographies that account for the translocations and diasporic nature of late modern African identities and lifestyles. I suggest an ideological shift from prescriptivism to practice-orientated approaches to harmonisation in which orthographies are based on descriptions of observable writing practices in the mobile linguistic universe. The argument for orthographic reforms is counterbalanced with an expose on current language policies which appear designed for an increasing rare monoglot 'standard' speaker, who speaks only a 'tribal' language. The implications of the philosophical challenges this poses for linguists, language planners and policy makers are thereafter discussed.IS