Paper short abstract:

Kanga is a traditional garment of Swahili women on which proverbs or short sayings are printed. Gossip or warnings through kanga are widespread and show the power of silent communication that takes place in Kenya and Tanzania, which must be done carefully so as not to threaten one’s face.

Paper long abstract:

A silent way of communication among Swahili women takes place in Kenya and Tanzania by means of a cloth worn around the body on which words, proverbs or short sayings are printed. The Kanga is the traditional clothing of Swahili women and their everyday outfit, which is bought because of the colour, but also because of the words. Women who are subject to the rules of respect use the Kanga to openly warn others.

This presentation is about the power of silent communication. Wearing a Kanga is one side of the coin. The other is admitting to wearing it in front of others, which is just as face threatening as actually wearing it. We will highlight the hidden ways women use to communicate what should not be communicated, to admit that they are communicating the unspeakable without losing face, and at the same time to satisfy women's pleasure in gossiping.

Silence, as experienced in this research, was an extremely powerful silence that restored women's dignity. By being able not to talk about their own gossip and, more importantly, how they gossiped, women were able to maintain their social power within the group.

We will give examples from two different research settings in Kenya and Tanzania and elaborate on the importance of face-saving acts.

Paper short abstract:

My paper will focus on how tourism workers from mainly Senegal, use multimodal souvenir T-Shirts to participate in the discourse about their lives and especially their work in the Spanish tourism sector.

Paper long abstract:

201.38 km beeline separates El Arenal on the coast of Mallorca and Barcelona. Mass tourism interconnects them and brings millions of visitors to both places every year. As a souvenir and multimodal material object of tourism, the ubiquitous T-Shirt projects stereotypes and narratives about destinations and is often hostile, constructing the host as the Other at the travel destination (Storch & Mietzner 2021). Yet the T-Shirt can also be used to display political resistance and as a means of perseverance and survival in the often-precarious labor at the beach and shopping districts.

My paper will focus on how African tourism workers, especially from Senegal, use T-Shirts to participate in the discourse about their life and particularly their labor in the Spanish tourism sector.

Whether by wearing T-Shirts with prints of famous discos in the El Arenal party district to engage in conversation with potential buyers of souvenirs or by producing and selling T-Shirts with subversive language and political statements in Barcelona about migration to and in Europe. I will discuss some examples of multimodal T-Shirt prints from data I collected at the two destinations. Here I will focus not only on the text and language displayed but also on the signs embedded in the fabric.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the discourse-pragmatic uses of kiss-teeth in Afro-Surinamese communities. By applying an ethnographically informed social semiotics perspective, the paper aims to better understand communicative strategies in interaction through a multimodal analysis.

Paper long abstract:

It is generally agreed that interaction is multimodal, involving an interplay of multiple semiotic systems, channels and modalities (Norris 2004: 1). Attaining meaning in daily interaction is thereby often established “through the partnership between gesture and speech” (Kendon 2000: 50). The fact that gestures carry certain culture-specific meanings, are affected by context, and can serve different pragmatic functions in spoken discourse has significant implications for meaning-making and interpretation (Kendon 2000).

This paper presents a case study that examines the multifunctionality of the kiss-teeth sound gesture in Suriname. The 'tyuri' as kiss-teeth is known locally in Sranantongo is widely used among Afro-Surinamese individuals. Particular attention will be paid to the emblem’s forms and functions, on the one hand, and its contextual and situated uses, on the other.

The data originate from a three-month ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2022 in Paramaribo, Suriname. The methods of data collection include participant observation and video recordings made of interviews and naturally occurring conversations.

The findings indicate that kiss-teeth fulfils a range of functions, including the expression of a negative emotional stance, the emphasis of illocutionary force in the context of a generic insult or a face-threatening act, the display of intragroup solidarity and engagement in flirtatious teasing.

References

Kendon, A. (2000). Language and gesture: Unity or duality? In D. McNeill (Ed.), Language and Gesture (1st ed., pp. 47–63). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511620850.004

Norris, S. (2020). Multimodal Interaction Analysis. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (1st ed., pp. 1–6). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0814.pub2

Paper short abstract:

Perceptions of multimodal apologies in Cameroon English. The data for this study were obtained from a perception questionnaire based on apology instances in selected scenes in four Cameroonian movies. These movies were produced between 2005 and 2022, making them suitable for a diachronic comparison.

Paper long abstract:

In conversation, speakers often employ a poll of strategies to communicate effectively. As a result, oral communication in its de facto form involves face-to-face communication for which multimodality occurs (see Ferrara & Hodge 2018; Mohr & Bauer 2022). This can be observed in most African societies whereby meaning negotiation among in-group members are dependent on sociocultural norms of multimodality associated with (im)politeness. Multimodal apologies, as an exemplary case, have been reported in previous studies to serve as intensifying devices that enhance the verbal apology rendered (Obeng 1999; Kasanga Lwanga-Lumu 2007). Kasanga and Lwanga-Lumu (2007), for instance in their study, demonstrated how these different forms of apologies complement each other. However, these studies only looked at apologies from a speech act production perspective. Therefore, investigating multimodal apologies in terms of their perception, i.e., how these paralinguistic means of expressing an apology are perceived by other members within the same speech community, a) seeks to fill this gap, and b) adds another methodological perspective by highlighting these decade-long sociocultural norms of apologising in both past and present. The data for this paper draw on a perception questionnaire that was administered to forty English-speaking Cameroonians. These perception questionnaires were based on apologies in selected scenes in four Cameroonian movies. These movies were produced between 2005 and 2022, making them suitable for a diachronic comparison. Since the data collection is due to take place in March of 2023, the results obtained shall be analysed in a timely manner and presented at this panel.

Paper short abstract:

After summarizing the complex language ecology of the UNHCR Minawao refugee camp in the Far North Region of Cameroon, in this paper we will present the initial results of our documentation of an emergent sign language that is used by hearing refugees to overcome communicative barriers.

Paper long abstract:

The UNHCR Minawao camp, in the Far-North Region of Cameroon, hosts ca. 60,000 refugees coming from areas of northeastern Nigeria that have been profoundly impacted by violent attacks of Boko Haram armed groups over the past ten years. The high linguistic diversity of these areas is reflected in the complexity of the camp's linguistic situation.Here one finds not only one finds communities associated with as many as fifteen different languages representing three of the four phyla of African languages, but also representing three of the four phyla of African languages an impressive diversity of individual also an impressive diversity of individual multilingual repertoires. On the one hand, competence in originally neighboring languages implies localized repertoires; on the other, even competence in languages of wider communication appears to seldom overlap between members of different communities. For example, people coming from the northernmost areas are used to Kanuri as a language of intercommunity communication, whereas those coming from other areas those coming from other areas are used to Fulfulde, Hausa, Nigerian Pidgin English or varied combinations thereof. In a camp whose language ecology also includes French and English, the resulting scenario is one of extreme complexity to navigate for refugees. Overcoming this complexity is the main factor that is leading Minawao refugees to develop a sign language. In this paper, we present the initial results of our documentation of this signed code, thus contributing to the understanding of emerging multimodal communication in environments of forced cohabitation between linguistically diverse populations.