Main Article Content
Language Policy, Language Choice and Language Use in the Tanzanian Parliament
Abstract
Swahili and English; Swahili has been and still is the preferred choice among parliamentarians. Nevertheless, we observe that language contact phenomena such as various forms of alternation between Swahili and English occur quite regularly in parliamentary debates and submissions. The paradox however is that various forms of documentation in parliament are drafted in English. From data extracted from a corpus drawn from issues of the Tanzanian parliamentary Hansard, the paper attempts an
analysis of particular choices, the advantages and disadvantages of such choices and their impact on the Swahili language.