Spoken Like a Market Woman: Learning Language in Malanje

This presentation examines gender through the conceptual, practical and linguistic differences in language as taught academically and experientially in western Angola in recent years.  Beginning with fieldwork observations from 2002, the focus is on how women and men learn and teach “proper” Kimbundu differently, and on the historical influences of professionalized language education and literacy.   In analysis, unequal participation in the production of literature, and perceptions regarding “who owns the language” are considered, as are ways in which the continued use of colonial sources as authoritative language references privilege a masculine voice in histories of African knowledge at the expense of more dynamic and complex gendered sociolinguistic histories.   If women think about, practice, teach, learn and own language differently, can we trace these gender differences back to the early Atlantic Age, or earlier?  Have we gendered our analysis of language evidence in the study of Africans in the Atlantic Ocean world?