- Title
- Naming practices, identity, power, and communication in Bindura, Zimbabwe
- Creator
- Zuvalinyenga, Dorcas
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This study, conducted in Bindura and its rural hinterland, examines the relationships between the town’s place naming practices, notions of identity, power, and communication through a mixed methods approach. This interdisciplinary study, which views toponyms and toponymic practices as texts and speech acts, explores how place naming in a multilingual linguistic landscape influences the construction, negotiation, and contestation of the identities and well-being of the language users. This exploration draws on a range of theories and methodologies from the sociology of language, sociolinguistics, socio-onomastics, pragmatics, linguistic landscapes, critical toponymy, and the discourse-historical approach of critical discourse analysis which emphasises the need to consider the linguistic, sociological, cultural, and historical contexts of the phenomena under investigation. This approach enabled increased awareness of the intertextuality of toponymic practices and the power relations embedded in them. Thus, a toponym was viewed not as an isolated form of spatial reference, but as related to other names within and or outside the particular area, and other socio-economic issues prevailing in the immediate community, the nation, or internationally that can be used to (em/dis)power individuals or communities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 35 participants including urban and rural planning officials, government officials, drivers, conductors, and users of public transport, youths, and elderly inhabitants of the area. Data gathering methods included surveys, observations, photographs, and analysis of documents including maps, gazetteers, archives, and reports. This research showed how identity construction connects to language use (place names) and how place naming practices can become sites of considerable negotiation and contest. The findings confirm that identity is important in place naming because it connects individuals, groups, places, and toponyms. This approach promotes understanding of how individuals associate with or detach themselves from communities, the type of information they intend to express about themselves, and how this information mirrors the ideas others hold about them. Understood this way, identity relates to the view that language use, in this case place naming, is a cognitive and inherently social venture. As a response to calls in linguistic landscape studies and critical toponymy to study the politics of toponymies this research shows how minority groups in multilingual spaces, already disadvantaged by identifying with and using less popular languages, face an additional challenge of having their languages silenced in the linguistic landscape and decision-making processes and positions. Linguistic and cultural identities, therefore, determine the precarity of minority groups in the linguistic landscape in particular and in relations of power more generally.
- Subject
- critical toponymy; critical discourse analysis; discourse-historical approach; linguistic landscapes; power relations; place naming practices; Bindura; Zimbabwe; decolonisation
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1426835
- Identifier
- uon:38478
- Rights
- Copyright 2021 Dorcas Zuvalinyenga
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 4 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 833 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |