Department of African Languages and Linguistics

Background

The African Languages and Linguistics Department (ALL) is a combination of staff in linguistics from the English Department, ALL and Centre for Language Studies. The Department offers courses in both linguistics and literature in vernacular languages.

Vision

The current department’s vision is to add languages that are crucial to the socio-economic and political survival of Malawi with its trading partners, both with its neighbouring countries and the global world.

Mission

In view of the vision, the department has a two-fold mission.

• The first part of the mission is to engage students and faculty in linguistic theory and empirical research. The department’s stance is that language learners and language teachers are most successful when they not only have a solid theoretical and empirical understanding of the nature of language but also practical experience, the nature of language use, and the nature of language acquisition.
• Second, the department wants to provide language training services in English as a second language (ESL), Chinese, Portuguese and Swahili, and a number of skills based courses such as editing, translation and interpretation. The elementary Portuguese syllabus is ready for use. We are also hosting the learning of Chinese language under the Confucius Centre arrangement.

The Program

The Linguistics Program at Chancellor College emphasises basic techniques of description and analysis, empirically based inductive theoretical linguistics and applications of linguistics. The members of staff have expertise in a wide range of language areas. These include African languages and English.

Graduate Programmes

The department also offers postgraduate programmes (PhD and Masters) in Applied and Pure Linguistics.