Changing livelihoods, language use and language shift amongst Basarwa of Botswana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores the historical relationship between the languages of Basarwa of Botswana and Setswana, in order to understand the dynamics underpinning their appropriation of the Setswana language, as they adjust to their changing livelihoods. The study contributes towards the promotion of a better understanding and awareness of the issues of language shift and language use amongst Basarwa. Basarwa occupy the lowest rungs of the social ladder in Botswana. Due to the close association between the status of the people and the status of their language, the Basarwa languages accordingly rank low in use and status nationally (Andersson & Janson, 2004 Andersson , L.G. Janson , T. 1997, 5th Imprint . 2004 . Languages in Botswana: Language ecology in Southern Africa . Gaborone, , Botswana : Longman . [Google Scholar], p. 118; Batibo, 2005 Batibo, H.M. 2005. Language decline and death in Africa: Causes, consequences and challenges, Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 71). Like the other minority languages, the Basarwa languages also have a low status and a low prestige in education and in written discourse. Moreover, the study observes that in their quest to mediate their socio-economic marginalisation, Basarwa have had to appropriate Setswana, the dominant national language for survival. However, their appropriation of the Setswana Language has had deleterious effects on their languages and overall socio-cultural identity. In this context, the nationally dominant Setswana language not only dominates public discourse, but also official spoken discourse as well, while English dominates official written discourse (Andersson & Janson, 1993 Andersson , L.G. , Janson , T. 1993 . Rich and poor languages of Botswana . In R. Granqvist Culture in Africa: An appeal for pluralism , Seminar Proceedings 29 73 85 . Uppsala : The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies . [Google Scholar], pp. 83–84). The sources used to guide this analysis include secondary material, official and unofficial documents, as well as the author's own observations, as a Motswana and an educationist.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".