The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 represent an important opportunity to improve learning globally. In this light, this chapter draws on a unique set of early literacy assessment results and demographic information from six African countries (Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia) to better understand the role that language plays in influencing early reading outcomes. While these data have been published in individual country reports, the information has not been analyzed and released prominently in the narrative surrounding learning outcomes in the region, although data like those presented in this chapter have begun to reverse this tendency. Following this introduction, a brief history is provided of postcolonial trends in literacy acquisition and language policyin sub-Saharan Africa from about 1960 to the present day, documenting the current language of instruction policies for twenty countries. Key questions are also outlined to drive the interest in gaining a better understanding of the variation in literacy acquisition in a selection of target countries for which we have data; then the chapter documents the data and methods usedas well as the results. Finally, the chapter discusses the implications of this work a for future policy and planning to achieve the promises made under the SDGs.

This chapter addresses Heidegger’s understanding of the relation between philosophy and poetry, inasmuch as each mode of saying has its source in language. Heidegger’s use of poetry has been the object of considerable critical scrutiny; he has frequently been accused of forms of misuse. However, any assessment of what Heidegger understands himself to be doing with the poetic text requires a grasp of his understanding of the notion of use itself (and with this the notion of relation). From this perspective, we have a more founded approach to Heidegger’s manner of thinking with and by way of poetry.

The significance of Heidegger’s engagement with poetry reaches beyond his remarks on poetic texts and the role of poetic composition, whether we consider his lecture courses on Hölderlin, his reflections on Greek tragedy, or his later essays on language and poetry. His view of Dichtung cannot be categorized under the rubrics of philosophical aesthetics, hermeneutics, phenomenological theory of art, or literary interpretation, as his unique investment in poetry and his idiomatic approach to Dichtung have in view a transformation of thought: a preparation of a non-metaphysical style of thinking, characterized by a new, non-conceptual rigor, which can be called “poietic.” Sketching this “other” thinking against the backdrop of the then most current techno-scientific developments, whether in cybernetics, physics or genetics, Heidegger insists on its preliminary scope and preparatory character. That is why the importance of Dichten in Heidegger’s work, especially its role in taking philosophy toward an otherwise to thinking can only be properly appreciated when we give its due to the “poetic” valence of his texts, which includes innovative textual composition, the syntactical and lexical texture of writing, its typographical experiments and verbal inventions, etymological explorations, and the inventive use of hyphens or quasi-tautological syntactic phrasing.

A Voyage to Lilliput lays the ground for a number of satirical techniques that continue throughout Gulliver’s Travels: selective use of detail; topical allusions to real people and events; an unreliable narrator; competing claims of the abstract (language, human ideals) and the concrete (the human body, the physical world); reversals; and manipulation of size and perspective. Lilliput, where everything shrinks by a scale of 12 to 1, has proven to be the most beguiling fantasy among the satiric fictions in Gulliver’s Travels that ultimately entrap Swift’s readers in painful truths. This chapter discusses the narrative style that readers encounter at the start of Gulliver’s Travels; the political parallels between Lilliput and England; the play on perspective and expectations; and Swift’s interest in the volatility, manipulability, and power of language.

The first part of this chapter provides a brief overview of the developments in the study of language, gender, and sexuality, with a focus on anthropological works and leading ethnographies, while the second part focuses on a particular case study from South Africa. It aims to capture examples of the multiple, flexible, and fluid ways in which linguistic, gender, and sexual identities are entangled and how they are negotiated in relation to power. The case study focuses on Zulu speakers, South Africa’s largest ethnolinguistic group. Ethnographic detail from the province of KwaZulu-Natal provides a nuanced discussion of how gendered and sexual Zulu identities are represented through three selected linguistic styles and how despite important differences in the Zulu ways of speaking and being, there are also remarkable commonalities that expose a matrix of oppression based on patriarchy, sexual and gender(ed) “otherness,” as well as pervasive heteronormativity and racism. The study demonstrates that African spaces provide a multitude of linguistic resources to recalibrate previous thinking around language, gender, and sexualities by theorizing with a “southern” lens.

Chapter 1 introduces the central theme of the book, which is in essence the question of how human beings come to know what they know. Trying to answer this question, while considering different views, leads to getting involved in the infamous ‘nature–nurture debate’. I will discuss what kinds of more specific questions we ask when we engage in this debate and also how this debate has changed over time. We then focus our attention on how this debate applies to human language. Specifically, this chapter discusses the Innateness Hypothesis for language, i.e., Noam Chomsky’s idea that children are born with a specific “instinct” to acquire language. This chapter also contains a preview of all the subsequent chapters.

This short conclusion briefly summarises the book’s contentions regarding language, iteration, reworked traditions, mimesis, world-building and communities, before articulating a final argument for the importance and interest of Fantasy.

This chapter considers how Fantasy is rooted in language’s ability to describe things that do not exist, arguing that this same ability is crucial for constructing the value systems that allow human cultures to operate. In intervening in conversations about meaningfulness and identity, Fantasy plays with heady stuff, but by explicitly parading its impossibility, it creates productive and revealing abstractions that can both playfully and critically interrogate received norms and languages of power. Fantasies ask whether the world we have made through language is the one we want, holding open imaginative spaces for alternatives that are by turns utopian, dystopian, revealingly similar and radically different. Key works discussed in this chapter include Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, Plato’s Republic, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Books, Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

Chapter 4 gives an account of the role of repertoire and travel in German public theatre and how the Theater an der Ruhr works against national understandings of canonised theatrical repertoires. It examines why German repertoire theatres do not discard plays after a season but reperform them for years, even decades, and what consequences this has for actors and their self-cultivation, as well as for the building of an ethico-aesthetic tradition in an institution. This system goes hand in hand with the closely knit notion of the ensemble in German theatre. This chapter explores these notions through a case study of the transnational repertoire of the Theater an der Ruhr and their long-term collaborations with international theatre-makers from precarious parts of the world, known as the ‘international theaterlandscapes project’. I accompanied the Theater’s journey to Algeria and witnessed first-hand their cooperation with Algerian and Tunisian artists after the ‘Arab spring’, focusing on the way in which theatre develops forms of transnational diplomacy and troubles national narratives of cultural heritage.

An exploration of how Collins’s prose style contributes to suspense and mystery by destabilising language and therefore creating ambiguity and ambivalence

The Emergency Department (ED) is a microcosm of its greater surrounding community. Urban EDs in particular have a broad variety of people – both physicians and patients – who hail from various backgrounds, races, and ethnicities, each with unique primary languages and cultures. Urban metropolitans are the most diverse regions compared to more rural parts of a given country. Based on current demographic data and our own collective experiences in urban EDs internationally, ED physicians seldom have an opportunity to reflect on race, language, and culture in the populations that we serve. These differences, or the discordance between clinician and patient, can become problematic for emergency physicians.

This chapter includes an investigation of precolonial Mesoamerican languages, including Maya languages and Nahuatl, and their connection to issues of truth and meaning. We find the concept of truth connected to representation and activity. The importance of performative aspects of language can be seen in different ways throughout Mesoamerican traditions, from the ritual performances of the Maya to the focus of acts of speaking of the Aztecs. The chapter begins with a consideration of written language, and continues on to considerations of movement and physical performance as symbolic and as continuous with language, which expresses meaning by sharing essence with what is expressed.