Dr. Abdulwahid Mazrui
The School of Linguistics and Language Studies is pleased to announce that they have added an impressive new member to their team. Dr. Abdulwahid Mazrui (PhD, Indiana University), co-author of the prominent book Swahili: A Complete Course for Beginners, will be teaching two introductory Kiswahili courses for the 2015-2016 academic year – LANG 1010A, Intro to Language 1: Kiswahili (Fall) and LANG 1020A, Intro to Language 1: Kiswahili (Winter).
These courses will cover oral skills and basic reading and writing skills. There will also be an important emphasis on cultural practices of Swahili-speaking people.
Kiswahili (which is the Swahili word for the language, although it is increasingly used in English as well) is one of many Bantu languages spoken by more than 60 million people throughout central and eastern Africa, and is an official language of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also an official language of the African Union and is the second language of some 135 million more people, making it the most widely used language in sub-Saharan Africa. Remarkably, the 2006 Canadian Census reported 27,795 Ki-Swahili speakers were living in Canada.
Kiswahili has had an interesting evolution that spans centuries. Although it is African in origin, the language has been influenced by contact with Arabic, Persian, German, Portuguese, English, and French.
Much like the language he teaches (which is also his first language), Dr. Mazrui’s career path has had a significant global flavour.
“I was born and raised in a small island off the eastern coast of Africa called Pemba, which is part of Zanzibar in Tanzania, explains Mazrui. “I started teaching Kiswahili to Peace Corps volunteers in Tanzania in 2002. I then went to Indiana University for about 10 years to teach Kiswahili and did my postgraduate studies there as well and also taught Kiswahili at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.”
Mazrui has been passionate about teaching language to others for as long as he can remember. As a multi-lingual individual, he is aware of the challenges of learning a new language, but is also very familiar with the sense of triumph and reward attached to acquiring a new dialect.
“English was my favorite subject. So much so that I wanted to learn English so that I could teach others. I also learnt Spanish while I was in high school and had a firsthand experience in learning a totally foreign language in Zanzibar. This has helped me a lot in my teaching.”
Upon completing his PhD in Linguistics at Indiana University, Mazrui moved to Ottawa with his family. He is thrilled to be sharing Kiswahili with students at Carleton. Mazrui, whose research interests include Sociolinguistics, Second Language Phonology, Second Language Acquisition and African Literature, is known for his teaching dynamism – often implementing creative methods and techniques to teach the particularly challenging aspects of a given language.
He sees many advantages for Carleton students who are interested in acquiring Kiswahili.
“Kiswahili is one of the widely spoken language in Africa. It is a very useful and an instrumental language for those who want to do research in that region.”
“The language also has some very interesting linguistics features to research. One of the many reasons it is fun to teach Kiswahili is to watch as students realize that they already know some Kiswahili words. Students tend to pick up Kiswahili rather quickly because it is written just as it is spoken.”
He added, “the students will be more familiar on the unique culture of the Swahili people and of the Swahili speaking countries. This hopefully widens their interest in the areas where Kiswahili is spoken.”
Having Dr. Mazrui on its roster is yet another reason that The School of Linguistics and Language Studies at Carleton University has earned its reputation as world-class language learning institution. Dr. Mazrui joins a small army of some 40 passionate full and part-time language instructors in the Modern Languages program, teaching American Sign Language, Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), Arabic, Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
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