Celebrating African language teaching and research with emphasis on Kiswahili. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Our mission at the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology at Dragvoll in Trondheim, Norway, is to teach Kiswahili language proficiency and to carry out high level research on the language at the same time. This goal is also the objective of many teaching departments around the world. Other African languages are also the object of research in our department and attention will be drawn to them. The picture that emerges is of a department committed to research into a range of African languages and this reflects the diversity of the continent of Africa. In this paper, however, we place emphasis on Kiswahili language teaching and research. We take the view that the goals of Kiswahili language teaching are to teach the student not only the mechanisms of Kiswahili grammatical structure but also to inform him or her about the points of contrast between Kiswahili and other languages, e.g. Indo-European languages. The paper will, therefore, give a brief overview of Kiswahili teaching in Trondheim. If the Year of African Languages is to be meaningful, then the peculiarities or authenticities of African language structures, called by Krapf (1850) the Nilotic Idiom, ought to be emphasized more and more by language teachers.