LINGUISTIC ORDERING AND THE CONCEPTION OF LANGUAGE CATEGORIES: the case of Bantu languages in southern Mozambique

Abstract

The conquest and administration of colonial territories, in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference, imposed management needs, which implied the establishment of a certain order and the consequent making up of categories to capture their realities. In this regard, different colonial agents (missionaries, administrators, explorers, adventurers, etc.) sought to apprehend the social realities of the colonial territories by projecting a certain social order, through which a profile was given to the colonial space. An example is the social ordering created by the definition of ethnolinguistic categories.  The objective of this article is to revisit the process of linguistic ordering in Mozambique, taking into account the (re)creation of (ethno)linguistic categories, focusing on the southern region of the country. For this purpose, the study resorted to documentary and bibliographic research. Starting from pioneering approaches from missionaries and academics, or resorting to more recent work by national scholars, the article will present an overview of the mapping process of autochthonous languages, usually recognized in the south of the country. The process starts with the initial descriptions and classifications, undertaken by the first European colonizers, mainly missionaries, who identified and concocted languages for evangelization. With colonial occupation and sophistication of epistemological tools and religious proselytism, work on language categorization and mapping intensified, and language categories as representations of the language landscape were devised and consolidated. It is argued that these language constructions still have an impact on the ordering of current societies, as shown by the case of southern Mozambique.