Intonation in advice-giving in Kenyan English and Kiswahili

Abstract

We examine salient prosodic features used in advice-giving in Kenyan English and Kiswahili from a radio phone-in programme. Our pilot corpus constitutes 40 sequences taken from The Breakfast Show , a Kenyan radio phone-in aired on Classic 105 fm. Although the programme is moderated in English, advice is given in both English and Kiswahili, since Kenya is highly multilingual with frequent code-switching. In this paper, we focus on the pragmatic strategies of expressing advice involving forms that furnish the recipient with little optionality in carrying out the suggested action, including, imperatives, declaratives with modal verbs, and conditional forms. In both languages, we observe a terminal falling intonation in advice-giving. However, whilst the global pitch contours in Kenyan English follow a marked downtrend for expressing advice in imperative, declarative and conditional forms, interpreted as a downstepping sequence of H* accents, those in Kiswahili have alternating rises and falls, suggesting a more elaborate intonational phonology. In instances of code-switching, imperative forms of advice generally reveal alternating rises and falls. This pattern is also found in declarative and conditional forms, although with a greater pitch range. These preliminary findings are useful in applications such as identification of language and variety, especially in multilingual interactions.