languages and area spoken for chitipa - Centre for Language Studies

g) To guide government in the formulation of a comprehensive language
policy for Malawi.
h) To facilitate the standardization of Malawi languages
i) To guide the Ministry of Education in the implementation of its policy of
local language instruction at primary level.
1.3 Methodology
As indicated above, language data on Malawi has in the past years been collected through
population census. This data is however, flawed in many ways in that the methodology
used in collecting the data is not appropriate to language research. For instance, some of
the languages that have been claimed to be languages by the census reports are not
languages but dialects of particular languages. In the census data it is also evident that
belonging to a particular tribe was treated as being synonymous to speaking a language
associated with the particular tribe. For instance, being Ngoni by tribe is synonymous to
being a Chingoni speaker.
As a starting point however, the survey team sourced all the language data collected by
the National Statistical Office during the 1998 population census which is the most recent
data available. The data showed languages spoken in the different villages in every
district in the region. This information was used as a guiding tool for mapping the
geographical distribution of languages/dialects spoken in a particular district. It also
provided clues about the tribal identities of the indigenous inhabitants of the particular
district. The research team worked closely with Traditional Authorities (TAs) to verify
the authenticity of these data before identifying sample villages to be interviewed in
every Traditional Authority in a district.
1.4 Research Team
The research team comprised twenty researchers and was divided into three field groups.
Each group had 6 to 7 people one of whom supervised the group. Each group had its own
vehicle. Every evening the three groups met to review the day’s work and decide on the
way forward.
In as much as the Principal Investigators wanted to balance the gender of the research
team, recruitment of the research assistants was based on their research experience and
communication competence in the languages of the northern region so that they could
comfortably conduct interviews in the respondents own languages. More female
candidates were deliberately short-listed for interviews but most of them did not do well
more especially in the languages test which was the most important requirement.
Preference was also given to candidates who had knowledge of more that one language
spoken in northern Malawi. In the end, the research team comprised 11 males and 9
females. Each group had researchers who were competent in the languages spoken in
each of the district of the northern region.
Each group had a copy of the census data. Field trips were planned in advance in the
evening with the guidance of map sheets for each district sourced from the National
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