Patterns of language use in Malawi

This paper reports on results of a sociolinguistic investigation on patterns of language use in Malawi. The analysis which was limited to seven domains of interaction revealed two main patterns of language use. One pattern involving intraethnic or ingroup communication encoded ethnic identity, familiarity and traditional status quo. Another pattern involving interethnic or outgroup communication encoded social distance and interpersonal interactions along power and hierarchical differences. The results in general showed that language use in Malawi-is fluid and not compartmentalised. Based on these findings the paper attempts to argue for the importance of integrating macro and micro-level sociolinguistic theories to account for the large corpus of data that showed use of more than one language in a particular domain or speech event.