Sarah Nakijoba is a lecturer in the school of languages, literature and communication at Makerere University. She holds an MPhil in Linguistics and a PhD in General Linguistics of Stellenbosch University. Her core research interests include socio-pragmatics, contact linguistics, language education, communication and translation. In her study, she presents linguistics as a strategy in contributing to food security debates and healthy-feeding campaigns in the developing world. She sets out to document food names, analyse the pragmatics of the linguistic expressions used about food and explain how the people’s emotional involvement with food helps to preserve it.
This study aims at increasing food visibility among the people of central Uganda by documenting the foods that they grow/or use. It analyses the pragmatics of the linguistic expressions used about food and explains how people’s emotional and linguistic involvement with food helps to preserve it. The study will use qualitative-ethnographic methods of participant observation, key informants’ in-depth interviews, group discussions and document analysis to generate a field-based inventory of the domestic and wild foods of plants, animals, birds, insects and fish species, which will be archived and disseminated to the present and future Ugandan and non-Ugandan relevant users. In addition to documenting the basic names of the foods, the study will examine the pragmatics of food names and establish the underlying emotions in the sociologically based identification of the foods among the people of central Uganda. By so doing, the study will create awareness about the wealthy of the foods available, enhance food presentation, and also turn food into an area of linguistic inquiry, as well as a domestic and external tourist attraction.
