The paper evaluates spatial, behavioural, and material signalling of social class in African contexts, focusing on Kenya and Zambia. In particular, it draws on notions of mode of class signalling and intersectionality and a vignette of an interaction between urban‐based Western educated development agents and local participants in rural Kenya to illustrate how social class is implicated in interactions. The paper shows how significant features of class and dimensions of social inequality may be perceived intersectionally so that positionalities in class structures are negotiated in contexts of interaction, thus illustrating how structural conditions of class may be challenged and questioned. The paper concludes that sociolinguistics needs to identify the various ways in which the marginalized challenge social structures of inequality. Otherwise there is a risk that sociolinguistics will work to validate inequalities as permanent and fixed, and victims of unequal treatment as permanently condemned and never able to rise against oppressive social structures that tyrannize them.

中文翻译：

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社会语言学和社会阶层信号传递的模式：非洲的观点

本文评估了非洲背景下社会阶层的空间，行为和物质信号，重点是肯尼亚和赞比亚。尤其是，它借鉴了阶级信号和交往方式的概念，以及以城市为基础的西方受过教育的发展代理人和肯尼亚农村地区本地参与者之间的互动的装饰图案，以说明社会阶层如何在互动中发挥作用。本文展示了如何相互理解阶级的显着特征和社会不平等的维度，从而在互动的背景下协商阶级结构中的地位，从而说明了阶级的结构条件如何受到挑战和质疑。本文的结论是，社会语言学需要确定边缘化挑战不平等社会结构的各种方式。