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Controversies around the so-called alliterative concord in African languages: A Critical Language Awareness on communicative competence with specific reference to Tshivenda1

One aspect in syntactic studies that has fascinated European linguistic pioneers of African languages has been the concord which they have dubbed ‘the alliterative concord’. In their grammatical treatment of this phenomenon they purposefully created sentences to underscore their discovery of what they termed ‘euphonic’ and ‘melodic’ letters as ‘letters [that] correspond in form and use, to reveal prefixes from which they are derived’ (Boyce, 1844:ix). Eventually they concluded that it is ‘the key to the etymological structure of the language’ (Doke & Cole, 1969:34) and also to the understanding thereof. The term ‘alliterative concord’ has since been used with caution, because it is a misnomer and does not fully capture the nature of concordial agreement. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate, through Critical Language Awareness (CLA), that the so-called alliterative concord in African languages should be studied, taught and interpreted within context as a tool that deals with societal issues. This will be explicated by showing the balance between theories of grammar and theories of language in which knowledge and skills about rules and principles are learned and gained. Through both written and spoken language it will be demonstrated that the use of concords by speakers and writers is more determined by discourse-pragmatic factors to achieve communicative competence than by morpho-syntactic rules.