Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo Livres

This collection is divided into two parts: the reconstruction of identities through everyday life experiences and through literary and creative works. The carefully chosen chapters illuminate identity construction in transnational contexts, exploring migration issues from Brazil, Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, and Romania. It addresses the discursive construction of identities, a central concern among researchers in the humanities and social sciences. The necessity for identity construction arises primarily from migration, a social change process where individuals leave their geographical areas for prolonged stays or permanent settlements elsewhere, often for economic, political, or educational reasons. Migrants carry their knowledge, worldviews, fears, and aspirations, leading to changes in cultural identity that foster a sense of belonging. They navigate assimilation or biculturalism as they settle into new cultures. Language plays a crucial role in this identity construction process. The collection features contributions on various topics, including the experiences of African and Caribbean students in Brazil, sociolinguistic trends among Nubi communities, the impact of social media on Ugandan diasporas, and narratives of identity in migrant women's autobiographies, among others. This work highlights the complexities of identity in a globalized world.

Lexical innovations represent unconventional forms resulting from unsuccessful rule application by children as they unpack regular patterns in their language and develop a set of guidelines that govern their early word use. They are novel words, coined specifically to refer to an object, process or event, for which the child has not learnt the conventional form. The study used an ethnographic approach to investigate how Luo children, acquiring their native language, Dholuo, engaged in the production of lexical innovations in an effort to bridge the lexical gaps in their mental lexicons, resulting from their failure to retrieve or learn the conventional forms. It reports that children manipulated word-formation paradigms of Dholuo to create lexical innovations which, in turn, were related Dholuo derivational morphology.