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Historically, southeasternmost Africa has been home to a large variety of speech communities, including Nguni, East Bantu, Khoi, and San—the legacy of a long and complicated history of migration, interaction, assimilation, and disaggregation between many peoples. With detailed, careful analysis, Raevin Jimenez guides readers through a thousand years of human movement, cultural contact, and social development in this region. Taking a historical linguistics approach, she sheds new light on this history by focusing on Nguni speakers’ use of gendered practices—including initiation, marriage, and avoidant speech known as hlónipha—to blend multilingual and diverse communities.

Use of gendered institutions inaugurated variable social spaces that could either elide or accommodate difference and thus enabled a multiplicity of community types. Contrary to previous assumptions about the roles of men and women in precolonial southeasternmost Africa, Jimenez shows that gender impacted life and social interactions across a large variety of important domains and became a way of forming, negotiating, and maintaining community. These developments shaped and remain visible in southeastern African speech communities today, and understanding them is vital to understanding the region’s long history and current linguistic society.

Muslim marriages have been the focus of considerable public debate in Europe and beyond, in Muslim-majority countries as well as in settings where Muslims are a minority. Most academic work has focused on how the majority Sunni Muslims conclude marriages. This volume, in contrast, focuses on Twelver Shi'a Muslims in Iran, Pakistan, Oman, Indonesia, Norway, and the Netherlands. The volume makes an original contribution to understanding the global dynamics of Shi'a marriage practices in a wide range of contexts--not only its geographical spread but also by providing a critical analysis of the socio-economic, religious, ethnic, and political discourses of each context. The book sheds light on new marriage forms presented through a bottom up approach focusing on the lived experiences of Shi'a Muslims negotiating a diverse range of relationships and forms of belonging.