#5 - Rehabilitating African Languages, Prah (ed)

[waelisc.livejournal.com]

Rehabilitating African Languages: Language Use, Language Policy and Literacy in Africa, Selected Case Studies, edited by Kwesi Kwah Prah (Capetown, South Africa : The Center for Advanced Studies of African Society, 2002).

A few weeks ago I posted about the book Afrikan Alphabets. I wanted to read more about African language issues and I'm fortunate to work in a university library with a strong collection in African studies.

Unsurprisingly, a huge proportion of the published works on African languages are by North American / European academics, but I found this one, in which all but two chapters are by black African academics. The editor addresses that in the introduction, in fact, noting that for one language group, Khoisan, there are no native speakers with linguistics training at present (or there weren't in 2002.)

I'm actually not a linguist, so I more or less floated through some of the technical issues discussed here. But the rest was very thought-provoking. Virtually everywhere in Africa, the colonial languages (mostly English and French) are used in higher education and government. (I did know that.) That means a student must learn a new language to go beyond secondary school, or in most cases, beyond primary school, because the the colonial languages are widely (not universally) used at the secondary level.

And in fact, what I did not realise at all is that students at the elementary level often don't get schooling in their own language. In Tanzania, the official languages are English and Kiswahili, but only 5% of families speak Kiswahili at home. The other 95% speak other African languages; those children have to learn Kiswahili just for elementary school. Similarly, there are more than 200 languages & dialects spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

So there are several very challenging issues involved in reclaiming, or as the title puts it, rehabilitating African languages. One is that there's a lot of prestige associated with colonial languages because of their use in higher education and government; the people who've spent years learning those languages naturally don't want to give up that status. Another is that most African languages don't contain scientific and technical vocabulary; one of the chapters here was on the various ways of doing that (compounding, loan words, "calquing" - lots o' technical linguistic stuff here.)

And a third issue is the incredible number of languages & dialects involved. Printing 200 versions of every textbook? What a logistical nightmare. So the linguists see their main job as "standardisation and harmonisation" of dialects within a given language, and within language families. This involves things like choosing a single writing system (whether it's the Roman alphabet or one developed specifically for African languages) and standardizing the spelling of words that actually are pronounced similarly in different dialects. (I think the parallel to this might be if English words in the U.S. were spelled differently depending on whether they were being used by someone with a Southern accent, someone from the Midwest, someone from Boston...)

The research center that published this book has a whole series, some of which appear highly technical (Ibibio Phonetics and Phonology) and others more on cultural issues (Knowledge in Black and White: The Impact of Apartheid on the Production and Reproduction of Knowledge.) I'm interested to keep reading on this topic.

(Cross-posted to my journal.)

Comments

[quasiradiant.livejournal.com]

just randomly: i spent a summer teaching and living in a village in uganda. amusingly, i was teaching hebrew (the community is a jewish one, a group of ugandans who converted in the 1920s) to kids who regularly already spoke four or five languages. many spoke the language of their mother's village and of their father's, some spoke perhaps another local language or two. many spoke luganda (like kiswahili, luganda is an official language of uganda but few people speak it in the home) with at least some facility. many spoke, even by the elementary level, english with some degree of fluency.

the school was very strict about forcing the students to speak in english. punishments for speaking in "the colloquial," as the headmaster put it, sometimes seemed severe to me, as an outsider, but the headmaster insisted that in order for his students to go on and become professionals in society, they were goin to need to know english, and he was going to make sure they learned as early as possible. to his credit, most of the teenagers in the area were able to simultaneously translate between luganda and english, could read and write fairly well in english, and could certainly communicate orally in english. many even went home and helped teach their families some english.

i remember once, though, asking him whether he thought it was important for the kids to be educated in luganda, if not in their local languages. he sort of blinked at me, unable even to respond. clearly, he thought i was nuts. his response was essentially, "why would i want to encourage these kids to be backwards?" and i thought that was really sad.

end of very long comment. thanks for your post!

[waelisc.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed and in awe of kids knowing 4 or 5 languages already by the time they are 10 or 12. And now learning Hebrew? with a whole other alphabet of course. Wow.

Something else that drew my attention to this topic, in addition to the Afrikan Alphabets book, was a batch of unpublished research papers I processed recently (I'm a librarian). They were by undergraduate linguistics students at the University of Kinshasa (in lovely, perfect French, orders of magnitude better than my own). Since these were by students near the beginning of their academic studies, mostly they documented their own village languages, which you could tell because the list of 'informants' at the beginning would list people like "my grandfather" and "my uncle's second wife." Also the papers always documented, both in a verbal description and with a hand-drawn map, the area in which the documented dialect was spoken. I spent hours on Ethnologue, a linguistics database, matching the local name for the language with the documented names and variations. It was unbelievably fascinating.

The geographic areas were often very tiny, which is what connects this long story to yours: two villages might be only 10 or 20 or 30 miles apart (close enough to meet someone from there and get married) but have distinct dialects! What incredible diversity and richness of culture.

Thanks for sharing your experience!

[sanguinity]

I'm adding a "language" tag, and it strikes me that you posted about at least three books about language and linguistics, but I can't find the third one. Am I misremembering? If I'm not, could you give me a link or tell me the author's name?

[waelisc.livejournal.com]

I think you're misremembering - this one, and Saki Mafundikwa's Afrikan Alphabets are the only ones for language, I think. I also posted about The African Prayer Book and Letters from My Father and A Concise Chinese-American Dictionary for Lovers.

Thanks for adding those subject tags! I'll do better in the future. :)

[sanguinity]

John McWhorter was the third one -- it got mentioned in today's rec post, which was enough to make it possible for me to find it. I had it stuck in my head that it must have been your post, but that was me grasping at straws.

And you're welcome with the tags. :-)

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

This is *fascinating*. Thank you for reviewing this book!

[waelisc.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reading the post! I've already checked out another book published by this same research center.