Rehabilitating African Languages
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 50books_poc)
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 50books_poc)