Rethinking our Strategies towards the Development of Indigenous African Languages
Lendzemo Constantine Yuka[1]
H. Oby Okolocha[2]
Abstract:
The domination of indigenous African languages by exogenous hegemonic languages has been the principal characteristic of the new African linguistic order. Post-colonial free-thinking African intellectuals have provoked the emergence of ethno-linguistic nationalism that is now ubiquitous in Africa. This paper examines the crisis of linguistic identities in some postcolonial African states. It highlights some of the idealistic and nationalistic approaches to language policy issues which have resulted in the persistence of the language problems in most postcolonial African states. The paper proposes alternative strategies to language planning and language development issues which are capable of addressing the national language problems that abound in many multilingual and multiethnic African States. These alternative strategies are motivated by the functional relevance of language to the speaker’s pursuits of his/her 21st Century goals. Our argument is that any language development strategy in the 21st Century that is motivated by the socio-economic needs of its speakers is likely more easily sustainable than an altruistic, nationalistic and idealistic driven strategy.
Key words: indigenous African languages, language policy, language planning, language
development, strategy.
1. Preliminaries
The current geo-political demarcation of the African continent is a direct result of the European scramble for Africa that resulted in colonization. The linguistic map of Africa owes its official structure largely to its political history. Each colonial master was keen to impose her language and culture onto the people within her territorial jurisdiction. These European languages automatically became the languages of governance, education, commerce and official communication. In most African states today, the official language of communication is hardly any of the numerous indigenous languages; rather it is the colonizer’s language. This has not been without great adverse consequences for the over 2,035 indigenous African languages[3] which have largely been neglected by language policy makers. They have been sentimentally assessed as non-prestigious, old-fashioned, inferior, and uneducated. Such judgments have however failed to erode the sentimental attachments and loyalties, accorded these languages by their native speakers.
Part of the rejection of colonialism was to replace the identities of the departing colonialists with national identities. The advocacy for national languages became part of the replacement argument. Proponents of this argument recognize the need to replace the colonial tongues with any of the native languages. Some African scholars validly argue that once African creative writers begin to employ indigenous African languages to represent ways of life, such a strategy will result in the clarity of thought, purpose, spontaneous creativity, self confidence, the gradual elimination language deficit, the promotion and development of these languages. This intensely idealistic and nationalistic approach to language policy planning[4] assumed that the replacement of foreign languages with national languages was part of the restoration of their linguistic sovereignty. The multitude of indigenous languages available to choose from, threw up new hurdles to African nationalists. One of them being; which among the many languages was to be selected as the tongue of a new nation? The native speakers of every language (often led by linguistic loyalties, language attitudes and arguments of language rights[5]) advance divergent opinions about which language merits to be selected for promotion and development into the national space. At the dawn of independence for most African states, it was clear that the majority of the post-colonial administrators had their training in systems designed to operate in the language of the departing colonial masters. An abrupt language substitution, (they feared) could lead to a systems’ collapse. Another worry was the fact that indigenous languages were not yet technically equipped to handle complex matters of state and the limitation of these languages as languages of wider communication. Language policy planning in post colonial Africa needed to begin from identifying and developing the national language(s).
As the debate for the choice of language has become more and more divisive, the foreign languages have developed in their countries of origin and have gradually become more entrenched even in their former colonies. There is evidence that the languages of the colonizers have crystallized in Africa. Most of these foreign languages are gradually adopting local African colour[6] while the persisting nationalistic and sentimental arguments have slowed down the pace of the development of indigenous African languages. Part of this idealistic argument is the exclusion strategy which argues that the work of African writers who fail to employ an indigenous African language as their vehicle of communication cannot be considered as African Literature[7]. To assume today that an African writer has the choice of coding his creative thoughts either in an indigenous language or a colonial language is to assume that the linguistic choices open to the writer are between two equally developed mediums of expression and that the target audience is evenly equipped with the ability to make the same choices in decoding the message that the writer seeks to convey. The persistent growth of languages of European origin at the detriment of indigenous African languages is evidence that our language development strategies have not yielded the desired results. In this paper, we suggest a change of strategy for the promotion and development of indigenous African languages with our proposal of a language development plan that is motivated by the socio-economic needs of language speakers in the 21st Century and beyond.
2. The African Linguistic Situation
The linguistic map of Africa is not less complicated than the linguistic constitution of individual African countries. The endoglossic languages of Africa belong to the four main language families: the Niger-Congo family, the Afro-Asiatic family (sometimes called Hamito-Semitic group), the Nilo-Saharan family and the Khoisan family. Greenberg[8] made the first attempt to classify the languages of Africa. No study boasts of accurate figures of speakers of the languages that make up these language groups[9]. The Niger-Congo phylum is the largest language group with an estimated speaker population of 400million. About 70% of African languages belong to this language family with seven major subgroups; six of which are in West Africa and one in Central African Republic. Languages such as Fulfulde, Yoruba, Igbo, Kiswhihili, Xhosa and Kinyawanda belong to this language family. The Afro-Asiatic phylum is estimated to have 300 million speakers; consisting about 29.5% of the languages spoken in northern Africa, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and around the Lake Chad region in Central Africa. This phylum has five subgroups: Berber, Semitic, Cushitic and Egyptian. Hausa is a very prominent member of this language family with more than 22 million people who use it as their first language. It is spoken in Northern Nigeria, Northern Cameroon and Southern Chad. It is a lingua franca in West Africa and is used as a language of wider communication in Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire and South East part of Libya. The Nilo-Saharan Phylum has an estimated 30 million speakers who are located around Eastern Sahara, the upper Nile Valley, around Lake Victoria, east of Central Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The last of the four language phyla is the Khoisan family which has about 12 languages and two sub groups: South African Khoisan (which includes languages like Nama and Naron spoken in Northern South Africa, South-western Botswana and Namibia) and East African Khoisan (consisting of languages like Sandawe and Hadza spoken in Tanzania). This phylum is estimated to have over 300,000 speakers[10]. Clicks are a very prominent feature of these languages.
Languages completely alien to any of the language phyla reviewed above began to gradually encroach into Africa long before the European scramble for colonial territories in the continent. The 12th Century Trans-Saharan trade brought with it Islam and the Arabic language. The Fulani Jihad resulted in the spread of Islam and Arabic in most of North Africa. The European traders arrived by sea in the 14th and 15th centuries and introduced their goods to Africa with their language. English began to spread across Africa, Asia, Australia and America aided by slave trade. Closely related to English in West Africa, French in Central Africa were Pidgins. These Pidgins turned out to be simplified speech forms developed through extended contact between the natives and the Europeans as a medium of communication. Many of the exogenous languages like English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish became entrenched in Africa as a result of colonization. Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa that is equally not indigenous to the continent. It originated from a 17th Century Dutch-dialect and has become Africanized over a period of 300 years.[11]
These exogenous languages have gradually been embraced in Africa as languages of education, media and governance. They have modified the linguistic landscape of the continent to such an extent that there is hardly any possibility of restoring the original landscape at any time in the foreseeable future[12]. These languages have gained enough wide usage and acceptability to become the official languages in the colonies left behind by the colonizers. Awonusi[13], notes that English (for example) has not only become hegemonic but has developed into a superstructure that is threatening the survival of indigenous languages especially in multicultural and multiethnic African countries. Nationalists and linguists in quest of the restoration of linguistic sovereignty have rightly observed that the domination of exogenous languages on the African linguistic turf is threatening linguistic identity of Africans. Unfortunately, the same strategies adopted to develop, and promote these languages in the 20th Century have hardly changed in the face of completely different linguistic challenges confronting the native speakers in the 21s Century.
3. Reasons for the Persistence of the Language Question in Africa
A lot of literature exists on how to solve the gradual devaluation of the indigenous languages of Africa in the face of the hegemonic expansion of European languages whose superstructure is being nourished and propelled by their functional relevance and the engulfing impact of globalization. This section of our paper reviews some of the strategies that have been proposed to reposition indigenous African languages as a vehicle of African socio-cultural life style and creativity. We are interested in assessing the application of these proposals and the effectiveness of the solution tactics in an attempt to identify reasons why the crisis of linguistic identity still persists on the continent.
Given the multiplicity of ethnic nationalities in most independent African countries, an easy solution to the national language debate was to sacrifice indigenous languages in favour of the language of the colonial master. The neutrality argument of exogenous languages as languages of official communication in the new states put in abeyance linguistic rivalry among ethnic nationalities and gave national language planners some space to design language policies that could fast-track the development of indigenous languages to an appropriate level at which they can easily replace the colonial languages.
At the dawn of independence from Britain and France the new government of Cameroon opted to adopt French and English as official languages of communication for the new multilingual but officially bilingual state. Half a decade after independence, this language policy fraught with linguistic conflicts remains the same. The argument has been that with 286[14] indigenous languages[15] elevating one of them to a national language may rekindle language loyalties and ethnic nationalities which government interprets as a threat to the delicate national unity and national integration in which so much has already been invested[16]. The 1979 language related unrests in the Algerian University of Tizi-Ouzou[17] appeared to give credence to the fear in Cameroon that the recognition of linguistic diversities at the national level could threaten national integration and the national unity. About the same time that Cameroonian politicians were advancing their national unity argument, other countries were approaching their language issues differently. Nigeria[18] (for example) was bold enough to adopt 3 indigenous languages (Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa) as national languages. Rather than explore the practical possibilities of elevating any of these languages to an official status, Nigeria strangely found it necessary in 1996 to opt for French as her second official language. Yuka[19] argues that this controversial language policy for Nigeria is not only ill-motivated but also fails to reflect the language needs of the country and the attitudinal linguistic preferences of the citizenry. South Africa has moved away from the 1976 Soweto Riots that witnessed the death of many students protesting the imposition of Afrikaans (the language of the Afrikaners) to the adoption of 11 languages as official languages[20], 10 of which are indigenous. In 1974, Kenya made Kiswahili her national language and later the official language alongside English. This was done in spite of the powerful interests represented by languages like Gikuyu, Dholuo, Luluhya, Kikamba[21]. About 30 years ago, Tanzania, an ex-British colony with German connections adopted Kiswahili as her official language and immediately set up a language development academy of experts to recommend new words to express highly technical concepts into the language. The Tanzanian example has been so successful that there is hardly any scientific term that Kiswahili lacks a word for[22]. Kiswahili is the language of formal education in Tanzania. It is the language of parliament and government business. Decades after the Tanzanian evidence of how a dedicated application of a carefully designed language policy can turn the fortunes of indigenous African languages many educated Africans still advance the argument of vocabulary limitation as a reason to object to the adoption of indigenous languages as official languages.
In general terms, the image of a people is intertwined with the perception of the language they speak. The idea that Africans were primitive, uncivilized and uneducated people in contrast to the Europeans who had come to spread civilization to the Dark Continent affected the perception of African languages. When independence came to Africa, the new leaders were those who had acquired western education and could speak the language of the colonial master. In many African countries it has been difficult to market African languages because they lack social, political and economic benefits that the European languages offer. The economic devaluation of African languages has led parents and teachers to resist encouraging their children from learning their mother tongues. It has turned out that Africans have been the worst enemies to their own languages. They have not only abandoned efforts to develop them, but now support policies that seek to confine African languages to tribal interactions. Such policies are killing most languages of Africa since the motivation for the young people to learn them is being hindered by the persisting colonial idea that these languages are primitive, uneducated and uneconomical.