Language Policy: Some Economic and (Socio-)Linguistic considerations

What’s the purpose of language policies? Are they intended for economic development, for political rule, or for productive schooling? Which one comes first; and need things evolve in a specific order? Can a weak economy support adequate schooling? Must all citizens of the same nation-state speak the same language (in all domains of interaction)? Is a nation-state necessarily united demographically by use of one and the same language by all the citizens? Is the Western monolingual model what African States should follow? Is language the only or primary reason why formal education has been failing most pupils and students in Africa? What is the role of population structure in setting up adequate language policies? What is the role of linguistic-typology considerations in designing language policies? I intend to address these questions and more (from the audience) in this lecture.

African Languages as Medium of Instruction in higher education:
what has happened after Prah?

For decades, a generation of African and Africanist scholars has been arguing the need for using African languages in domains such as education. One of the most articulate of these is Prah, who has argued that sustainable development will remain an illusion if African languages are not used in more domains. However, progress has been slow at best.

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This webinar will examine some of Prah’s proposals and the advances in research and theory that have been made since then. It will discuss some of the limitations of approaches such as ‘translanguaging’ and seeing ‘language as spoken’; it will outline recent theoretical advances in seeing language as designed versus as discerned. It will show the potential of analysing the evolution of enrolment in education. This will expose the fiction that African educational systems can expand indefinitely using former colonial languages as medium of instruction.

Moroccan Language Policy between Theory and Practice:

An Overview of the Status of National/Official and Foreign Languages  

Morocco is qualified as a multilingual society where national, official and foreign languages coexist and are used on an everyday basis. Morocco has undergone the ‘Arabization’ process (i.e. replacing French with Modern Standard Arabic in all the formal domains), as a symbol of linguistic and cultural independence and has adopted Modern Standard Arabic as the official language of the state. The Moroccan 2011 New Constitution recognizes Amazigh (widely known as Berber), the indigenous language of North Africa, as the second official language of the country, besides Modern Standard Arabic, but more than a decade after its officialization, the implementation of Amazigh as an official language is still facing serious challenges. The constitution also encourages the learning of foreign languages. The present talk addresses and tries to answer the following questions: What is the state of the Arabization process in Morocco? What is the state of the official adoption of Amazigh, its teaching, and its standardization? What is the status of mother tongues, official and foreign languages in Morocco, more than six decades after its independence? What governs Moroccan language policy? What do the educational policies in Morocco reveal about the state’s language policy?  I will try to answer these questions and all the questions of the audience.

Discrepancies in Sesotho orthography; challenges in cross border collaborations
(South Africa and Lesotho)

This presentation will highlight challenges emanating from the cross-border project between Lesotho and South African scholars who teach Sesotho language in higher institutions. This project's main objective was to produce Sesotho material that will be used for teaching and learning in higher institutions. There were numerous challenges in this project that emanated from the discrepancies in orthography and lack of standardization and harmonization of certain words/letters/ etc. The lack of standardization and unified orthographies made sharing scholarly publications written in Sesotho from Lesotho and South Africa difficult.  Sesotho is the official language in Lesotho and one of the official languages of South Africa. In the 1960s, SA chose to use a scientifically researched orthography, while Lesotho opted to continue with the one introduced by the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society in their quest to translate the Bible into Sesotho in the 19th century.  Both Sesotho speakers from Lesotho and South Africa understand each other. However, the problem comes when writing. They write Sesotho differently, hence it is difficult for academics from either one of these countries to share their knowledge or at least use each other’s literary works. The study will focus on the review document that was used for this project. Interviews with both academics and students will be shared.  The study proposes reconciliation of two orthographies to be merged to avoid further confusion.

The Proposed Languages in Education Policy for Botswana: Will it Make Local Languages a Social Development Resource?

Botswana’s recently-proposed language in education policy could lead to a big step forward in using local languages in early primary education in the country. It is in line with Botswana’s Vision 2036 to make education for all a reality. The policy, if implemented, will especially lead to an improvement for learners who do not have Setswana as their home language. However, the deadlines set by the government make proper implementation a challenge. The presentation will assess the situation and point out issues that crucially need to be addressed in order to make the policy a success.

African Languages as Medium of Instruction - the case of Nigeria

The sociolinguistic profile of most African nations is both multiglossic, a precolonial legacy, and diglossic, a colonial legacy that has proved enduring. However, individual African societies have navigated the ensuing sociolinguistic conflict in different ways. This webinar examines the situation in Nigeria, the duels among the indigenous languages, and between them and the dominant colonial language, English.

Congruent with these duels is the mother tongue as medium issue, and the related triadic contest between desirability, necessity and viability.

The webinar identifies two strategic indices in this sociolinguistic duel – the development index and the affective index – and five related questions:

• Development – is the current diglossic situation truly enabling or disabling?

• Agency – who are the proponents and opponents, beneficiaries and victims?

• Policy – is this proactive/reactive, radical/conservative, enabling or disabling?

• Practicality and Contingency – what are the optimality conditions and the challenges?

• Prognosis - what prospects exist in the immediate and in the long run for the duelling languages?

Opportunities for language revitalisation through digitization: the example of Ejagham

​Ejagham is an endangered Ekoid language, spoken in Nigeria and in Manyu division of Cameroon. In principle, digitization offers opportunities for preserving the knowledge contained in the language and for its revitalisation. However, is it considered relevant by speakers of Ejagham? What are the challenges and the opportunities? This talk will examine these, using the results of a study using both qualitative and quantitative material.

Language hierarchies: Individual and group perceptions of Subaltern languages in Mozambique

The webinar will present an analysis of the sociolinguistic dynamic in Mozambique. In so doing, the webinar aims to elucidate the diverse strategies employed by subaltern language speakers to assert their linguistic identities, maintain and revitalize their languages, and challenge the hierarchies that perpetuate their subaltern status. The paper highlights the key role played by education systems, new digital technologies, and stakeholders in the cultural arena such as artists and musicians, in reshaping the linguistic landscape for subaltern languages.

Cameroon: 273 local languages, French, English, German, Spanish, CamPidgin, and many others all together; Forging new multilingual language policies

Cameroon is considered by many as ‘Africa in miniature’ because of its high diversity in terms of its natural landscape and geography, its human composition, and especially the many languages making up its multilingual landscape. However, the language policies borne out of a colonial agenda of division and exploitation ensure that the local languages are excluded as languages of teaching from the education system and from most of the public domains and spaces.

But how has the implementation of language policies inherited from colonial times impacted the evolution of local languages in their use in education and public communication?

After giving a brief overview of the multilingual ‘ecosystem’ of Cameroon, this presentation will provide an account of the development in language policies in Cameroon, while examining critically the challenges faced in the actual implementation of some of those policies. The presenter will also provide some information on some recent grassroots efforts, educational changes, and advocacy work that are trying to bring about some significant changes in the Cameroonian educational sectors, in a bid to bring about more linguistic justice and more empowerment of local languages so that they can better fulfill their necessary roles as tools and resources for sustainable development, and for an education system that does not perpetuate the declining intergenerational transmission of local languages and cultures.