Litnet

This talk was delivered at the Association of Independent Publishers’ Annual General Meeting at Birchwood Conference Centre, Johannesburg, 9 September 2013.

Introduction
The dominant view is that African languages have no future as languages of print. For purposes of this talk the designation “African language” excludes Afrikaans, and the word “print” is used inclusively to refer to both paper and digital print.

I am pleased to see that African languages are in fact significant languages of print in the independent media sector. The Association of Independent Publishers should be congratulated for housing and nurturing some of the most vibrant and linguistically diverse African language newspapers covering a range subjects, including local politics, culture, education and the state of social services. For the most part it is true that African languages remain marginal and marginalised languages of print, with perhaps the possible exception of isiZulu in parts of KwaZulu-Natal. The focus of this talk is how to bring these languages and, therefore, their speakers to the mainstream of print.

In a multilingual society such as ours African languages are essential to building a diverse and inclusive media landscape. In addition to being inclusive in the linguistic dimension such a media has to be inclusive in other important dimensions as well, including ideological orientation, content and sources. Although I rate highly the potential of the language factor to contribute to creating and sustaining a diverse and inclusive media, I have no illusion that addressing the language issue alone cannot bring this about without complementary changes in the broader political economy of media ownership, production and consumption.

The language factor
African languages have a future as languages of print, but this future is contingent on, among other things, the adeptness of editors and journalists of African language print media in forging links with educational and cultural institutions and movements, as well as with other writers in African languages beyond those in the world of media. Like the late Neville Alexander¹ I believe that to take full advantage of these languages requires of us to take a historical, open-ended and non-sectarian view of language. In this section I illustrate the implications of adopting such a view by examining the role of African languages in education, in development, and in fostering cross-cultural communication, understanding and unity.

The role of language in education is much discussed in the media and other public for a, but not always in an informed way. The essential issue is that a child learns best through a language (s)he knows best and in most cases such a language is the child’s home or community language. A child can, of course learn, through what are technically referred to as second or foreign. It would be absurd to suggest that it is impossible to do this. The crucial point is that a child can learn through a second or foreign language, provided that the child knows the language well enough. Knowing a language well enough to learn through it successfully requires a certain level of language infrastructure to support it. English for most South African children is a second language and the minimal language infrastructure necessary to learn English and to learn through English includes several elements. First, teachers must be either home language speakers of English or highly proficient second language speakers of English. Second, teachers must be proficient to teach content subjects through the medium of English. Third, the child must be immersed in a home, community or school in which there is a need to use English for real communicative purposes, rather than only for contrived classroom purposes. Fourth and finally, the child must live in a home or community that can support school learning, even if it cannot specifically support language learning.

As we all know, these minimal conditions do not exist for the vast majority of African language children, but exist only for African language-speaking middle-class children. As Neville Alexander often pointed out, the African continent is the exception in being the only continent in which the vast majority of its children are required to learn through a language they don’t understand and in a language that, in many cases, its teachers don’t command, with predictable catastrophic results.

To argue that children learn best through their home language is not to say that children should be taught exclusively through the medium of an African language. For the foreseeable future it is necessary to accept that we need to prepare our children for an English-based higher education system and economy. The question is how best to do this for the vast majority of children in our country.

The consensus internationally is that children require:

• good teaching of the first language (or mother tongue) as a subjectand teaching through the first language (or mother tongue), that is, using the mother tongue as the language for teaching maths and other content subjects for at least the first six to eight years of schooling
• good teaching of the second language (in our case, English) from as early as possible
• a well-structured and supported gradual transition to learning content subjects through the second language with the support of the first language, beginning in during the first six to eight grades, depending on circumstances.

I hope I have convinced you of the importance and complexity of the language of learning issue (also known as the medium of instruction issue) and of the need to have this issue discussed and written about more widely in an informed way. A quality African language-medium education during the first six to eight grades of school will contribute to creating broader and more literate readership in African languages, and also in English. A practical implication for editors and journalists is that they need to inform themselves about the complex pedagogical and policy issues² involved in language in education in order to educate the public and report accurately.

Recent reviews of initiatives to modernise African economies since 1960s have examined the role of language in economic development and conclude that the failure of many of these initiatives can in part be explained by the fact that much of this work has been packaged in one or the other ex-colonial language which, invariably, is spoken or written with facility by only a small section of the population.³ Essentially, development work happens over and above the heads of the masses.

As an intellectual project, modernisation is about the appropriation and naturalisation of the cutting-edge scientific, technological and professional concepts and discourses from across the world and their translation and dissemination in the relevant local languages. Modernisation is a mass phenomenon requiring people to empower themselves. To empower themselves people need to be innovative, creative or entrepreneurial, and it is quite difficult to do all that in a language you don’t command. All the modern European economies took off after the scientific and technical concepts were made widely available in local languages in contrast to earlier times when this knowledge was available only to a tiny Latin-speaking elite. The economic successes of Japan, China and the Asian Tigers are recent examples of countries that have appropriated and naturalised scientific and technical knowledge in local languages through massive translation programmes accompanied by wide distribution of this knowledge via schooling, adult education and higher education. African societies, too, need to take better advantage of the languages that the vast majority of its people command, while at the same time providing access to high levels of literacy in the relevant language of wider communication (in the case of South Africa, English). A practical implication of this is that in order to reach the greatest number of people in poor urban and rural communities, high-quality entrepreneurship and hard skills training programmes have to be made available in African languages alongside providing communication skills in English.

Of the three aspects of language discussed here, the connection of language to culture is probably one which many people have strong opinions about. To simplify: there are essentially two sets of approaches to this connection. In the first group are traditional approaches that take it that there is a direct connection between language on the one hand and cognition and cultural behaviour on the other. The argument is that languages co-evolve with cultural and social systems. To illustrate: Inuit speakers who live in the Northern American Arctic have 20 to 50 different words for different kinds of snow. The reason for this is that snow is central to the Inuit speakers’ way of life. Accordingly, an Inuit speaker perceives and acts in relation to snow in a very different way from the way a Xitsonga-speaking pastoralist in Southern Africa would. The Xitsonga pastoralist, by contrast, has just one word for snow but many words for different kinds or features of cattle, because cattle are central to a pastoralist’s way of life.

There are many obvious problems with this approach. The main one is that most of us can accept the idea that a language can influence the way we perceive and relate to the world, but I don’t think many of would accept the proposition that language alone, or evenly mainly, determines the way we perceive the world. The traditional approach is based on the assumption that languages are discrete entities and communities are cultural islands sealed off from one another. The Inuit languages, for instance, are made up of many different dialects even though the speakers of these languages live in the same physical environment. The dialects of Inuit don’t have the same number of words for snow, but it would be absurd to suggest that because of differences in dialect the speakers of Inuit think and relate to snow in significantly different ways.

In addition, the traditional approach doesn’t deal well with bilingualism or multilingualism. The approach leads to the simplistic conclusion that only because a speaker is bilingual or multilingual the speaker is by definition also bicultural or multicultural. Language is a proxy for culture.

Newer approaches problematise language, culture and the connection of language to culture.³ These approaches show that natural or spoken languages are internally diverse, consisting of named and unnamed dialects. In the traditional view, isiXhosa, for instance, is thought to comprise the following named dialects: isiThembu, isiMpondo and isiHlubi, which supposedly correspond to the abaThembu, amaMpondo and amaHlubi sub-cultural groups of an overarching isiXhosa culture.⁴ This sort of thinking ignores that named dialects as well as sub-cultural groups are themselves internally diverse. IsiMpondo, for example, is made up of at least two unnamed dialects which we can refer to by the geographic areas where they are dominant: the Qawukeni and the Nquza varieties. Simply because we have identified two possible varieties of isiMpondo, that does not necessarily mean we have now also identified two distinct sub-cultural groups, “abaseQawukeni” and “abaseNquza”. The relationship between a named language and culture and identity is not a one-to-one relationship. For instance, one may regard oneself as belonging to the Mpondo cultural group and yet speak no isiMpondo but actually speak Sesotho, isiXhosa, isiZulu or just English.

While language is a factor in identity construction, it is not always the main issue and it is not always the most relevant one. How people identify themselves has a lot more to do with history, broader cultural factors and changing ideas about what is culture and identity. For example, Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, for historical and political reasons, not linguistic reasons, are regarded as the same language, even though speakers of these languages don’t understand one another, whereas isiZulu and isiXhosa, two mutually intelligible languages, are regarded as separate languages.

Perhaps in the distant past cultures and identities were built bottom up, brick by brick, from the homestead, village, ethnic group, racial group and to a towering South African culture and identity at the top. However, it must be obvious that this is not how we are socialised and construct our identities in today’s world. Again to borrow from Neville Alexander, it is perhaps better to think of the homestead, village, ethnic group and the mainstream of South African cultures as streams from which we draw to construct our own socially situated but unique individual identities. The salience of linguistic, ethnic, racial identities and a South African identity will vary, for example, according to where one is raised and where one goes to school, and will vary according to interactional variables, including topic of discussion, participants in and place of interaction.

Because of the specific history of our country the salience of ethnicity and race as markers of identity is deeply influenced by the extent to which people experience or construe fierce competition for jobs and economic resources in a capitalist society as competition between ethnic or racial groups. The practical implications of this for journalists include the questions: Are you treating your readership as a linguistic or cultural or both as a linguistic and a cultural community? What kind of cultural or linguistic community? Is it an open or a closed linguistic and cultural community? To what extent is this reflected in your publication?

Reading in African languages
Several barriers exist that hinder efforts to promote a culture of reading for all the languages of South Africa, English included. First, we have low levels of functional adult literacy. This is a problem for children who are learning to read in the early grades, because children who do well in early reading are those who have been immersed in a culture of reading before they begin formal school. For the child to be immersed in a culture of reading includes being read to regularly and having adult models around who daily use reading and writing for real purposes. As we all know, it is predominantly black and white Afrikaans and English middle-class children who have access to highly literate caregivers, print at home and/or high-quality preschool education.

Second, very little print reaches the homes of most poor urban and rural communities, including schools, the most likely place for poor children to gain access to books. Fewer than 30% of South African public schools have a well-stocked and functional library, underscoring the importance of campaigns by education social movements to put pressure on national and provincial departments of education to ensure that every school has access to a functioning school library.

Outside of school, access to print is limited because of too few public libraries and of the relatively high cost of print materials in South Africa, including books and newspapers. Independent and community print products are reaching sections of some communities, but, overall, many South African households can’t spare the money to buy even the modestly priced mainstream newspapers such as the Sun or Sowetan.

Third, traditional ideas about what language is can become a barrier to promoting print in African languages. Written language – what is sometimes called a standard variety of a language – is related to, but also distinct from, spoken language. Strictly speaking, nobody speaks a standard or written variety of a language, although some varieties of spoken language are closer to the written variety than others. For example, in the case of isiXhosa the isiThembu variety is closer to written isiXhosa than is isiMpondo. The varieties or dialects we speak are coloured by where we’ve grown up, the social groups to which we belong and the schools we have attended.

Spoken language tends to be, in most cases, ahead of written language; written language tends to play catch-up with spoken language. If people want to talk about new objects or ideas that are unnamed in their variety they don’t wait for terminologists but go ahead and coin a new word or borrow it from other languages.

Of course written language can be ahead of spoken language – schooling is an example of this. In the early years of schooling children learn to read, write and count, and in the course of doing this they learn from books mathematical, scientific and technical concepts and words so that over time they begin to use these words and terms in their everyday spoken language.

People who work with written language, such as journalists, teachers and linguists, have a dual responsibility in terms of language: to keep up with the spontaneous changes of spoken language on the one hand, and on the other hand to ensure that speakers of different dialects of the same written language can read and understand the same written text.

This dual role is also performed by users of written language in every language. The implications of this include that we need to move away from inflexible ideas of a standard/written language based on old, rural standards, as is the case with many written versions of African languages taught in school. For print aimed at urban speakers of African languages, for instance, we must seek to include their varieties in print. This entails, among other things, resisting the temptation to ridicule or stigmatise urban varieties of African languages. This does not mean wholesale abandonment of the current written standards of African languages, but greater recognition that these are too narrow and that historically they have excluded many rural varieties, and also that in the next few years urban speakers of African languages will make up the greater majority of speakers of African languages. Urban varieties will not necessarily kill the old, rural-based written varieties, but if handled properly, they could help revitalise these varieties, expand their vocabularies and give them greater relevance in the 21st century.

Fourth, under the pretext of protecting the purity of this or that African language some linguists use colonial and apartheid language ideology and practices as a point of departure to think about African languages in a post-apartheid South Africa. Often this manifests in an obsessive search for largely irrelevant differences between varieties of African languages and to the policing of these differences. What is needed is a careful and long-term programme of restandardisation and harmonisation of African languages,⁶ in particular of the Nguni and Sotho clusters.

Language restandardisation and harmonisation in the case of the Nguni cluster, which comprises most varieties of isiNdebele, isiSwati, isiXhosa and isiZulu, means that in the future these languages will develop a single written language. The potential advantages are enormous and include savings in materials production and increasing the financial viability of using African as media of instruction in higher education, together with and/or alongside English and Afrikaans. Towards this end, linguists in the Nguni or Sesotho clusters need to cooperate around the generation of new terminology for scientific, technological and business concepts and objects so that the terminology is the same in the cluster. This is precisely what Japan, China and South Korea have started to do for new science and technology terminology, even though these languages are typologically different.

Fifth, we need to take seriously the suggestion that languages are best thought of as multidialectal (or as heterogeneous) rather than as pure, singular or homogenous. Adopting this view helps us to see that even monolingual speakers of English speak their own dialect of English as well as a variety of English that is close to the standard variety. In other words, many so-called monolingual people are, in fact, at the very least bi-dialectal.

Many African language speakers, especially in urban areas, are multilingual and therefore local print needs to reflect this multilingualism.

This can be done in a number of ways. A newspaper with a focus on a particular African language could, for instance, also carry monolingual or bilingual content in another, smaller, but locally important community language. An inclusive and also realistic view of language use would recognise that there is no, or little, access to spoken or written English in many communities and that given the importance of English in the South African linguistic market it is relevant for an African language paper to consider how to support its readers in acquiring English literacy by carrying some of its content in English. Doing this would also help reaffirm communities’ aspiration to become bi-literate in an African language and English. Of course the degree to which such multilingualism can be accommodated in an African language newspaper will vary according to the paper’s goals, expertise and the kind of communities it serves.

Do African languages have a future?
Common sense musing about the future of African languages often takes two pessimistic turns. First is the question about whether there is a great shift towards English and away from African languages by, in particular, young speakers of African languages, and hence about the future relevance of African languages. In other words, languages that haemorrhage young speakers can’t survive for too long into the future. Second is the question about whether African languages are undergoing such fundamental and rapid change that we should question whether they are worth investing in.

The question about the great shift to English can be approached as follows. At the moment there is no evidence of a great shift towards English monolingualism among African language speakers, even among the middle class. What seems to be happening is that African language-speaking black middle-class children are learning to be literate largely in English and Afrikaans and not in an African language. Even this situation may not last, because the Minister has announced that in a year or so ex-Model C schools that do not offer an African language will be required to offer one from the early grades. At least for the moment, the offspring of African language-speaking middle-class people do, by and large, speak one or other African language, even if they are not able to read or write it. The essential point is that for the foreseeable future, a wholesale language shift away from African languages to English, if it occurs at all, is likely to be restricted to the relatively small African language-speaking middle class. It is very unlikely that there will be a significant shift from African languages to English among the working class and the urban and rural poor. What is likely to happen is that those who have limited access to English will continue to strive to add English to their language repertoire as well as to use a form of English that is mixed and switched with various African languages, especially in spoken discourse.

Second, it is often argued that caregivers want English. The truth is that caregivers want their children to have access to quality education. In South Africa quality education also means access to the highest possible levels of literacy in English. However, the route to English literacy for children who live in English-dominant homes and communities and attend English-dominant schools is different from that of children who live in English-limited homes and communities and attend English-limited schools. The former are essentially middle-class ex-Model C and wealthy private school children who can succeed in learning only through English from grade R, and the latter group comprises the vast majority of children in poor urban and rural schools who, by and large, do not benefit from an English-only or English-mainly education system, as reflected by matriculation results. The latter group of children will benefit from an education system that is based on the first language in the early grades, that provides high-quality teaching of English as a subject, and that is based on a gradual and late transition to teaching and learning through English. The international consensus is that in order for children to benefit from learning through a second language they need 6 to 8 years of learning through their first language.

It is also often argued that youth language in many urban townships is increasingly mixed with other African languages as well as English and therefore urban youth don’t have a specifiable first language. In other words, young people are growing up without a “mother tongue” and therefore it is pointless to talk about mother-tongue-based bilingual education in the early grades. But language switching and mixing are not necessarily a sign of a language shift; in most cases it is a speech style used by and within a social sub-group such as youth as part of marking its social identity. Language switching and mixing is the most common and normal form of language behaviour in multilingual communities. In any case, it is worth noting that language switching and mixing are not random, but patterned and skilful language behaviour. Most people who switch and mix can and do keep their languages if required to do so, especially in formal settings such as formal lessons, meetings and formal writing. The practical implication of this for the schooling system is that if a child comes into school speaking a mixed form of an African language, for instance, the job of the school is to help the child to become aware of his or her language use and to use the child’s form of language use as the basis upon which to build knowledge of the standard written form of the language.

This is no more  than what teachers in inner city London schools, for example, do: they take the London Cockney spoken by children as their point of departure to help children to become aware of how this dialect of English differs from standard written English and to help them to acquire the standard variety.

Related to the above argument is the argument that there is no point in saving African languages, because they are undergoing such rapid change. A short response to this is that almost all languages are undergoing rapid change in the 21st century. The challenge for African languages is, therefore, the same as that for all languages: how to ensure that the written language keeps up with and reflects the essential features of all the contributing rural and urban dialects of the given language, while still fulfilling its role of acting as a linking variety for all dialects of the language.

Conclusion
While I hope it is clear that African languages have a future, it is also equally clear that this future is a complicated one. In summary: we can help insure the future African languages by keeping in mind all of the following.

First, accept that African languages are an important resource for learning for our children. A high-quality education through an African language along with good teaching of English as a subject in the early grades will ensure successful learning through the medium of English with the support of an African language in the later grades.

Second, African languages are a potential resource for African development if we recognise that we need to modernise the languages by initiating large-scale translation programmes through which African languages can appropriate the core scientific, technical and professional concepts and discourses. Given the lack of time, resources and expertise it is not possible to develop every African language to the same level as Afrikaans, and in any case this is unnecessary, as many African languages are closely related. What is required is that people working on related African languages should cooperate much more closely.

Third, for the 21st century we need a dynamic and also more realistic view of language and culture, a view that recognises that variation is the core of both language and culture, and that the most interesting variation is not between languages and cultures but inside languages and cultures. Such a view is empowering because it challenges us to see variety and change in and between language and cultural systems and strengthens the idea that the world is not just changing but that it is changeable.

Fourth, and finally, it is clear that language is ultimately not just about language but about people. African languages exist within a linguistic market that privileges English, and to a diminishing degree Afrikaans, and it is therefore clear that realising the benefit of African languages requires a degree of change that the value of African languages is increased in the linguistic market through their use in high-status functions such as higher education, the judiciary and the legislators.

Endnotes

Read Jonathan Jansen's Percy Maneshik Memorial Lecture.

Read Jacques du Preez's take on Jonathan Jansen's speech: Wanneer rassevooroordeel met taalregte verwar word.

Also read Tessa Dowling's Some thoughts on Jonathan Jansen's call for English.

Also read Russell Kaschula's response to Jonathan Jansen's Percy Baneshik Memorial Lecture.

Read Herman Wasserman's article: Die stand van die Suid-Afrikaanse media.

Also read Waldimar Pelser's article: Afrikaans en die media op pad na 2020.