Multilingualism, modernisation, and mother tongue: Promoting democracy through indigenous African languages

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Multilingualism,modernisation, andmother tongue: Promotingdemocracy throughindigenous AfricanlanguagesH. Ekkehard Wolff aa Institut für Afrikanistik , University of LeipzigPublished online: 13 May 2008.

To cite this article: H. Ekkehard Wolff (1999) Multilingualism, modernisation,and mother tongue: Promoting democracy through indigenous Africanlanguages, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 25:1, 31-50, DOI:10.1080/02533959908458660

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Social Dynamics 25:1 (1999): 31-50

Multilingualism, Modernisation, and MotherTongue: Promoting Democracy ThroughIndigenous African Languages

H. Ekkehard WolffInstitut für AfrikanistikUniversity of Leipzig

PrologueIt may be illuminating to link some sociolinguistic observations and experiencesin Europe to the present sociolinguistic situation in Africa. The author's mothertongue, German, is spoken by about 100 million people, it is the native and firstlanguage of maybe 80 million. It seems completely natural, now at the end ofthe 20th century, that German should be the official language of Germany,Austria, and parts of Switzerland, and a national language of legally recognisedminorities in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark, and that it serves quitenaturally as medium of education on all levels in these European countries. Thismakes German into a cross-border language. German, however, is not or nolonger an international language comparable to English or French, although itis taught and studied as a foreign language in many countries outside thecountries where it is spoken by its mother-tongue speakers. It is, who wouldwant to deny it, as modern a language as one would want it to be, and has a richliteracy environment with flourishing post-literacy production for its highly(even if not yet 100%) literate communities of speakers.

Would this be a model, a realistic goal to achieve for any major Africanlanguage at some point in the new millennium ahead of us, and would this trulywitness to the "African Renaissance" everybody speaks about and hopes for onthis vast and linguistically most heterogeneous continent? Sceptics may answer:Well, German is not isiXhosa, nor even Kiswahili for that matter; one simplycannot compare German to any of the indigenous African languages, one would

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32 Multilingualism, Modernisation and Mother Tongue

only have to look at their totally different histories! - Is this really so? Let metake the reader back a bit into the sociolinguistic history of German.

When the famous philologist Jacob Grimm, Professor for the GermanLanguage in Gottingen, gave his Inaugural Lecture in 1830, he did not deliverit in German, he was using Latin as the language appropriate for the occasion.Any student of medicine writing his doctoral thesis had to do it in Latin, too.1 -Yet, already in 1687 and 150 years before Jacob Grimm's Inaugural Lecture,quite an extraordinary event had taken place at the University of Leipzig: thethen 32 year old Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) had dared to offer to hisstudents the first lecture in the history of that old university, which was founded278 years before in 1409, ever to be held in the German language. What ashock, what an unheard of provocation, the more so since he had explicitlyopened his lectures to female students, Christian Thomasius, who later foughtsuccessfully against torture and witch hunts in those dark days in Europe, alsocreated the first journal in the German language {Montagsgesprdche - MondayTalks) and thereby laid the foundations of modern journalism in the Germanlanguage. - A man with a glorious career? In 1690 he was expelled from hisuniversity! He crossed the border from Saxony to Prussia into another Germanspeaking kingdom and prepared the ground for a new university in the city ofHalle (founded 1694). When the University of Leipzig belatedly realised whatthey had lost in this enlightened, brave and efficient scholar, they offered hima position in 1709 - which he declined. Highly respected, this militantpropagator of enlightenment and fighter against prejudices and erroneoustraditions died in Halle 20 years later.

Would this story contain a message for us - specialists on Africanlanguages in South Africa or elsewhere on this vast continent, at the thresholdof a new millennium in which it is hoped that democratisation will become asrevolutionary a change as was enlightenment in Germany some 300 years ago?Where do we stand today - at the side of Christian Thomasius, or with hisunenlightened and unimaginative colleagues of the University of Leipzig in histime and age who would not accept and recognise the particular German-Latinbilingualism already deeply entrenched in the society and which was to prevailfor another 200 years? Are we going to give isiNdebele, SePedi, SeSotho,

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H. Ekkehqrd Wolff 33

siSwati, Xitsonga, SeTswana, Tshivenda, isiXhosa, isiZulu, and many morelanguages in Africa the same chance in competition with English, French,Portuguese, Spanish as German eventually had in competition with Latin or, inthe eighteenth and nineteenth century, with French when the country waslargely characterized by German-French-Latin triglossia2?

To end this Prologue I take the liberty to quote the motto of a speech ofthe President of the USA which he delivered in 1998. Commenting on the Iraqcrisis, Mr. Clinton had warned his compatriots with the words "Look at the past,and imagine the future!". When Africanists look at the past, for instance, of alanguage like German (and Afrikaans, for that matter!), and imagine a future forAfrica without due recognition of multilingualism involving the indigenousAfrican languages and multiculturalism - do we really have a choice?

The Prologue has now brought me to the topic of this paper, i.e. thediscussion of three central issues related to the language question in Africa andparticularly so with regard to democratization and development which are stillcontroversial in some quarters:

• multilingualism involving mother tongues - as the norm rather thanthe exception,

• modernisation of indigenous languages - as almost a synonym fordevelopment,

• mother-tongue literacy and post-literacy - as almost a prerequisitefor democracy.

These three issues reflect continuously renewed topics in the general discourseon language and human rights, language and development, and language andeducation.3

Multilingualism as the norm in AfricaWhether we view bilingualism or multilingualism in the micro-perspective ofindividual speakers, or in the macro-perspective of sociolinguistic profiles ofindependent states, multilingualism is the norm rather than the exception inAfrica. The linguistically (and culturally) homogeneous society is a myth andreflects nineteenth century romantic and Utopian visions of European

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provenance, yet it is still cherished by propagators of assimilation policies forAfrica as, for instance, in the case of la francophonie. The linguistic andcultural, even "ethnic" heterogeneity of France, the motherland of francophoniawith its Briton, Alsatian, Occitan minorities and their distinct language varietiesdefeats the idea of homogeneity at home, not to mention the thousands ofimmigrants from (former) overseas territories of la France d'outre mer. TheUNESCO Working Document (1997:3) summarizes the African situationlucidly:

According to the definition of languages and dialects there are between 1,250 and 2,100languages in Africa. It is a trivial statement to say that monolingual countries are more theexception than the rule if we are to adhere to strict criteria. Even in an apparentlymonolingual setting, the geographical distance (dialects), the social distance (sociolects),the historical distance and other codes and registers will make the situation more complex.

Homogeneity is a fiction in the linguistic field more than in any other. Talcing anarbitrary threshold of 90 per cent as the defining landmark of a monolingual country, onlya handful of countries meets this criterion in Africa. The ones generally cited are Botswana(language: Setswana), Burundi (Kirundi), Lesotho (Sotho), Madagascar (Malagasy),Mauritius (Creole), Rwanda (Kinyarwanda), Seychelles (Creole), Somalia (Somali),Swaziland (Seswati).

The degree of multilingualism varies greatly. About 105 million people speakaround 410 languages in Nigeria, 30 million people in Zaire use 206 languages andEthiopia has 97 languages for a population of about 45 million. Diversity is not thecharacteristic of giants alone. In Cameroon 185 languages are used by 8 million people,giving an average of 50,000 persons per language, 3 million inhabitants of Benin are spreadover 58 languages while 2 million Congolese have at their disposal 31 languages. On theother hand, Mauritania has four languages, Niger ten....these figures need to be scrutinizedfurther, and they yield interesting and useful information. With a population of about 28million Tanzania has 120 languages, among them Kiswahili which as a lingua franca isused by the vast majority of the population. Mali has 12 languages and 90 per cent of thepopulation use four of them and 60 to 65 per cent use only one language, Bamanan, as first(LI) or second (L2) language. Twenty years ago this percentage was around 40 per cent;the increase is due more to growing numbers of users of Bamanan as L2 rather than thedemographic increase of the ethnic Bamanan. Burkina Faso has about 60 languages for apopulation of 9 million, half of which is morephone (speaker of More language).Thenumbers also conceal facts which need to be brought to light for a better understanding ofthe context and the challenge of multilingualism as a problem. In Nigeria 397 languages outof 410 are 'minority' languages, but the total number of their speakers account for 60 percent of the population. Among them are several languages with more than 1 millionspeakers, with a few of them having a number of speakers close to 10 million. Similarphenomena are observed elsewhere and compel a departure from 'numerical muscle' as adecisive criterion in language planning...

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H. Ekkehard Wolff 35

Even in world terms, a mother tongue of another language with some 200,000 orso speakers is by no means a small language, given the fact that the overall population ofthe country of its usage may be much greater. Where, as in much of Africa, speakers of acertain language are not dispersed but tend to be restricted to well-defined geographicalareas, even languages of some 50,000 speakers become significant for the purposes ofdevelopment and use in national life. By the time one gets down to this level of languageswith 50,000 speakers, one has taken into account well over 90 per cent of the populationof almost any African country ...

This survey deserves to be complemented with another quote from the samesource on individual multilingualism in Africa:"In a survey related to the caseof Nigeria, the number of languages spoken by each of the subjects of thespeech communities studied ranged from two to five as follows: 60 per cent ofthe subjects spoke two languages; 30 per cent three; and 10 per cent over fourlanguages. A similar observation could be made regarding many if not all theAfrican countries, where there is a widespread tradition of handlingmultilingualism. Often there is a complementary distribution of thismultilingualism across languages by sectors of activities. The multilingualismis not only functional or commercial, it cuts across the whole social fabric. Itforms a socio-political and socio-linguistic characteristic of most speechcommunities..." (p.4).

Language functions and "linkage" in multilingual andmulticultural contextsLanguage serves very different functions in society, and in multilingualsocieties several languages may be found to divide such functions among them.This aspect of functionality has been made the basis of many a sociolinguistic,categorization of languages in Africa, i.e. a categorization in terms of aparticular language's usefulness for promoting overall development and its mosteffective usage in certain domains. Such major functional domains are usuallyidentified with family, church, school, politics and administration, the mediaetc. Accordingly, societies or states can be classified according to the legalstatus of the languages spoken within its confines, and of how (and how many)languages are commonly used for which functions within its boundaries. Legalstatus is tied up with language functions. In most multilingual societies orstates, however, legal status and language functions overlap.

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FUNCTION/DOMAIN

FUNCTIONALLABELS/ LEGALSTATUS

FUNCTIONAL DESCRIPTION

officialcommunication

inter-groupcommunication

official language '

vehicular languagelingua francacommunity languageregional languagenational language

nation-wide official communication for political, legal,administrative, educational, business, media purposes

used for inter-ethnic communication whenever needarises, learned by large parts of populations withdifferent mother tongues as 2nd or 3rd languages;dominant language used in areas broader than theirethnic boundaries but not having a national scope;dominant language in multilingual environment usedfor regional or even nation-wide communication (defacto national language); may be decreed to serve someof the official functions (dejure national language)

intra-groupcommunication

internationalcommunication

education

literature

religion

mother-tongue languagvernacular languagelocal languageethnic languagetribal languagechtonolect

language of widercommunicationforeign languagecross-border languagelanguage of Africanintercommunication,Inter-African language

world language

[any of the above]

with members of communities to which they are linkedby parentage; sometimes non-dominant or language ofminority population in multilingual environment

cf. Inter-African language, world languageImported languages with no or very few mother-tonguespeakers in the countryLanguage whose territory has been divided by aninternational border and is spoken on both sides of theborder are widely used across national borders forAfrican intercommunication, e.g. Kiswahili,Pulaar/Fulfulde,,Mandinka, Hausa

such as English, French, Portuguese, Arabic which areused for communication among people of differentcountries and continents

a) language used for (adult) literacy b) language asmedium of instruction (school) c) language as subject ofinstruction (school)

language used for literary production, print media,post-literacy

language used for religious purposes

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Note, however, that apparently simple functional terms such as mother tongue,national language, official language are used with a confusing and conflictingrange of interpretation, and quite often there is considerable functional overlap.Further, policy makers and language planners are tempted to combine mothertongue and community languages and to dilute dialects and minority ethno-linguistic groups into a homogeneous language and speech community forpractical purposes. An underestimated and often ignored problem concerns thatof linguistic and cultural "linkage" in a multilingual and multicultural context.The idea is that oral skills and writing skills, linguistic and cultural differencesat home and at school, linguistic and cultural differences concerning theimmediate community and the nation-state are viewed not as mutuallyexclusive categories but as complementary and being equally important. Thepedagogical problems related to linkage issues, however, are a challenge to alltraditionally conceived educational policies and strategies: Here we are dealingwith changes of attitudes and creation of awareness at various levels. As far asformal education is concerned, for instance (cf. Pattanayak 1995:222), theseinclude:

• awareness about the need for mother tongue education,

• awareness about the differences between home dialect and thestandard as much as differences in comparison with othergeographical and social variations,

• awareness of the need to link the mother tongue with the schoollanguage which may be a different dialect or even a differentlanguage,

• confidence about the wellformedness of the mother tongue and itspotential capability and the possibility of creating a formalgrammar and dictionaries,

• awareness about the distinctions between the first, second,possibly third and the foreign language (in exoglossic educationpolicy environments).

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Mother tongue - multilingualism - development -democracyIf we accept multilingualism and multiculturalism as the norm, the role ofmother tongues is of vital importance because, as a rule, they will be part andparcel of the multilingual and multicultural environment for any individual orcommunity. Whenever one speaks of development and democracy, the normof multilingualism and multiculturalism involving mother tongues needs to bekept in mind. Some issues of interrelation between these notions will,therefore, be addressed next.

The role of language in development and democracyNew visions for Africa look at the notorious language question in the broadercontext of development (and democratization). We may be allowed to ask:"Development" of who or what and for which purpose? Language, in any case,is both object and instrument of "development":

1. Language serves as an important, if not the most important tool forthe development of individuals or communities, i.e. "development"in the sense of offering them education in order to enable them tochange their conditions of life;

2. Language is the transmission belt for all political, commercial andprofessional communication, i.e. the "development" of a wholecountry in terms of its economy or political culture hinges oncommunicative efficiency based on language;

3. Language itself changes and "develops" constantly, no language isintrinsically developed or underdeveloped, it is neither intrinsicallymodern nor unmodern; however, its change can be engineered andaccelerated through language planning in terms of elaboration andmodernisation of vocabulary, first of all.

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With regard to point (3), the UNESCO Working Document (1997:13) takes acloser look at the issue of language development or modernisation:

"It is in and through usage that development occurs and that a language extendsits technical scope. It is generally believed that the value, prestige andimportance attached to a language are proportional to its perceived usefulness invarious areas of activity. The preponderant factor in choosing a language to beused in the most important areas of communication is therefore function.However, it is the combined effect of a variety of socio-economic factors and ofits linguistic ecology' that conditions and shapes the functions and statusperformed by a language in multilingual contexts. Consequently, the link ofcausality between function and status and, in turn, between them and the use oflanguage is tautological, since a language that performs several functionsinevitably acquires prestige and, once possessed of growing prestige, it gainsaccess to new functions. Likewise, everyday use affects its status and the prestigeattached to it and, in turn, the acquisition of prestige enlarges its area ofapplication. To choose a language on grounds of prestige and status and thenmake its use contingent a priori on qualities that it can only attain through usageis an obvious contradiction.

Wider use has been the key to the modernisation of Hebrew, BahasaIndonesia, Somali and Kiswahili. The advanced training of new literates in Maliin the Mandingo-Fulfulde Promotion Project (MAPE) has revealed thepotentialities of local languages where they have access to scientificcommunication. These cases also show that technicalisation and terminologicaldevelopment are possible."

If I am allowed to once more jump back to the Prologue: Is German a"developed" language - the observation notwithstanding that there is noGerman word for automobile, hypotenuse, parallelogram, personal computeretc., and that apparently etymologically pure German words such as Erdkunde,Fernsehen, Kernspaltung, Sauerstoff, etc. are straightforward caiques, i.e. loantranslations, from originally Graeco-Latin neologisms which are also used inEnglish: geography, television, nuclear fission, oxygen, etc.? Loans andcaiques are just two of several strategies which every language possesses andhas been using constantly and efficiently even for ad hoc (unplanned) lexicalinnovation for as long as its speakers have been in contact with speakers ofother languages.

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Talking about official multilingualism and economic development:nobody has ever seriously questioned the developmental status of Switzerland,Belgium, Finland, to mention just a few European countries which are blessedwith official, i.e. constitutional multilingualism - or Germany for that matterwith

a. its plethora of dialects which are often not mutually intelligible, and

b. various officially recognized minority languages such as Frisian,Danish and two Sorbian languages; plus

c. the various languages indigenous to or preferred by, hundreds ofthousands of permanent or temporary immigrants, some of themliving in the country in third generation?

Again, the UNESCO Working Document (op. cit.) makes the point quite clear:

"It has even been suggested that a high level of political and economicdevelopment requires a limited number of languages in a community and isincompatible with a high degree of linguistic fragmentation, although it has nowbeen shown that there is no correlation between linguistic heterogeneity andlocal economic status and vice versa. However, even in the most radical analysisby economists there is growing recognition of the fact that economic andtechnological efficiency cannot be dissociated from the cultural context. Thus,technological development makes printing technology increasingly accessibleand affordable by a greater number of linguistic communities. Whether it iseasier and cheaper to produce a large number of textbooks in a single languageor the same number in several smaller batches is irrelevant compared with theconsiderable non-economic gains derived from this greater diversity. Theeconomic and, above all, social, cultural, psychological and personal costscaused by educational wastage are considerable and require attention. Suchwastage also occurs in mother tongue teaching, but compared to teaching inforeign languages it is relatively low. The shortage of staff and material is not aninsoluble problem and can be remedied. It is the result of long-standingdiscrimination, which can be eliminated."

Coming back to the new vision for Africa at the turn of the century: if

d. "a democratic Africa... seeks to enhance the active participation ofall citizens in all institutions - social, economic, political, etc.;

e. [and if in] a democratic Africa ... development is not construed innarrow economic terms, but within a broader context of justice for

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H.Ekkehard Wolff 41

all, fairness and equity; respect for linguistic rights as human rights,including those of minorities;

f. ... [and if this] Africa... acknowledges its ethno-linguistic pluralismand accepts this as a normal way of life and as a rich resource fordevelopment and progress, an Africa that promotes peacefulcoexistence of people in a pluralistic society; where pluralism doesnot entail replacement of one language or identity by another, butinstead promotes complementarity of functions as well as co-operation and a sense of common fate;

g. an Africa where democratization in a pluralistic context seeks toproduce through sound and explicit language policies Africans whoare able to operate effectively at local levels as well as at regionaland international levels;

h. an Africa that provides the environment for the promotion andpreservation of an African identity as well as the cultivation of aproud and confident African personality;

i. an Africa where scientific and technological discourse is conductedin the national languages as part of our cognitive preparation forfacing the challenges of the next millennium"; (DraftRecommendations 1997:1)

then there is no way not to acknowledge multilingualism and multiculturalismas the norm and to let it guide all decisions and implementation strategiesconnected with language planning and revisions of the educational system atall levels in Africa.

Some controversial issues regarding multilingualism andmodernisation

There are a number of beliefs, prejudices and fallacies concerning mothertongues in multilingual contexts which appear to die hard, if ever. There are,first of all, some commonly held beliefs and prejudices which have either beenproven not to be true or which refer to technical aspects of the problem whichare highly overestimated - as part of the cherished anti-mother tongue folklorein some intellectual quarters, namely that

• national unity requires official monolingualism,• the official language must be an international language,

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• initial mother-tongue education is at the expense of theinternational language, even if only taught in the first two/threeyears, ^r

• if children are taught too many languages, they will master noneproperly,

• most neighbouring mother tongues are basically "dialects" of thesame "language" anyway,

• normalization/standardization of mother tongues necessarilycreates inter- or intratribal political problems,

• mother tongues cannot be modernised,• literacy and post-literacy in all or many mother tongues is

illusionary for at least three reasons:- it is too expensive,- there is no material basis for most mother tongues,- there are no sufficient human resources (skilled instructors).

A review of different language policies and their implementations and theresults of countless pedagogical experiments in Africa and elsewhere in theworld reveal that all of these points can be identified for what they are:pretenses in order to avoid shifting the focus of national language policiesaway from foreign ("international") languages to indigenous languages, or todo anything at all in terms of active language politics. The present situationregarding the nine official indigenous African languages in South Africa, thecountry with probably the "best" constitutional stipulations in favor of mother-tongue promotion in Africa, appears to testify once more to the only tooobvious fact that it is not constitutions and decrees that matter, but the will ofthose in power to implement the policies, and the determination of the speechcommunities to enforce the implementation.

However, there are some fallacies for linguists and educationists to beaware of, no matter which stand they take, pro- or anti-mother tongue:

The colonial discrimination fallacy

i.e. the internalization of ideas of superiority of colonial languagesand cultures vs. inferiority of colonized languages and cultures;

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The "language equals culture "fallacy

i.e. the assumption that language shift means automatic culturalshift;

The imposition fallacyi.e. the insistence that all mother tongues must be used in educationand literacy even if the people don't want them to, based on thefalse notion that literacy in any language automatically presupposesliteracy in the mother tongue;

The objective-of-development fallacy

i.e. prime objective must be to educate people and build up theirpotential to alter their conditions of life independent of the languagethey choose for this purpose; to develop, i.e. modernise their mothertongue is neither sufficient nor an absolutely necessary prerequisite.

Mother-tongue education and (post-)literacyOne of the major disadvantages in all promotion exercises for Africanlanguages to attain and maintain their natural place in the overallcommunication setting of a given country is related to their at times completeor almost complete absence from the public sector - particularly in theirwritten form. They are practically "invisible" in most African countries asthere is usually no literacy environment for them. Consequently, literacycampaigns alone will fail to prevent that new literates rapidly relapse intoilliteracy after some time mainly due to lack of adequate post-literacymaterials. This is true for adult literacy as well. Usage of African languageson radio and television, in popular music and in theatre performances, modernor traditional, is fine, but it doesn't help in the creation of the-necessaryliteracy environment. The regular appearance of capital city and/or regionalnewspapers and journals is far from satisfactory. On the other hand, "... theoverall picture of the rural press ... is impressive... Rural newspapers initiallyexperienced financial and management problems, with the result that many didnot survive. However, in more recent years, great progress has been made inthis field as well." (UNESCO op. cit., p. 14.) But, "...high-quality literature inAfrican languages is still relatively underdeveloped in the African States as awhole. Since an environment favourable to the use of the written language is

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a major factor in any language policy, it is important to strengthen literaryproduction in the African languages, so as to enable African peoples to drawon their own heritage expressed in their own languages as well as gainingaccess to the cultural works of other peoples." (UNESCO op. cit.)

The Hamburg Declaration and the accompanying Agenda for the Futureissued by the Fifth International Conference on Adult Education hosted byUNESCO in Germany (14-18 July 1997) allude on several occasions to issuesof mother tongue and cultural identity which pertain to a multilingual andmulticultural setting and the role of literacy and post-literacy therein.

Section 5, Declaration:The objectives of youth and adult education, viewed as a lifelong process, areto develop the autonomy and the sense of responsibility of people andcommunities, to reinforce the capacity to deal with the transformations takingplace in the economy, in culture and in society as a whole, and to promotecoexistence, tolerance and the informed and creative participation of citizens intheir communities, in short to enable people and communities to take control oftheir destiny and society in order to face the challenges ahead. It is essential thatapproaches to adult learning be based on people's own heritage, culture, valuesand prior experiences and that the diverse ways in which these approaches areimplemented enable and encourage every citizen to be actively involved and tohave a voice.

Section 15, DeclarationDiversity and equality. Adult learning should reflect the richness of culturaldiversity and respect traditional and indigenous peoples' knowledge and systemsof learning; the right to learn in the mother tongue should be respected andimplemented. Adult education faces an acute challenge in preserving anddocumenting the oral wisdom of minority groups, indigenous peoples andnomadic peoples. In turn, intercultural education should eheourage learningbetween and about different cultures in support of peace/human rights andfundamental freedoms, democracy, justice, liberty, coexistence and diversity.

Section 18, DeclarationIndigenous education and culture. Indigenous peoples and nomadic peopleshave the right of access to all levels and forms of education provided by thestate. However, they are not to be denied the right to enjoy their own culture, or

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to use their own languages. Education for indigenous peoples and nomadicpeoples should be linguistically and culturally appropriate to their needs andshould facilitate access to further education and training.

The Agenda for the Future attached to the Hamburg Declaration has as one ofits 10 "themes" Ensuring the universal right to literacy and basic education.Under this heading we find, among many other commitments, some ofparticular importance for our topic:

"26. Improving the quality of literacy programmes by building links withtraditional and minority knowledge and cultures:

(a) by improving the learning process through learner-centredstrategies; sensitivity to diversity of languages and cultures;the involvement of learners in materials development;intergenerational learning processes; and the use of locallanguages, indigenous knowledge and appropriatetechnologies;

27. Enriching the literacy environment:(a) by enhancing the use and retention of literacy through the

production and dissemination of locally relevant, gender-sensitive and learner-generated print materials;

(b) by collaborating actively with producers and publishers sothat they adapt existing texts and materials to make themaccessible and comprehensible to new readers (e.g. thepress, legal documents, fiction, etc.);

(b) by creating networks for the exchange and distribution oflocally produced texts that directly reflect the knowledgeand practices of communities."

What can university-based African sociolinguistics do?

Necessary research at the university level, for instance, would include suchbasic research areas as creating inventories and documentation of

• degree and typology of multilingualism in all African countries;

• languages used in formal/informal education throughout Africa;

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• African languages with monolingual dictionaries as well as withspecialized/modernised dictionaries (classified according to contentof materials);

• African languages with sufficient fundamental material (grammar,dictionaries, orthography, texts);

• existence of metalanguage in mother tongues;• advantages of mother tongue pedagogy over other methods;

• methods of mother tongue pedagogy/literacy, together withsuccess/failure rates, methods of linkage;

• all experiences in mother tongue education plus linkageexperiments;

• evaluation and testing techniques and their standardization in thefield of mother tongue education and linkage experiments;

• language attitudes and stereotypes (and how to change them);

• conditions and strategies of language planning without planning:why do things succeed where they succeed, but not elsewhere?

Such basic research should eventually lead to the establishment of an overallmethodology of mother tongue teaching and linkage in multilingual contextsin terms of typology and evaluation as much as to a typology ofmultilingualism with all its sociocultural aspects, i.e. paying special attentionto the processes of alienation. The evaluation methods and procedures,however, should view education in a radically new and much broaderperspective as identified in recent declaration documents and should allow fora non-technical integrated process applicable by all, i.e. teachers, parents,schoolboard members and not just statisticians and educational experts.

In addition, the traditional work of applied African linguistics should,of course, continue - especially all activities geared towards languagedevelopment/modernisation, i.e. the making of orthographies, grammars,dictionaries including specialized and monolingual dictionaries, and texts.

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Conclusion

To summarize the gist of this paper three highly provocative claims are madewith particular reference to Africa and its prospects for the next millennium:

1. multilingualism and multiculturalism are and will remain normalrather than exceptional;

2. there is and will be no good education without good mother tongueeducation;

3. there is and will be neither internationally competitive economicdevelopment nor the inevitable democratic participation of allcitizens in national development without due recognition of the bigthree "M's":

• multilingualism,

• multiculturalism,

• and mother-tongue education.

Before I close, one of my favorite aphorisms concerning sociolinguisticsshould be quoted for which I give credit to a friend and professional colleagueat UNESCO on whose eminent expertise41 believe to have heavily relied forputting this paper together. It warns us against the ubiquitous ignorance, falsebeliefs and prejudices on the side of practically all our non-linguist partnersin dialogue on language planning and language in education issues in Africa,because, as Adama Ouane used to say:

Languages are equal only before God and the linguist.

The sad and unfair reality behind this aphorism is once again "the negativeattitude towards mother tongues, which at the same time favors theinternational languages, [and which] is based on obvious, superficialrationalizations in an attempt to justify imbalances born of injustices in historyand circumstances." (UNESCO Working Document 1997:14). Thedme hascome to re-educate the educators!

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AcknowledgementsThis is a revised version of a paper which was originally presented atthe Workshop on "The Role of the African Languages in DemocraticSouth Africa" jointly organized by the Centre for Research in thePolitics of Language, University of Pretoria, and The Department ofArts, Culture, Science and Technology, held at the University ofPretoria: 5 to 6 March, 1998.1 am particularly grateful to ProfessorWebb for having invited me to speak on that occasion and for somesubsequent editorial polishing of the first version of this paper whichwas later distributed to the participants of the Workshop under the title"Multilingualism, Modernisation, and Post-Literacy: Some centralissues concerning the promotion of indigenous African languages in ademocratic society".

I gratefully acknowledge the support received for two periods asa Visiting Professor in South Africa in March 1998 and May-June 1999from the University of Stellenbosch and its Department of AfricanLanguages and the University of Leipzig, on the basis of a partnershipagreement with the Institut fur Afrikanistik under the umbrella of theincumbent bilateral agreement of co-operation between the twouniversities.

Notes

1. I am told that in German-speaking Austria, at least until quite recently, partof the defense of a doctoral thesis still had to be in Latin!

2. Frederick the Great [1712-1786], King of Prussia, for instance, like all of thearistocratic elite, is quoted to have confessed to stable German-Frenchdiglossia, in which German was reserved for giving orders to domesticservants and for occasional encounters with peasants in the rural areas. Therole of Latin as the language of higher education and Roman Catholic liturgyremained unaffected.

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3. Implicit or explicit reference will be made to fairly recent documents, i.e. theBarcelona Declaration on linguistic rights as universal human rights (June1996), Working Documents and Draft Resolutions from theIntergovernmental Conference on Languages Policies in Africa (Harare,March 1997) on "optimal use of African languages ... [as] a prerequisite formaximizing African creativity and resourcefulness in development activities",and the Hamburg Declaration on Adult Education (July 1997) on the rightto education and the right to learn. Instead of re-phrasing the contents of therelevant sections of these documents I shall use direct quotations where Iconsider the wording to be perfect and to reflect diligent deliberation andexpertise on the part of the authors - tacitly assuming that the readership maynot be fully familiar with these texts but deserves to be exposed to them.

4. Assuming that Adama Ouane was the principal author of the UNESCOWorking Documents for the Harare conference 1997.

References

INTERGOVERNMENTAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE POLICIES IN AFRICA.1997. Draft Recommendations from the Group of Experts, Harare, 17 - 21March. (Unpublished version distributed at the Conference.) 10 pp.

Pattanayak, D. P. 1995. Les problemes de langues dans l'alphabétisation et l'éducationde base: le cas de l'Inde. In Ouane, A. (Ed.) Vers une culture multilingue del'education (Etudes de 1'IUE 3). Hamburg: UNESCO Institute for Education,pp. 211-230.

UNESCO. 1997. Working document - Intergovernmental Conference on LanguagePolicies in Africa. Harare, 17 - 21 March. (Unpublished version distributedat the Conference). 16 pp.


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UNESCO. 1997. Adult Education. The Hamburg Declaration. The Agenda for theFuture. CONFINTEA: Fifth International Conference on Adult Education.Hamburg, 14-18 July. 55pp. (cf. http://www.education.unesco.org/confintea).

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