History and Construction of African Languages x Colonialism
Spring 2019 | ANTH 3455: African Languages | Professor Sam Beer
What makes a language an African Language?
African-ness and language are both categories defined in relative terms that have historically been used to generalize or disenfranchise groups. The contested nature of these terms means that “African languages” are real, but contextually dependent entities, and that definitions have real consequences.
English is an especially helpful case to use in arguing in favor of categorizing colonizer languages as African. English has been so thoroughly globalized, and shares a history with both groups within Africa and the continent as a whole, that English must be considered an African language, not to the exclusion of other categorizations more appropriate in different contexts. As parents favor education in English over local languages, this effect is accelerating. Most importantly, its appropriation by African speakers— exercising agency and augmenting the diversity of the language— is cause for celebration.
The languages of Creole speaking and polyglossian communities in the African Diaspora are African too, and so are their paralinguistic phonemes (Rickford and Rickford 1976)—not to the exclusion of other categorizations more appropriate in different contexts. For outsiders, there is utility in categorizing a language spoken by descendants of Africans who retain and value their African roots as an African language, such as assembling inclusive narratives about cultural and linguistic history. By the same token, there can be utility in categorizing such languages as not African, especially when the goal of language designation is oppression through ownership of the means of communication. When said categorized people resist categorization as speakers of an African language, be it in impassioned protest, or simply pointing out an ontological fallacy, it is the responsibility of outsiders to listen to and respect the insider knowledge speakers carry.
What do case studies of Language Contact and Multilingualism teach us about prestige?
Examining the Lower Fungom region of Cameroon, DiCarlo and Good (2017) reframe discussions of language loss due to outside forces by looking instead at the resilience, utility, and maintenance of local languages. This emphasizes the meaningful power that individual language speakers exert to maintain political independence, control resources, and encounter globalizer languages.
In the case study, it was local elites who enforced the prestige value of local languages over linguae franca and globalizer languages in order to preserve autonomy in an African political landscape centralizing in growing urban centers. Non-members of the elite in local communities often used linguae franca as a way to rebel against the established order. This overturning of the pyramid of prestige that is predominant in studied localities outside Lower Fungom region illustrates the fact that prestige is not inherent to any language, rather, it is enforced through sociolinguistic stratification, otherwise thought of as class divide.
Are languages colonial inventions?
Calling for a more self-critical, accountable Linguistics, Irvine (2008) analyzes the ways in which “European ideologies of language, and the conditions in which linguists’ carried out their research, influenced the resulting descriptions of African linguistic structures and the delimitation of linguistic boundaries” in the mercantilist age. She critiqued the research methods used by early linguists, such as the sample population and questionable methods from which linguists in Freetown reconstructed African languages (Irvine 2008). Early linguists in Freetown failed to account in their research for the fact that the linguistic ecosystem of a refugee city, though bringing together speakers from infinitely diverse original language contexts, encourages (a) the loss of linguistic complexity and (b) the forgetting of languages. This linguistic loss can be due to separation from a language community at a young age followed by an extensive period within a different language community, or intentionally due to trauma. The crucial takeaway from the article was summarized by Irvine herself: “Linguists need to investigate – not just to assume – what kinds of influences their representations of languages may have on people’s ways of using them” (Irvine 2008).
How does language use in African cities challenge common Western assumptions?
African cities are distinctive in their multilingual nature: inhabitants are very commonly trilingual, less often bilingual, and rarely monolingual. The Githiora paper (2002) concentrated on the case study of Sheng, an urban language spoken in Nairobi, and attempted to define it as either a Peer language, Swahili Dialect, or Emerging Creole. Sheng is a means of establishing group identity among the young and underprivileged residents of Nairobi. Sheng in Nairobi today is changing so rapidly because new generations of Sheng speakers need to innovate so as to exclude grown up, “converted” members of the establishment.
Sheng resembles conventional definitions of a peer language because it is spoken by an age-restricted group of people who must speak at least one other language in order to communicate outside the peer group. The language is exclusively used within an in-group, and the language’s social function is to distance speakers from the establishment. This elucidates why not just young urban dwellers, but also the urban disenfranchised—namely the poor—also use Sheng.
Sheng acts like a Swahili dialect if conceptualized as a variety of Swahili that is simply spoken by young urban dwellers. This claim is complicated by the fact that (a) it borrows from languages other than Swahili and (b) Swahili is a prestige language of local life. This claim is supported, however, by the fact that all languages spoken in Nairobi (a) borrow from one another due to speaker polyglossia and (b) operate arguably like conventional peer languages in that inhabitants speak all languages with certain appropriate demographic groups and in appropriate contexts. In this linguistic framing, Sheng behaves, in essence, as a subset of a wider Swahili language.
The argument that Sheng may be an emerging Creole is not convincing because Sheng is spoken by a group that does not view itself as diverse. Members of the in-group rely more on age and socioeconomic status when constructing their identity than on Eurocentric concepts of ethnicity, meaning they are not, in their own estimation, diverse. Sheng also excludes the establishment rather than bridging and facilitating communication between members of multiple linguistic groups.
This illustrates an important cultural difference between Western and African frames of thought: people in African cities identify primarily as urban rather than with any analogous ethnic or “tribal” affiliation a Westerner may expect coming from their own more tribalistic culture.
How have colonialism and the field of linguistics caused lasting problems in Africa?
Colonizers suppressed or integrated vernacular languages into colonial engines in order to control linguistic diversity and, by extension, more readily exert control over the populace (Spencer 1972). The lasting effects of these policies are the reinforcement of dependent relationships with colonizer countries after the end of de jure colonization and the association of colonizer languages with colonial oppression.
All systems used education as a way of integrating native speakers of vernacular languages into the colonizer power structure so as to be able to operate cross linguistically. This role was largely inhabited by missionaries, most prominently, protestant English-speaking missionaries. British politicians controlled the narrative surrounding “Native Education,” and endeavored to (a) erase the advantage native Africans had speaking vernacular languages by teaching the languages in school, and (b) make English the Lingua Franca of Africa by enforcing bilingualism.
It was wise for the author to include this quote: “It is a universally acknowledged principle in modern education that a child should receive education both in and through his mother tongue, and this privilege should not be withheld from the African child….” On one level, it encapsulates the idealistic paternalism of the European colonizers, that they guard the gate of universal morality. On another, it shows the evolution of moral thought, which creates a degree of humanizing complexity: this was what having good, or at least partially good, intentions meant at this time under these circumstances. Perhaps most importantly, these ideas taken together give us license to condemn the actions of colonizers even as outsiders judging the past. Here, to learn in one’s mother tongue is regarded as a human right; and in the next breath, English colonists negotiate with this human right by enacting compulsory bilingualism in schools, and weaponize vernaculars by seizing control of their teaching, watering down their complexity, and valuing some over others.
Sources
Angela E. Rickford and John R. Rickford, “Cut-Eye and Suck-Teeth: African Words and Gestures in New World Guise“ (1976)
Pierpaolo DiCarlo and Jeff Good, “The vitality and diversity of multilingual repertoires: Commentary on Mufwene” (2017)
Judith T. Irvine, “Subjected words: African linguistics and the colonial encounter” (2008)
Chege Githiora, “Sheng: Peer Language, Swahili Dialect or Emerging Creole?” (2002)
John Spencer, “Colonial Language Policies and their Legacies” (1972)