ECAS 2013

For effective communication, there is the for African languages to be written in such fashion that they reach very wide audiences or at best reach the optimum size of audience. That can only be achieved if we harmonize existing orthographies so that instead of producing a book for a million people, we can produce a book which can be read by 10 million people. In other words, the harmonization of African languages is the first step towards creating a firmer foundation for the production of literature which can then be used to enhance civic participation or advance public service media. This paper highlights significant parts of a broad range of recent critical institutional interventions by the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC) - an agency of the Federal Government of Nigeria - geared towards the promotion of interest in African indigenous languages, arts and culture to foster development, unity and integration of Africans. The harmonisation and standardisation of select cross-border languages in the West Africa sub-region using Nigeria as a pivot through workshops and technical sessions represents a significant part of the core mandate of CBAAC. The paper articulates identifiable concerns and challenges as well as proffers feasible mechanisms for effective transmission of vital ancestral knowledge systems suppressed by several decades of domination by foreign languages.

The introduction of Portuguese as a language of instruction in the Nigerian educational system actually predates Nigeria itself as a nation. Historical records show that the Portuguese language was first brought into the area known today as Southern Nigeria by the arrival of the first Portuguese sailors on the Guinea Coast in the 15th Century in their quest for the road to India and the wealth it promised in spices and silk trade, among others. A more pronounced presence of the Portuguese language was introduced into the coastal region of South-Western Nigeria from the mid-1800s when Afro-Brazilian returnees known severally as Aguda, Amaro and Tabom along the West-African coastal region came to settle in the areas around Badagry and Lagos where the Agudas successfully constituted themselves into a closely-knitted community and implanted the Brazilian version of the Portuguese language and culture. Today, Portuguese language represents one major component in the restricted list of Foreign languages taught in the Nigerian Tertiary School System. The present paper not only seeks to evaluate the role that the teaching of Portuguese as a foreign language has been playing in the training and formation of Nigerians in the past four decades but also highlights the impact of the interaction of Nigerian Portuguese language students have been having with the Lusophone world, most especially, Brazil and Portugal, over the years to the cultural, socio-economic and technological development of Nigeria.

Governments and people in Africa have, over the centuries, recognized the importance of an efficient education and language policy in the development of a nation. Following the introduction of Western education to Africa and the scramble and partition of the region by European powers from the nineteenth century, the various European powers and the new educational providers who found the indigenous cultural practices and educational system, including the African languages inadequate, introduced the teaching of European languages to the different geographical regions under their authority for a myriad of social and political reasons. Africans, who began to appreciate the value of the acquisition of the knowledge of European languages, in addition to the local languages which continued to function effectively, mostly within the out-of-school context, began to patronize the learning. This paper explores the story of the teaching of French and German in Nigeria from 1859 when the first secondary school was founded, and the subsequent development under the British colonial rule, which encouraged the promotion of English language. It seeks to examine the decisive role played by the British Examining Bodies in the language crusade and how the Nigerians on their own, in spite of the absence of encouragement from the native speakers of the languages, and under difficult circumstances, began to take advantage of the available facility for learning the foreign languages. It concludes by exploring the relationship between political Independence and language learning and draws attention to the development which followed the attainment of Independence in 1960.

Taking into consideration the National Education Policy (2004-15) that encourages the respect and preservation of indigenous languages of The Gambia and emphasizes the need to use vernacular languages during the first stages of formal education, this paper presents the results from observing the languages used to teach within the Gambian classrooms.

The investigation in the field focuses on finding and understanding the reasons that lead educators to choose either the vernacular language or the colonial language. The fieldwork is mainly conducted in lower basic schools in The Gambia, because it is the critical period when learners develop languages skills and will impact on the future acquirement of other foreign languages. Furthermore, the paper presents and explains briefly the situation within the whole education system from lower basic to tertiary education.

Finally it presents the goals that the Global African Language Center, inaugurated in January 2013, seeks to achieve in the coming years and its impact on the linguistic education policy of the country.

This paper presents data about ideologies of language interference and their effects on indigenous language development. Based on nine months of fieldwork in Cameroon in 2010-11, the paper focuses especially on Lam Nso, a very covertly valued language that is widely understood to "interfere" with numerous concepts of development, including the development of Cameroonian English and in the process, interfere with both regional economic development and aspects of human development. Drawing on data from the national teacher training program, I discuss how academic teaching about the psychology of mother tongue interference is popularized through teacher training programs and textbooks; popular attitudes include "blaming" languages like Lam Nso for poor children's lack of educational success, where the problems of poor educational achievement are more likely based elsewhere, i.e. overcrowded schools, costs of schooling that exclude the poor who are more likely to use only pidgin and mother tongue languages, lack of English literacy embedded in daily life and work, and the concomitant instability of Cameroonian Englishes. I close by discussing how to reverse the trend in denigrating local languages towards two aims: broadening the discussion of pedagogies of literacy around both English use and local language use, and how to inspire mother tongue valuation by connecting it more explicitly to both local human development and economic development.

Increased literary production in national and regional languages and the introduction of educational linguistic policies that promote local languages and social practices have, over the last few years, suggested a further move away from the culture, institutions and systems of the coloniser towards languages and literatures that celebrate the local and, to some extent, the traditional in francophone West African countries. A contemporaneous shift from rural to urban communities has seen the testing of conventional forms of social and self description and a reconfiguration of groupings and identities that requires new means of expression and, often, a new language which, increasingly, is not French but a national or hybrid language into which French is subsumed. In the Senegalese capital, Dakar, this language is an urban Wolof, heavily influenced by French and progressively disconnected from its related ethnic group. Wolof is becoming a lingua franca in the north of Senegal, contesting French as the language of social mobility and success. It is being taught in schools, published in literary works and passed on to a new generation of migrants making their way to the capital city. This transition from French to Wolof can be seen as a reaffirmation of Senegalese identity and a rejection of the culture inherited from the coloniser, but it can also be viewed as a fresh challenge to local languages and their related cultures from a new dominant force that threatens their very survival.

As a marker of identity, mother tongue education is considered to be of great importance: First, it is seen as everyone's right and secondly it is said that children perform better at school if they are taught in their mother tongue (cf. Campbell-Makini 2000; Phillipson, Rannut & Skutnabb-Kangas 1995, McGregor 2002).

From a heuristic approach of language attitudes the paper investigates people's attitudes towards mother tongue education in Uganda and argues that some approaches might be considered neocolonialist. The poor outcome of the evaluation of the performance of Ugandan pupils initiated a pilot programme in Uganda to enforce mother tongue education in primary schools: The project introduced the mother tongue as the language of instruction for the first three years of schooling (ct. NCDC 2006).

But many parents did not appreciate this concept: It is rather regarded as a means to hinder their children's progress and career.

English is seen as a language of power and success. The mother tongue is considered to be a marker of ethnic identity. In schools, however, it is regarded as a way to prevent their children's progress: "You try to make sure that our children remain backward" (interview Uganda, 2008). The paper investigates the academic claim for mother tongue education from a people's perspective and provides an alternative approach to educational language policies in Africa.