The sociolinguistics of colonisation

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Sociolinguistic Studies

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The sociolinguistics of colonisation: a perspective of language shift Tope Omoniyi Abstract In this chapter I want to propose an alternative paradigm for understanding the dynamics of multilingualism, language competition and politics in the complex sociolinguistic terrain of sub-Saharan Africa. Particularly for the purpose of explaining language shift, it is important to note that African states had fought wars of expansion and taken vassal states in a ‘colonial’ era before European colonialists arrived in the region. Keywords: language shift; sociolinguistics of colonisation; sub-saharan africa

Affiliation Roehampton University, UK. email: [email protected]

Sols vol 3.3 2009 307–328 ©2009, equinox publishing

doi : 10.1558/sols.v3i3.307 LONDON

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Sociolinguistic Studies ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart’ (Nelson Mandela, no date)

1 Introduction The assumption by many is that language threat which results in language shift and subsequently language death is facilitated directly or indirectly by the singular agency of unfair competition between powerful languages and relatively weaker ones. Fishman (1991:39) uses a grand survival metaphor in suggesting that it is futile to contemplate reversing language shift unless there is a plan in place to permanently remove the threat that occasioned shift in the first place. But sometimes the competition is itself secondary in that it may be the consequence of a much more complex phenomenon such as colonisation. The question is, can history or the past which it reports threaten a language by causing shift among its speakers? The answer to this lies in the sociolinguistics of colonisation. Thus our core challenge in this paper is to establish what the sociolinguistics of colonisation is. What purpose will a language shift perspective of this serve? In sociolinguistic scholarship in the multilingual nations of Africa, it is evident that by default the powerful languages are the colonial languages and the weak languages are the indigenous languages. Therefore a development such as the translation of the Nigerian Constitution into major Nigerian languages from English fifty years after colonisation ended officially can be better analysed and understood within such a framework. First, I take the position that it is simplistic to regard the binary opposition between colonial and indigenous languages as sole explanation for language shift. It completely denies the fact that language contact and competition existed before European colonisation. It also fails to consider the entire ramification of colonisations; European colonisation of Africa did not initiate the phenomenon of shift on the continent even if it raised the scale of it. Second, colonisation impacted languages in many more ways than the simple binary opposition of European and African languages as I hope to demonstrate below. We ought to make one precautionary clarification before we proceed. The sociolinguistics of colonisation is not by any stretch of the imagination unconnected to the sociolinguistics of globalisation. One of the crucial points driven home by contributors to a special issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics (Coupland 2003) dedicated to globalisation is the centrality of social theory in the process. Social theory is equally at the core of the colonial experience whichever way one chooses to look at it. Thus there is a sense in which globalisation completes or complements that which was started by colonisation. Alternatively, colonisation opened up the terrains for globalisation.



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Let us begin by delimiting the region under discussion and introducing some historical context. Sub-Saharan Africa refers to the group of nations southwards from the Savannah and from the west to the east coasts of Africa; in other words, those countries generally referred to as Black Africa. To the north of this are the African nations that have historically had Arab influence and therefore orientate more generally towards the Middle East in language, culture and politics – Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria which together constitute The Maghreb. The histories of these nations also shared intersections with those of nations on the southern tip of Europe, Spain, Portugal and Italy especially. For instance, the Almoravids ruled southern Spain for almost a century from 1056 to 1146AD and it wasn’t until 1492 that Spain was able to expel the Muslims. Spain and Portugal had occupied Moroccan ports in the fifteenth century. These are significant historical facts to note in discussions of language shift as those intersections were also moments of culture contact in which language hierarchies reflected the power structures of the day. With reference to Sub-Saharan Africa, sociolinguistic scholarship has been broadly framed in two ways; migration either around the emergence of nonnative varieties of former colonial languages, especially ‘Englishes’ or around issues of language planning and language policy in which the relationship between the colonial languages and indigenous African languages and their respective statuses are debated. There have been other areas of exploration but these either have not been extensively covered or they have been done as subsidiary objectives within the larger framework of the research on varieties of English and language (in education) policies. This bias towards English is understandable if we consider that the first detailed attempt to discuss sociolinguistics in the region was John Spencer’s edited volume The English Language in West Africa (Spencer 1971). Closer scrutiny reveals that researchers’ focus on varieties of English and language in education is itself already indicative of the role that European colonisation has played in defining sociolinguistics in the region. The region is divided into two almost distinct research blocs or traditions with only minimal interaction between them – the Anglophone and the Francophone. Arguably, sociolinguistic scholarship in the Francophone tradition is relatively recent. In this paper I want to propose an alternative paradigm for understanding the dynamics of multilingualism, language competition and politics in the complex sociolinguistic terrain of sub-Saharan Africa (Igboanusi and Peter 2005). Particularly for the purpose of explaining language shift, it is important to note that African states had fought wars of expansion and taken vassal states in a ‘colonial’ era before European colonialists arrived in the region. In other words, there were already some cultural contact situations in which language and linguistic hierarchies existed. So, during the nineteenth

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century Western Yoruba Wars that Asiwaju (1976) eloquently writes about, the dialects of Yoruba competed on a hierarchy according to control of political power of the subgroups; the Egba, the Ijebu, the Oyo and so on. Dialect diffusion in sub-Saharan Africa is thus historically a sociolinguistic precursor of language diffusion. The latter has increased as a result of urbanisation in contemporary times. Similarly, the Fulani Jihad and its objective of ‘dipping the Quran in the Atlantic’ was a colonial expansion of sorts and it explains the presence of Hausa-Fulani cultural phenomena in the linguistic landscape of Ilorin in northern Yorubaland in Nigeria for example. All of these incidents illustrate the contexts and recipes of language shift. But I shall begin by answering a seemingly basic but crucial question: what is the sociolinguistics of colonisation? I proceed from the premise that we can theorise ‘colonisation’ as a pattern of relationship between two nations in the same way that globalisation is a network of relationships between several nations. The former is less complex and less elusive than the latter. In both cases we are dealing with a peculiar structure of relationships of power, exchange and expectations, of positionings and representations around which has developed a characteristic discourse. With reference to sub-Saharan Africa, one of the legacies of colonialism is the representation of Europe in the former colonies. Arguably, this is a reversal of European representations of Africa as Pennycook (1998:47) elucidated in his discussion of ‘Eurocentric diffusionism’ based on Blaut (1993) and Spurr’s (1993) eleven tropes of the ‘rhetoric of empire’ (Pennycook 1998:50). A sociolinguistics of colonisation focuses on the dialogue between the coloniser and colonised and the intricate social and power structures that defined the relationship as well as discourses generated about the two and their relationship. Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas (1986) and Phillipson (1992:245) capture these relationships in their references to English as a ‘language of wider colonisation’ and language of wider incorporation’ respectively. The entire scholarship around Official languages, standard varieties, and medium of instruction in education are thus accommodated by the sociolinguistics of colonisation. But a note of caution here is wise as the framework also runs the risk of glossing over the difficult intra-regional relationships between Sub-Saharan Africa’s local languages. In a sense, the paucity of literature on the language shift consequences of being a minority language speaker in the region is double jeopardy as remediation becomes even less likely. Focused investigations on the same level as those of Europe’s minority languages in their domiciliary ecologies are scant, probably because researchers see such an undertaking, erroneously I would argue, as consigning them to periphery or provincial scholarship. Adegbija’s (2001) work on the 50,000 strong Oko community is one of the most known



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studies in sub-Saharan Africa, yet there are hundreds of minority language groups whose stake in the geopolitical federation they belong to is probably more tenuous than the Oko’s for the simple reason that they are not aligned or closely linked to a majority ethnolinguistic group like the Oko are to the Yoruba in Nigeria (cf. Walter and Ringenberg 2007). Another aspect of the sociolinguistics of colonisation is down to accessing English through missionary texts with the result that early users of English exhibited an ethnoreligious flavour. That is, it was possible to observe a degree of affinity with religion and ethnicity in language performance. Since then, through intervention processes of standardisation, description and internationalisation the form has been divested of large-scale religious flavour. Second language learning of English in postcolonial contexts had mainly been textbook-based and in school curriculum. In other words, contact with the language was much more through written texts much of which focused on achieving competent knowledge of the grammar of English. Although phonological analysis often revealed wide variation in sources, competencies and strategies of the In-put models, there was a general lack of spoken fluency as a result of text-based rather than speech-based learning. Thus, in relation to language shift, arguably media globalisation facilitates more extensive extracurricular contact with speech and interaction as communicative modes and de-emphasises textbooks. ‘Bookish English’ may be diminishing as people have access to a variety of repertoires through the mediascape which are bound to impact their personal registers from one situation to another. For instance, membership of social networks such as Facebook and Myspace.com might result in an oscillation between varieties or forms. Eisenlohr (2004) notes how new technologies reconfigure communities. The congregation of regional and ethnic languages and accents of English and French plus participation in various virtual community or social networks determine the multilingual patterns that characterise African urban communities. The formation of the Economic Community of West African States in 1975 has also meant that the old division between Francophone and Anglophone was on a gradual erosion course allowing for transnational cultural flows. This development has culminated in greater regional cohesion and harmonisation of administrative structures across the former colonial binary divide thus further tearing down remaining vestiges of the old order. Transborder cooperation enhances the shared local community languages largely to the exclusion of the colonial languages except in cases of language choice for the purpose of momentary gate-keeping and exclusion of others in a conversation (Omoniyi 2004). Such use of the colonial languages may represent a shift in language practice if it replaces a strategy of exclusion in the local language when the interlocutors are bilingual.

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2 Social practices 2.1 Christenings and suuna Naming or christening (Christians) and suuna (Muslims) is a sociocultural practice in which a shift occurred from traditional names to religious ones thus conveying the superior status of the culture with which those names are associated. Biblical names may be Hebrew in origin but in the psyche of African converts to the ‘Whiteman’s religion’ (Christianity) the names were ‘Oyibo names’ (European). Similarly, Islam brought its own set of names and they were Arabic. What is interesting here is that both Islam and Christianity historically emanated from the same region of the world yet Christianity’s construal is European and Islam’s is Middle Eastern. This is essentially down to the fact that European missionaries brought Christianity while Islam came through the trans-Saharan trade routes of the Middle Ages linking Arab North Africa to the states and kingdoms of the West African Savannah. Ancient Ghana was not an Islamic empire but many of its citizens converted to Islam through their trade dealings with the Arab states to the north. The empires which grew out of Ghana’s decline were Islamic; Ancient Mali (the Niger bend cities of Gao, Djenne and Timbuktu) and Songhay Empire. The Kanem-Bornu Empire (centred around present day Chad) did not start as an Islamic empire but became one through missionary activity. 2.2 Popular culture Popular culture is a site of post-modernity’s transcultural and transnational flows (see Pennycook 2007). Institutional media offerings like Big Brother Africa, MTV base, Nollywood (the Nigerian film and motion picture industry) all facilitate extended contact between actors drawn from different ethnolinguistic groups and therefore open to influence and discursive shift through cultural osmotic processes. Omoniyi, Scheld and Oni (2009:6–7) presented a comparison of Nigerian and US hip-hop names to illustrate this practice. Table 1 shows a more widely spread African selection which illustrates the same flow. The contrast we must emphasise here is that outside of hip-hop culture, the practice of adopting ‘also known as’ (akas) seem to be less common. In other words, akas may be described as a language-focused shift in cultural practice. The change is both in adopting an aka as well as the language of such akas. In some cases, indigenous language names are anglicised and in other cases Western names are localised.



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Table 1: Stage names of selected African and US hip-hop artists Also known as (aka)

Name

Location

P-Square

Paul and Peter

Nigeria

Weird MC – Da Rappatainer

Sola Idowu

UK/Nigeria

Missy Eliot

Melissa Arnette Eliott

USA

STL

Stella Mwangi

Kenya

Lil’ Kim

Kimberly Denise Jones

USA

Fid Q

Faridi Kubanda

Tanzania

Tu Face or 2Face

Innocent Ujah Idibia

Nigeria

2Pac

Tupac Kamoru Shakur

USA/Deceased

Pro [formerly ProKid]

Linda Mkhize

South Africa

MC Solaar

Claude M’Barali

Senegal

2.3 Place names The linguistic landscape (Gorter 2006) is one place to look for vestiges of colonisation. In effect then it is also the site for investigating language shift in the sociolinguistics of colonisation. The linguistic landscape in a sense represents a geosociolinguistics in which the diglossic relationship between colonial languages and African indigenous languages becomes evident. By geosociolinguistics I refer to the marking out of cities into contrasting social spaces based on language ecology and language use practices. Across the Commonwealth, public buildings, streets, and in some cases, institutions are named after colonial officers. Accra municipal street map shows street names from different epochal moments in the City’s cultural and political evolution. For instance, those with English or European names such as Kimberly Avenue, Thorpe Road, Derby Avenue and Lutterodt Road either date back to or are reminiscent of Colonial Accra, while those named after African icons like Nasser Avenue, Samora Machel Road, Farrar Road and Nkrumah Avenue, are post-independence landmarks and indexical of the heydays of pan-Africanism, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU, now African Union), and the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War years. Liberia Road is symbolic of the fact that Ghana played a crucial role in the Liberian crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Sixth Avenue, Seventh Avenue, and Eighth Avenue suggest an American orientation and mark a more recent development in Accra’s emergence as a cosmopolitan centre (http:// www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/images/centralaccra_map.jpg). It was US President Barack Obama’s preferred first Sub-Sahara African destination in the first year of his presidency (July 2009).

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We find similar examples in Nigeria with Lugard Hall in Kaduna and Macpherson Road in Ikoyi, Lagos named after colonial officers Lord Lugard and Sir William McPherson respectively, and many other similarly named public spaces. More often than not these colonial landmarks distinguished between upper and lower socio-economic classes. Postcolonial cities have a peculiar architecture such that closes, crescents, and boulevards are common in the Government Reservation Areas (GRA) and infrequent in other parts of town. The GRA was inhabited by colonial officers, and later by top government functionaries, members of the diplomatic corps and business executives. Local spaces were orthographically transformed into empire/global or transnational spaces through Anglicisation, that is, the process of imbuing a word with features characteristic of the English language. For example, the suburb of Lagos called ‘Ebute-Metta’ in public records is an anglicised version of the Yoruba form Ebute Meta. The language shift dimension to these is the implementation of indigenisation programmes across the region. The policy was instituted by decree in 1972 and 1977 respectively. The period witnessed the reclamation and renaming of streets and public institutions. Businesses were indigenised too such as the case of British Petroleum which became African Petroleum. A second phase of language shift occurred noticeably post-independence in the sociocultural practice of naming, a departure from wholesale adoption of biblical names. As part of on-going cultural revivalism and nationalism people are doing Christianity without having to choose between sets of names which are simply emblematic because they do not of themselves constitute Christianity. It is however ironical that indigenous African names with deitybased affixes and indexical of communal histories of ancestral and religious lineage are dispreferred in the two major religions in the same era that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) listed the Osun Grove and Shrine in Osogbo (Osun State, Southwest Nigeria) as a World Heritage site. The latter has been a great impetus to Yoruba as a heritage language, and a boost to practitioners of traditional religions who see the development as added social and culture capital.

3 Language shift and geopolitics Another perspective to language shift is linked to changes in the internal geopolitical configuration of states since independence. Colonisation had balkanised erstwhile ethnic kingdoms, states or nationalities and carved out new nations from aggregations of fractions of ethnolinguistic groups and whole groups in some cases. In the newly formed colonial nations, new relationships of interdependence and shared destinies evolved. Naturally, variations in population size seem to have produced a hierarchised society based entirely on inherited democratic principles of proportional repre-



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sentation. This arguably is how the binary distinction between majority and minority ethnolinguistic groups emerged. For example, in Nigeria, the political structure has changed from three administrative regions plus Lagos (1960), to four regions (1963), 12 states (1967), 19 states (1976), 21 states (1987), 30 states (1992) and 36 states (1996). The ramifications of this distribution are evident in the ethnolinguistic composition of several administrative sectors and their language practices. For one thing, official language policies and actual language use practices in a given society reflect the character of the language ecologies. The multilingual patterns that exist within an ecological zone may vary either in terms of the actual presence of certain languages or in terms of the dynamics of the co-existence of some languages within a zone. We may illustrate this by referring to Bamgbose’s (1976) idea of implementing the language of the immediate community (LIC) as medium of instruction in the Nigerian educational policy. LICs may vary between regions depending on the ethnolinguistic character. Table 1 below shows a distribution of regions and their LICs. Table 2: Main languages of the geopolitical zones 1

2

3

4

Others

Angola

Portuguese

Bantu

Mbundu

Loanda

Kongo

Benin

French

Fon

Yoruba

Gun

Fulfulde

Botswana

English/Tswana

Kalanga

Kgalgadi

Afrikaans

Yeyo

Cameroon

French/Eng*

Beti

Basaa

Ewondo

Fulfulde

Chad

Arabic/French

Hausa

Amdag

Dazaga

Fulfulde

Congo

French

Lingala

Kingwana

Kikongo

Tshiluba

Ghana

English

Twi

Ewe

Fante

Ga, Hausa

Côte d’Ivoire

French

Senoufo

Ewe

Baoulé

Dan

Kenya

English/Swahili

Gikuyu

Luyia

Borana

Luo

Niger

French

Arabic

Fulfulde

Hausa

Gourmanchéma

Nigeria

English

Hausa

Igbo

Yoruba

Edo

South Africa

English

Ixihosa

Afrikaans

IxiZulu

Sotho

Zimbabwe

English

Shona

Ndebele

Ndau

Manyika

Language X which is the Language of the Immediate Community in Region A may be a minority language in Region B as we find for example in the status of Yoruba in Southwestern and Northern Nigeria. In Togo, Yoruba at national level is a minority language whereas nationally in Nigeria it is a majority language. In the seventeenth century, the Yoruba-speaking parts of present day Togo, Benin and Nigeria formed part of the Kingdom of Abomey.

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Language shifts in this context may happen within the framework of what Kaplan and Baldauf (1997) called micro-planning. For example, parents may decide for a strategic reason such as preference for an education system to move from one LIC zone to another. Also Omoniyi (2007) provided the examples of microlanguage literacy planning in Pride Africa’s DrumNet Project in the Kirinyagah District of Kenya (p. 545) and the Fr Oudet Project in Koudoughou, Burkina Faso (p. 546) involving non-governmental organisations. In both cases, indigenous language involvement in promoting or boosting the primary economy indicates a shift in the perception of the actual capacity of the local languages to contribute to development.

4 Conflict and displacement-induced language shift The post-independence political history of sub-Saharan Africa over the last half century has been marked by conflict: Nigeria (1966–1970), Angola (1975– 2002), Rwanda (1990–1993), Sierra Leone (1991–2002), Liberia (1989–2003), Congo wars (1996–1997, 1998–2003), and the Darfur crisis (2003 to date). These conflicts have no doubt been the cause of mass population movements, ethnic diffusion and language contact. Let us look at specific cases. The International Refugee Council (IRC) reports that 5.4 million lives had been claimed by Congo wars (Table 3 below). Generally, borderlands are the immediate recipients of displaced populations in the various crises of Sub-Saharan Africa. More importantly, the millions displaced by the war spilled into eight neighbouring countries. In most cases, they crossed national boundaries but remained within ethnic boundaries. Still such crossings meant a renegotiation vis-à-vis a new majority or Centre Language – language shift. The same is true of Rwandans who crossed state boundaries following the 1994 Genocide into Tutsi areas of Uganda and Kenya where English is the official language. In the Liberian crisis several thousand escaping from the theatre of war crossed state boundaries into neighbouring states and if the size of the displaced population is larger than that of the host community the pattern of shift may differ. The same trend has been observed in eastern Chad villages on the border with Darfur in Western Sudan with refugees fleeing from Janjaweed militias. Khalil Alio’s findings (2008:3) from his study of the Hadjaraye who migrated from the Guera region into the neighbouring regions of Salamat and Chari-Burguirmi suggest that: while social integration is successful due to the common lingua franca the host and migrant communities share, the future of the mother tongues of the immigrants is at stake, because they will be spoken in a reduced circle, namely at home only. So, even though at an initial stage they are spoken, in



The sociolinguistics of colonisation 317 the end they will be gradually abandoned, not in favor of the host regions languages, but in favor of the Chadian Arabic which is also the lingua franca in Chad. Linguistic borrowing, bilingualism, code mixing, code switching are the results stemming from these language contacts. However this depends largely on the attitude of the migrant community. This actually seems to indicate that the immigrants are not likely to pass on their languages to the next generations in the distant future. The ultimate outcome will be the loss of language which will inevitably lead to the loss of identity of the migrants.

As I argued elsewhere (Omoniyi 2007:540), the conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire resulted in what is arguably the largest population displacement in the region in the last quarter of the twentieth century. I differentiated between intracolonial and intercolonial populations (see Table 4 below); the former replace one French or English-speaking country for another, while the latter move from a French-speaking to English-speaking country (and vice-versa) respectively either permanently or temporarily. Communities across the borders from these conflicted nations received and resettled fleeing populations. The sizes of these resettlements vary and determine the extent to which they are prone to shift. In these contexts language shift may become a deliberate strategy of survival. In the tables below I have attempted to represent the extent of the movements in question. Table 3: UNHCR global refugee distribution by regions 2008 report Refugee population by UNHCR regions, end-2007 UNHCR Regions

Refugees

People in refugeelike situations

Total refugees end 2007

Central Africa and Great Lakes

1,100,100

-

1,100,100

East and Horn of Africa

815,200

-

815,200

Southern Africa

181,200

-

181,200

West Africa

174,700

-

174,700

Total Africa*

2,271,200

-

2,271,200

Americas

499,900

487,600

987,500

Asia-Pacific

2,675,900

1,149,100

3,825,000

Europe

1,580,200

5,100

1,585,300

Middle East and North Africa

2,654,000

67,600

2,721,600

Total*

9,681,200

1,709,400

11,390,600

* Excluding North Africa Source: http://www.unhcr.org/statistics/STATISTICS/4852366f2 (pdf accessed 21 April 2009)

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Table 4: Refugees across intra-and intercolonial language boundaries, 2002 and 2004 Refugee numbers and receiving nations Donor nation

Côte d’Ivoire

Ghana

Côte d’Ivoire

Guinea

Liberia

2,188

19,158

Mali

Nigeria

Sierra Leone

1,505

10,771

Gambia

20,000 Liberia Sierra Leone

122, 846 8,865

82,792

74,180

42,466

149,639

1,998

95,527

65,000

61,192 54,717

1,415

2,041

7,734 6,205

Note: Intercolonial figures are in bold font. The bottom figures in the doubled boxes are 2004 (UNHCR 2005).

What we deduce from these tables is the fact that sociolinguistic phenomena are not bound by nation-state boundaries or indeed political boundaries of any kind. There is a second kind of migration which is non-conflict related but one that is more ideological in nature. Asiwaju (2000:80) describes this as ‘protest migration’ and remarks that: In their treatment of African protest movements against European colonialism, scholars have tended to concentrate their attention on armed confrontation or ideological or philosophical opposition, especially the mahdist or messianic insurgencies and literary expressions such as négritude and the concept of the African personality.

He defines protest migrations as ‘the large-scale exodus of subject peoples from one colonial sphere to the other’. The sociolinguistic dimension of this protest is the shift from French to English. Asiwaju draws illustration from French West Africa with a focus on Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso. The conflict here is a mental attitude of resistance to European domination and colonisation. Ngugi wa Thiong’o and others who share his political philosophy and language ideology in East Africa are an example of resistance and language shift. Borderlands are zones of continuity in Sub-Saharan Africa in which inhabitants explore and exploit the peculiar advantages of the borderland. In Idiroko/Igolo (Nigeria-Benin) people on the Benin side of the borderland demonstrate a greater tendency to converge towards Nigerian language behaviour patterns. The preference demonstrated for English-medium education is indicative of this shift from the French-medium of instruction policy bequeathed Benin by France.



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A similar line of thinking to the point made above is the link between language attitudes and shift. Attitudes towards languages and their speakers are significant factors motivating language learning as well as language shift. The attitudes are often a reflection of perception which itself may be the consequence of the nature of relationship between ethnolinguistic groups. Attitudes are very crucial to language maintenance and shift (Adegbija 1994). In postcolonial Africa, attitudes towards indigenous languages range from most tolerant to least tolerant whereas the European languages may be said to be marked on a scale of functionality and desirability. This distinction invariably explains why shortly after independence in elite society, conscious decisions of language shift were made and resulted in intergenerational communicative gaps with children unable to interact with their grandparents’ generation. 4.1 Domains of language use shift We carry mental sociolinguistic maps in which we match communicative domains with default languages. The reality may not exactly match the details on our maps but often the maps which are built from socialisation within a culture tell us our language requirements from one situation to another. Such one-to-one correspondence between domains and language can be problematic especially in today’s globalised environments. Transnational businesses hold multi-point trans-global video conferences in which varying register repertoires and scales are evident in communicative exchanges and clearly not associable with predetermined groups a priori. We have a simple illustration of that scenario in outsourcing as in this account culled from the New York Times (Marc Lacey, 2 February 2005). NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan. 30 – Susan Mina, a Kenyan who has never stepped foot out of Africa, speaks English like the haughtiest of Britons. She can also put on a fair imitation of an American accent by swallowing all her words. Still, every once in a while, some Swahili slips out of her and that is not at all helpful as she tries to enhance Africa’s role in the global explosion of outsourcing. It happened the other day when she was trying to get a British man to sign up for a new cellular telephone service. He was in his home, minding his own business. She sat near the Nairobi airport, doing her business as a sales agent for KenCall, Kenya’s first international call center. The man’s accent – she pegged it as Irish – was unintelligible to her. ‘Pole sana?’ she blurted out, which is what one says in Swahili instead of ‘Huh?’ (http:// www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11824 Accessed 11 May 2009)

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Similarly, with specific reference to sub-Saharan Africa, media globalisation means that registers that may not originally have formed part of the interactional repertoires of a family become observable (Blommaert 2009). For instance, some hip-hop enthusiasts in Lagos in conversations refer to ‘homey’ and ‘hood’ and say ‘ai’ which are obvious borrowings from US hip-hop culture and African-American English, in spite of the attempt to counter-construct African hip-hop as an original rather than a copy of the former.

5 National shifts Often we discuss language shift from an ‘effect’ perspective by focusing on individual or community experience of a circumstance rather than from a ‘cause’ perspective which focuses on governments and institutions as authors of policies. So for instance, people from minority ethnolinguistic groups assess their mother tongues as functionally limited based on roles assigned to these in policy documents while consciously strategically developing a multilingual repertoire by adding plus capital languages. However, there is also shift at the institutional level in terms of policy change. There are a few examples of countries in which the language policy has altered in the years since they attained independence. Such changes are reflections oftentimes of changes in the socio-political reality of the countries. For example, in 1967, Chad adopted French as Official language but in 1993, Arabic was added as a second official language. This happened in the context of an indigenisation drive similar to the one undertaken by Nigeria in the late 1970s; in other words this takes place within a historical context. The introduction of French as second official language by the military junta of General Sanni Abacha in 1998 by decree is a perfect demonstration of the tie between policy and historical context. I have described this elsewhere in terms of compensation for France’s friendship during a period of global isolation (Omoniyi 2003a; see also Igboanusi and Pütz 2008). Table 5 below shows a selection of countries in which language policies have changed since independence. As an immediate consequence of the configuration of Africa’s nation-states, it became necessary to ensure equal protection within the new nations and that gave rise to a whole body of sociolinguistic discourse. For instance, in Nigeria the Federal Character Commission which was established by an instrument of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (Section 153, c) had the responsibility of overseeing equal representation. Chapter II, Section 14, Subsection 3 and 4 state categorically that: (3) The composition of the Government of the Federation or any of its agencies and the conduct of its affairs shall be carried out in such



The sociolinguistics of colonisation 321 a manner as to reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and also to command national loyalty, thereby ensuring that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few States or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in that Government or in any of its agencies. (4) The composition of the Government of a State, a local government council, or any of the agencies of such Government or council, and the conduct of affairs of the Government or council or such small agencies shall be carried out in such a manner as to recognise the diversity of the people within its area of authority and the need to promote a sense of belonging and loyalty among all the peoples of the Federation.

Similarly, Chapter 3, Part 2, Section 53 of the Constitution of Kenya states as follows: 53 (1) Subject to this section, the official languages of the national assembly shall be Swahili and English and the business of the national assembly may be conducted in either or both languages (2) Every Bill (including the memorandum accompanying a Bill), every Act of Parliament whenever enacted, all other actual or proposed legislation under the authority of an Act of Parliament, all financial resolutions and documents relating thereto, and every actual or proposed amendment of any of the foregoing, shall be written in English. (3) In all proceedings of the National Assembly which involve the discussion of any of the following matters, that is to say, a Bill (including the memorandum accompanying a Bill), an Act of Parliament, other legislation whether actual or proposed, a financial resolution or document relating thereto, or an actual or proposed amendment thereof, the wording of the matter shall, as occasion requires, be quoted in English.

What both of these constitutional provisions demonstrate is that the status of colonial languages have not lost much if any of their capital and that there are a few local languages on a rung below the colonial languages and above the other local languages. The patterns are generally the same across the region. For instance, just as Kiswahili is a transnational lingua Franca in East Africa spoken by about 35 million people in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Somalia, Congo, Mozambique, and Rwanda, between 10 and 16 million people in 18 countries (e.g. Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Senegal) across the Sahel Savannah belt in West Africa speak Fula. The latter had served as a regional trade language in pre-colonial times. Thus these positions determine the nature of language attitudes and direction of shifts that may be observed. The

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fortunes of both these languages have increased as resistance to neo-colonialism has grown. The large population of native speakers of Hausa has meant that in the burgeoning democracies of West Africa in which the ethnolinguistic group has acquired substantial political force, the language has also been a functional and preferred choice for Type-2 Minority people (see Omoniyi 2009) seeking to acquire multilingual skills. I have elsewhere differentiated between Type 1 and Type 2 minorities. Type 1 Minority comprises a small community of Western Europeans and Americans and local elites for whom the point of reference from a social and cultural point of view is the West rather than the local multilingual African context. In contrast, Type 2 minorities are members of minority ethnolinguistic groups for whom the frame of reference is the sociocultural, economic and political milieu presented by their respective African nations. 1 Table 5: A selection of countries and language policy shifts Central African Republic

1986 Art. 1 names French as official language and Sango as national language. 1994 Sango added as second official language.

Mali

1960 French official language; Bambara and Fula were introduced in 1994 as co-medium of instruction in schools in addition to French.

Nigeria

1960 English, but in 1998 French was added by decree as a second official language.

Senegal

1960 French official language; national languages added by decree in 1971 for use in education.

South Africa

English and Afrikaans; 1996 Constitutional amendment instituted eleven official languages.

Such shifts in policy were in a sense a measure of the socio-political mood of the times. Writing about Senegal, Weinstein (1990:18) commenting on the language situation in Togo notes that ‘if, as the Bureau of Language suggests, Ewe is selected in Togo for important official functions, the Ewe people will have an advantage over their non-Ewe neighbours’. This observation reflects the same sentiments as those in Bamgbose’s (1991) discussion of the National language question in Nigeria. Weinstein’s account regarding Senegal also affirms the link between language shift and resistance. He says: The promotion of Wolof as a national and official language in Senegal is certainly part of an effort to break, or at least reshape the country’s dependence on France and the French language. From the point of view of non-Wolof mother tongue speakers in Senegal, Africanization may be part of an agenda promoting Wolof dominance. In such a Wolof state, admittedly freer from French influence, Wolof mother tongue speakers would replace the French-speaking elite (unless they were the same already).



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Shift has been even more noticeable in Lusophone Africa, that is, the former Portuguese colonies: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe, Equatorial Guinea. Equatorial Guinea was already leaning towards English-speaking Nigeria by the mid-1980s. Under a bilateral agreement, Equatorial Guinea English language teachers were sent to the University of Lagos for a language course. However, this development is not confined to Lusophone Africa. In 1999, a batch of Ivorian teachers received scholarships to study at Thames Valley University, London. The practice in colonial capacity building was for Francophone personnel to go to France for training while Anglophone personnel went to the United Kingdom for the same purpose. Language was an obvious consideration. A departure from these as shown by the cases cited is an indication of shift. Now I shall sound a cautionary note. I could not agree more with the reviewer who cited Kwesi Kwaa Prah’s (2002) volume to support the remark that ‘some of the issues raised regarding shifts to African languages have been seen as half-hearted efforts that have not yielded positive results’. The Eleven Official Language policy in the South African Constitution is one case in point. Research has shown the policy has not drastically improved the lot of the African languages which have co-official language status with English and Afrikaans. Kamwangamalu (2003) presented the South African context and showed that in spite of their parity of status, the distribution of airtime across three broadcast channels of South African Broadcasting Corporation 1, 2 and 3, the eleven official languages were anything but equal. In the period April to June 2001, English had 3954.5 hours (85%), Afrikaans had 484 hours (10%) while the nine indigenous African languages had a cumulative total of 226.02 hours (5%) (p. 233). The data show a shift from majority local languages to minority colonial language in spite of policy provision to promote the former. Empirical studies such as the UNESCO-funded Ife Six Year Primary Project in the 1970s which demonstrated that mother tongue education can contribute to capacity building and which were expected to lead to a major policy shift in Nigeria in particular and more generally across the region had only a modest impact. Most sub-Saharan African countries now have a mother tongue medium of instruction policy in the first three or four years of schooling. It is ironic that private nursery and primary schools which institute Straight-forEnglish regimes have simultaneously experienced a boom as a counterforce to state school policy. In view of these macro-level failures therefore, I must re-emphasise the fact that development-anchored micro-language planning has been successful and may be the obvious option to explore. A little hiccup here though is that the resources for conducting large scale literacy surveys are controlled by the macro-language planners and so it is difficult to determine in exact terms, the extent of success of micro-planning projects such as Pride Africa’s DrumNet Project.

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6 Language shift in the curriculum The school is always a useful context for examining languages in competition for here the roles assigned to respective languages is a reflection of the evaluation of how much capital accrues to them and generally an idea of shift that may be taking place (Omoniyi 2003c and 2009). Is a language, for instance, a medium of instruction, a taught subject only? If it is a taught subject, where is it located on the timetable? For even that can be ideological with mainstream languages taught earlier in the day and peripheral ones towards the close of the school day. The seriousness of this observation is evident in the remark below made by Professor Peter Ejiofor on the imminent extinction of the Igbo language – far-fetched as it might seem: Ejiofor said unlike the Hausa and the Yoruba, most Ndigbo today would prefer to communicate with each other in English language than their indigenous language. According to him, while over seven universities in the North study Hausa and four universities in the West, study Yoruba language, the reverse is the case in the South East where no university including the University of Nigeria Nsukka, study Igbo language as a course. (The Independent, 2 October 2008, ‘Igbo language faces extinction’ – Ejiofor)

Ejiofor’s claims above are a little off mark. According to the latest University Matriculation Examination/Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board’s brochure, Hausa is studied and taught as a degree programme in only 4 (not more than 7) universities – Ahmadu Bello University, Bayero (Kano), Usman Dan Fodio (Sokoto) and University of Maiduguri. Yoruba is studied and taught as a degree in 8 (not 4) universities – Olabisi Onabanjo, University of Lagos, University of Ibadan, University of Ilorin, University of Ado-Ekiti, Obafemi Awolowo University, Lagos State University and Ajayi Crowther University (Oyo). Like Yoruba, Igbo is studied and taught in 8 universities – University of Nigeria Nsukka, University of Lagos, University of Ibadan, Imo State University, Abia State University, Ebonyi State University, Nnamdi Azikiwe University and Anambra State University. Even though these numbers are rosier than Ejiofor proffered, the fact that these universities have capacity to accommodate less than 20% of the total number of secondary school graduates who desire tertiary education underlines the grimness of the situation. There is an expanded sociolinguistic framework that encompasses competition:

• between local languages; • between local and colonial languages in a growing number of domains; • and between the colonial languages on their own.



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Also contemporarily the framework includes competition between the old languages of the free market economy, mainly Western European languages led by English, and the languages of an emerging New Economy, mainly Asian and led by Mandarin. While Russian has been struck off the subject list in many Nigerian universities since the end of the Cold War, Mandarin’s fortune has been rising with it being introduced as a Foreign Language in some universities in Nigeria. These language schools were established in collaboration with the Chinese government and Zhejiang University. This is a significant development and serves as a reflection of the direction of the global economy. In relation to language shift, the fact that the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the USSR is reflected by the collapse of Russian language programmes in Nigerian universities would suggest that the presence of programmes is an indication of the current distribution of language capital. I distinguish between linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1991) which is assigned based on competence/proficiency and intra-language variation and language capital which is a reality of the multilingual environment and is assigned according to the total functional efficiency of the languages in one’s multilingual repertoire (Omoniyi 2003b). Amidst a growing presence and influence of China in the African economies, the discussions in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics was a call for boycott on the grounds that China was implicated in the crisis in Darfur, Western Sudan – Hollywood producer Steven Spielberg withdrew as artistic director for the games. The Confucius Institutes being sponsored by the Chinese government around the world and in Africa in particular are fashioned ideologically along the same lines as the British Council, the Goethe Institute and Alliance Française. 2 The institutes have a brief, overt or covert, to popularise Chinese culture around the world and the establishment of Mandarin language schools in different parts of the continent complements that fact. The Chinese Consul General in Lagos, Guo Kun said in a press statement that: the Chinese government would guarantee the arrangement and that plans had reached an advanced stage to open Mandarin-language schools in some Nigerian cities, similar to the French and German language schools. He explained that a delegation from China’s Zhejiang University had gone round Nigeria to make plans with relevant Nigerian authorities.

The long term consequence of this is a dissipation of the dominance of the former colonial languages. Thus the emerging global economy under the leadership of China is bound to feature Mandarin more prominently than the current US-led economy does. Consequently, sub-Saharan African governments and agencies that are investing in its promotion may be perceived as proactive.

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7 Conclusion I shall close this discussion first by returning to the issues I posed in my introduction and then end by suggesting a direction for follow-up research as a way forward in planning intervention in language shift in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa. I had asked if history or the past which it reports can threaten a language by causing shift among its speakers. I proposed that the answer to that lies in the sociolinguistics of colonisation which then became the central pursuit in the discussion above. The question is are we any wiser now as to what the purpose might be of a language shift perspective of such sociolinguistics? I believe so. A cursory look at the literacy rate figures for West African countries shows consistently higher figures for Anglophone than Francophone Africa. I take the position that this is not unconnected with the sociolinguistics of colonisation. 3 Both colonial administrations were dismissive of the capacity of indigenous languages, however the administrative models of Association (British) and Assimilation (French) seem to have had variable impact on indigenous language capital with local languages in Francophone countries slightly more prone to threat and shift. Especially considering the findings of the UNESCO-funded Ife Six Years Primary Project in Nigeria, the French colonies were bound therefore to return lower literacy rates due to the total Frenchification drive of colonial France. Thus the reversal of low literacy rates in a few places in Francophone Africa where local languages have been introduced into the language policy or through micro-planning schemes that have broken the monopoly of a single colonial language may be evidence. But this is only speculative thinking. It is necessary to empirically establish a sustained link between revision of colonial policies and practices and language shift trends in sub-Saharan Africa. This will be a substantial proof that indeed a sociolinguistics of colonisation has something to contribute to the capitalisation of languages and capacity building and subsequently to development. That is the resonance we get from Nelson Mandela’s remark in the epigraph at the top of this paper. About the author Tope Omoniyi is Professor of Sociolinguistics in the English Language and Linguistics Programme, Roehampton University, London, UK.

Acknowledgement I thank the editors and reviewers of the volume for their part in facilitating the discussion that I present in this paper.



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Notes 1 See Omoniyi (2009) for a detailed discussion. 2 The growing global appeal or marketing of Chinese culture is evident in the fact that there is a Confucius Institute for Scotland located at the University of Edinburgh. It coordinated the aptly titled China Now in Scotland festival in 2008. (http://www.Confuciusinstitute.Ac.Uk/about/) 3

Unesco reports that ‘despite the overall positive trend, very low adult literacy rates, below 50%, still characterise several countries, including Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Afghanistan, the Niger, Guinea, Benin, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Senegal, Bangladesh, Central African Republic, Nepal, Côte d’Ivoire and Pakistan’. Most of the West African countries on this list are Francophone. Sierra Leone is the only Anglophone country on the list. Unesco (2008) Education for All Global Monitoring Report p. 64. (http://unesdoc. Unesco.Org/images/0015/001547/154743e.Pdf) Accessed 16 August 2009.

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