In general parlance, language, whether in multicultural societies or in mono-cultural and mono-linguistic ones, plays a defining role in the development or backwardness of a continent or a country. Africa is no exception. While hundreds if not thousands of languages or dialects are spoken across Africa, the continent is still economically backward because these languages have not been so far adopted to the needs of economic and social development as well as modernization in general.
According to Wikipedia, “The total number of languages spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation languages versus dialects) at between 1,250 and 2, 100 and by some counts at over 3000. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages, one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world.”
On the other hand, China has achieved development and modernization not because it speaks one language which is Mandarin because more than 90 percent of Chinese are from one nation called the Han nationality. True, having uniform ethnicity and one or two languages greatly facilitate communication, trade and development. But having one language is not a prerequisite for getting fast and furious development. There are many countries in Africa and elsewhere those have fewer languages but have not achieved development while countries that have linguistic diversity have attained higher levels of socio-economic development.
What educated intellectuals, or the educated elites, have so far failed to do in Africa is to promote language in such a way as to make it a catalyst of economic development and/or modernization in order to overcome the old colonial legacy and the continents own inherent economic retardation. During colonization, colonizers usually imposed their language onto the peoples they colonized forbidding natives to speak and less write in their native languages.
Although it may not be fair to blame colonialism for everything that went wrong in Africa, we can rest assured that European colonialism has broken the backbone of Africa’s potential economic development by prohibiting its peoples to communicate, trade and express themselves in their God-given native languages. It may indeed be unfair to say that colonialism is the culprit in all cases. African educated elites have also failed the continent and its people. No doubt the hands of colonialism were also visible in this process. “Colonialism not only blocked further political development but indirect rule made local elites less accountable to their citizens.”
In the introduction to a study entitled, “Language and Colonialism”, Bettina Migge says that, “the literature on colonialism tends to focus on Europe’s economic exploitation many regions and peoples around the world and Europeans’ use of excessive force towards the natives. While these issues are undoubtedly of great importance, it is equally important to
understand the cultural and specifically the linguistic and discursive practices that came to be associated with European colonial rule. These practices played an instrumental role in assigning low prestige to non-European languages and cultures, including cultural and linguistic forms that emerged due to Europe’s colonial expansion and in establishing the superiority of the colonizer’s language and culture.”
Instead of allowing African native languages to flourish, during the colonial era, “Indo-European languages such as Africans, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish hare widely spoken generally as lingua francas and ad held official status in many countries.” So far so good about the effects of colonialism on language and economic development. In order to have a fuller picture of this cause and effect relationship, it would also be relevant to consider the post-independence period in African attempts to conjugate language development with economic growth.
With the end of colonialism, Africans could reclaim their sovereignty, control over their destiny as well as the opportunity to restore their language diversity not only as an expression of free use of their native tongues but also as agents of continental communication and the promotion of economic activities both horizontally and vertically between the diverse tribal and ethnic identities and with the new decolonized but divided world between the center and periphery of the international system.
In a book entitled Language and Development in Africa-Perceptions, Ideologies and Challenges, H. Ekkehard Wolff, says that, “Development is based on communication through language. With more than 2000 languages being used in Africa language becomes a highly relevant factor in all sectors of political, social, cultural and economic life. This important socio-linguistic dimension hitherto remains under-rated and under-researched in Western mainstream development studies.” Why former colonial powers are not keen to study the socio-linguistic dimension is obvious to see. Any honest and dispassionate academic research would reveal the fact colonialism is at the root of all the malaise and that and raise the claim of Africans that their economic retardation was due to Europe’s colonial occupation and the request for massive compensation for the ills done to the continent’s development.
Competence in one or a few major languages at the national and continental levels is considered a good thing while the need to strike a balance with the prevailing diversity is a major challenge because linguistic diversity if properly managed, would be an asset for economic development. As the choice of working language may demonstrate in certain African contexts, we cannot exclude one at the cost of the other and adopt a single policy or try to apply both at the same time. In other words, we may not succeed in adopting the one to the detriment of the other if we want to avoid chaos. People might think that language barriers may hinder communication under certain circumstances but the proliferation of languages in the African context is an asset rather than a liability.
As experts in the field maintain, “Economic studies have shown that fluency in a dominant language is important to economic success and increases economic efficiency. However, maintaining linguistic diversity also has value since language is also the expression of people’s culture.” Without a balanced approach it may be difficult to attain the desired developmental objective while in the worst case a kind of functional chaos may result with failure to reconcile the two.
The process of language integration in Africa cannot be promoted by individual African countries. This is rather a process that can only be promoted by the African Union (AU) one of whose objectives is to realize the economic integration of the continent as well as the integration and adoption of African languages as working languages. The official languages of the African union are Arabic, English, French Portuguese, Spanish and “any other African language”. The primary working languages of the AU are English and French.”
Other languages are being added in the process and Swahili, the widely used language in East Africa has become one of the AU’s working languages back in 2004. The story of Swahili’s rise to prominence by becoming the most widely spoken language in Africa is interesting and instructive as to the way an African language can be adopted as the AU language. John M. Mugane, A Harvard academic, in an article entitled “The Story of How Swahili Became Africa’s Most Spoken Language writes that, what was “once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognized language. It is peer to the few languages of the world that boast over 200 million users.”
The process of selecting African languages to meet the objectives of continental integration as well as expediting economic development and modernization will continue to dominate the cultural agenda of the organization in the years and decades to come. Other African languages are bound to join the ranks of most important languages and join the other candidates. According to available data, The most important African languages are, Amharic from Ethiopia, Hausa from Nigeria, Arabic from North Africa well as Yoruba from Nigeria again and Zulu from South Africa. These are not languages that are only widely spoken in individual African countries but also serving as linguistic tools to promote regional communication if not regional integration as their major function.
The benefits of speaking many languages or learning a new language are many, according to available data, learning a new language expands your mind and worldview. It opens you up to new cultures and to the fruits of diversity. Speaking a second and third language boosts self-confidence and increases self-esteem. In a globalizing world, knowing a second or third language give people an advantage in terms of careers. It can also facilitate interaction among different cultures and promotes trade among communities in many African countries that were divided by colonialism. So language integration can be seen as language facilitation both at individual, community, national and global levels. At the end of the day, all these factors add up to make languages the drivers of economic development or modernization in Africa.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
The Ethiopian herald July 14/2024
