the University of Chicago. He has worked extensively on the development of creole languages, especially Gullah and Jamaican Creole, on the morphosyntax of ...
Preface to the book "Portuguese Language in Africa Linguistic Policies and Crioulos in Debate" written by Professor Salikoko S. Mufwene1 (University of Chicago)
Book edited by Alexandre António Timbane and Sabrina Rodrigues Garcia Balsalobre
Multilingualism has always been an issue in relation to education and economic development in Black Africa since the 1960s, when most of the countries were liberating themselves politically from their European colonizers. The vague language policies of most of the emergent nation-states aimed at the European one-nation-onelanguage ideology, whose ultimate conclusion would be the devaluation or possible eradication of the vast majority of their indigenous languages, if not all of them. On the other hand, it has not been easy to promote one single indigenous language as the national and official language out of the multitude of languages spoken in most of them. Before the rise of one-part-without-opposition political regimes, language policies were complicated by the reality of political parties that were initially either ethnically based or regionally-grounded. The choice 1
Salikoko Mufwene is a linguist born in Mbaya-Lareme in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. He has worked extensively on the development of creole languages, especially Gullah and Jamaican Creole, on the morphosyntax of Bantu languages, especially Kituba, Lingala, and Kiyansi (which he speaks natively), and on African American Vernacular English. He has also published several articles and chapters about language evolution. Mufwene received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1979. Mufwene is the editor of the book series Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact, an interdisciplinary series covering diverse perspectives on languages in contact, pidgins, creoles, language evolution, language change, and bilingualism.(Source: Wikipedia). For more details: http://mufwene.uchicago.edu/
of any language would have conjured up some disadvantage to speakers of the other languages. With a couple of exceptions, the tendency has remained to maintain the European colonial language as the official language, because it is ethnically and regionally neutral, although only a small minority elite speak or write it fluently. Yet, it excludes the vast majority of the population from participating in their national politics. In effect, this policy perpetuates the colonizers’ practice of ruling and administering the colonies through a few indigenous auxiliaries and intermediaries, which relieved the colonial administrators of the onus of learning the vernaculars of the indigenous people. It devalued the indigenous languages, which the colonial administration, subscribing to the ideology of “mission civilisatrice,” had considered as conveying no culture, because they were not written and had not been used in the production of elite literature. In essence, Africa appears to have lost pride in the wide range of its own linguistic and cultural heritages, which are primarily oral. This post-colonial policy not only privileges the elite class but also disempowers the indigenous languages and marginalizes the majority, non-elite segments of the population. Not only are they precluded from participating in their national politics but they are also condemned to compete only for unskilled jobs, in the blue-collar sector, or to stick to vernacular economy. This situation is the consequence of the fact that the vast majority of the emergent nation-states have also chosen the same European official languages as the media of education. Independent of the poor conditions of schools, students have been taught in languages that are foreign to them and make their learning
experiences much more challenging than necessary. Because of language problems, the school systems have guaranteed success only for a chosen few, especially those whose parents could speak the European language at home too. African language policies have thus created a vicious circle in which the European languages have not spread widely. They are learned more as subjects than as tools of communication and can be forgotten by all drop-outs who find no need for them after leaving school. The indigenous languages have also remained disempowered because they are not used in the white collar-sector of the economy and or in senior levels of public administration. Governance has continued in the colonial tradition, though there are vibrant national popular cultures that in many places have developed in some urban indigenous languages. To be sure, such languages are few in the Lusophone world, with the exception of creole-speaking islands, where traditional African languages did not survive language contact in the violence of slavery. In places such as Cape Verde, it is only recently that efforts have been undertaken to dispense primary education in Creole, while Portuguese is kept for post-primary education. Language policies still favor the European colonial master’s language, rating metropolitan Portuguese (culture) as superior to their local indigenized varieties. Success in formal education is still difficult for the average student, who linguistic competence is assessed relative to the foreign, former metropolitan norm. Although, in the first place, there are too few jobs that pay good wages (predicated on the command of the European languages), the fact that school systems have favored Portuguese over indigenous
languages has imposed a barrier difficult to overcome especially for those living in rural areas or in the peripheries of the urban centers. Access to the language of economic power has thus been impeded by inadequate language policies which, privileging the European languages over indigenous ones, have not created the right ecologies for acquiring them naturalistically. It is high time Black Africa invested more in the economic and political empowerment of its indigenous languages, especially the major ones that function as lingua francas. It is high time they were used throughout the formal education system, from elementary school to higher education, in all sectors of public administration, and in all sectors of the formal economies. Africa must operate first in African languages, though room must also be made for learning major world languages as foreign languages intended to facilitate communication with the outside world but not for communication within. Part of the investment in the indigenous languages, including creoles (because they are locally born), is of course intellectual. That is why scholarship such as in the present volume is highly welcome as a milestone toward much needed change.
September 2017.
To cite this text use the following data of ABNT norms: MUFWENE, Salikoko S. Prefácio. in: TIMBANE, Alexandre António; BALSALOBRE, Sabrina Rodrigues Garcia (Org.). Língua portuguesa em África: políticas linguísticas e crioulos em debate. v.31. Lisboa: AULP, 2017. p.5-7. Available in: http://aulp.org/node/114883
