International Mother Language Day: Indigenous African Languages vis-a-vis International Languages

In commemoration of International Mother Tongue Day today, Africa probably needs reminding that the threat of local language disappearance is increasingly spiking across the continent.

Estimates say Africa has 2,140 distinct languages; one-third of all languages in the world, despite having only one-seventh of the global population. However, some 100 of these languages are seriously endangered. And with the death of each local African language, a well of knowledge is lost.

The African countries with a particularly high number of mother tongues include Nigeria with 515, Cameroon with 274, the Democratic Republic of Congo with 212 and Tanzania with 125.  

However, despite their wealth in linguistics, most African countries adopt ex-colonial tongues or Arabic as their official languages.

A reason for this is the artificial borders imposed around African nations by colonists. These borders, in some cases, lock disparate languages and communities together while, in other cases, separating linguistically and culturally homogenous groups.

With the advent of independence came the need for African leaders to find ways to unite different peoples inside these inherited colonial borders, and most simply adopted a colonial language — French, English or Portuguese — for purposes of unity.

While the irony of such choices are without question, given that these languages symbolize division, separation and pain for several African nations, as at independence, these languages were the ones that the greater number of the disparate peoples within those colonially mapped countries understood in common, and so the choices were the safest ones to make at the time.

Tanzania chose different

All the same, a few African countries chose an African language as their official language. Rwanda with Kinyarwanda, Lesotho with Sotho, and most popularly, Tanzania with Kiswahili as its national language.

This move by Tanzania went a long way in making Kiswahili, a major Bantu language spoken in East Africa, the most widely spoken language in the African continent.

While Tanzania also adopted English as its formal language for international communication, it is common for Tanzanians to speak two or three languages — their mother tongue, or home language spoken in their village, then Kiswahili and English.

This adoption of both Kiswahili and English has also positively impacted Tanzania’s education system, as pupils find it easier to learn both simple and complex ideas and concepts when spoken in a language that feels so homely to them.

Kiswahili is the language of instruction in Tanzania’s primary schools

But even in Tanzania, there is a cause for concern: we see that learning in public primary schools takes place in Kiswahili while from secondary school to university, the education system suddenly switches to English. This can seriously impair the learning process for those who have had little exposure to English language up to that point. And this, in fact, refers to many of the students coming into the secondary school system newly.

Also, with Kiswahili being the lingua franca in Tanzania, English levels are generally low. But people living in rural areas or from poorer backgrounds who have even less exposure to English are especially disadvantaged — leading to worse marks as from secondary school level, and, in turn, fewer chances to find a well-paying job.

The unignorability of these challenges have led to a continuing debate on the use of English in Tanzania.

For clarity, even in countries like Nigeria, where English is the Lingua Franca, English levels are generally low. And that keeps posing similar challenges especially to rural dwellers and people from poorer backgrounds who have had littler exposure to the foreign colonial language who are trying to secure a better life for themselves within their own local shores.

The aforementioned scenario in Tanzania and Nigeria highlights the challenges major African languages encounter, especially in countries where colonial languages have been adopted for general communication and/or official purposes instead of a mother tongue.

Notably, though, we believe that these challenges could have been avoided had African governments chosen their indigenous languages as their official languages and left the colonial and other international languages to be international languages to be taught as a part of the educational curriculum from primary school level.

We believe so because research has proven that using local languages in education and corporate systems could improve educational outcomes, whilst simplifying the route to a profitable livelihood for more and more African teenagers and youth.

And even to this day, we believe this to be an option worth considering, even though there is no ignoring the fact that this would require countries investing in quality educational materials and research that would allow Africans to learn in their own languages at the post-primary level.

We are by no means suggesting, however, that African teenagers and youth should not learn International languages, though. We realize that being fluent in one, two or more international languages gives an edge in the global labour and business markets, and also eases international relations and diplomacy and technology transfer.

We are only emphasizing the vital need to appreciate, invest in and showcase our own tongues before struggling to commonly inadequate levels of understanding or command of foreign ones. We also seize space in this piece to advocate mandating the study of local languages till at least senior secondary level.

Going further, language is not only a tool of communication and transaction, but also a component of our identity.

Rather sadly, even now, over 60 years after the first African nation gained independence, our countries are still defined according to their ex-colonial languages: They are referred to as Anglophone, Francophone or Portuguese-speaking Lusophone nations.

If that doesn’t scream of a need for us to recover our unique African identity, I don’t know what does.

Personally, I look forward to an Afrophone Africa that embraces and effectively uses its wealth and diversity of languages.

For that Africa to be, though, African nations will need to make sure that Africans learn and communicate in their own languages right from their childhood and teenage years, whilst learning international languages as the beneficial addedums they should be. That would be the fulfilment, for Africa, of this year’s International Mother Language Day, which is “Fostering Multilingualism for Inclusion in Education and Society.”