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Felix Banda Orthography Design Orthography design and harmonisation in development in Southern Africa By Felix Banda Garth Stead/iAfrika Photos roperly designed cross-border orthographies Of interest to this paper is the fact that Bantu lan- can play a monumental role in promoting the guages can be divided into zones or clusters of lan- use of African languages in all spheres of life, guages with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility. and hence contribute to the socio-economic Some of the languages in the Nguni language cluster development of Africans. In Southern Africa, are isiXhosa, isiZulu, siSwati and isiNdebele. Pwhere people speak related Bantu languages, benefits According to Miti (2006), Guthrie (1971) classifies from mass literacy campaigns for socio-economic devel- these languages in Group 40 of Zone S. The opment can only accrue from a wider readership of mate- Tswana/Sotho group is also classified in Zone S and rial, written in unified standard orthographies. Language includes the following languages: seTswana, sePedi planning and policy across geographical borders should and seSotho. Zone M includes languages such as take advantage of cross-border languages, which are cur- iciBemba, Lala, iciLamba, and ciTonga; Zone N rently promoted in isolation within nation-states. In this includes ciNyanja, ciTumbuka, ciNsenga, and ciKunda; idiom, status and corpus, planning should go beyond pro- while Zone P includes ciYao, eMakua and eLomwe. motion of isolated languages in nation-states, to a broad- What is worth noting at this juncture is that the lan- er and more comprehensive one that accounts for the guage zones or clusters do not constitute a neat pack- relatedness of Southern African languages as a result of a age, and they do not correspond to colonial borders. In common Bantu ancestry. spite of classifications into different groups, I shall It is common knowledge that most people in argue that the languages and the zones or clusters with- Southern Africa speak a Bantu language as their first in which they fall are neither mutually exclusive enti- language, and that Bantu languages are genetically ties, nor impermeable to influence from other lan- related. Miti (2006, page 45) summarises the character- guages within (and in the case of zones, from other) istics of Bantu languages. They have a noun class sys- clusters. The natural harmonisation that has been tem with a related concord system. The languages also reported for languages in the Nguni and Tswana/Sotho have a tendency for agglutinative behaviour. This groups (Msimang 1998; Jokweni 2003) and for Zone N means that Bantu languages have the propensity for and Zone P and other language groups in Zambia affixes to attach themselves to stems. (Chisanga 2003) is a case in point. Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa 39 Opening Societies Through Advocacy These revelations make compelling arguments for • the exchange of materials, cross-border orthographies. They also form the back- • the sharing of expenses, and ground for arguments I make about orthography • the pooling of human resources and thus reduce the design and harmonisation in development in Southern cost of promoting these languages.” (Chanda 2002, Africa. page 28). Because the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Societies (CASAS) has been the leading advo- Most of the organisations and individuals that have cate for cross-border orthographies in the past decade, I attempted orthographic reforms have not sustained their draw mostly on its publications for illustrations and to efforts. In most cases such attempts have been haphazard demonstrate the possibilities and challenges of such and uncoordinated. However, since its inception in 1997, orthographies. However, the views expressed in this CASAS under the directorship of Professor Kwesi Kwaa paper are my own and do not necessarily reflect the Prah, has been at the forefront advocating harmonisation views of CASAS or its Director. and standardisation of orthographic conventions of African languages based on “significant degrees of Orthography reforms in Southern Africa mutual intelligibility.” (Prah 1998, page 7). Prah (1998, Early attempts at orthography reform appeared geared page 7) questions the western inventions of African lan- to enable Europeans rather than indigenous people to guages and argues that, contrary to the myth of the access African languages. Banda (2002b) reports on African Babel (where Africans “babble away in unfash- how prominent Bantuists GP Lestrade, CM Doke, JA ionable and indecipherable tongues, so many that one is Englebrecht and VN van Warmelo met at the 1937 unable to put a precise figure on them”), African lan- Inter-University Committee for African Studies guages can be clustered into a few mutually intelligible (IUCAS), not only to decide how Bantu languages groups. The western inventions of African languages and should be written (e.g. they decided to drop the prefix the accompanying proliferation of orthographies have and call them by the root only) but also resolved that the had a negative impact on Africa’s quest for socio-eco- spelling of Bantu languages should not do too much nomic development (Prah 1998). This has led to a multi- violence to the spelling-canons of English (Lestrade plication of languages, but a reduction in the number of 1993 [1937], pages 19-20). This in effect meant that the speakers of particular languages. This is because what anomalies and inconsistencies that plague European should be one language is often split into different and orthographies were imported into Africa. Not only that, smaller dialects, each with its own writing system. the resulting orthographies de-familiarised African The CASAS publication list (CASAS 2007) and the written languages from mother tongue speakers. Thus website (www.casas.co.za) have a comprehensive list of written African languages which should be a resource material in various African languages, all of which are for development became the property of the western- a result of cross-border orthographies that are also list- educated African, who presides over the new terminol- ed. The ensuing discussion on the design of cross-bor- ogy and the new rules to be implemented in the lan- der orthographies is drawn from these sources, as well guage. as my own experiences with Bantu linguistics and hav- In recent years, orthographic work has focused ing been party to the design of some CASAS orthogra- on trying to remove anomalies and contradictions in phies (cf. Prah 2003). orthographic conventions of African languages. As one would expect, the work has taken a cross-border Unified standard orthographies perspective. For instance, Chanda (2002) reports on for Southern African languages the Cross-Border Language Workshop held at Chanda (2002, page 30) identifies four kinds of orthog- Okahandja, Namibia, 23-27 September 1996, raphy planning. These are: orthography development, attended by eminent African linguists and well orthography reform, orthography standardisation, and known European experts on African languages. The orthography harmonisation. He characterises the first participants recommended that “as much as possi- three types as relevant to a single language, and the ble, orthographies of cross-border languages should fourth to more than one language. be standardised and harmonised in order to encour- He defines orthography development as the provi- age – sion of a writing system for an unwritten language. He 40 Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa Orthography design and harmonisation in development in Southern Africa points out however that orthography development can symbols, the process can also be said to be orthography also be applied to a language that already has a standard standardisation. At the same time, the process involved writing system. In this regard, orthography develop- adoption of similar graphemes and spelling rules in lan- ment means replacing the old writing system, with a guages across geographical borders, which makes it a new one. In a case where an existing writing system is process of orthography harmonisation. modified, this is called orthography reform. According In any case, the languages involved are related to Chanda (2002) this is often done to modernise pro- Bantu languages with similar sound systems and mor- nunciation and grammatical structures. One reason for pho-syntactic rules. For this reason, the four senses of this is re-codification of a language to account for new orthography design described above cannot be viewed specialised terminologies of science, technology, etc. in isolation of each other. Suffice to say that the process The third kind of orthography planning aims to pro- of designing cross-border orthographies in Southern vide a standard orthography through identification of Africa included first a description of the phonetic sys- inconsistencies, which are then purged. Chanda regards tem and grammatical systems of Bantu languages in the orthography standardisation as a special case of orthog- cluster, followed by the allocation of graphemes for the raphy reform. He describes the standardisation of the sounds as well as word, phrasal and sentence writing orthographies of the seven Zambian regional official rules. However, even as one is working with one cluster languages in 1977 (cf. Chanda 2002, pages 53-59) as an one always takes into account the rules of writing and illustration of orthography standardisation or reform. the graphemic representation of related sounds in other Chanda calls the fourth kind orthography
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