The Standardisation of African Languages Michel Lafon, Vic Webb To cite this version: Michel Lafon, Vic Webb. The Standardisation of African Languages. Michel Lafon; Vic Webb. IFAS, pp.141, 2008, Nouveaux Cahiers de l’Ifas, Aurelia Wa Kabwe Segatti. halshs-00449090 HAL Id: halshs-00449090 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00449090 Submitted on 20 Jan 2010 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. The Standardisation of African Languages Language political realities CentRePoL and IFAS Proceedings of a CentRePoL workshop held at University of Pretoria on March 29, 2007, supported by the French Institute for Southern Africa Michel Lafon (LLACAN-CNRS) & Vic Webb (CentRePoL) Compilers/ Editors CentRePoL wishes to express its appreciation to the following: Dr. Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti, Research Director, IFAS, Johannesburg, for her professional and material support; PanSALB, for their support over the past two years for CentRePoL’s standardisation project; The University of Pretoria, for the use of their facilities. Les Nouveaux Cahiers de l’IFAS/ IFAS Working Paper Series is a series of occasional working papers, dedicated to disseminating research in the social and human sciences on Southern Africa. Under the supervision of appointed editors, each issue covers a specific theme; papers originate from researchers, experts or post-graduate students from France, Europe or Southern Africa with an interest in the region. The views and opinions expressed here remain the sole responsibility of the authors. Any query regarding this publication should be directed to the chief editor. Chief Editor: Aurelia WA KABWE-SEGATTI, IFAS-Research director. The text herein presented as well as back issues of Les Nouveaux Cahiers de l’IFAS / IFAS Working Paper Series are available on the IFAS website: www.ifas.org.za/research IFAS – Research PO Box 542 – Newtown 2113 Johannesburg – RSA Tel: +27 (011) 836 0561 Fax: +27 (011) 836 5850 Email: [email protected] Institut Français d’Afrique du Sud Johannesburg, 2008 (Les Nouveaux Cahiers de l’IFAS / IFAS Working Paper Series) ISSN: 1608 - 7194 contents Foreword 1 Chapter one 7 Overview of issues at stake by Michel Lafon and Vic Webb Chapter two 22 Language policies and the erasure of multilingualism in South Africa by Susan Cook Chapter three 34 Asikhulume! African Languages for all: a powerful strategy for spearheading transformation and improvement of the South African education system by Michel Lafon Chapter four 60 What happens to literacy in (print) poor environments? Reading in African languages and school language policies by Elizabeth Pretorius Chapter five 89 Issues in scientific terminology in African languages by Elsabe Taljard Chapter six 93 The Use of Local African Languages as Languages of Science by Philip Pare Chapter seven 121 The Northern-Sotho / Sepedi Language Research and Development Centre (LRDC) by Mogale JR Rammala Chapter seven 133 ICTs and African languages: International and African language development agencies from UNESCO to ACALAN by Marcel Diki-Kidiri The Authors 139 foreword Michel Lafon, LLACAN-CNRS Vic Webb, CentRePol,UP introduction foreword In all human communities, education is crucially important: taken in its broadest meaning, it is, ultimately, the strategy through which the youth is groomed to, eventually, take over the community destiny, and allow it to maintain and further its existence. Education therefore shapes the character of communities and their performance in the future. With the growing globalisation process, there is a tendency to limit the concept ‘education’ to school education. This is particularly so in South Africa, even though ‘traditional’ education, as instanced in, inter alia, initiation schools, is maintained in some communities at least. This emphasizes the importance that, for better or for worse, school education now assumes in the country. Indeed, since the advent of democracy, the SA government has placed (formal or school) education at the core of the transformation process. While ensuring general access to primary education, which was not effective under the previous dispensation, government has been adamant in its resolve to make education at all levels, particularly in scientific domains, accessible to all those to whom it was previously denied. Beyond social justice and equity, the government’s avowed objective is to train highly qualified experts from among the African or black communities, to ensure that the transformation process is carried across the full breadth of the SA society. Given these premises, it is only natural that (formal) education in the new SA has been a sustained field of research at IFAS (the French Research Institute in SA), since its creation in 1995. Such research has been supported in the form of individual grants or funding for collaborative programmes. IFAS first sponsored Ingrid Bamberg, a PhD candidate, who investigated several KZN schools as a microcosm of SA society. In 2002, IFAS, in collaboration with other French stake-holders (the IRD & the IIEP with funding from the French Embassy) joined forces with the Gauteng Department of Education to hold a large conference on Education and Decentralisation1. IFAS also contributed to the extensive research conducted by a French education expert, from Picardie University, Prof. Claude Carpentier, which resulted in several publications, among which a richly informed book on the education system under transformation in 2005, and a recent one on inequalities2. A research programme on ‘the role of schools in the construction of a democratic, participative and multicultural model in SA’ coordinated by SA and French experts (Vijé Franchi 1 The proceedings were published by the GDE in 2002, under the title Education and Decentralisation. African Experiences and Comparative Analyses, 334p. 2 CARPENTIER, Claude (2005). L’école en Afrique du Sud entre fantômes de l’apartheid et contraintes du marché Paris, Karthala; CARPENTIER, Claude (2008). La politique scolaire sud-africaine face aux inégalités Paris, L’Harmattan. 2 introduction foreword and Jean Paul Payet, from the French CNRS (Urmis) and Lyon-II University respectively), has already yielded a number of papers. Within this context, it is not surprising that a collaborative programme linking a French CNRS research team dedicated to African languages (Llacan-UMR8135), and the University of Pretoria’s Centre for Research in the Politics of Language (CentRePoL) was accepted as an IFAS programme in 2007, after IFAS had supported a preliminary phase from 2005. This programme considers the role that African languages can play in education - a major issue in the SA education system3. Indeed, despite all government efforts to broaden access to education, it has, as yet, failed to reverse the trend whereby outcomes, notably national Grade 12 results, reflect learners’ racial backgrounds, with Africans being the most prejudiced. After socio-economic circumstances, language has been identified as the main factor underlying this sorry situation4. How to address this issue, however, is neither univocal nor fully apparent. Extensive research world-wide supports the view that education in the mother-tongue, or at least in a language with which the children are adequately familiar when they set foot in class, is much superior to education provided in a language which is not used in the homes and which learners first experience as a sustained medium of communication on their first school day. In SA, this implies that African languages, mother-tongues of the majority of learners, should be used for those learners. This collection of papers, which were presented at a workshop held at the University of Pretoria in March 2007 under the guidance of CentRePoL and IFAS, broadly assumes this position and considers various issues in this regard. The implementation of such a policy is indeed no easy feat, particularly beyond the very first 3 to 4 years dedicated to the initial acquisition of literacy and numeracy. Vic Webb discusses the crucial notion of ‘fully-fledged standard languages’: SA African languages do have recognized standard varieties but these lack broad acceptance within the various sectors of their respective speaker communities, and this constitutes a serious impediment to their use as language of teaching and learning. 3 More information on IFAS programmes can be gleaned from the IFAS research website (www.ifas.org). 4 From an Umalusi document : LOLWANA, Peliwe (2005). Where to with Matric? Matric, what is to be done?, Umalusi, Council for Quality Assurance in General and Further Education and Training. 3 introduction foreword The issue is powerfully illustrated by Sue Cook’s article. Using Setswana as an example, she shows that the forceful imposition through the school system of a standard variety that differs markedly from people’s own, and diverse, practices, and the lack of any degree of official sanction for those, amounts to a negation – an erasure in her own terms - of their own identities. As