Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu

The Language Planning Situation in South Africa.

This monograph examines the language planning situation in South Africa, where language has been instrumental in the countrys transition from colonialism to apartheid to democracy. In particular, it addresses, diachronically and synchronically, the issues of language spread and use, language policy and planning, and language maintenance and shift. The monograph is divided into four parts. The first part presents the language profile of South Africa to provide the background against which the aforementioned issues will be discussed. The second part discusses language spread and use, with a focus on language-in-education and the media. The third section looks at language policy and planning, with a focus on South Africas new language policy and on attempts currently being made to implement it. It shows that there is a mismatch between the language policy and language practices, with the former promoting additive multilingualism, and the latter showing a trend towards unilingualism in English in virtually all the higher domains of language use. The implications of this trend for the current language policy and for language maintenance and shift are discussed in the final part, with special reference to the countrys official languages.

Why educational language plans sometimes fail

Language-in-education policy (decision taking) and planning (decision implementation) are complex processes requiring a number of decisions to be taken and implemented if they are to be successful. While there is research that suggests the factors that lead to successful outcomes, these are often either ignored or too difficult for polities to implement, given their resources. This insufficiency can lead to a waste of resources and a failure to meet language planning and learning objectives. A number of myths have arisen about such planning, in general, and about the role of English as a second/foreign language, in particular, relating to English being a guarantee of access to economic opportunity and about starting language study early leading to better outcomes. In this paper, we examine 12 common fallacies related to educational language planning to provide some insights into why such plans sometimes fail. This paper provides an introduction to eight polity case study papers, which follow, that highlight particular aspects of these fallacies.

Language planning and its problems

There is a growing tendency in Asia, as well as elsewhere in the world, for English as a foreign/second language (EFL/ESL) programs to be implemented in the early years of primary schooling. Vigorous testimonials from parents about how their child has learned English from an early age – with the implication that such early language learning should be available to all children – abound. As Eggington (2010, this issue) indicates, when this decision is taken in the ecological context of minority language maintenance, it can undermine the efforts to maintain endangered languages. This parental pressure on educational systems has increasingly led governments to support Primary School English teaching curricula for all students. Additionally, parents are spending large sums of money on private tutoring or out of school tuition. Arguments in favor of early foreign language exposure are often based on the ‘earlier is better’ ESL hypothesis, rather than on sound language policy settings and ample EFL research. In Asia, government policies supporting teaching Primary school English are often framed in terms of the need for a language that permits learners to enter into the global community and the need to compete both with other Asian neighbors and with competitors in other parts of the developing world. These trends raise some questions, which to date remain unanswered, including the following:

Reflections on the language policy balance sheet in Africa

Abstract This article reflects on the state of language policies in post-colonial Africa at the time of the millennium, with a focus on efforts to promote the use of African languages in higher domains such as education. The evidence gleaned supports the argument that language policies in most African countries have succeeded only in creating space, on paper at least, for the promotion of the indigenous languages in higher domains. However, they have failed to implement the policies and sever ties with inherited colonial language policies. The article points out that language policy failure stems from the interplay of various ideologies, among them the ideology of development vs. the ideology of decolonisation; the ideology of globalisation vs. the ideology of localisation; and the legacy of inherited colonial language policies. The article deconstructs these ideologies and calls for a more pragmatic, decentralised, market-oriented approach to status planning for African languages, if the masses who speak these languages are to participate actively in the social, political and economic development of the African continent.

Medium of instruction in Africa: commentary

This special issue on the medium of instruction (MOI) in Africa is a sequel to a previous issue on the same topic on Asia published last year in this journal (vol. 14, no. 1). While we are aware that language boundaries do not correspond to political boundaries – either national or continental – we have been guided by our assumptions that the MOI situations were somewhat different in these two continents and therefore two separate issues would allow more in-depth exploration of these issues. In this introductory piece, we comment on the issues emerging from the African papers which are related to the issues highlighted in the Asian papers. Over the past decades, MOI policy has shifted dramatically in educational systems in Africa. At independence, African countries faced the questions of whether (i) to retain ex-colonial languages (French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish) as the sole MOI in public schools, (ii) replace them with the indigenous languages as MOI, or (iii) use both indigenous languages and ex-colonial languages an MOI. Some countries moved away from using the former colonial language as the sole MOI (e.g. French in Guinea and Burkina Faso), combining it with local languages, while others chose to move toward greater use of the ex-colonial language (e.g. Portuguese in Mozambique). This makes the MOI policy implementation in a number of African countries more complicated. This special issue comprises six contributions addressing issues in MOI implementation in a number of African polities. Trudell and Piper in their paper discuss the complexity of MOI implementation in Kenyan schools, providing a deeper understanding of language policy actors and their agency in the micro context. The study shows that language practices in Kenyan schools, as elsewhere in Africa, tend to prioritize the use of English as MOI at the expense of students’ first languages. These practices are seen as responsible for educational failure, including high school dropouts and students’ inability to read in both the mother tongue and English (e.g. Brock-Utne, 2001; Hornberger, 2002). It is noted that the demand for English as MOI is orchestrated by local stakeholders, and that the Kenyan national language policy mandating the use of the language of the catchment area in Grades 1–3 is being ignored. In a related paper, Jones uses an ethnographic approach to explore teachers’ perceptions of MOI policy implementation in Kenya, with a focus on a predominantly Sabaot primary school in the west of the country. She found that teacher classroom language practices in this context did not conform to the national MOI policy, which requires that the area language, in this case Sabaot, be used as MOI in early grades. This study also attests to the role of teachers’ agency in policy practice in local contexts. Pearson in her paper addresses MOI policy implementation in the neighboring country of Rwanda, which in 2008 replaced French with English as MOI in the schools. Using an innovative approach to explore language policy in practice, Pearson highlights some of the difficulties, due in large part to inadequate planning, in implementing the policy. Subsequently, Rwanda revised its MOI policy in 2011, suggesting that the previous policy, a

Why Inherited Colonial Language Ideologies Persist in Postcolonial Africa

The main focus of this chapter is to explain why colonial language ideologies discussed in Chap. 3 and subsequently in Chap. 4 continue to inform language policy and planning in postcolonial Africa. In particular, the chapter reviews the argument, often made in the literature, that the ideology of the nation-state persists in postcolonial Africa because the continent’s linguistic diversity or multilingualism is both a problem and a handicap to development. It reviews this argument against the background of Africa’s arguably monolingual countries, Lesotho and Swaziland, and shows that the argument asserting that multilingualism is a problem is a myth. Instead, it argues that inherited colonial language ideologies persist as a result of at least three interconnected factors, including linguistic instrumentalism: the market value of former colonial languages compared to African languages, Africa’s economic dependency on Western countries, among them former colonial powers, and what Scotton (Language Policy and Political Development. Ablex, 1990) has termed elite closure.

Globalization, the Spread of English, and Language Planning in Africa

The ideology of globalization is discussed further in this chapter, with a focus on the spread of English and its role in language policy and planning in Africa in the twenty-first century. The central question addressed in the chapter is “Why does English spread?” The chapter discusses two competing theories offering to explain the unprecedented phenomenon of the spread of English: the Anglo-American Conspiracy Theory (Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford University Press, 1992) and the Grassroots Theory (Fishman, et al., Post-imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940-1990. Mouton de Gruyter, 1996). Next, it discusses the manifestations of the spread of English—the waves of globalization—in various African countries. In conclusion, the chapter considers the impact of the spread of English on language policies aimed at promoting the use of African languages, especially in the educational systems, and raises the question of whether vernacular language education, which is at the heart of the language question in Africa, will survive in the era of globalization, a phenomenon so powerful that it competes for influence even in countries that have no colonial ties to Britain or the USA.

Language Planning and Ideologies in Postcolonial Africa

Determining the role of language in the socioeconomic development of the African continent has been ubiquitous in the debate over the language question in postcolonial Africa. This chapter discusses the ideologies that have buttressed policymakers’ thinking about this problem, focusing on the ideology of decolonization (which was expected to emerge through vernacular language education) and the ideology of development grounded in what Blaut refers to as the colonizer’s model of the world (which was expected to emerge through internationalization, the precursor to globalization; The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. Guilford Press, 1993). The main argument in this chapter is that, in postcolonial Africa, attempts to promote the indigenous languages in the higher domains (including the educational system) have failed. Inherited European ideologies, especially the ideology of the nation-state, continue to prevail in the debate over the language question throughout the continent, much as they had in the colonial era.

From Linguistic Apartheid to Linguistic Co-habitation Codeswitching in Print Advertising in Post-apartheid South Africa

Apartheid South Africa instituted laws that divided not only the communities but also the languages they spoke. Phenomena such as codeswitching (CS) were an anathema for the apartheid state. Now that apartheid is dead, it is perhaps opportune to explore to what extent the political change from apartheid to democracy has permeated South Africas other institutions, including language. This article investigates the use of CS in print advertising in the post-apartheid South Africa, with a focus on Zulu English CS. In particular, the article seeks to address the following questions: Why do the marketers in South Africa use CS in advertising? What are the syntactic patterns of their CS behaviour? Are these patterns random or rule-governed? Does their use of CS in the advertisements follow a certain order or hierarchy, such that if English occurs in one part of the advertisement it then spreads to the other parts as well, as suggested in Bhatias (2001) Structural Domain Dependency (SDD) model?

The Language Question in Africa

This introductory chapter surveys theoretical approaches to language planning to provide the background against which the language question in Africa may be examined. It reviews, in particular, language planning models in Africa as previously discussed in, for instance, Bamgbose (Language and Exclusion: The Consequences of Language Policies in Africa. LIT Verlag Munster, 2000), Brock-Utne (International Journal of Educational Development in Africa (IJEDA) 30:636–645, 2010), Brock-Utne and Qorro (Multilingualism and Language in Education—Sociolinguistic and Pedagogical Perspectives from Commonwealth Countries. Cambridge University Press, 2015), Djite (The Sociolinguistics of Development in Africa. Multilingual Matters, 2008), Fardon and Furniss (African Languages, Development and the State. Routledge, 1994), Koffi (Paradigm Shift in Language Planning and Policy—Game Theoretic Solutions. De Gruyter Mouton, 2012), Laitin (Transition 54:131–141, 1991), Organization of African Unity (OAU) (Language Plan of Action for Africa. Council of Ministers, 1986), Mazrui (Language Policies in Education—Critical Issues. Routledge, 2013), Prah (Language and Education in Africa: A Comparative and Transdisciplinary Discussion. Symposium Books, 2009), Qorro (Language and Education in Africa: A Comparative and Transdisciplinary Discussion. Symposium Books, 2009), Weinstein (Language Policy and Political Development. Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1990), and Wolfson and Manes (Language of Inequality. Mouton Publishers, 1985). It also shows the relation of the proposed Prestige Planning model to theoretical developments in language economics (Coulmas, Language and the Economy. Blackwell, 1992; Dustmann, Journal of Population Economics 7:133–156, 1994, Grin et al., The Economics of the Multilingual Workplace. Routledge, 2010) and in game theory (Harsanyi, Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations. Cambridge University Press, 1977; Myerson, Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict. Harvard University Press, 1991). These two theoretical frameworks—language economics and game theory—are particularly relevant to this book, as they offer insights into why language planning for the indigenous languages of Africa has failed: language planning in this part of the world has never linked education through the medium of the indigenous languages with economic outcomes.