A Dream of Modern
The Development of the Standard Languages, the Colonial Legacy of Education Policy in Africa, and a Few New Sects of the Obscurans
The African continent is one of the only places in the world where children start school with the medium of education being a foreign tongue. A relic of the colonial order, the medium of education in many African nations remains the departing colonial power’s language. This has been shown to have an overall negative effect on many children’s educational outcomes; however, the policies have stayed in place. However, the state continues to push forward with these policies, with strong support from many parents, development expert, and other stakeholders, in the name of modernization. But does any of this actually make sense?
During the period of political decolonization, the dominant way of looking at national development was with Modernization theory. Modernization theory is a vague way of looking at development which boils down to the idea that nations will go through periods of advancement in a linear route towards “modernization,” which is basically just turning post-colonial states into Western European states. This meant for many African states that the process of language planning and development that had been pushed through in Europe a century before became the policies of the new African states. Briefly, here were the development of European language policies.
The development of European language policy followed a reasonably similar pattern across the continent. Starting in the feudal era where there was either a lack of ability of the state or (as described in the previous post on Grégoire) purposeful policy of obscuration. The powerholders who made up the states of the feudal systems derived their power from stationary rural worker and so there was no need to educate the workforce in a unified state language or to teach them to written language of Latin in which operations of the state and church were done in, it was an age of obscuration. There was a shift that started during the mid-18th century where with the rise of the enlightenment and a waning of the old feudal class led many leaders to try and unify the nation under a united national language, it was the age of assimilation. The rise of industrial capitalism and the need for a more mobile workforce accelerated this drive. In places like Spain and France, this culminated with significant reforms to the public education system in the mid-19th that promoted standardized versions of the national language as the medium of instruction (see Moyano Law and Jules Ferry laws respectively). In the post-war years with the rise of politics of recognition as well as the current human rights regime states policy towards language shifted yet again, to the age of maintenance. In the post-war period, the minority languages of Europe stopped being seen as a nuisance to be removed but more as a unique part of the cultural heritage of the state. Massive state resources have been put into trying to incorporate minority language more into the public sphere in order to keep minority languages in use during a period where the rise of global print capitalism threatened many local and even some national languages by the rise of the hegemonic “world” languages. It was also on the individual level where the shift from an individual’s obligation to use the national language shifted to be that an individual has both the right to use the national language along with the right to use their mother tongue (as long as it was a native regional language, this is a whole other issue). In this period the new ideas towards language get institutionalized in things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. And that is a horribly brief history of language policy in Europe.
During the colonial period, the lessons of historical language policies in Europe massively informed colonial language policies. In that most looked at the European age of obscuration and just tried to replicate that in their new territories (except for France, again, they’re generally an outlier in LPP). European powers created artificial collections of territory that contained a wide assortment of linguistic groups that were governed by new state bodies that operated in entirely different languages. It’s the same strategy that was used in the medieval period with languages like Latin. So, if the age of colonization was also Africa’s age of obscuration, then in order to “modernize” Africa would need an age of assimilation in its language policy.
This would come (maybe) in the post-colonial period. But while it had happened in European or Asian nations through a standardization process of the capital regions language/dialect which would then be imposed nationwide through a public education system, that’s not exactly what happened in newly independent African nations. Instead of a language indigenous to the state’s territory, newly independent states would keep the colonial structures of language policy in the state the same. However, the new states would attempt to increase knowledge of the colonial language by creating a public education system that used the colonial language as the medium of education, and this would have mixed results.
Before we continue, I need to explain the difference between a language being the medium of education in a system and teaching a language as a subject. The medium of education is the language that classes not about the language are in, think what language your math or history class was in; while teaching a language as a subject as a class solely focused on learning that language, think a Spanish or English class. The general practice around this is that a child should have their mother tongue, the language spoken at home or in their community, as their medium of education in primary education while the national language gets taught as a subject. This eventually transitions as the child continues along with their education to where the national language is the medium of education in some of the topics, and ultimately, the national language is the medium of instruction in the final years of schooling. This is meant to help children learn more easily in early education while slowly transitioning them to be fully competent in the national language (good read on the mechanics of this and a deeper dive on the reasoning can be found here with the Hauge recommendations). This plan is still highly contentious on many sides especially in areas with limited education resources. Think about small but diverse towns where the population may be split linguistically (this actually is the case in many Welsh towns). However, what is established fairly certainly is educational outcomes are better when children are at least taught in their mother tongue for at least primary school. So then why is this both not the policy of the state or even policy that many parents seem to want?
In a study on South African parents’ attitudes towards education, 65% of parents wanted the medium of instruction to be English in primary education. The support for using the colonial language as a medium of education is a fairly common view through the continent. It is also supported by the elite government class that already speaks the colonial language. But why? There is one idea that centers around the massive diversity of languages in these states. In this case, many of the local languages are already tied to specific ethnic identities. One of the local languages in schools attended by children from many ethnic backgrounds would cause more conflict than just using the more “neutral” colonial language. This “neutrality” has led to the transcending of tribal and ethnic identities in many cases. The use of English in Zambia colleges has been shown to lead to an increase in inter-tribal marriages. This also ties into the fact that elites of many states already spoke the colonial language and so the colonial language has become associated with higher socioeconomic status. Because of its association with a better position in society, many parents have seen the learning of many of these colonial languages as paramount. Thus, there has been a push to have languages like English be the medium of education from an early age, which will make children better at English and harm their education in all other fields. Colonial languages have (unjustly) been cemented as naturally “modern” and in a push for “modernity,” today’s children have had their educations sacrificed for possible linguistic transformation.
But here is a more cynical reading of the educational policies and why they haven’t been shifted. Because the elites of a nation already use the colonial languages and are undoubtedly aware of its heavy use as a medium of education’s adverse effects on educational outcomes, it begs the question that maybe these policies are very purposeful in the maintenance of the elite’s power status. I talk about how assimilationist policies can do this in a previous blog (linked here) but, essentially the argument is that the use of assimilationist policies inherently frames one language as the standard and thus place the burden on non-speakers. This both puts a real burden on those non-speakers and reframes the whole culture of the new state around the imposed standard language’s cultural practices. Grégoire talks about this in 1794 when discussing how the imposing of a standard French language based on Parisian France will make the nation that of the Trouvères and not the Troubadours. Both of these things essentially strengthen an elite’s grip over a state and its people establishing a nation with them firmly at the centre. Outside of this, the use of assimilationist policy in theory but not in practice can create a system in which makes sure political power is held in the hand of the “right” people. The use of the official language requirement while also not having an education system that efficiently can teach that language makes sure that only the elite who already spoke that language can hold certain positions of power. In Malawi stringent tests on English language proficiency to be a member of parliament have imposed real barrier for many outsides of elite circles from entering politics due to an underfunded public education system.(fun fact, Canada also does this, but with English/French bilingual requirements, but that’s a whole other story) As Grégoire may say, a new sect of the obscurans.
I want to talk a bit about bias here as a westerner studying this topic who’s lived in nations that have moved the perception of languages to the “age of maintenance” in which the death of language can be about vague notions around the loss of culture and not about the material function that a standard language provides. While I believe that there is immense criticism of these policies, I think it’s also important to point out that almost all in the “developed” world benefit today from past assimilationist language policies. While benefiting us today, these policies also were probably bad for many of our ancestors. And that the point, language policy that promotes the standard use of a single national language is a trade-off between the outcomes of the present and a transformed future. The western perception of a rights-based language policy comes after a specific history where they have already gained the benefits of an imposed national language. There is this question that gets brought up a lot in development studies that askes “do western nations, who used massively harmful methods of industrialization, that started the climate change process we see today, in order to raise their standards of living, is it fair for those nations to now ask developing nations to not use those industrialization methods to raise their own standards of living?” It’s a question that gets asked and debated quite a lot, and while there are most defiantly differences, I think the heart of the question remains the same when talking about language policy.
