Languages, Identities and Intercultural Communication in South Africa and Beyond

Russell H Kaschula

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000421460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

African countries and South Africa in particular, being multilingual and multicultural societies, make for exciting sociolinguistic and applied language analysis in order to tease out the complex relationship between language and identity. This book applies sociolinguistic theory, as well as critical language awareness and translanguaging with its many facets, to various communicative scenarios, both on the continent and in South Africa, in an accessible and practical way.

Africa lends itself to such sociolinguistic analysis concerning language, identity and intercultural communication. This book reflects consciously on the North–South debate and the need for us to create our own ways of interpretation emanating from the South and speaking back to the North, and on issues that pertain to the South, including southern Africa. Aspects such as language and power, language planning, policy and implementation, culture, prejudice, social interaction, translanguaging, intercultural communication, education, gender and autoethnography are covered.

This is a valuable resource for students studying African sociolinguistics, language and identity, and applied language studies. Anyone interested in the relationship between language and society on the African continent would also find the book easily accessible.

1 Language policies, identities and African nations

‘Language checks and balances’

Introduction

This introductory chapter aims to:

• generally define language policy, planning and implementation
• discuss language policy and planning in relation to Africa
• create an understanding of the differences between standard, national and official languages
• provide comparative examples of language policy and planning from different parts of Africa by focusing on Morocco, Senegal, Rwanda, Tanzania, Botswana and South Africa.

In this chapter, the work of language planners is explored against the backdrop of how language planning has been approached in Africa more broadly, but with specific reference to southern Africa. Language policies in other parts of Africa are also discussed, thereby providing a more holistic perspective regarding the linguistic makeup of the African continent and how it encapsulates varied identities. Where appropriate, comparative references are made with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Switzerland, Russia, Ukraine, Australia, the United States, China and other countries.

Language policy and identity diversity

This book builds on knowledge of African identities found in Simpson’s (2008) Language and National Identity in Africa. For the purposes of the present book, examples are drawn from across Africa, including Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, Mali, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Tanzania, Zambia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Senegal, Cameroon, DRC-Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, North and South Sudan, Somalia, Seychelles, Eswatini, Malawi, Botswana, Burundi, Rwanda, Guinea, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and primarily South Africa. Individual and national identities are explored in relation to linguistic and political histories on the continent.

Makoni and Makoni (2013) speak of this link between language and identity as a possible ‘site of struggle and contestation’. They provide an example of the conflict between North and South Sudan where the ‘Arabization’ of the North, based on Islamic religion, conflicted with the Anglicization of the South, based on Christianity. Present-day Cameroon presents similar challenges in relation to French and English-speaking Cameroon. Makoni and Makoni (2013:1) suggest that, ‘The relationship between language and national identity is therefore constantly evolving and negotiated at different levels.’

Many ‘ethnicities’ were also arguably created by colonialism, which has fuelled identity conflict in Africa. The Dinka and Nuer in Sudan traditionally belonged to the same group; however, they were reconstructed through colonialism. Further examples are the Manyika of Zimbabwe and the Ngala of Congo (Makoni & Makoni 2013:4). Language-based conflicts in support of independence are found around the world: from Scotland to Ukraine, Palestine and Cameroon.

Africa is multilingual, and therefore presents us with multifaceted challenges when it comes to matters concerned with language policy and planning (Kaschula & Wolff 2016). This multilingualism influences and reflects identities across the world as well as on the African continent. Many countries are faced with multilingual scenarios – for example, Nigeria where more than 400 languages are spoken, or Russia where 150 languages are used and Australia with its 14 remaining Aboriginal languages. It is also true that many European nations are multilingual, such as Switzerland where four official languages are recognised.

Recent mass migrations from the Middle East and Africa towards Europe have also contributed to new developments in multilingualism in Europe, and in some cases to identity and language conflict. The United Kingdom Brexit debate on withdrawing from the European Union is a case in point, where the British were attempting to retain their own sense of identity. A British interlocutor once told me that ‘London has been stolen from the British’, thereby negatively acknowledging the changing nature of identity and challenging the newcomers’ sense of belonging in Britain. Similarly, many people in Scotland and Ireland want independence from Britain, and they want their Scots, Gaelic and Irish languages recognised as official.

The growth of Spanish language use in North America – for example, in California – has also challenged the notion of America as a melting pot of languages and identities, where a single American identity is created and encouraged through the use of English. The ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan used by President Donald Trump during the 2020 election campaign was arguably an attempt to reinforce American-English-speaking identity to the detriment of embracing multilingual immigrant identities. In 2019, Trump mooted new immigration laws that made competency in English mandatory.

In the Ukraine, there is an attempt to reinforce Ukrainian identity through language as separate from Russia and the Russian language itself. The same applies in Hungary, where Hungarian language and identity are seen as being under threat from migrants, resulting in a hardening of attitudes towards migrant communities.

According to Walsh (2019), in Australia (where there were around 200 Aboriginal languages, with 14 remaining) and in South Africa, the opposite is happening. Here there are attempts to reach out to the first peoples – the Aborigines, Khoi and San – in order to revive languages, and to inclusively celebrate these cultures, languages and heritage. Language and identity can therefore be used in many parts of the world either to reinforce identity or to fragment it in some way or another for political reasons.

Similarly, language policies in African nations emerge out of specific political, historical, socioeconomic and linguistic conditions. If not handled correctly, language planning can easily become language manipulation and abuse, leading to major conflict and in many instances identity oppression. This is what happened in South Africa in 1976 when the apartheid government of that time enforced the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction (MoI) in all black schools. The enforced use of Afrikaans in South Africa led to what became known as the Soweto uprising, where learners revolted and resisted the use of this language as a MoI. Today this is seen as a major event that contributed to the downfall of the apartheid regime.

Diversity can, of course, also be celebrated rather than being politically manipulated in a negative way. Examples of nations where multilingualism and unity in diversity are celebrated – at least on paper – are South Africa, where there are 11 official languages, and Zimbabwe, where there are 16, thereby providing political protection for selected languages.

One must be careful, however, not to label language and identity as oppressive. It is rather those who speak language(s) who have the propensity to become oppressors – for example, Afrikaans-speaking people under apartheid or German-speaking people during the time of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe, or speakers of Mandarin Chinese in Tibet, or Hutu and Tutsi Kinyarwanda speakers in Rwanda. It is peoples and individuals who have the ability to commit crimes against humanity. The languages that these people speak should be freed from the deeds committed by the speakers of these languages. Unfortunately, the notion of the ‘language of the oppressor’ has often resulted in the oppression of the language itself – for example, Afrikaans in a post-democratic South Africa.

Language policy: Towards a conceptual framework

Language policy is divided into language practice, language attitude and language planning. Language planning consists of status, corpus and acquisition planning (Johnson 2013:122–123). Acquisition planning was only added in 1989 to the term ‘language management’ (Cooper 1989). The work of Cooper (1989) is seen as significant and provides an initial framework for the concept of language planning.

Some scholars have added prestige planning to this described framework (Baldauf 2005:962; Taylor-Leech 2007:27). Recently, Antia (2017) has spoken of opportunity language planning, which relates to language in the workplace and language as a resource. This builds on the concept of econo-language planning (Kaschula 2004). Language policy dates back to medieval times. Agencies such as the Académie Française or the Russian Academy are among the oldest examples of what is now called corpus planning, involving terminology development (Kloss 1968:69–85).

The growth of Mandarin-Chinese Confucius Institutes across the globe can be seen as a contemporary example of status, acquisition and opportunity language planning or linguistic agency, alongside for example the British Council, which has promoted the growth of global English and more recently inclusive multilingualism alongside English (Kaschula 2016). This is based largely on the fact that countries in Asia and Africa, which have adopted English as a MoI, are failing educationally. The throughput of students remains unimpressive as they are not taught through their respective mother tongues, but rather through English – a language they do not fully understand. This educational failure is thus based to some extent on linguistic failure (Stubbs 2002). Effective language policy and planning are required to support effective educational and economic structures within a country. Failing this, language policy can also divide people in societies.

Language policy issues and societal divisions

Language is by its very nature political. It can be used in a politically emotive manner. Building on the examples and discussion provided above, one only needs to consider the role of Russian in the Baltic countries or in the Ukraine to understand the political nature of language (Soler-Carbonell, Saarinen & Kibbermann 2016; Søvik 2007). Another example would be the oppression of Kurdish in Turkey, as well as the conflicts in Catalonia and secession discussions in Scotland and Ireland. The attempts by the Irish to exclude themselves from the Brexit scenario and their alignment with the European Union rather than Britain, while retaining their Irish identity, language, accent and culture, are further cases of this.

Then there is the fight for language rights in Northern Ireland and Scotland. Another example would be the rising status of Gaelic within the Welsh community in the United Kingdom, thereby entrenching their own identity as separate from the English. The same can be argued of Scots dialect and identity in Scotland. Ironically, language, and particularly a global language such as English (with its associated dialects), is now at the forefront of the disintegration of the United Kingdom. In sociolinguistic terms, new words and acronyms that have been created and that are associated with this disintegration speak to the importance or gravity of the situation. These include BREXIT (Britain Exiting the EU), flextension (a flexible extension to the process of BREXIT) and BRINO (Brexit in name only). Language and politics are therefore intertwined, giving rise to new lexical items such as a single word or an acronym.

On the African continent, a good example is the way language was used to politically divide people in South Africa as part of a divide-and-rule policy (based on the language or dialect you spoke), with Afrikaans becoming known as the language of the oppressor (Alexander 2013). Wolff (2013) refers to ‘language policies’ and ‘language politics’ in relation to Africa. He states (2013:13) that ‘language policies are different from language politics which, however, may play a negative role in the sabotage of the implementation of such official policies … from stakeholders, with their own and often hidden agendas’. Hence, the question of education and socioeconomic development, identity and belonging is often closely related to language. Moreover, the process of globalisation reduces the distance between societies and countries. As a result, the various languages or language varieties remain, or have even become more, important. A language can also be referred to as a separate variety – for example, Spanish, Mandarin or English. It can also be referred to as a code.

Language policy and multilingualism in Africa

Approximately 7000 languages exist in the world (Altmayer & Wolff 2013:16). The process of globalisation has led to serious challenges for many of these languages, as some are only spoken by small groups – for example, the Khoi and San languages of sub-Saharan Africa. These are also spoken in countries such as Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. In South Africa and Namibia, desperate attempts are being made to save and support languages such as the Kwe, Nama, N!uu and !Kung. Matheus Brenzinger, a German linguist who was previously based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, has done much work in this regard. He set up the Centre for African Language Diversity (CALDi), which supported the development and preservation of these languages. The N!uu language has only three remaining speakers, including Katrina Essau, who tries to teach the language to young people in order to keep it, together with the identity it underpins, alive. In 2003, the United Nations Educational Scientific Cultural Organization (UNESCO 2003) estimated that around 90 per cent of the globally existing languages were in severe danger of language death.

In sub-Saharan Africa, many countries retain a multilingual character. One reason is the existence of arbitrary colonial borders, encouraging the entrenching of what we now refer to as cross-border languages such as Shangaan or Xitsonga in Mozambique and South Africa, or Chichewa spoken in Malawi and Mozambique, as well as bigger languages such as Kiswahili spoken in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, the DRC and so on. These boundaries were created in the nineteenth century by Africa’s colonisers through what is now known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’ and its resources. This colonisation was undertaken by European countries such as Britain, Belgium, Germany, Portugal and France.

The multilingual linguistic challenges are further complicated by the fact that African countries are generally also large in comparison to European countries. Therefore, African governments need to put significant effort into the implementation of multilingual languag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Language policies, identities and African nations: ‘Language checks and balances’
• 2 Languages, identities, politics and power: ‘Speaking back to power’
• 3 Languages, dialects, identities and varieties: ‘Tower of Babel: Speaking in tongues’
• 4 Languages, identities and cultures: ‘What’s orange for you is red for me!’
• 5 Linguistic prejudice and identities: ‘To speak or not to speak?’
• 6 Languages, identities and gender: ‘Wathint’ umfazi, wathint’ imbokodo – You strike a woman; you strike a rock!’
• 7 Languages, identities, power, multilingualism and education: ‘Thetha, bua, khuluma, speak: Your language or mine?’
• 8 Intercultural communication, identities and workplaces: ‘A smile is a smile in any language’
• 9 Language, power and identity in creative contexts: The Trevor Noah effect: ‘Born a crime’
• 10 Languages and identity: A personal journey: ‘Umntu ngumntu ngabantu – A person exists by virtue of others!’
• 11 Conclusion: ‘Phela-phela ngantsomi, our story is done’
• Glossary
• Select identity definitions
• Further reading
• References
• Index