1.1 Introduction
When the majority of African countries liberated themselves from colonial domination in the early 1960s, one of the many challenges that faced them was what they should do about the languages inherited from their former colonial masters1—French from France and Belgium, English from Britain, Portuguese from Portugal, and Spanish from Spain. Should these languages be replaced by African languages and, if so, at what cost? (Bamgbose, 2000). If not, what policies should be introduced to bring African languages to parity with inherited colonial languages? The challenge, which some African scholars refer to as the language question (Bamgbose, 1983; Djité, 2008; Mazrui, 1997, 2013), has been the subject of a perpetual debate among language policymakers, language professionals, and language activists of every persuasion. At the heart of this ongoing debate has been the problem of defining the role of African languages in juxtaposition with ex-colonial languages in the higher domains, especially in the educational system.
Education has been singled out because it is universally recognized not only as a powerful instrument of change but also as a vital site for social and linguistic reproduction, the inculcation of relevant knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Kennedy, 1983: iii), and therefore particularly central in the process of what Phillipson (1997: 240) calls linguistic hierarchization. Education, says Christopher Colclough (2012), has an extraordinarily important role to play in efforts to eliminate poverty worldwide. The United Nations (UN) lists education as one of its sustainable development goals (SDGs), the successor to the UN’s millennium development goals (MDGs) (www.un.org/millenniumgoals), which expired at the end of 2015. The UN views education as a key agent for change and as a means for achieving sustainable development, and has given particular attention to equality of educational access to all, including boys and girls. In particular, the organization aims to ensure, among other goals, that “by 2030 all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes” (http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org). Missing from the SDGs, as well as from the MDGs they have replaced, is a mention of the medium of instruction through which education should be imparted; language too does not play any significant role in the efforts to achieve the projected goals. Nonetheless, the UN goes on to say that achieving gains in education will have an impact on all its SDGs. I will return to the issue of the medium of instruction in Chap. 5, where I make the case for mother tongue education in African schools. As Inglehart (1990: 228, cited in McGroarty (2002: 21)) remarks,
Who controls the school and by extension the educational system, notes Joseph (2006: 49),Education is probably the most important single factor shaping one’s life: one’s educational level sets the limits of career one enters, how much money one earns, and how much social prestige one possesses and influences the communication networks one is exposed to throughout life.
In this regard, Shin and Kubota (2010: 206) note that “language education is embedded in socio-political and economic relations of power and hence plays a key role in the construction as well as transformation of inequality between the privileged and the underprivileged.” Perhaps, most importantly, the language question in Africa has focused on education because, unlike other institutions, education remains a vital site where future generations of elite, language policymakers, and bureaucrats are trained and reproduce themselves.controls the past, through the teaching of history; structures the present, through the powerful hierarchization of individuals and communities entailed by language choice and the enforcement of language standards; and shapes the future, by shaping, or even by failing to shape, those who will inhabit it.
In this introductory chapter, I survey theoretical approaches to language planning to provide the background against which the language question in Africa may be examined. I do so by reviewing, in particular, language planning models in Africa as previously discussed in, for instance, Bamgbose (2000), Brock-Utne (2010, 2014), Djité (2008), Fardon and Furniss (1994), Koffi (2012), Laitin (1991), Mazrui (2013), Organization of African Unity (OAU) (1986), Prah (2009), Qorro (2009), Weinstein (1990), and Wolfson and Manes (1985). I also show the relation of the proposed Prestige Planning model to theoretical developments in language economics (Grenier, 1984; Vaillancourt & Grin, 2000) and in game theory (Harsanyi, 1977; Myerson, 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.
I use the term indigenous language interchangeably with the terms vernacular language and African language to mean a local language, also known as ethnic community language (Brock-Utne and Qorro, 2015: 21) or, as LePage (1997a: 6) puts it, “the everyday spoken language or languages of a community” in contrast to a transplanted, foreign, or colonial language. Accordingly, I argue that African masses might embrace their own indigenous languages as the mediums of instruction in schools if that education were as profitable as an education through the medium of a former colonial language.
In this regard, the book draws on the work of Bourdieu (1991), especially his notions of capital, social fields, and markets, to demonstrate how language policymakers in Africa formulate policies loaded with escape clauses intended to maintain the status quo rather than to promote the use of indigenous languages in such higher domains as education. Bourdieu theorizes that all human actions take place within social fields, that is, areas of struggle for institutional resources and forms of privilege and power. He notes that the individuals who participate in this struggle have different aims: some (e.g., the elites/policymakers) seek to preserve the status quo by legitimatizing some linguistic capital—in this case, the former colonial languages; others (e.g., language activists and language professionals) seek to change the environment, each choosing differing chances of winning or losing, depending upon where they are located in the structured space of their respective positions in society (Bourdieu, 1991: 14). Accordingly, individuals make choices about which languages to use in particular kinds of markets, which Bourdieu defines as places where different kinds of resources or capital are distributed. Bourdieu says that the distribution of such capital in the community is related in specific ways to the distribution of other forms of capital (e.g., economic capital or cultural capital) that define the location of an individual within the social space (1991). I will return to the theme of the linkage between Africa’s linguistic capital—the indigenous languages—and the economy throughout the remainder of this book. But first I provide a description of the field of language planning and its attending theoretical approaches in order to set the background against which the language question in Africa may be addressed.
1.2 Theoretical Background to Language Planning and the Language Question in Africa
Language planning is a field of study whose mission is to find solutions to language problems (Prah, 2009; Ricento, 2013a; Ruiz, 1988). The field has been described as a government-authorized, long-term, sustained, and conscious effort to alter a language’s function or form in society for the purpose of solving language problems (Shohamy, 2006; Spolsky, 2009, Tollefson, 2013). Bamgbose (2004) noted, however, that not all the sources of language planning can conceivably be traced to “language problems.” He noted further that “even when there is something that can truly be regarded as a language or communication problem, such is its nature that it is only a manifestation of an underlying political or economic problem” (2004: 82). Thus, Cooper remarked, that “it is preferable … to define language planning not as efforts to solve language problems but rather as efforts to influence language behavior” (1989: 35). It has also been described as the locus where language is perceived as a societal resource (Eastman, 1983: ix; Jernudd & Das Gupta, 1971: 196); that is, policy statements formulated against such a perspective are aimed to serve as guides by means of which language is preserved, managed, and developed (Ruiz, 1988: 10–11). Language planning, says Zhao (2011: 917), is an interest-bonding enterprise whose members, especially policy-decision makers, are invariably vested with various forms of regional and economic interest. Kaplan (2011: 925) distinguishes between language planning and language policy. He defines the former as “an activity … intended to promote systematic linguistic change in some communi...