by  Clifford Fyle
 
 

The grammar, the proverbs, and the idioms of a language give us a clear understanding of how its mother tongue users think and feel, and they do this more completely than anything else can.  The vocabulary is the sum total of all the objects, actions and ideas that affect them or that they need to know in their environment.  Their literature expresses the best of what they have experienced and felt over the years.

It is for these reasons that language is an expression of the personality of the group, a means of identifying its members according to their culture.  When, for example, we say "I am Italian" or "I am Yoruba", we are identifying ourselves as members of a particular cultural group using a particular language.

This kind of identification is important.  It provides authenticity for an individual, in the sense of rooting him firmly within his community, of bonding him with others of the same culture.  In this respect, language is a great unifying factor.  One can in fact say that an important essential for any unified society is that all its members should speak the same language.

This is why in many developing countries there has been so much interest in a single national language, which is seen among other things as a means of achieving national unity.  It becomes imperative to. teach a language, its literature and its oral traditions to its users, so that they can have a proper appreciation of their own culture.

This is necessary even when the users are in their home environment; it becomes even more so when they are removed from this environment but may have to return to it.  This is the case, for example, with the families of migrant workers, who for various reasons have taken employment in other countries, but whose children at least have to preserve their own culture and may wish to return to their home environment.  These migrant workers, however, also have to learn the language of the other country in which they find themselves, so that, at least for the duration of their stay, they can integrate also into these new communities.

Since a person's mother tongue is the language in which he is most adept, in which he can best express himself, which he can best understand, it follows that it is the language in which, for him, learning can best take place.  For this reason, there has developed the worldwide educational principle that all education is best achieved when it is given through the medium of the learner's own language.

Countries seeking to achieve rapid development for their peoples need rapidly also to provide education for all their citizens.  Only by mobilizing their total manpower and putting it to effective use will they be able to make the economic strides that they desire.  This means mass education, the mass teaching of reading and writing, a constant flow of information and constant communication, teaching of new habits and new attitudes, and not least of all, training in new skills.  All this is impossible without a vast national mass education programme.  A country's leaders are usually quick to realize that such a programme can only succeed if it is conducted in the language or languages with which their people are familiar.

At this point it is useful to reject the popular linguistic fiction that some languages are incapable of being used for certain educational purposes.  The truth is that any language, any one at all, is a complete and perfect medium of expression and can be used to teach anything.  Initially it may not have enough words to cope with a new situation or a new field of activity, but whenever this happens the simple principle for all languages, in developed and developing countries alike, is that they either create new words or borrow them from other languages.  The only problem for developing countries is that, with the abundance of new situations their languages have to face in being used for modern education, borrowings have to be rapid, organized, and are therefore generally expensive.

What are the major problems involved in promoting and using national languages as a means of reinforcing cultural identity, and as educational instruments?

The initial problem is that of which language to choose, particularly in countries with large numbers of peoples using different languages.  It does not always help to say that one must choose the language of the greatest number of speakers, because sometimes there are two or more groups equal or almost equal in strength, or there may be a minority group which is socially or economically more significant than a majority group.  The problem is not as serious for countries with only one language each; but even they do not escape it entirely.  This single language usually has a number of dialects-that is to say, the language, though basically the same, is used in distinctly varying forms in different parts of the country.

This explains why a number of developing countries have still not been able to choose their national languages.  For example, of the forty-five States in sub-Saharan Africa, there are some eleven which still have to make the decision.  It also explains why, in the countries which have made the decision, the term "national language" has been interpreted in different ways and correspondingly different choices have been made.  There are the cases where a country has decided on one language as a national language.  Tanzania is an example of this.  Then there are the cases of multiple adoption.  Some countries merely choose a few of their many languages as national.  Others go further and add a few others for use at some levels of formal education.  Still others go further and add a number of other languages for purposes of literacy teaching.

One problem facing all these countries is the dominance of the old colonial languages, usually English, French or Portuguese.  Traditionally, all education in the Western sense of the word has been given in these languages, often for well over a hundred years.  This has led to the assumption that modern education is only meaningful if it is given in one of these languages.  The assumption is false because, as we have noted above, given vocabulary development, any language can be used to teach anything.  But it is such a widespread assumption in developing countries that it often acts as an effective barrier against the development and use of the country's own languages.

But languages such as English, French and Portuguese affect the problem of African language development and use in another way.  These languages are international languages, and so for the purposes of international communication at least, the developing countries wish to retain the one they have been used to and to see that it is effectively taught.  In face of this, the problem arises of how much use can be made of the countries' own languages as instruments of education, no matter how the term "national language" is interpreted.

But the biggest problem of all is the practical problem of research and the availability of materials.  Some of the heavily multilingual countries still have not been able to determine exactly how many languages are within their borders and how many persons speak each language, not to mention producing the linguistic grammars and dictionaries needed as basic reference works for the use of these languages.  There is also a need for educational research into the proper ciirricula and methodology for teaching the languages in the languages.  Then there is the need to provide primers, readers and other materials for literacy and other forms of education.

Another problem is that of minority languages.  Except for the few States which have only one language or which have decided on the adoption of all their languages as national, all developing nations are faced with a minority language problem.  And when we consider that a country like Nigeria with possibly some 400 languages has decided to adopt only three as national, and that Kenya with some ninety-four languages has decided to adopt only one, Kiswahili, we can appreciate the scope of the minority language problem.  Properly used, minority languages can contribute very greatly to the enrichment of the national culture and enrich and inform national education.  Yet very few countries, if any, seem to have discovered exactly how to take them into account.

In Africa only Tanzania seems to have taken some action, and that only by way of looking for words from these languages to enrich the vocabulary of Kiswahili.  So important is the use of national languages seen to be for purposes of national unity, identity and development that more and more of the developing countries are facing up to these problems, The statistics would seem to bear this out.  They are available for fifty African States, and they indicate that whereas in 1976, twenty-eight of these States had more or less clear language policies and ongoing programmes, mostly at the primary level, for the use of their African languages in education, by 1980, eleven more countries had declared national language policies, and six more had initiated primary level programmes.  By 1982, some twenty to twenty-five of them were teaching African languages as subjects in secondary education, and ten were actually using the languages as media of instruction at this level.