Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

130 Language Planning and Education
puts it, ‘the strong jaws of morphology chew loan-words with surprising ease into
well-formed sentences.’
There are, then, contrasting views on English as a language of science, some giving
greater prominence to the real disadvantages for indigenous languages of reduced use
in such high status domains, others emphasising the advantages in a globalising
world of an international vehicular language of science. That this language is English
is, of course, a matter of historical contingency than of any intrinsic merit.
5.2.1.2 African languages and the role of English
There is less room, however, for such an ambivalent conclusion when it comes to
Africa, where English, along with other former colonial languages, continues to
dominate not just higher education but a range of other high status, formal domains
– secondary education, government and administration. The inevitable effect has
been to relegate indigenous African languages to lower status, informal domains, and
thereby to deprive them of opportunities and resources for functional elaboration,
for what Liddicoat and Bryant (2002: 10) refer to as ‘intellectualisation’. Mazrui
(2002: 275) highlights the problem by noting that Das Kapital cannot, even now, be
read in any major African language, this very fact in his view (Mazrui 2002, 2004)
indexing Africa’s continuing, and debilitating, intellectual and epistemological
dependency on the West.
For many African intellectuals, and others beside, redress of past neglect requires
no less than a kind of linguistic decolonisation, this being achieved by promoting
and developing African languages so that they attain a status equal to, or greater than,
the former colonial language, losing in the process their stigma of inferiority. The
principles, and rationale, for such a linguistic renaissance are set forth most clearly in
the Asmara Declaration of January 2000 (reprinted in Mazrui 2004: 129), one of
whose key clauses proclaims that African languages ‘must take on the duty, the
responsibility and the challenge of speaking for the continent’.
Given the persisting absence of indigenous African languages from high status
domains and the often deleterious effects of the use of former colonial languages as
media of instruction (see Chapter 7), it is difficult to feel anything but sympathetic
to the aspirations underpinning the Declaration. At the same time, however, it raises
issues of theory and practical implementation that merit closer scrutiny.
An initial point, made by Blommaert (2001: 137), is that rights-based discourse,
of which the Asmara Declaration is one instance, tends to view problems of diversity
and inequality as a matter of relationships between languages. Overlooked is the
issue of diversity and equality within units defined as ‘languages’, which may actually
have a more direct bearing on social mobility and equality:
what counts is not the existence and distribution of languages, but the availability,
accessibility and distribution of specific linguistic-communicative skills such as
competence in standard and literate varieties of the languages. Granting a member
of a minority group the right to speak his or her mother tongue in the public arena
does not in itself empower him or her. (Blommaert 2001: 136)