Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

The global spread of English 131
Blommaert goes on to argue that the ideal of institutional equality between
languages in a multilingual polity – each having a place in education, the media,
administration and so on – is not just financially unfeasible but sociolinguistically
impossible because this would involve the development of exclusive status varieties,
which not all members of the group would control. The result, Blommaert (2001:
137) avers, is that ‘inequality among language groups would be reduced, but
inequality within languages would be increased’.
Another contentious aspect of the Asmara Declaration is the assertion in its tenth
clause that ‘African languages are essential for decolonisation of African minds and
the African renaissance’. Informed, clearly, by Ngugi’s (1986) ideas on ‘decolonising
the mind’, this proposition more than bears a trace of Whorfianism; the notion that
the language we speak organises and controls our conceptualisation/perception of
the world. Such a deterministic outlook is widely disputed, however, most relevantly
by such African writers as Mphahlele (1963) and Achebe (1976), the latter of whom
has argued that English can be indigenised, that it can ‘carry the weight of the African
experience’ and that it can become the medium for oppositional discourses. The
existence of an indigenised literature in English, the emergence of African varieties
of English and the fact that opposition to English as a global language tends overwhelmingly
to be expressed in English are all supportive of Achebe’s opinion that the
appropriation of English is possible, a viewpoint many would endorse as a more
accurate, less essentialised account of how language works.
There are also, of course, practical and socio-political impediments to the recentring
of indigenous African languages, as the recent experience of South Africa,
one of Africa’s richer states, illustrates. Here, the 1996 constitution commits the
government to the development of the nine indigenous languages granted official
status alongside English and Afrikaans, one aspect of which is their intellectualisation
(Finlayson and Madiba 2002). Finlayson and Madiba report that, while progress has
been made in terminology development and other technical areas through agencies
like the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB), there remain doubts as to
whether the government has enough resources to support the simultaneous development
of all nine languages 6 in the face of competing priorities – housing, electricity,
health, water and so on.
More problematic than this, however – given that use in education is an important
driver of intellectualisation 7 – is the resistance of the African population to the use of
indigenous languages as instructional media, an attitude that most probably reflects
both the past inferiorisation of the these languages under apartheid and current
perceptions that English is more economically advantageous. Documenting this
trend, Finlayson and Madiba (2002: 45) note that all fifteen universities responding
to a questionnaire survey on language tuition report the continued use of English as
the sole language of instruction. In secondary education a similar pattern prevails:
English continues to be the favoured medium in African schools. Kamwangamalu
(2003: 241) observes, meanwhile, that English takes up as much as 91 per cent of
the available airtime on South African television and that, in 1994, 87 per cent of
parliamentary speeches were delivered in English.