Paper long abstract:

Avant la colonisation, l'Afrique était une véritable mosaïque de nationalités, d'ethnies et de langues. Aujourd'hui, après des siècles de guerres, de colonisation et de luttes d'indépendance, le continent africain est divisé en quatre grandes zones linguistiques : francophone, anglophone, arabophone et lusophone.

Nous nous proposons d'examiner ici les spécificités démographiques de ces différentes régions linguistiques, l'objectif étant de tenter d'établir un lien entre la langue pratiquée, et notamment en milieu scolaire, et les comportements démographiques. Par comportement démographique, nous entendons essentiellement la nuptialité, la fécondité, la mortalité et la migration. Nous tenterons également de vérifier si les populations parlant la même langue affichent également les mêmes indicateurs démographiques (âge au mariage, polygamie, prévalence du sida, espérance de vie, Indice synthétique de fécondité,…).

Je tenterai de trouver quelques éléments de réponse aux questions suivantes : le fait de parler une même langue, d'avoir subi une même influence coloniale par exemple, suffit-il pour déterminer un même comportement démographique ? Peut-on parler, sur le plan démographique, d'une Afrique anglophone ? Quelle est la portée de la boutade « La langue portugaise est plus parlée en Afrique lusophone qu'au Portugal (on sait qu'il y a 11 millions de portugais, alors que les mozambicains - tous lusophones - à eux seuls sont plus de 20 millions) » ? Pourquoi l'espérance dans l'Afrique arabe est-elle relativement proche des standards européens, alors que le ouest-africain francophone ne peut guère espérer dépasser l'âge de 50 ans ? Quelles sont, dans ces conditions, les perspectives d'intégration africaine et mondiale ? Peut-on compter sur une Afrique plus homogène démographiquement, dans le contexte de mondialisation que l'on connaît ?

Ma réflexion se fera en trois étapes. Je commencerai par présenter les traits saillants de la démographie dans les quatre grandes régions linguistiques africaines, en montrant l'existence de ressemblances, mais également de profondes divergences. Je discuterai ensuite les causes de cet état de fait, en me référant très largement à la culture et la langue pratiquée dans les différentes régions. Enfin, la dernière partie de l'article traitera de la politique démographique des gouvernements respectifs, mais surtout de l'influence de l'ancien pays colonisateur, qui continue à diffuser des pratiques démographiques en même temps qu'une langue, et notamment à travers la politique d'éducation scolaire.

Paper long abstract:

As we know, colonialism and many African states marginalised the introduction of minority languages in higher eduction after independence . Moreover, only Swahili language is used at the AU ( African Union) and nearly 30 out of 1500 languages spoken today in sub- saharan Africa have an official status .

    In education , a number of minority languages are used today as languages for instruction in primary schools in Nigeria, Namibia, Kenya , Ghana and Algeria ( Reference made to Tamazight). My paper focuses on  casting light on the following questions:How human rights  institutions and African Union can give an impetus to developing Tamazight language  in North Africa ? What are the main mechanisms to promoting Tamazight language in North Africa? How to make the North African governments involved in promoting Tamazight language in higher education  in North Africa ?

        However, it can be said that minority languages are usually used in the earlier stages of education programs but not in the field of higher education except in some African countries such as South Africa where Zulu language is used in Durban university.

    The African Commission can also protect minority languages in Africa in general and North Africa in particular by  using the UNESCO Convention against discrimination in Education and  the right to learn in a minority language?  

     Finally, National and international  human rights institutions should  play an essential role in giving North African  countries tough solutions  on minority languages and cultures rights issues by elaborating  human rights education programmes and promoting the introduction of minority langauages both in higher education and teaching at university level.

Paper long abstract:

Language is made up of several symbols to which humans attach meanings often shared by members of the society. The verbalized symbols among humans are very essential for smooth social relationship among people. Social relations enhance political, economic and other activities carried out for the progress of the society. This paper aims at analyzing the need for a universal national language configured out of the major languages in the country often referred to as 'WAZOBIA' and its effects on the Nigerian society as a whole. This paper is based on ethnomethodological perspective with the assumption that social order is embedded in the conversational process. The conversational process involves the use of words which have different meanings in different contexts of social relations. A hybrid of the differing language structure helps the conversational process. The paper is based on the use of secondary data involving desk review of literature, books and internet resources. The paper surmised that language diversity without a universal language derived from the indigenous languages affects the social health of the country. Also, Social harmony would be fostered by an indigenized universal language which is capable of reducing misunderstanding of issues which often lead to conflicts in the country. Moreover, the paper reveals that an indigenized universal language gives a social identity that is capable of unifying the populace in contrast with the high rate of disunity currently being witnessed in the country.

Keywords: Indigenous, Language, Social Relation, Universal, WAZOBIA

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Paper long abstract:

The widespread and acceptability of slang in the narratives of an urban African speech community is not unconnected with the indigenous structure of the society which allows close and steady communication among language users. One of the motivations for the spread of slang is the interactive condition of a speech communities. The conceptualization of slang in a society is strongly characterized by social groups and informal language-use (cf. Hatmann & James 1998, Saliyeva 2008). Lagos is a Nigerian city with Yoruba as the lingua franca. The city can be described as a potpourri of diverse sociolinguistic interaction in Nigeria with massive use of slang. This study examines the derivation, contents, structure and usage of slang involving Yoruba lexicons in Lagos. Population boost in Lagos has helped in the creation of numerous social groups, among which is the university community where students constitute a significant percentage of the population. This research will examine the use of slang with Yoruba lexicon among University students. Even though the language of instruction in the university is English, it is observed that the language of slang is mostly always Yoruba, which is the lingua franca of the immediate speech environment. This paper will investigate the reason why Yoruba is easily adopted for slang in the academic space despite the conspicuous representation of different ethnic nationals. Mixed research methodology is employed for this study. A certain number of students will be interviewed in order to investigate their proficiency level in the use of slang. Questionnaire method will be employed to evaluate the general opinion of both Yoruba and non-Yoruba university students as to the derivation, construction and spread of slang in their immediate environment. Furthermore, linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis of the slang will be done which will involve the semantic analysis of the slangs. Grammatical inquiry including morphosyntactic investigation will also be carried out. To achieve this, the generative theory of grammar and the foregrounding theory will serve as framework for the theoretical analysis. It is hypothesized that natural language should be represented with informal linguistic and sociocultural narratives. Therefore, this study is an attempt to reinvigorate the slang involving Yoruba language as a communication pattern of the traditional African community.

Keywords: Slang, Conventionalized,

Morphosyntactic, Derivation,

Lingua-franca

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Paper short abstract:

Homosexuality is continuously masked as nonexistent in Africa and discourse which continues to push such narrative is commonplace. However, digital media have become a platform for putting the knowledge straight and further helping us to understand its attending homophobic narratives.

Paper long abstract:

Diverse sexual relationships are masked as nonexistent in Africa and discourse which continues to push such narratives is commonplace. With the internet and social media assuming a veritable platform for the advocacy of the rights of Nigerian LGBTQ persons, it is necessary to examine the language operational in the discourses involving sexual diversity and homophobia. I examine the use of language in the discourse on sexual diversity and homophobic discourse in Nigeria. I focus on 100 manually culled tweets and comments from Twitter using 'Nigerian homosexuals', 'Nigerian homophobia', and 'Naija LGBTQ' as search terms on the subject. I adopt the orientation of discourse stylistics to carry out a qualitative analysis of the data. Linguistic negativity, agentivity and affectivity, and language of silence are the dominant stylistic features identified in the discourse. The study reveals Also, queer sexualities are masked as having no representation in the Nigerian indigenous languages, at least in the sampled tweets. The implication is that homosexuality is objectified in digital media as Western infiltration on African modernity. Therefore while people with alternative sexualities are represented as objects, they are further subjected to verbal cyber-bullying.

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Paper long abstract:

The discussion on decolonising the mind and turning to African indigenous knowledge tends to construct a contradiction between the 'colonial' (bad) and the 'decolonial' (good), as well as between the 'foreign' (bad) and the 'indigenous' (good). However, independent African thinkers have never shied away from taking in elements from abroad into their thinking and have always tried to marry the best elements of indigenous and foreign insights. One therefore wonders if the discussion should not be framed differently: as an examination of which ideas can be seen as empowering, in terms of increasing African agency, and which ideas instead can be seen as disempowering, or inhibiting African agency.

This paper discusses a number of such ideas in two key related areas, the areas of culture and language. In the area of culture, it argues in favour of a view of cultures as value systems that serve as common points of reference to a people. It argues that with such a view and the methods of cross-cultural psychology it is possible in principle to chart new developments in the area of culture in Africa and to devise new policies taking those developments into account. In the area of language, the paper attacks the idea that all 2,000 living languages counted in Africa need to be treated in the same way. It shows that this idea paralyzes the debate and proposes instead a distinction between 'discerned' and 'designed' languages. It proposes five principles that would enable increased use of a limited number of African languages in more and more domains.

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Paper short abstract:

The language issue justifies most of Africans' problems. Education quality and outcome are better when the learners' culture and language are taken into account. Unity among African countries, independence of thought and autonomous ways of funding research are possible solutions.

Paper long abstract:

Africa has long been considered as a continent of troubles : Starvation, illnesses, wars, poverty, illiteracy, poor health, inadequate education systems, etc. The African "curse" has long been investigated all over the world with specific agendas. Most African researchers in their turn have mostly reproduced the conclusions reached before for several reasons including financial ones.

This paper aims at analyzing one of the major causes explaining why Africa is still lagging behind in most fields: failure to take into account cultural background including language in the learning process and the education systems. Language is included into culture and vice versa. The transmission of knowledge from one generation to the other should be rooted into culture. Dissociating language from cultural background is creating an artificial leadership and a superficial development. The linguistic situation of most African countries has been characterized as a diglossic one, which implies that there is a linguistic distribution of languages according to their function in society. This situation is mostly due to the fact that the new topics brought about by colonisation have often been assimilated to the coloniser's language and culture. Thus, European languages seem to be fit for schooling, scientific disciplines and somehow religious issues, while local languages seem fit for sociocultural matters and to a certain extent certain religious ones. So, school subjects in general have been assimilated to the language which brought them. Knowledge, aptitude and even intelligence have often been and are still associated to the mastery of the coloniser's language. Relying on the existing literature on post colonialism and on data from the case of Burkina Faso in the fields of education, health and justice, this paper will be descriptive and analytical. The methodology both describes and analyses statistical facts. It then tries to suggest solutions on how to reconsider a number of concepts.

Key words : Education, Language, Postcolonialism, Development, Africa

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Paper short abstract:

Attitudes play an important role in the fortunes of languages and may lead to their advancement or stagnation. This paper probes the backlash phenomenon, as a feature of attitude, with regard to Nigeria's 'dueling languages'. It examines prospects for the resurgence of indigenous Nigerian languages.

Paper long abstract:

The dominant narrative regarding the status of English and general attitude to the language in Anglophone Africa is that English is the constant beloved language of the populace, one that they cannot do without - a salvaging, unifying and edifying language. Conversely, the dominant narrative regarding the general attitude to indigenous languages is that of indignation, indifference or even hatred towards the languages, being tribal, non-scientific and ineffectual. These narratives occur both in the research literature and in folk renditions. However, in reality, the attitude towards English language has been a "love-hate" one, or at least one of considerable ambivalence (Adeyanju 1989; Alebiosu, 2019; Oloruntoba-Oju, 1993, 2019). This paper probes this attitudinal curve involving English on the one hand and Nigerian indigenous languages on the other hand. Of particular interest is the backlash phenomenon and its manifestations. The paper examines the relative backlash against each of 'dueling languages' (Myers-Scotton, 1993) in the Nigerian context, with a focus here on the tango between English and Yoruba in Southwestern Nigeria. Attitudes play an important role in the fortunes of languages and may lead to their promotion, or their stagnation or even their death. How then does the backlash phenomenon, as a feature of attitude, key into the movement for the restoration of African indigenous languages in general, and within the academia in particular? The dominance of the English language in the environment is real, being the language of education, governance and international exchange; the prognosis for the resurgence of indigenous languages may therefore look bleak, more so within the context of the academia. However, this paper, through questionnaires and an analysis of the backlash phenomenon, attempts to tease out possible other outcomes for the indigenous languages in the future.

Paper long abstract:

In 2013, the Lagos State government, under Governor Babatunde Fashola, introduced the teaching and learning of Mandarin in five state-owned secondary schools. The pilot programme was part of efforts to identify with China, which is fast becoming a world power of note. This paper undertakes an exploration of the reactions that greeted the state policy especially from Lagosians. Using the research instrument of netnography, data harvested reveal mixed perspectives about the socio-cultural implications of this action on the indigenous languages of Nigeria and the people as a whole. Lagos is a linguistically heterogeneous enclave accommodating people from virtually all ethno-linguistic groups, with Yoruba as the language of wider communication. The introduction of Mandarin, though not compulsory but expected to be of economic benefit to those who learn it, is perceived as a move towards conflict of linguistic and cultural interest. While indigenous languages are mostly undermined in high school curriculum in Nigeria, the teaching of Mandarin dramatizes the onset of the integration of Chinese into the Nigerian school system, besides English and French. The difficulty that may arise from learning a new foreign language, with an alien orthography constitutes a significant part of the reactions. The paper concludes that much as the motivation for introducing Mandarin stemmed from the prospects of economic benefits for indigenes and residents of Lagos State, it raises important questions about the implication of this initiative on the languages in Nigeria.

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Paper long abstract:

The decolonial project in postcolonial Africa is suffused with quests and queries. Education has been touted as the singular platform for redress, reform and re-articulation of hope and redemption for the marginalised people. What has not happened in Sub-Saharan Africa is a strategic appropriation of the education sites and processes for the development of a pedagogy of hope. Half the world's one hundred largest economies are not countries, but transnational corporations (TNCs). These TNCs have crafted and disseminated powerful messages predominantly in the English language that essentially constitute what we understand today as globalisation. This insatiable demand for the English language has invariably enabled the deployment of an ensemble of electronic communication and computer-aided technologies to move massive amounts of financial capital across the globe, predominantly out of Africa to metropolitan Euro-American capitals. The same strategies have been used to globalise distance education, which has become massive business for American, Australian and British universities. In the new communicative apparatus and strategies that are owned by TNCs, globalisation has been disseminated simplistically to mean a multiplicity of international relations, diversity, personal encounters with foreign peoples, obscene dances, musical profanities and the spread of the internet. In tandem, globalisation has witnessed the spread and proliferation of private schools, Curro Academies, Heritage groups of schools, Anglican and Catholic sites that offer Cambridge International Examinations to rival the stymied domestic curricula. The same private schools use English as media of instruction from Grade One to exit Advanced level examinations and therefore justify their exorbitant fees: not one private school in South Africa has an indigenous language policy. We argue therefore that the clamour for universal literacies are subverted by the way in which postcolonial states privilege the English language, private schools and the modalities of the internet. Indeed, the weakening of the postcolonial state is a principal characteristic of the process of globalisation: who gets globalised into what. Globalisation, this chapter submits, is a capitalist market economy that surreptitiously strengthens former colonial languages to the detriment of translanguaging encounters that could be productively explored to generate new assemblages and knowledges. It is a maelstrom whose vortex is the supremacy of coloniality. Globalisation is epistemic and linguistic violence, marked by a deleterious businessification of educational institutions on the pith of the rights of the native languages of Africa.

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Paper long abstract:

With recorded attempts variously made to censor public engagement of the topics, sex and sexuality have always held an allure in human societies. Contemporarily however, digital technologies and social media platforms have ruptured these conservative tendencies and enabled Africans much broader and open discourses on language and identity issues. In this contribution, we explore the linguistic representations of 'government' and other discourse agents in Nigerian society today in negotiating identities and ideologies on homosexuality in Nigeria. The data for the study is a 114,000 word-corpus collected from 'Nigerian' Twitter and this was subsequently processed with Anthony's (2019) AntConc software. The quantitative corpus-linguistic analyses of hybrid new language practices was complemented by the application of the tenets of Critical Discourse Analysis since this avails the contextualisation of the analysis. The analysed narratives reveal that the government bears the brunt of ideological blame-game as it is at the receiving end of both positive and negative attributions. We identify two strains in the narratives: anti-homosexuality vs. pro-homosexuality. In the anti-homosexuality tweets, the government is charged with the necessity of toughening the stance against the queer community through requisite legislation and implementation. Conversely however, the pro-homosexuality tweets upbraid the government for failing to uphold the global standards of human rights and protect marginalised communities. One thing however is obvious: the social media continues to be a platform for marginalised communities to actively make their voices heard and this allows linguists to analyse new hybrid and controversial language practices which reflect the new hybrid and controversial identity constructions in Nigeria today.

Keywords: Linguistic Practices; Ideology; Identity; Homosexuality; Government; Twitter

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Paper long abstract:

The paper takes a relational/historical perspective to make a serious of arguments regarding the so-called postcolonial states in Africa. It begins by invoking the genetic theory of ideas from the work of Gilles Deleuze, to make the basic argument that the ideas underpinning the assemblage of institutions and practices, of which the current African instances are varying actualizations, emerged in the context of Africa's encounter and interaction with European colonial domination beginning towards the end of the 19th century. The paper then provides brief explorations of current language and educational polices of selected African countries from various regions of the continent with a view to illustrating and validating the above basic claim. The paper subsequently argues that these states of affairs have given rise to deep structural and organizational disjuncture between the institutions and practices of state apparatuses and those of indigenous knowledge and social and cultural practices. The paper further argues that this situation of disarticulation has far-reaching egregiously negative consequences for the resilience and vitality of, on the one hand, the African "postcolonial" state as vehicle and expression of political community and, on the other, the vast majorities of citizenries as embodiments of indigenous sociocultural institutions and practices. Under these circumstances, state power becomes fragile and unstable, prone to the vagaries of regional and geopolitical contestations, ethical lapses and political and financial corruptions of elites, coup d'etats, etc., while local and indigenous sociocultural institutions and practices are left to wilt and die without the supports they need to get from the states in order to maintain their vitalities to flourish and develop. The paper concludes by pointing to possible long-term directions of changes meant to create situations in which sociocultural institutions and practices of external provenance would interact with those which are homegrown in a manner of mutual interplay, reinforcement and perpetual syntheses instead being one in which the external smothers the internal.

Paper short abstract:

The study provides the analysis of the position of the Amharic language in Ethiopian society over the years in comparison with that of English and points out the key elements of the Ethiopian language policy since Emperor Menelik II.

Paper long abstract:

Ethiopia is a multiethnic state which unites not less than 80 peoples speaking more than 70 different languages. According to the 1995 Ethiopian Constitution, while all the languages «enjoy equal state recognition», Amharic is officially recognized as the working language of the Federal Government.

The aim of the study is to analyze the position of Amharic in Ethiopian society over the years, to examine its role as the native language as well as the lingua franca in comparison with the role that English has gradually gained in the country, to point out the key elements of the Ethiopian language policy since Emperor Menelik II.

Amharic gained its national importance mostly due to a single language policy during the imperial period of its history. Since the beginning of the Derg Regime, some efforts have been made to provide the other ethnic groups with the right for the free use of their languages. This policy has become especially active since the fall of the Derg in 1991. As a result, nowadays there is a strong tendency in the country towards bilingualism and multilingualism (not counting English), with Amharic being the component. This phenomenon is observed mostly in the regions where Amharic is not the native language for most of the population.

Examining the position of Amharic in Ethiopia, that of English should not be overlooked. Official meetings with different countries' representatives and correspondence are held in English. Over the last two decades, there has even appeared a phenomenon of «guramayle» - the English-Amharic mixed language. Less attention is paid to the correct use of Amharic grammar.

It is hoped that the study will provide the panelists with a comprehensive picture of the history of the Amharic language and its use in Ethiopia and key tendencies in the development of the status of Amharic compared to English and other indigenous languages of the country.

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