Mi eggii, yaltii Niizer gilla balɗe sappo. Korka duu timmii gilla balɗe nay. Joonin miɗo waɗa jahangal ley Ameriik, fadde hootude galle amin ley Assiin.

Well beyond Niamey now. Events moving quickly, and too much to do, to maintain this blog regularly.

Some interesting meetings in DC when I was there. Mostly my time in this part of the trip is spent working on refining a presentation and paper.

In the meantime some other writing. One quick note to the authors of a report from last year, The impact of cybercafés on information services in Uganda, asking about how the dimension of language (multilingual ICT) fir in their research. It was not mentioned that I could see in what was otherwise an interesting article (similar issue to a recent survey of users' evaluation of content in Nairobi which did not broach the issue of language either - see my posting in this blog of 21 Feb. 2004). My note to the authors of the Uganda survey included the following:

A number of significant questions come to mind that are hard to ignore in a polyglot society such as that of Uganda: How are maternal and vehicular languages such as Luganda and Swahili used currently in cybercafés and in local web content etc.? What are user practices and preferences in this regard? What are the attitudes and knowledge levels of cybercafé operators, governmental authorities and development projects to exploring and utilizing the multilingual potential of the technology? What different uses might different languages have in the evolution of cybercafés and MCTs as they respond to the realities and needs of the country?

Another letter was in response to part of a dispatch "Is there any hope for Africa" by New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. On a trip to Chad and Sudan he commented on, among other things, education and its importance. Like so many who evaluate the African development situation, he sees the importance of education, but not some of the complexities in the issue brought about by the way education is approached. I offered the following (edited slightly here):

I just looked at your dispatch re education in Chad with great interest. You touch on some important aspects of this vital issue but there's one missing factor - that of the language(s) of instruction.

Since colonial times in most of Africa, formal education has tended to be approached as a monolingual agenda, relying entirely on European languages. There were and are various reasons and rationalizations for this then and now, but relatively little attention I'm aware of to discussing the costs for individuals and societies of ignoring people's first languages in education.

For one thing it is a sink-or-swim thing for kids arriving in school the first day to encounter an unfamiliar or little heard language. For another it puts up a barrier to greater parental involvement in their children's schooling. I've also been working on the hypothesis that this monolingual approach means for most school leavers what amounts to an impaired bilingualism/multilingualism, where they plateau at a certain functional level in their first language(s) and never attain a high level in the school language. (Education is not my field of specialization - that is rural development - but I've become increasingly interested in the language & basic education issues over the course of several years work in and study of West Africa.)

The oft cited main reason for not having any instruction in any African tongue is that there are "too many" languages. This is so often repeated that it is accepted as dogma even when the local realities would not prohibit use of relevant local languages at least in the first years of primary ed. From that flow other justifications like the cost of producing materials in diverse maternal languages or the fear that teaching children in anything other than the language inherited from colonization will lead to divisiveness.

All such questions and issues need to be examined critically and fairly, but at the moment it seems that the topic of language of instruction is largely omitted from the discourse. Odd, to say the least, in as multilingual a region as sub-Saharan Africa. I previously wrote Ms. Sengupta about this following her story on girls' education in Benin. One of the leads I gave her was Lynn Lederer, director of Save the Children in Mali, which has been deeply involved in Mali's successful program for first language primary education in that country. There are certainly other programs of this genre and I would think a very interesting article or two on what the choice of languages of instruction means for students and communities.

A quick addendum - lest there be any misunderstanding, the issue is not monolingual African language education instead of monolingual French or English, but rather effective bilingual approaches that incorporate at least early instruction in first languages, such as what is being implemented in Mali. There are other approaches that may use African languages for instruction or as subjects at higher levels. Africa is complex and various such solutions could be adapted as appropriate in different places.

Part of the reason for this concern is that outside interest in advancing basic education in Africa seems mostly to ignore the multilingual nature of African societies. The role of African governments (elites) in this tends to be to more or less passively reinforce the status quo (monolingual instruction in French or English). Between the two, it is hard to generate positive evolution in educational approaches.

Today is International Mother Language Day, an observance established by the UN in 1999. Apparently there will be some ceremonies chez UNESCO on Monday 2/23. More info at www.unesco.org/education/IMLD2004. En français à www.unesco.org/education/IMLD2004/fr/.

In the panorama of holidays, anniversaries, and observances it may seem quite minor, but it is one of the only events calling attention to 1) language loss and 2) the too often overlooked (esp. in Africa) importance of first languages in education.

A couple of brief articles give more info: UNESCO urges teaching from earliest age in indigenous mother languages and UN's Mother Language Day Focuses On Conserving World's Linguistic Heritage.

There is no observance that I'm aware of in Niamey. A colleague I mentioned this to a while back asked, but there was nothing. And no time to generate something. Unfortunately the advance support from UNESCO for this seems to be minimal - they pull things together nicely in time (webpage, ceremonies), but for advance planning there is little. I did get a nice letter in response to inquiries offering to send materials, but it was too close to the event to allow for mail to arrive.

Problème avec l'affichage du français ici! Sur un autre ordinateur que j'utilise d'habitude pour regarder ce blog j'ai remarqué que les caractères accentés sont transformés en autres choses... Cela arrive je crois parceque ce page est en UTF-8, et selon la configuration du browser, les entités indiqués par caractères accentés veut transmettre d'autres informations que celles qu'on a esperé. A faami?? Franchement, je ne sais même pas si moi je comprends complètement. Une solution est de mettre, par exemple, & e a c u t e ; (sans les espace intercalés) pour e accent aigu dans le texte (html) du "post" etc. - mais c'est gênant. Donc je chercherai une autre solution...

Enfin, a couple of things written to someone re an interesting survey of cybercafés in Nairobi. It seemed to me that the question re language was missing. In fact language of content and access seems to be given little energy by people promoting ICT. Here are excerpts from my two letters; I omit the nice brief reply (basically saying no) to the first letter that I received this morning:

(Thursday, November 20, 2003 6:51 AM)

Greetings! I saw the item on your Nairobi cybercafé survey in Balancing Act's News Update #183 and found it very interesting. Indeed, this is a topic deserving more research and I hope your effort encourages same.

In looking at the News Update piece and the summary at http://www.ccoak.net/cyber_survey.html I did not notice mention of any questions in what I think is an area of central interest, that of language. Maybe this subject was discussed in the full report, but I had trouble downloading it.

Some questions I would look for would include the languages people use in e-mail and websurfing (not sure how many sites in Kenya have Swahili, for instance, though there are a number in Tanzania of course) and whether users have any preferences in this regard that are not currently met with regard to content language (i.e., would they like to see more content in Kenyan languages). The latter question would seem to fit with the overall theme of the report that users sought more local content: does the language of the local content matter, to whom, in what ways, and to what extent?

This all would bridge to another set of questions re computer interfaces: although Swahili for example uses the ASCII character set, I understand that Gikuyu has some diacritic characters (see http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/KENYA-table.htm ) and that this may pose an inconvenience to people who might want to use this in, say, e-mail (see for example http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AfricanLanguages/message/73 ). Have cybercafés dealt with this question or even thought about it?

Thanks in advance for any feedback and all the best!

(Saturday, February 21, 2004 10:51 AM)

. . . Re language I think it's always important and the interest is definitely real. Three things tend to submerge the issue in various agendas/discourses (including those relating to ICT):

1) In my mainly West African experience, there are things close to the heart that people don't make a big thing of overtly.
2) Many Africans have more or less bought into the line that their languages are "tribal dialects" or in any event unsuited for science, technology, and learning. This has been reinforced by the formal education systems which at best assign a secondary role to indigenous languages and in too many cases (esp. in former French colonies)
3) Many Westerners tend to assume away African languages, even though their intent be benign, since they generally don't understand them, and the Africans they interact with the most tend to be able to get by in English or French.

ICT adds another dimension to this. The association of English (or French) with technology, opportunity, and the exciting world elsewhere is understandable, but there could and arguably should be the opportunity for some balance. Nobody is suggesting that Africans have to use their languages on computers and the internet, but the current approaches in many ways tell them that they can't - or shouldn't be so foolish as to think of it.

The latter may seem gratuitous, but I've been dumbfounded by some things I've heard occasionally mainly from Westerners working in development here - why would someone want to use something other than French if they can understand that? ; we're a decade and a half away from any localization for African languages ; the plurality of African languages (and the inability to initiate use in all of them) makes it better to stay with English or French...

Coming back to your cybercafé survey, language is worth the question(s). Especially in the case of Swahili, which of course is an important regional language that is even being considered as a medium for instruction in higher education. But even in the case of Kenya for other maternal languages - there has been some significant publication in Gikuyu, for instance, so why not use it on the internet, or why shouldn't speakers of that tongue be interested in seeing some web content in it? The main thing is that behind the apparent "lack of excitement" on the topic there may be, and likely is, a range of opinion and interest. It would be interesting to know what this is currently and also to follow its evolution, if you are planning to continue the study.

. . .

Last item for this entry - I had joked about agricultural linguistics with a couple of our trainees not long ago. It's not as far out a juxtaposition as it might seem: I just ran across the term environmental linguistics looking for something else yesterday. That has a couple of senses it seems - depending on whether it's the built environment or the natural one - a distinction that means more perhaps to us with ag. & NRM backgrounds than to linguists. The latter sense seems along the lines of the operating premises of the NGO Terralingua. I still think that there's a fertile area for research and practice on language and development in Africa, and linguistics needs to be brought into the mix more vigorously.