A meeting with ACALAN in Bamako

At the end of last month while in Bamako, Mali, I had the chance to meet with Adama Samassekou, who is currently serving in an advisory capacity with the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN), and with the current executive secretariat of ACALAN - Dr. Lang Fafa Dampha, Senior Research and Program Officer, and acting Executive Secretary; Dr. Ojo Babajide Johnson, Senior Program and Project Officer; and Kossi Abassa, Finance and Administrative Officer.

ACALAN's office is now in the Hamdallaye ACI quarter of Bamako - when I previously visited it in May 2008, its office was in Koulouba. The organization is evidently rebuilding, with a search underway for a new executive secretary and other staff to hire. They were also preparing for a two-day meeting of the Technical and Scientific Committee (held 8-9 December), one of the major organs of ACALAN.

Other working structures of ACALAN include Vehicular Cross-Border Language Commissions for 12 African languages (a structure I mentioned on this blog 3 years ago), and the national language agencies in the various African countries.

They also have a number of projects including on terminology and lexicography, the linguistic atlas of Africa, cyberspace, interpretation and translation, collection of stories, and a graduate program in applied linguistics. While ACALAN is headquartered in Bamako, its Pan-African Center of Interpretation and Translation, and the Terminology and Lexicography Project are based in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.

And ACALAN publishes various materials and reports, as well as an academic journal called Kuwala.

The meeting we had last month will hopefully facilitate collaboration in the future. 

It is also worth noting that this year we are about to conclude marks one decade since the ACALAN-sponsored Year of African Languages. That year, 2006, was also the year that ACALAN (founded in 2001) formally became the African Union's specialized language agency.

The Bamako 1966 meeting, 50 years later

From February 28 through March 5, 1966, a group of noted linguists and African language and literacy specialists from Africa and the North gathered in Bamako, Mali for a UNESCO-sponsored "expert meeting" on "unification of alphabets of national languages."^1,2

In a posting two years ago - "See you in Bamako in 2016?" - I discussed some reasons why it would be useful to revisit issues of harmonizing orthographies of African languages on the 50th anniversary of the meeting. Here I will focus mainly on the 1966 event itself. 

Background

This event was apparently the outcome of two processes, one being a proposal made to UNESCO's Executive Board by Amadou-Hampaté Bâ, Mali's representative to that body, to consider the issue of African language transcription, and the other a set of recommendations on the same topic by the 5th West African Language Conference held in Accra in April 1965.³ It also followed UNESCO-sponsored conferences on literacy held in Abidjan and in Ibadan, both in 1964.

The participants in the Bamako meeting included representatives from institutions in Cameroon, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Upper Volta (now of course Burkina Faso), as well as individual experts invited from other countries. Their names (from Annex I of the English and French versions of the report, which also have their affiliations and countries) are:⁴ David W. Arnott; Amadou-Hampaté Bâ; Oumar Ba; Étienne Balenghein; Mrs. Belovolova; Charles Bird; Geneviève Calame-Griaule; Mrs. J. Calvet; Ousmane Cissé; Bakary Coulibaly; M.A. Coulibaly; Alhaji Abba Jiddum Gana; Claude Gouffe; Ahmed M. Aq Harnany; Carl Hoffman; Maurice Houis; Anthony Kirk-Greene; Pierre F. Lacroix; Faconey Ly; Eldridge Mohamadou;Vincent Monteil; Demba N'Daw; Condotto Nenekhaly-Camara; Frederick W. Parsons; Karl G. Prasse; André Prost; Jean Rouch; Serge Sauvageot; Ibrahim Alpha Sow; Viktoria Petrovna Tokarskaja; Mahamane Touré; Kamory Traoré; Anton Vorbichler; Malam N.S. Wali; Daniel W. Zimmerman. The meeting was chaired by the Malian minister of education, Abdoulaye Singaré.

Work

The meeting in Bamako actually focused on six West African languages - Fula, Hausa, Kanuri, Manding, Songhay-Zarma, and Tamasheq - and on the Latin-based transcriptions for them. According to the report, the choice of languages was based on two criteria: (1) the language must be "officially recognized for adult literacy work in more than one Member State"; and (2) linguistic study of the language must be "sufficiently advanced to enable the work to proceed rapidly." There were a few subsequent expert meetings focusing on other groups of languages in the region, and most significantly, a meeting in Niamey in 1978 with more of a continent-wide mission of harmonizing African language transcriptions.

The Latin transcription of African languages actually has a long history, much of it traced back to missionary work in the late 19th century, but one of the dynamics has always been the tendency on one hand to develop special orthographies, even sometimes within the same language, for the phonetic systems encountered, and on the other hand to try to develop a unified system, even to the extent of covering many languages. This meeting is obviously in the latter category, building on earlier efforts, such as the IAI alphabet (1928, 1930).

One of the ways in which the Bamako meeting was significant was in facilitating discussion and agreement among several countries, including both Francophone and Anglophone states. In particular the orthographic conventions adopted in Nigeria for Hausa and Fula (including the so-called "hooked letters," in particular, ɓ, ɗ, and ƙ).

Some of the conventions discussed in the meeting, such as the hooked letters above for Hausa and Fula, and the letter ŋ ("eng") for for several languages have endured through the development of the African Reference Alphabet in Niamey. Several digraphs retained for Manding languages - dy, kh, nw, ty - and use of diacritics (accents) for open vowels were later dropped in favor of single letters and extended characters. (The "dy" has lived on, however, in the spelling of "Dyula.")

So the importance of the Bamako expert meeting was not necessarily in the specifics, but in advancing the process of developing standard orthographies for major African languages used in multiple countries.

The road not taken: Ajami and Tifinagh

Prior to European penetration and colonization of Africa, a number of languages of West Africa including most if not all the six discussed in Bamako, were written with an adaptation of the Arabic alphabet called Ajami. (The Arabic alphabet was also used on the East African coast and islands.)  There was apparently no interest on the part of colonial or post-independence authorities to develop these systems.

Among the reasons one might discern for such (non-)policy probably was the fact that resources were much more readily available for use of the Latin alphabet. One has only to look at Guinea's departure from the Bamako consensus to establish a Latin-based orthography using only the letters and diacritics one could type with typewriters of that epoch - no hooked letters or eng - to see an example of how central such practical limitations can be. (Guinea later harmonized its system with the rest of the region.)

Little surprise then that for Tamasheq, the ancient but locally used Tifinagh script was not entertained for literacy and other work.

Next steps?

In the years since the last major meeting focusing on harmonizing transcriptions - the expert meeting in Niamey mentioned above - we have of course seen revolutions in computing, how text in various scripts can be managed, and increasingly in human language technology. The standards fostered by meetings such as those in Bamako and Niamey have been helpful in the facilitating the informatisation of African languages.

However on country levels, orthographic rules for the same languages still vary. And now there are a number of new alphabets that, in the case of N'Ko for example, are popular among significant populations. And use of the older systems of Ajami and Tifinagh are facilitated with information technology.

So, in light of these complex realities and changing needs, the possibility of a new meeting that I brought up two years ago with regard to the 50th anniversary of the Bamako expert meeting still seems valid. Would a conference on African language transcriptions and technology be useful, as a way of taking stock and taking account of new developments? And would the 40th anniversary of the Niamey meeting in 2018 be a good time for it?

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1. The report of the meeting is available in original French (as image PDF and as HTML on the Bisharat site) and in English (image PDF).
2. Note in the title the use of "national language," a term that has been discussed previously on this blog. See in particular: "Ethnologue and 'national languages' in Africa" (5 Dec. 2013); "Ethnologue: 'National' and 'Principal' languages in Africa" (14 Oct. 2014); "'Community' & 'national' languages in African contexts" (11 Nov. 2015).
3. That same Congress in Accra, part of a series organized by the Survey of West African Languages, also founded the West African Linguistic Society. 
4. I thought it interesting to link the names where possible to bios or other webpages with information about these individuals. In some cases, however, this was not possible.

See you in Bamako in 2016?

Forty-eight years ago today, in Bamako, Mali, began a UNESCO-supported expert meeting on the "Unification of Alphabets of National Languages."* Running from 28 February until 5 March, 1966, this meeting was a key part of efforts to harmonize or standardize writing systems for several West African languages, which fall under the category that we now refer to as "cross-border" languages. Would the 50th anniversary of this event be an ideal time to revisit its impact, and ongoing challenges and opportunities for written African languages in general?

The Bamako 1966 meeting followed several smaller meetings and built on efforts that began during the colonial period. It in turn was followed by others, notably one in Niamey in 1978 that attempted to take the harmonization up a level with a proposed standard reference alphabet for all of Africa. One of the issues with writing African languages that had limited or no written tradition has been how to accommodate sounds that were not readily represented by imported alphabets. Another was how to develop standards for languages that crossed Africa's new borders - which in many instances were also borders between areas where different Europhone languages, and their respective phonetic systems, were dominant. These meetings dealt with both, drawing on national experiences and expert opinions.

The result of these meetings was a remarkably coherent set of standards that has guided many African countries on developing orthographies for their national languages (as the term tends to be used there).

In later years, conferences and expert meetings on planning for African languages dealt more with policy, and applications such as literacy and localization. Yet there are still issues with African languages in print and writing, some larger, some dealing with details, and some that could not have been anticipated by the notables and experts of half a century ago. Some of those are certainly being addressed by the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN)'s Vehicular Cross-Border Language Commissions and National Language Structures.

Ultimately it would be for ACALAN and/or other African language organizations to decide on the utility of a general meeting in the near future, but what might a conference on the 50th anniversary of the seminal Bamako 1966 expert meeting have on its agenda? As indicated above, one issue might be a kind of stock-taking of how the work of the early expert meetings has served a range of efforts in African languages, from education and literacy, to literature, and via Unicode, to social media and mobile devices.

And about Unicode, how is it supporting written African languages? One issue which seems to have receded as the technology has improved, is how well dynamic composition works for complex Latin (where characters have accent/tone mark combinations not included as single characters in the Unicode standard - some languages such as Yoruba and Igbo have this). There may be other details such as that of the capital "eng" letter.)

A larger issue is how the focus on "unification" of African alphabets on the one hand and country-level practice on the other relate. "Harmonization" seems to be a fortuitous concept, but is it, and how should it work going forward, when dynamic local usage may seem to go the other way? (See for example the earlier post on "Texting in Wolof & implicatons for standard orthographies.")

Since the early conferences (and indeed language policy in many states) focused on the Latin-based alphabet, a new conference might also consider other scripts, such as Ethiopic/Ge'ez, Arabic (often referred to as Ajami when used to write African languages), and N'Ko. The focus could be more technical, including issues such as harmonization (especially for Ajami) and transliteration, to support more policy options for countries where diverse scripts are used.

We're still two years out from the 50th anniversary, but it is not too early to discuss the utility of using that occasion to bring together a new generation of experts working on support for written African languages.

* The French language version is available on the Bisharat website.

Bamako triptych, and resuming again

Since my last posting, which was after returning from a trip to Bamako, I haven't had the time to do much with this blog. Circumstances have changed somewhat, though the focus of my work and essence of the ideas that I am developing are much the same.

The title of this entry remembers that trip to Bamako and alludes to a recent conference on languages and an ongoing one on African development, both in the same city. More on those below.

This blog in the mix of things

This blog, to review, is focused on African languages, ICT and development, with attention to some related matters. I've given particular attention to language-development links.

In addition to the postings, I have arrayed in the left sidebar feeds from a number of lists relating to these subjects, especially the language-ICT links. Part of the concept is that even when I am not posting actively, there is changing & updating material (or links to same). I intend to do more with the main part of this blog but it really is a question of time.

Two things not in the left sidebar that I have been working on in some of my online time over the last few months are two projects on my personal/professional site, donosborn.org: another blog, "Multidisciplinary Perspectives," which concerns a wider rage of topics (and facilitates exploring some ideas); and a collection of information on the International Year of Languages (which is about to end).

Bamako last year and now

My trip to Bamako in May 2008 was mainly an opportunity for Dwayne Bailey, project lead of the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc) and me to meet with Adama Samassekou and his colleagues at the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN). ACALAN, which is now part of the African Union, has been collaborating with UNESCO and to a lesser degree IDRC on issues of linguistic diversity and ICT. It is hoped to work more with them on issues relating to localization of ICT in African languages.

In January (2009/1/19-21), ACALAN hosted a conference involving UNESCO and the MAAYA linguistic diversity network called the Bamako International Forum on Multilingualism. Billed as "A first step towards a World Summit on Multilingualism," this event treated aspects of multilingualism with anaccent on Africa.

Interesting to note that this month - 2009/2/19-21 - the ninth Forum de Bamako is being held. Exactly one month later and in the same hotel as the conference on multilingualism, one wonders if this conference on development (with the theme this year of governance) will boach the topic of languages in development and governance in multilingual societies.

I have not been able to attend either of these two meetings, but I look forward to seeing the Action Plan from the former and the proceedings of the latter. Hopefully I can then follow up with some comments.

In the meantime, I'm trying to catch up on various work, notably for ANLoc on policy relating to localization (language and ICT).