Why African languages? My introduction to multilingualism in Togo, 1979-81

Togo was my first African country and my first overseas residence. I arrived there as a Peace Corps (PC) volunteer trainee along with several others in late September 1979. My job area was in the agriculture sector, as an animal traction extension agent.

 

Togo is described as "Francophone," with official French being a legacy of its post WWI colonial history. Of course, I knew all that before going, and indeed one of the reasons for my assignment there by Peace Corps was that I had studied some French in school. I also had a general awareness that people in Togo spoke a number of other languages, but it wasn't until actually being in country that I began to understand what that meant in practice.

 

PC/Togo letterhead in French, Ewe, Kabiye & English, 1980

 

Pre-service training

A story from probably my third or maybe fourth day in Togo: I remember sitting with 8 or 9 other paleface male rural development trainees under a shade tree shortly after arriving at the Cacavelli training facility just north of Lomé in September 1979, when a Togolese woman with a headload passed along a path nearby. "Yovo, way-zoh-low," she said, barely turning her head as she continued on. (Later I learned that that must have been "Yovo, miawòe zɔ loo!")

None of us knew to acknowledge with "Yoo!" (rhymes with "yo-yo," but the "o" is held for an extra half-beat), and one of the guys, in typical American fashion, speculated that she'd just said something sexual in nature. It turns out that she happened to be the first person to welcome us with a phrase common in Ewe (Eʋegbe) and Mina (Gɛngbe), which are closely related Gbe languages widely spoken in the south of Togo. (I'm still not sure about the exact relationship between the two was in common practice in southern Togo, but some people said that Mina functioned as a second language spoken by non-Ewes in markets, etc. - Ewe language also being said to be harder to master.)

Our language training initially focused on French, and did so for at least a couple of reasons. It is official in Togo, so used by counterparts in our assigned jobs. And it is spoken widely, since Togolese formal education was in it.

 

Then later, as was typical in PC programs in this region, those proficient enough in French would begin some training in the "local language" that was most important in the region they'd be assigned to. I actually began learning Kabiye when the training moved north to Kétao in the Kara region, so that was the first African language I actually studied (unless one counts my early foray into Arabic). I still remember some phrases in it.

 

Amlamé & environs 

After some discussion of a posting to Anié, north of Atakpamé, I was ultimately posted in Amlamé, to the southwest, in late December, 1979 (40 years later, I wrote a short remembrance of that day).

 

Detail from a cloth map of Togo (1979); Togo on a Michelin West Africa map (1998) 

 

Amlamé - called Emla in the Akposso (or Ikposo) language of its original and still majority inhabitants - is in the Plateaux region of southern Togo where Ewe/Mina otherwise dominates. My counterpart in the animal traction project I worked with was an Ewe speaker. (I briefly also had a second counterpart who was from a Yoruba sub-group known locally as Ana). Many of the farmers I worked with near Amou-Oblo spoke Kabiye (they or their immediate ancestors were resettled in this region from the north during the colonial period). Amou-Oblo actually had a Kabiye chief as well as an Akposso chief, and the weekly market there reflected this diversity. 

While I mainly used French and worked on improving my command of that language, there was always a lot going on around me in several languages. Stuck between several languages, I never progressed much with Kabiye, learned only a little Ewe, and even less Akposso (I found the lack of learning materials for the latter frustrating). My French carried me in most situations, as many of the farmers or their sons had learned at least some in school, and where it didn't, a counterpart or someone else could help in interpreting.

 

Some Kabiye farmers of Agbassa Kopé, plus the extension agent I worked with, Afo Koffi, who was an Ewe speaker (in back, 6th from right)

 

Also, as I came to learn was common in multilingual settings in West Africa, there was almost always someone (or in unusual circumstances a chain of people) who could interpret, when needed. For example, when I worked with my counterpart Afo Koffi, an Ewe speaker, and Kabiye farmers of Agbassa Kopé (ESE of Amou-Oblo), some communication went French to and from Kabiye, and occasionally it would pass from French through Ewe/Mina to Kabiye and back.

 

Those interpretations were generally summaries. That's not a criticism, just an observation. Later in my time in Togo I found myself assisting with interpretation between English and French, so came to understood better the challenges and results.

 

One unusual translation opportunity came in one of my visits to the hill village of Oulita, when an ethnic Akposso from Ghana who did not speak Akposso or French came to visit: I interpreted from English to French and someone else interpreted to Akposso. But usually, in this multilingual context, I was the beneficiary of others' language knowledge.

So, even when the mysterious dialogue around me was interpreted, I still felt a distance from what was actually being said. That was one takeaway from my first immersion in Africa.

 

 

Other observations about languages in Togo and their usage

 

Lexique Français-Kabɩyɛ-Eʋe

One aspect of Ewe I found particularly interesting was greetings that changed depending on when you last saw the person (earlier today, yesterday, or two or more days ago). I'll come back to this once I can (re)locate a good source verifying my recollection. This was one of the earliest examples of a linguistic mindset, if I can put it that way, or maybe a cultural paradigm expressed in communication, that was very different than what we have in English or French.

 

In my brief study of Kabiye and of Ewe - which are very different languages one from the other - I was introduced to their respective orthographies, based on the Latin alphabet with additional letters (what we now call  "extended characters") to represent sounds meaningfully important in those languages. Some of these are shown in the PC/Togo letterhead image above and the title of the lexicon at left. They are, for Ewe: ɖ, ɛ, ƒ, ɣ, ŋ, ɔ, ʋ; and for Kabiye: ɖ, ɛ, ɣ, ɩ, ñ, ŋ, ɔ, ʋ. I was to later encounter some of the same extended characters - and others - in the orthographies of other languages in West Africa.

 

Some notes on the personal experience

 

Finally, three notes about the personal experience of inching into multilingualism. 

 

First is a remembrance of one aspect of the mental experience at the early end of my arc of language learning. Coming to Togo, I was basically monolingual, with classroom experience learning French, some German, and one year of high school Latin, plus a minimal personal study of Arabic. During the course of my service in Togo, as I became more functionally bilingual with French as my L2 (second language), I got the feeling that I had three mental language "slots": English, French, and "other." And that the L3 slot, as it were, was the processing space for whatever other tongue I was learning or trying to speak at the time. That opened the possibility for confusion among those other languages, which eventually I worked past (until a much later on rare occasion between Bambara and Chinese, but that's a story for later).

 

Second was the experience of traveling outside of a Francophone space for the first time, after a year and a half in Togo. On a vacation trip to Ghana, I felt like French was percolating in my mind until I got used to being able to again default to English all of the time. That was the only time in my various travels that I ever had that sensation.

 

And third, was realization that competence in at least one locally used African language was key to fully functioning in a multilingual setting in Africa.

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In the next post - my return to Africa, and learning and using languages in Mali.
 

Ethnologue and the cross-border languages of Africa

Two content features seem to me to detract from the overall quality of Ethnologue - which is the indispensable reference on all the world's languages. One is that pages on cross-border languages - a prominent sociolinguistic feature in Africa - are titled as the language of only one of the countries where they are spoken. The other is that in the current online version, the country pages list "national language," which is a problematic heading, given diverse use of the term, notably in a number of African countries. In this post I will deal with the first of these two items.

A continent traversed by cross-border languages

Due to the way borders in Africa were drawn, a great many of its ethno-linguistic groups are split among two or more of the modern African countries. The languages spoken by such groups can today be called "cross-border languages," and in fact this is the term used by the African Academy of Languages for some of the work it is doing, notably the Vehicular Cross-Border Language Commissions.

Languages that are spoken in more than one country - whether as a first language, which is often the case, or as a vehicular language, which is also frequent - have been a concern of language planning in Africa since independence. The various conferences on African languages that I have cited in some previous posts reflect this concern. Cross border languages were also highlighted by former Malian president Alpha Oumar Konaré, who compared them to "sutures" uniting African countries.*

"A language of" one country, more than one country, or a region?

When one looks up one of these cross-border languages in Ethnologue, however, they are as a rule listed as "a language of" a single country. It bears noting that when borders divide a language community, that community is rarely split in equal parts, so it appears that Ethnologue usually assigns the language to the country where there are more speakers. Other countries, regardless of significance in the language usage, are placed under "Also Spoken In:..."

So, for instance Hausa, the first language of 18.5 million Nigerians (according to Ethnologue, based on a 1991 SIL estimate), but also of about half the much smaller population of Niger, and used across large parts of West Africa (as a lingua franca), is titled simply "... a language of Nigeria." Is Hausa any less a language of Niger, given that the historic home of most Hausas (sometimes called Hausaland) extends well into the latter country? Better "A language of Nigeria and Niger"? Or given the number of other countries where it is "also spoken," maybe Hausa is really "A language of West Africa"?

Another example is the Ewe language, spoken by a population split between southeastern Ghana and southern Togo, which is listed as "... a language of Ghana." Similar to the case with Hausa in Nigeria and Niger, Ewe is spoken by more people in Ghana, but by a larger percentage of the population in Togo. So why not "A language of Ghana and Togo"? The reverse is noted in the case of Southern Sotho, which has more speakers in South Africa, but a higher percentage of population speaking it in Lesotho (it has legal status in both countries) - and is listed as "A language of Lesotho."

Examples abound, among which the major regional language of Swahili is listed as a language of Tanzania (see also discussion of macrolanguages, below).

Ultimately it seems (1) misleading to title pages on cross-border languages as languages of one particular country, and (2) inconsistent the way it is done. Going back to Ethnologue's "Plan of the Site" page, one finds mention of counting "each language only once as belonging to its country of origin" - but what if the area of origin of a language (to the extent one can determine that with any precision) is divided by borders?

Would it not be possible to develop a simple set of criteria by which cross-border languages were given titles  based on the extent (countries) of their major use?

Cross-border macrolanguages

The category of macrolanguage - defined as "multiple, closely related individual languages that are deemed in some usage contexts to be a single language" - takes this issue up another level. Although defined on linguistic criteria, macrolanguages in Africa are even more likely to cross borders, often many borders. There are 14 African macrolanguages by my count, with many of those being cross-border and some really looking like regional languages. Yet all of those are listed as being of one country or another:

• Arabic, "A macrolanguage of Saudi Arabia" (spoken in many countries, including at least 9 in Northern Africa)
• Dinka, "A macrolanguage of South Sudan" (spoken mainly in South Sudan)
• Fulah, "A macrolanguage of Senegal" (spoken in well over a dozen countries, mainly in West Africa)
• Gbaya, "A macrolanguage of Central African Republic" (spoken in CAR and Cameroon)
• Grebo, "A macrolanguage of Liberia" (spoken in Liberia and Ivory Coast)
• Kalenjin, "A macrolanguage of Kenya" (spoken mainly in Kenya, and also in Uganda and Tanzania)
• Kanuri, "A macrolanguage of Nigeria" (spoken in 5 countries of West and Central Africa)
• Kongo, "A macrolanguage of Democratic Republic of Congo" (spoken in DRC, Angola, and Congo)
• Kpelle, "A macrolanguage of Liberia" (spoken in Liberia and Guinea)
• Malagasy, "A macrolanguage of Madagascar" (spoken mainly in Madagascar)
• Mandingo, "A macrolanguage of Guinea" (spoken in 7 countries of West Africa)
• Oromo, "A macrolanguage of Ethiopia" (spoken in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia)
• Swahili, "A macrolanguage of Tanzania" (spoken in at least 9 countries mainly in East Africa, among which some governments have accorded it legal status)
• (Akan is described as "A language of Ghana" in Ethnologue, and is also a macrolanguage in ISO 639-3. Either way it is considered to include Fanti and Twi, and is spoken mainly in Ghana.)

Here again, would it not be possible to adjust certain titles to more accurately convey the range of use? For instance, Fulah as "A macrolanguage of West Africa" and Swahili as "A macrolanguage of East Africa." The macrolanguage items may be easier to modify on a case-by-case basis, as there are fewer of them than languages, and their respective circumstances are somewhat unique. The language entries on the other hand might, as suggested above, need a set of criteria to avoid case by case discussion.

Final thoughts

These observations and suggestions are made in the spirit of helping improve the Ethnologue resource, with a mind particularly to what kind of information that people new to the study of languages of Africa would take away from their initial encounter with it. Cross-border languages exist in all world regions, of course, but perhaps in none more than Africa, where borders were never intended to respect the integrity of ethno-linguistic groups. This category of languages seems to me to merit attention and appropriate revision in how it is presentated.

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* "Les langues nationales transfrontalières doivent être non pas des points limitrophes, des points de démarcation, mais des points de suture entre nos pays."

Language - a vital & neglected topic in African agricultural development?

Following are some excerpts with minor modifications from the introduction I wrote to comments on a report about agricultural development in Africa several months ago. These are in italics, followed by some comments to put it in a personal perspective:

I see language as an important consideration often - and paradoxically - omitted from discussions on agriculture and rural development in Africa: language and specifically communication about agriculture in farmers' languages and/or local lingua francas. ... The issues of choice of language in development communication, and the implications of those choices for who participates, whose knowledge counts, how well knowledge that is exchanged is understood and appropriated, etc. [have] implications for analysis or action. ...

I think it is fair to say that only in Africa (esp. sub-Saharan) is it the general pattern that the languages dominant in agricultural research and extension are different from those the farming populations speak as their first languages and even lingua francas. There are various reasons for this of course, but the fact is important, and too central to any effort to communicate about science and technology with farmers to be left on the margins of the discourse, let alone to be totally ignored.

Rural realities as concern language and linguistic diversity are not unknown to scholars and practitioners concerned with agriculture in Africa, of course, and many of our African colleagues have themselves lived those realities to one degree or another. However, disciplinarily, such language-related issues are alien to agricultural specialists (to a greater extent even than the broad category of social science), and in practice language differences are left to extension agents and/or intermediary farmers in the field to deal with. Moreover, professional incentives, training and education, etc. are all in English, French and Portuguese, not the first languages of agriculture in Africa.

As a consequence there seems to be a linguistic divide with consequences for understanding, transmission and generation of knowledge etc. This issue, which has many unanswered questions but not easy answers, is underresearched, in part because of a disciplinary divide which linguists on the one hand and the range of specialists concerned with agricultural development on the other need to find the will and means to bridge.

I recall working in rural areas and there were many occasions where multiple languages complicated communication or even shaped the way the work was done. At the time it was just one of those things you and your co-workers dealt with. My main counterpart in an animal traction project in the Amlamé district of Togo spoke Ewe as his first language (L1) but the farmers spoke either Kabiye or Akposso as their L1. With a mixture of French and mostly Mina/Ewe, my counterpart could get the messages across. I worked mainly in French and while communication was possible with some of the farmers it was not with the rest. People there were adept at using their "language portfolios" as it were to translate and complete some sort of communication. How much was lost is another matter and I suspect in retrospect that this system is good for the gist but not nuance or detail, and the "devil is in the details" as the saying goes.

It was clear in any event that no one had planned systematically for how communication across languages was to happen - everything sort of depended on extension agents' and farmers' skills in the field.

In working on a forestry project in the Djenné district of Mali, language and ethnicity emerged as issues in deciding which villages to contact for participation in tree planting (the project was just beginning there and it was not possible by any means to go everywhere). The local staff was more comfortable in Bambara than in some other languages, and indeed it was in the Bambara-speaking villages that the work focused (other issues like perception of the readiness of some other groups to reliably participate in tree planting were also expressed - it is hard to sort out the different factors, but that would have been important to do).

The multiplicity of languages is sometimes pointed at as a problem in Africa, but I think that misses the point. In fact it is not the multilingualism that is the issue but the fact that no few if any (as far as I know) discussing how to best work in the linguistic environment.

At the same time, the skill of Africans generally in facilitating communication across languages (which has been discussed in the literature on African languages) may be obscuring the need for more systematic attention to the issue.

It was interesting to note that some researchers with ICRISAT and IITA who had to follow up on field trials with farmers by means of a questionnaire decided to translate the questionnaires into the farmers' languages (Bambara in Mali for sorghum trials I believe, and Hausa in central Niger for cowpea trials). Having one or many field agents translate the questionnaire from French each time it was administered was obviously going to introduce all sorts of unknowns into the quality of the data. The research need for greater precision led to the obvious choice to communicate in the farmers' languages.

So, one wonders, what about the way field agents translate extension information day-to-day?

It took me a while to really catch on to this issue, even though I have worked on language as well as rural development. Which has me wondering why - was I just slow or what? I do think now, as I indicated in the excerpts quoted above, that part of it is a disciplinary culture and divide issue: the issue was agriculture or forestry, and the foreign experts and the research/extension systems function in French (in those countries). Language, or optimizing communication in specific languages, were not something that entered into the discourse.

This gets into speculation for the reasons, but the main point I'm trying to make is that language is a big deal and there hasn't been enough thought given or research done on how big a deal it is, in what precise ways, and how to best address it. Discussing new approaches and techniques for agriculture in Africa, and especially discussing dissemination of knowledge about these, without engaging the issue of language seems to me to be a mistake we don't have to keep making.

Anyway, this is an issue that I've mentioned before (for instance, Sept. 14, 2006) and will come back to periodically.

Sidebar improvements

I've made some more changes on the sidebar, which hopefully is more useful now.

Balɗe noogay* e joyi faa mi egga (yaltina kaaki e suudu); cappantati e jeegon faa mi dillan ley laana pirooha.

Another weekend too busy to do as much packing as planned. Among other things, correspondence with various folks re Tifinagh, N'ko, Yoruba, and Akposso. One letter is worth sharing (most of) - it concerns whether or not a local language version of a tourist pamplet &/or web material should be done - I respond to someone who says that it hadn't been thought of:

In projects such as this, a lot of the focus is outward, which is not bad as far as that goes, but eclipses inward dimensions. And the inward dimensions, if you will are only partly covered by the official language, better in Togo than in Niger, but not complete. Which is to say that potential Togolese visitors, as you suggest, could make do fine with the French version, but there are things that that version can not do.

First, the French version cannot give the same message about the value of the cultural heritage of the area. Having a brochure and/or web content in Akposso (&/or Ewe?) alongside those in European languages has a significant symbolism - to yovo visitors as well as to local people.

Second, beyond symbolism the local language content will have some impact. Putting the material in the local language opens another dimension to the project and the resource in question. So much of the discourse in this region relegates certain things to the vernacular (local "indigenous knowledge," customs, home life) and others to the official language (scientific knowledge, laws, interaction with the outside). To a degree this is functional, but it is also artificial. Putting something onto people's first language(s) that they aren't used to seeing that way breaks that boundary at least a little, perhaps raising new possibilities of thinking. This may sound terribly abstract, but new ways of thinking is part of development, and new ways of thinking may involve the maternal languages.

Third is the link or bridge between local "indigenous knowledge" and environmental education (EE) - a more focused possibility of the second point. I understand now that the PCVs are concerned mainly with the economic aspects of tourism development. I don't know the current program in Togo well enough to know if there is something like EE, but translating a brochure and/or web material about the environment into the vernacular is a beginning to talk about the environment in a different way. Can new concepts about environment be incorporated into the same medium used to discuss local knowledge (i.e., the local language(s))? Here in Niger if there is new PCV work (e.g., website) on the "Park W" the suggestion of including material in the two principal local/national languages has been raised.

Fourth, there's the angle of how validating the use of the printed local language might help encourage people to write things down (this is also related to the second point above). An example: My cook and her husband here in Niamey are Akebu from Togo. The husband, has some interesting stories - for instance he and one of his brothers in Togo who have long wanted to publish the Akebu calendar (similar to the Akposso calendar you may have seen in Togo, which is still published annually there and I put on the web last year). He also told of his father, who apparently had a wealth of information on local species and medicines such that the sons wanted to record it somehow, but their father passed away and the opportunity was lost (one of the proverbial "libraries burning" of Amadou Hampaté Ba). How many opportunities like this are lost? My point here is not that a brochure or webpage in Akebu (in this case) would have saved such knowledge, but that it might be an important encouragement to people who could.

The main thing for your project is, I think, can local language content be added with little additional monetary cost - I think it can - and if so whether one is missing an opportunity by not making as much of an effort as possible in this direction.* Look at it this way - an unavoidable side aspect of the project is whether it reinforces the usual pattern (i.e., anything printed or technical being only in French & foreign languages) or opens some new possibilities (with printed &/or web material in the vernacular about an important local resource).

A lot of my thinking on this comes from my years in the region, and also from reading and thinking about rural development in other areas of the world. There is a lot of thinking and material out there about the importance of the maternal languages and linguistic diversity - which is not to say our role has to be to save every language, but neither should it be to overlook possibilities to work with them and their speakers in novel ways. (One organization linking language and biodiversity for instance is Terralingua, at http://www.terralingua.org/ .)

Let me close by returning to the symbolism issue with a story from PC/Niger - even though some of the realities here are different from Togo I think it is illustrative of the possibilities of doing more, even on a small scale, with local languages. We have the experience of printing up Peace Corps brochures in Hausa and Zarma as well as in French, in part at my suggestion over 2 years ago. One American staff at the time actually argued against it, since "people who can read, can read French anyway" (in actuality there is a small number literate in their first language but not French), but in the end we went ahead with it mainly with the thoughts that 1) the local language versions could also be read aloud if need be, and 2) the symbolic message was a natural in a program where volunteers often speak better local language than French. So now, when we have our nice color brochures available say for invitees at swearing in ceremonies, many of them take more than one version, and really look at the local language ones. And when PCVs facilitate literacy work, they can actually bring out the appropriate local language version when folks are advanced enough. And they're nice to present to people.

It was impossible to know what exactly would become of the Hausa and Zarma versions when we tried this, but it has turned out to be an easy, positive way to reach more people, be seen in a new way by people we deal with already, and perhaps open new possibilities. And I'm happy to say we're revising all 3 versions currently to reprint. My hunch is that if the project you are collaborating on finds a way to do something significant in one or more local language, it will get you a lot of positive attention locally and internationally.

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* This same sort of "more bang for the buck" reasoning was behind including "same language subtitling" (SLS) as an element in a Hausa & Zarma AIDS education video proposal here (SLS being a literacy tool).

That's all for this sitting.....

* Ley Mali e Gine 20="noogay" ; ley Niizer, "leeso" ; ley Senegal, "noogas." Fulfulde/Pulaar ko ni.