Texting in Wolof & implicatons for standard orthographies

In a recent post on Think Africa Press entitled "Wolof 2.0: Spoken Languages in a Digital Age," Juliana Friend offers a very interesting snapshot (and video) of the meeting of the Wolof language in Senegal with information and communications technology.

A remark by a Senegalese woman quoted in the post about spelling in Wolof not mattering as much as getting the message across oddly had me remembering a long discussion on H-Africa in December 2007 ("Names for African peoples & languages") wherein one of the topics was whether scholars should use the official orthographies of languages whose terms they used in publication.

Standardized spellings and orthographies of course have a reason, or really several functions (from clarity of meaning to facilitating learning to read). They are more critical in long texts and formalized uses, such as a localized interface on computer or mobile device, than they are in texting or citing an occasional word in an academic publication. So one sees for example attention to Wolof spelling and orthographies in both the content and the interface of the Wolof Wikipedia.

Ms. Friend's post focuses on Senegal - the main country where Wolof is spoken - but it's important to remember that the language is also spoken by significant segments of the populations of Gambia and southern Mauritania. The issue of transnational harmonization of the written forms of the many cross-border languages of Africa is a subject that has been given official attention since the 1960s. It would be interesting to know whether written Wolof is still "unified" in this sense across the countries where it is spoken. (I'll come back to this general subject in a later post.)

It's also probably worth thinking about how it came about that in Senegal "French was traditionally the language of writing, Wolof the language of speaking." In fact, Wolof was historically written in Wolofal, an Arabic-based script whose use has persisted.

Part of the reason that a language like Wolof is spoken "not" written has to do in large measure with education policies under which generations of students were not taught to read anything but French (or in Gambia, English). In Saint-Louis, Senegal, an early effort to teach in Wolof was stopped in 1829, setting the tone of French monolingual education policy in colonies acquired later.

The latter historic anecdote came from an article several years ago on spell checkers for certain African languages. In the case of Wolof, maybe a new generation of spell checker apps for devices on which one texts might be an important piece of the establishment of its official written form. Other pieces might range from first-language literacy apps for smart mobile devices to evolution of education policies.

Burning textbooks, beating schoolchildren

African languages have not only been passed over as languages of instruction and even omitted from school curricula in much of Africa, they have in some cases been actively excluded. While a full discussion of the issues involved would take something much longer than a blog post, I wanted to review a few facts and anecdotes. It should be noted that the worst abuses were in the colonial past.

Burning Tigre textbooks

One of the more striking examples from Ghirmai Negash's article (see the previous entry) was how in the 1970s in Eritrea, the ELF declared illegal a school curriculum in the Tigre language and ordered all copies of the school book to be burned.

This may be an extreme example but one from Madagascar in the 1980s may be more typical. Apparently the government of Madagascar at one point needed foreign assistance to produce textbooks for its schools. At the time the instruction was in Malagasy, but when France offered aid, it was with materials in French. (Unfortunately I don't have the reference at hand). It has been noted elsewhere that the UK and US are very forthcoming with materials in English. It would be hard to say how often English, French or Portuguese materials have replaced African language ones, or to what degree their availability has been a disincentive to develop African language materials.

Even when there are materials in African languages, they are not always well distributed. The article on International Mother Language Day in Ghana (available here, and mentioned in an earlier posting) mentions:

It is however very pathetic to note that while schools complain of lack of Ghanaian Language books which affects the teachers' delivery of lessons and consequently the performance of their pupils in their schools, publications of the Bureau [of Ghanaian Languages] are locked up in our ware houses in Tamale and Accra and are not being patronised.

So at least in some cases, books for learning in African languages have been burned, replaced by books in other languages, or "locked up" in warehouses. This is not even to mention those that are out of print and only available in distant libraries.

Beating or shaming schoolchildren for speaking their mother tongue

The history of schooling in Africa has many stories of how African languages were excluded from classes and school grounds (not always, but in many places) and punishments were meted out for transgressing the rule. I recently posed a question on the H-Africa list about the degree to which this is still happening. (It does still happen, but probably not as extreme as in the past.)

It is not only a question of teachers punishing students but also ways of involving peers in the punishment (see this example from a blog on Lesotho). There are some other links here (post #8).