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ENGLISH IN AFRICA Members Anh Kiệt Phụng Nhi Ngọc Hà Ngọc Mai Hà Trang Phi Yến TABLE OF CONTENTS 01 The countries history 1 1 Language 1 2History English in Africa today 2 1 Native language 2 2 Doma.

ENGLISH IN AFRICA

2.3 In education

3.1 A preliminary sketch3.2 Phonology

3.3 Syntax3.4 Lexis3.5 Pragmatics

02

I The countries and the history

of the

introduction of English

• Four countries in East and Central Africa have some connections with English but are not discussed in detail:

• Rwanda, where English is currently, quite remarkably, replacing French as the language of government and education

• Somalia, where the Somali language coexists with English and Italia.

• Ethiopia, where secondary and higher education are mainly in English, but most other state functions are

in Amharic or a regional language.

• Southern Sudan, where English is well established, and may shortly be the official language of an

independent South Sudan.

• In South Africa 70% people speak languages which are mutually comprehensible with Zulu

• The modern European ‘monolingual’ states are the result of

several centuries of aggressive language policy, border

adjustment, ethnic cleansing

The indigenous languages in sub-Saharan Africa mostly belong to three groups:

- Afro-Asiatic - the group which includes Arabic, such as Hausa in Northern Nigeria and adjoining areas.

- Cushitic/Sudanic and Nilotic in Ethiopia, Somalia and northern Kenya and Uganda.

- Niger-Congo.

The Niger-Congo languages in general are often tone languages The examples:

-àwò (two low tones)

-‘star’ versus áwó (two high tones)

English street appears as a loan into Yoruba as títì

Within the Niger-Congo family, the Bantu languages of West, East and Southern Africa are agglutinative

The correct name for Swahili is KiSwahili

1.2

• Bantu languages seem to have started expanding south and east at the beginning of the Iron Age, perhaps with the Nok culture of around 500 BC in central Nigeria or maybe even earlier

• Some people speaking pre-Bantu languages – the San (‘Bushmen’) – and there used to be another group called Khoi (‘Hottentots’)

■ Islamic ones in contact with the Arabic-speaking world along the southern border of the Sahara and the east coast, and pagan ones to the south and west.

■ Benin City in 1485 West Africa was a patchwork of empires and small kingdoms On the east coast, trade with Egypt and Arabia had started by 200 BC

By 1000 AD there were Muslim African trading cities and ports along the coast, importing cotton and luxury goods Swahili developed during 1000 ad on the coasts of what are now Kenya and Tanzania It is

a Bantu language with extensive borrowing of vocabulary from Arabic and Persian and without tones By the beginning of the nineteenth century English had become a useful foreign language.

● Some locals in the main trading cities knew English well Written Nigerian English dates from as early as 1786 (Banjo 1993)

● The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807

● From 1787 ex-slaves from Britain, North America and the

Caribbean settled or were settled at Freetown in Sierra Leone (and some at Banjul (Bathurst) in Gambia)

● From the 1820s freed slaves from the USA settled in Liberia and created a community speaking a variety of American English

● The first mission station in Cameroon was opened in

1843/44 by Joseph Merrick.

● During 19th century, missionaries with the outer circle

various European languages as L1 started to spread

Christianity, English and Swahili inland from the coast.

● At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a Bantu clan

in Southern Africa called the Zulus united a large number

of Bantu-speakers into one state (Davidson 1984)

● Britain took possession of the Cape at the end of the eighteenth century, and launched an assimilationist policy towards the Afrikaners, Dutch-speaking settlers who had been in the Cape since the seventeenth century Late in the nineteenth century, rivalry among European powers led to a ‘scramble for Africa’ and the Congress of Berlin in 1884–5 ratified the division of the continent into zones

belonging to seven European powers

● English was generally now the language of administration and the higher courts, and a key language for career success in business and the extractive industries of Southern Africa

● English often played a part from the first years of education in

response to mixtures of mother tongues among pupils, lack of material

in a particular language and parental demands

2.0 English

in Africa

today

English remains the main language of

education, administration and

business

2.1 English as a native language

- At least three groups in Africa had English (or creole) as their mother tongue

-There are also indigenous groups who are going over to English or pidgin (thus creolising it)

-The Cape Flats coloured community in South Africa has

traditionally spoken nonstandard Afrikaans, but parents are now speaking second-language English to their children

2.2 Domains for English and

-The Englishes of West Africa have many similarities in form and

sociological situation

-In most West African countries pidgin is widely spoken between

speakers of different African languages

-Electronic media spread the same US, British and local models over whole countries

-The varieties of English in the other countries in eastern and southern Africa also have many features of form in common, and a tradition of movement for work within the regions.

-In Zambia and Zimbabwe English is very dominant and local languages have little or no public role.

-In South Africa the government has launched an extremely ambitious languagerights policy

-Three fairly monolingual states in southern Africa: Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland

-English is the predominant written language in most of anglophone

Africa and the main language even of conversational writing

English seems to retain a public position in all these

states, and in most cases is acquiring native speakers

and expanding, even when it is not particularly

functional

2.3 English in

education

The debate between Westernizers and orientalists about the correct

medium for education in a colonial environment responds to an insoluble problem created by colonization

-If education is offered in the language of the colonizers, it alienates the local educated from their own community and creates an elite

-But if education is offered in the vernacular, the colonized people suspect an attempt to keep knowledge from them and provide second class service

Educationalists basically agree that it is better to acquire literacy in a language one is familiar with, rather than struggle to learn literacy and

a new language at the same time (Cummins 1983, 1986)

And, there is a good deal of evidence that children learn content

ineffectively in languages that they and their teachers have not fully mastered

-In Zambia, English is the only potential link language and is the medium of education even at primary school Zambian children normally

do not learn to read their mother tongue

-In Malawi Nyanja/Chichewa was made an official language and primary education was carried out in it, with English as a subject

But this language is also spoken in Zambia, so it is possible to compare the policies

-Williams (1996) showed that while Zambian children could only read English, Malawian ones not only read as well in English as Zambian ones, but also were literate in Nyanja/Chichewa, which was their mother tongue

Parents on the other hand remember colonialist policies aimed at

excluding blacks and can generally see that knowledge of English is a key

to success in their society

-Zambia has many mother tongues, and large urban areas where people of different ethnic backgrounds mix.

-Politically, in a country with 30 mother tongues and limited resources, it would be very expensive to provide even primary textbooks in every mother tongue, or even 5 or 6

-In theory, Foreign aid money might be used, but in practice it has normally been directed to English-language materials, cheaper to produce because of economies of scale, and frequently written by the aid-giver’s own experts and published by their own publishers (Banda 1996)

Even in multilingual and supportive South Africa there are practical problems in providing education in all 11 languages, and very many parents prefer English-

medium schools to those in their own language

The result is that middle-class children come to school knowing its medium and poorer ones do not, and that the books they read, even if not published in the West, say by their choice of

medium that the West is best.

3 African English – a descriptive

account

3.1 A preliminary sketch

_Some common features, partly because they often have a substratum in Bantu languages

_A smaller vowel set than inner-circle varieties, compensated for by spelling

pronunciations and nonreduction of vowels Spelling pronunciations are normal and predominant.

+Example:

purpose /'pɔpɔs/, perpetrate /pεpε'tret/ compared with GA

/'pɜrpəs/, /ɜpərpətreit/

or RP /'pɜ:pəs/, /'pɜ:pətreit/

where every vowel is different both in realization and

systemically and yet both varieties have three different

vowel phonemes in these two words

_Some vowel pronunciations used as identity markers In discussing

NURSE, first realized as [nas] [fast], Schmied (1991) quotes Kenyans saying ‘I don’t want to The outer circle 163 strain myself so much to say [fɜ:st] only to sound British This would seem snobbish to my colleagues’

_Word stress sometimes assigned according to local rules (Peng and Ann 2000, Bobda 1994), as in West African indi'cate vs RP/GA 'indicate perhaps because stress is attracted to certain types of strong syllable

_Figurative expressions based on the substrate languages Chisanga and Kamwangamallu (1997) cite I have killed many moons in that hut from Zimbabwe

_In casual speech, long words which sound formal to circle ears but do not necessarily have that value, since

inner-casual styles have had to be ‘reconstituted’ from language learnt at school

3.2 Phonology

• The accents of individual African speakers depend on their mother tongue, the area they grew up in, and how acrolectally they are speaking

• However, there are similarities among the varieties of English that have a Bantu, or at least Niger–Congo substratum, and those with Afro-Asiatic or Nilotic (or Krio) substrate seem to have similar phonological characteristics

• The exceptions to this overall very rough similarity are varieties in South Africa with Afrikaans (Germanic) and Indian substrata

Schmied and Bobda have attempted overall summaries

of the vowel systems of

speakers with

African-language substrata, and the result, describing a mesolectal accent, is something like this (Table 5.4), with interesting mergers and splits

Finally, because African English is less stress-timed than inner-circle varieties, comma and letter have split (Bobda 1994), so that a vowel like that implied by the spelling is produced.

Most African English is syllable-timed with stress marked mainly by high pitch (Wells 1982)

Words are very often stressed differently in African English (partly because stress is a less prominent feature and rarely distinctive)

an object such as attention.

3.4 Lexis

In Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia any borrowed word must begenuinely 'local English' rather than code mixing In Kenya andTanzania speakers can assume that the interlocutor knowsSwahili But in the monolingual states of Southern Africa one canassume some knowledge of the national language

One common stylistic feature of African English is the use of idiomatic expressions in different forms from their inner-circle originals.- The Zimbabwe-born British novelist Doris Lessing highlights similar extensions: ‘What’s wrong, Rebecca?’‘Okay’ said Rebecca, meaning, I shall tell you ‘Okay’ said Sylvia, in her turn using this new or newish idiom which now seemed to begin every sentence She meant that she had absorbed the information and shared Rebecca’s fears.

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