Re: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona

Olayinka,

You are going round in circles and shifting the discursive goal posts as you go, and that's usually an indication that there is nothing more of substance to be said about an issue. All your questions have been answered in my last post. Read it again if you've not had the chance to read it thoroughly. 

English has moved beyond being imperialistic; it's now hegemonic in the Gramscian sense of the term. That's why several countries are turning to it voluntarily. When German, Italian, Israeli, etc. universities decided to switch  to English as the medium of instruction, they didn't do so because they were conquered by Britain or the US. When millions of Chinese people spend time and resources to learn English, they do so because they want to be competitive in the global market. When South Koreans go to the ridiculous extremes of spending thousands of dollars to perform surgery on their tongues so they can speak English with native-like proficiency, they do it of their own volition. Zizek once argued that people who are targets of hegemonic cooptation only voluntarily agree to this process if they believe that, in accepting it, they are giving expression to their free subjectivity. That's effective hegemony. But you want crude, vulgar, unvarnished linguistic imperialist subjugation of linguistic minorities in Nigeria. Ain't gonna happen, buddy. So crush that dream.

I haven't advocated that any Nigerian be stopped from learning any language they want. What I resist is the formal imposition, in the school system, of so-called majority languages on people who are not native speakers of the languages and who don't want to be bothered with the languages because they have theirs. I have already articulated my reasons for that. I won't repeat them.

The irony in all this is that the languages you are proposing as alternatives to English owe their present form and dominance to English colonialists. The notion of a "Yoruba language," for instance, is so thoroughly colonial. For starters, "Yoruba" is an exonym first used by a Songhai scholar to refer to people in what is now Oyo, Osun, and Lagos states--and parts of Kwara State. Ajayi Crowther later adopted the name and used it to refer to cognate but nonetheless linguistically diverse people in Nigeria's southwest. For administrative convenience, colonialists standardized the Oyo "dialect" of the language and imposed it on people who never spoke it before. To this day, many people in rural Ekiti, Ondo, some parts of Ogun, etc. don't understand "Yoruba." Their languages, though certainly cognate with "Oyo Yoruba," are almost mutually unintelligible with it. I think it was Professor Etannibi Alemika, an Okun person (whom some people would call a "Yoruba") who once described himself as a minority that some majorities are aggressively trying to assimilate against his will. In other words, he resents being called "Yoruba." I was once in a rural Ekiti community for a wedding, and "Yoruba" people from Lagos were shocked that most people there couldn't communicate with them in the common language of the region.

The whole idea of a Yoruba identity and language, in their present forms at least, was forged in and sanctified by British colonialism and its twin sister, missionism. This is true of Igbo, too. Although Hausa was a trade language in most parts of northern Nigeria before colonialism, it, too, benefited from several purposive colonial language intervention policies. This is what I wrote in a 2005 book chapter titled "Kparo: Study of the emergence and death of a minority language newspaper in Nigeria" in Indigenous Language Media in Africa edited by Abiodun Salawu:

"In the first few years of primary school education, the colonial administrators not only made the teaching of Hausa compulsory for all students in the North; they also made it the language of instruction for all subjects for the first four years of primary education. This policy continued up to a few years after independence until the regional structure of Nigeria was dissolved and replaced by states by the emergent military regime. The result was that the first crop of educated people from minority linguistic groups in the North had high literacy in the Hausa language but were illiterate in their own indigenous languages. This was a huge seminal disincentive for the emergence and growth of indigenous language newspapers in mediums other than the Hausa language. The only set of minority groups who were insulated from this linguistic imperialism were the people who were educated in Christian missionary schools. Religious denominations developed writing systems for a whole host of minority languages and translated the Bible into those languages. This elevated the status of the languages to a certain extent. But these languages were few when one takes into account the immense linguistic diversity of the North."

My friend, rest this quixotic ploy to impose any so-called majority languages on Nigerian linguistic minorities against their wishes. The English imposed their language on us first because they conquered us. (Now English has become the ladder for social mobility in our increasingly globalized world). You will have to also conquer other Nigerians before you can impose your language on them, and good luck with that. The only time people willingly accept FORMAL linguistic imposition without conquest is if the language serves a personal social need. There is absolutely nothing to be gained in getting one's education in a domestic foreign language.

Farooq Kperogi

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperog

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 6:53 AM, Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:

Farooq:

I quite appreciate your long disquisition.  This isnt about jettisoning English.  Like you I teach English for a living. If the global embrace of English is not construed as linguistic imperialism why must the adoption of Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa in Nigeria be construed as such? As a comparatist I would rather learn Igbo than pidgin. I would rather expand my grounding in Hausa too.

And if the call by the primal linguist, Elegbara (like the injunction by Allah for all adherents to strive to visit Mecca at least once in a life time) that all strive towards learning as many as they can towards a16 tongues capability in a life time is assiduouly pursued as I intend to, your language may be among the next set I would turn my attention to without regarding that as linguistic imperialism.

Rather than attempt to brow beat the majorities to silence if the issue is put to referendum,would the minorities be able to impose their will on the majorities? If the vote goes the way of the majorities would the minorities secede from the federation on that account? May I ask for the source of your statistics on India?

On 3 Nov 2016 02:58, "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 6:44 PM, Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:

Why did the Indians not readon the way you did?

In addition to having the Welsh assembly why did Wales not insist it would not be part of the Union unless Welsh is the national language adopted at Westminster over and above English? Why did the Welsh not campaign to make German or Latin the British national language to spite the English majority?

Is democracy not a game of numbers?

And why should the minorities in Nigeria resent the fact that the majorities are the majorities and capitulate to a global majority to cover this 'national' verity? Will this strategy wish away the fact of their majorities?

Olayinka,

The short answer is that Indian linguistic minorities are NOT the same as Nigerian linguistic minorities. Nor are the Welsh synonymous with Nigerian linguistic minorities. So their attitudes must necessarily be different. I think it bespeaks a lack of self-reflexivity for you to institute (your notion of) the attitude of sheepish acquiescence to domestic linguistic imperialism in India and Wales as the template that Nigerian linguistic minorities must adopt. Even if every minority group in the world unquestioningly acquiesced to the majoritarian tyranny of major language groups, that's no reason we in Nigeria should toe the same line. Consensus is not always synonymous with the truth or with what is right. 

But your recounting of the Indian and Welsh experiences isn't even faithful to the facts. India has two national official languages: Hindi and English. It also recognizes 29 (?) regional languages in its constitution, and allows states to determine their own official languages--even if the languages are not among the 29 constitutionally recognized languages. In addition, people whose mother tongues are not recognized as state languages may choose to speak in their native languages in official communication, including in state parliaments--of course, with the permission of the Speaker. But all laws at both state and federal levels must be written in English.

In any case, 45 percent of Indians speak Hindi or its dialectal variations. No Nigerian language is spoken by up to 40 percent of the population. You can't impose Hausa, for instance, on the people  of Kwara, Benue and Kogi, who are politically in the north, because only an insignificant minority of people speak the language there. Nor can you impose Yoruba on Edo people, or Igbo on the people of Bayelsa, Cross River, and Akwa Ibom; You may have limited success with Igbo in some parts of Delta and Rivers states. There would be massive, violent protests.

You make it seem like linguistic minorities in Indian simply accepted their domination with listless resignation. That's false. In India, the proposal to derecognize English as an official language and impose Hindi as the sole official language of the country was met with violent protests, which compelled the government to reverse it (See Robert Hardgrave's interesting 1965 essay titled, "The Riots in Tamilnadu: Problems and Prospects of India's Language Crisis" in the Asian Survey.) Nor is Hindi's dominance in India unchallenged (See "Hindi Not a National Language: Court" in The Hindu of January 25, 2010).

Most importantly, though, there is a class dimension to the language policy in India that you seem to ignore in your haste to linguistically colonize other language groups in Nigeria. The upper crust of the Indian society educate their children in English (and, of course, Hindi) and condemn others at the lower end to Hindi or other indigenous language education. This entrenches the intergenerational perpetuation of social and economic inequalities. That's the kind of social apartheid your "indigenous" language policy would inaugurate in Nigeria. Children of wealthy people would attend English-language schools, climb the social ladder, travel the world, become citizens of the world, partake in all the thrills that the English-dominated global world offers, etc. while children of the poor would be educated in indigenous languages, vegetate in epistemic insularity, limited social mobility, and perpetual servitude to the children of the English-educated privileged class. That is not the Nigeria I want for my people.

The case of the Welsh is very straightforward. Welsh is an official language in the UK even though more than 70 percent of people who self-identify as ethnically Welsh don't speak it. Since  the year 2000, as a result of sustained Welsh linguistic nationalism, the language is now taught in schools, and knowledge of the language is now one of the linguistic competencies (other options being English, Gaelic, and Scottish) that prospective applicants for naturalization in the UK must demonstrate. About 8 years ago, when former National Assembly for Wales member Alun Jones spoke at the EU, he spoke entirely in Welsh and got someone to translate what he said in English. In short, Welsh linguistic nationalism and recognition are on the upswing. 

Why would the Welsh campaign to make German or Latin the national language to "spite" the English when Latin is dead and Germans are themselves switching to English? That's an astoundingly odd analogy to make. Read the link I shared some days back about Italian, Israeli, and German universities switching to English as the medium of instruction. Here is a quote from my book that speaks to this:

  'Most importantly, [English] is the language of scholarship and learning. The Science Citation Index, for instance, revealed in a 1997 report that 95 percent of scholarly articles in its corpus were written in English, even though only half of these scientific articles came from authors whose first language is English (Garfield, 1998). Scores of universities in Europe, Africa, and Asia are switching to English as the preferred language of instruction. As Germany's Technical University president Wolfgang Hermann said when his university ditched German and switched to English as the language of instruction for most of the school's master's degree programs, "English is the lingua franca [of the] academia and of the economy" (The Local, 2014). His assertion has support in the findings of a study in Germany that discovered that publishing in English is "often the only way to be noticed by the international scientific community" (The Local, 2014). So most academics in the world either have to publish in English or perish in their native tongues. In addition, it has been noted in many places that between 70 and 80 percent of information stored in the world's computers is in English, leading a technology writer to describe the English language as "the lingua franca of the wired world" (Bowen, 2001).'

The Welsh are in the UK where English is spoken by more than 90 percent of the population. So your contrast of contexts is entirely imperfect. I hope you are not implying that the resistance to the imposition of Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo as languages of instruction is inspired by the desire of linguistic minorities to "spite" linguistic majorities. That would be intolerably insulting. People are just emotionally wedded to their languages (the same way you are wedded to yours) and would go to any length to resist domestic linguistic imperialism. It's that simple. If learning any of the majority (or even minority) languages would open doors of opportunities, of course people won't even need to be persuaded to learn the languages. But there is no advantage, none whatsoever, to learning a domestic foreign language IN PLACE of a global language like English that several other people in the world are turning to.

Finally, you've moved from an indigenous epistemic logic for your "3-language" indigenous language policy (which can't be defended with the resources of logic) to barefacedly domestic imperialist and majoritarian arrogance about democracy being a "game of numbers," by which you seem to imply that the rights of minorities can be trampled upon unchallenged. Look, if Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo people want to use their languages as the media of instruction at all levels of education, good luck to them, but they shouldn't impose their languages on others who are proud of and invested in their own languages, and who want to have no truck with domestic linguistic imperialism. 

 If English ceases to be the receptacle of vast systems of knowledge that it is now and goes the way of Latin, everyone would drop it like it's hot. This isn't about "race," "inferiority," "superiority," or such other piteous vocabulary of the weak. It's plain pragmatism. 

Farooq Kperogi

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperog

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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