Page 76 - Languages Victoria December 2019

Secondly, political revolutions can be reinforced by technical revolutions. At the time of Luther, Gutenberg’s innovative printing press allowed fast production of the first-ever mass media in the form of pamphlets written in German that were distributed all over and read out to the an-alphabetic masses of the people. Today, we have innovative digital information technology and social media, which allow complete democratisation of access to information. At both periods of time, texts – meaning knowledge and information – were spread faster and cheaper than ever before, creating true democratisation of the media, so to speak.
Thirdly, the parallels also apply to language. At Luther’s time, Latin was the only language that allowed access to higher education, the local vernaculars were considered too primitive for educational purposes. In Africa today, likewise only the ex-colonial languages of European provenance are considered suitable for education, but not the African vernacular languages. This creates elitism and oligarchies, and it disallows quality mass education for democratic control of governments.
In Europe and the North, the Modern Era entailing enormous scientific and economic progress and the rise of democratic rule was linked to mass education through the use of local languages instead of Latin only, which was widely relegated to a teaching subject in grammar schools. This is a promising model to follow also for Africa, namely learn English and other world languages, but do so through African languages that are mastered well by both teachers and learners and through which individual cognitive capabilities are being awakened and enhanced.
Prof. Ekkehard Wolff retired in 2009 from the Chair of African Linguistics (Afrikanistik) at the University of Leipzig, which he had taken in 1994, at that time being Professor of Afrikanistik at the University of Hamburg. Over several years he also taught at universities in Nigeria, Niger, South Africa, Ethiopia and Finland. His research covers descriptive, comparative and applied linguistics and sociolinguistics of African languages. He has published over 25 books, the latest being ‘The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics’ (2019), ‘A History of African Linguistics’ (2019), ‘Multilingualism and Intercultural Communication: A South African Perspective’ (2017), ‘Multilingual Education for Africa: Concepts and Practices’ (2016), ‘Language and Development in Africa: Perceptions, Ideologies and Challenges’ (2016), ‘The Lamang Language and Dictionary’ (2 vols, 2015).
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Page 76 Volume 23 Number 2