Page 80 - Languages Victoria December 2019

Languages Victoria
"For them, using the former colonial languages is not a problem. They can send their children to private schools and their children are probably fluent in these languages prior to starting school," Fleisch says.
Additionally, the European languages are still very important for higher education. Only a fraction of the students will, however, end up working in white-collar jobs, says Brock-Utne. She believes that the international languages could be taught as subjects instead of being used as the main teaching language.
"Another reason which is more difficult to tackle is that many parents, even if they don't speak the colonial languages themselves, think that the best way to learn a foreign language is to have it as a language of instruction," says Brock-Utne. But that isn't correct, she says, especially if the teachers themselves are not fluent in the language.
A solution: African multilingualism
While English, Portuguese and French have their colonial origins, even some of the African languages have negative connotations, says Fleisch. In South Africa, for instance, students took to the streets to call for the use of English at universities and against the use of the colonial Afrikaans and local languages like Zulu. The language, many argued is too closely associated with ethnicity and the separation of the different groups during apartheid.
In many cases, the languages are very close and are dialects of the same language, explains Brock-Utne. It was often missionaries who wrote down the languages and to teach them, you would first have to agree on a common way of writing them.
The Kenyan author and Ngugi wa Thiong'o has his own vision of how languages should be taught in school. "My policy which I am advocating is simple: Start with your mother tongue. Then, know whichever is the lingua franca or the language which can enable people from different linguistic communities to speak to each other and then add English, French, and any other language," wa Thiong'o told DW. If only English and French are taught, he says, it creates the impression that knowledge only comes from abroad.
Mohammed Khelef contributed to this report.
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