State-Building and Multilingual Education in Africa

Abstract

How do governments in Africa make decisions about language? What does language have to do with state-building, and what impact might it have on democracy? This manuscript provides a longue durée explanation for policies toward language in Africa, taking the reader through colonial, independence, and contemporary periods. It explains the growing trend toward the use of multiple languages in education as a result of new opportunities and incentives. The opportunities incorporate ideational relationships with former colonizers as well as the work of language NGOs on the ground. The incentives relate to the current requirements of democratic institutions, and the strategies leaders devise to win elections within these constraints. By contrasting the environment faced by African leaders with that faced by European state-builders, it explains the weakness of education and limited spread of standard languages on the continent. The work combines constructivist understanding about changing preferences with realist insights about the strategies leaders employ to maintain power.

Language as an including or excluding factor in mathematics teaching and learning

“…Some changes do seem to be afoot, however, both in South Africa and elsewhere on the African continent, in recognizing the negative and exclusionary consequences learning through an inadequately mastered language has for educational outcomes. Albaugh (2014) reported, for example, that whereas at independence, 'only nineteen out of fortynine African states (29 percent) were using local languages in primary education, the number has doubled to thirty-eight states (78 percent) doing so currently' (pp. 7-8).…”

Publishing Nations: Technology Acquisition and Language Standardization for European Ethnic Groups

“…The rise of modern citizenship, an institution in which language uency is typically a requirement, is a good illustration. 7 Indeed, contemporary works use language as the dependent variable to theorize about the variation in the salience of identity across time or within an ethnic group (Laitin 1998(Laitin , 2007Brubaker 2004) and the variation of "language regimes"-state policy on language instruction (Albaugh 2015;Cardinal and Sonntag 2015;Liu 2014;Safran and Laponce 2005).…”

Linguistic Situation in Twenty sub-Saharan African Countries: A Survey-based Approach

“…Since they are usually not surveyed directly, the study relies on various materials such as the OIF website (2010), individual estimates collected in Albaugh (2014), and literacy data from the latest population censuses, literacy reports and the DHS to approximate the spread of languages beyond the primary language level. However, censuses and literacy reports predominantly focus only on literacy in languages in which education is available.…”