Unintended consequences of methodological and practical responses to language endangerment in Africa

Language Endangerment and Language Documentation in Africa

“…This preoccupation with language as a visual entity translates to the almost automatic reflex to see transcription as an initial step towards the creation of a practical orthography for an unwritten language (Schultze-Berndt 2006), which is very often seen as the corner stone of language development for minority languages. Yet, the assumption that orthography development is part and parcel of LDD and essentially a technical task (Seifart 2006) has been questioned by a growing number of Africanists (Ameka 2015;Essegbey 2015;Lüpke, 2004Lüpke, , 2011, forthcoming a), because it cements exclusion. Which speakers of a small-scale multilingual society will invest in reading and writing one or several of the languages in their repertoires, languages that are shared with only several hundred others?…”

Supporting Vital Repertoires, Not Revitalizing Languages

“…A crucial and often overlooked point made by Newman is that Western attempts at language revitalization often assume simplistic positions on the role and scope of revitalization based on a patronizing postcolonial stance, ignoring the complex multilingual and multi-ethnic configurations of African societies. This view is shared by Ameka (2015) who warns against implicit Western language ideologies underlying linguistic documentation and revitalization resulting in practices that, rather than strengthening linguistic diversity, contribute to decrease it, emphatically rejecting standard literacy practices as particularly harmful in this regard. Dimmendaal (2015), reporting on his own experience in a revitalization project centred on orthography development in the Tima language of Sudan, comes to the conclusion that even when communities actively ask for particular language revitalization activities, a clash between instrumental functions (which are communicative and related to linguistic participation at a larger scale) and integrative functions (which relate to identity at the local scale) of languages means that speakers of minority languages will not use the minority language in instrumental functions in practice, but only claim it for the symbolic affirmation of their local identity.…”