This article is taken from the "Pathé Diagne Initiative" blog. Visit pathediagne.blogspot.com to learn more ...
In this article
- The background studies and test results
- The lessons learnt from the results of the studies
- Other factors that complicate matters
- Loss of the cultural identity
- What Africans who recognize this problem are doing to make things better
- Debunking the main argument against the use of African languages for tuition
- Why it is "idiocation" and not education
- The will, the way: Blueprint for the instatement of mother tongues as languages of tuition in African schools
- Further reading
The background studies and test results
In 1976, Pathe Diagne, a Senegalese linguist working in Burundi, conducted a study. The objective was to establish whether there would be a difference in the rate of uptake between pupils in school taught using a mother tongue and a foreign, European language.
The subjects of the study were Burundi children who were divided into two groups. The first group received tuition in their mother tongue, while the second used French as the medium of instruction.
At the end of the study, the children were passed through a test to see which ones did better. The results could not have been anticipated. 65% of the children in the first group passed the exam, while only 5% in the second group managed to pass.
Recently in the Netherlands, high school students were subjects of a similar study. For a fixed period of time, one group received instruction in English while the other in Dutch, the national language of Holland. Though the results obtained after examinations were similar to the Burundi study, the big gap in pass rates seen in the former example was not repeated.
One explanation as to why the Burundi children taught in their mother tongue scored so highly compared to the second group is the fact the two languages used were not closely related. The languages applied in the latter study, Dutch and English, are both Germanic tongues that have very similar syntactic-semantic structures.
Another reason for the disparities lay in the age differences, and especially proficiency in both languages used in the studies.
In the Dutch example, the test subjects were teens in later phases of the education process. They were already proficient in their mother tongue Dutch and, as is the culture in this country, they were conversant in English.
It was discovered in the Dutch example that those who didn't do as well as they expected were not in the least aware that their command of the foreign language was as poor. Many of the Dutch students in the study were interviewed prior to the exams, during which researchers noted that the Dutch students overestimated their command of English. They felt they were as competent using it as they were their mother tongue. Only the comparably poor results they obtained after the examination proved how wrong they had been.
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The lessons learnt from the results of the studies
What both these results confirm, beyond a shadow of doubt, is that pupils/students that are made to learn a non-native language for use in school, including in this bracket others who already are fluent in one, have their capacity to learn adversely affected.
It can also be deduced from this that when such instruction occurs in the formative stages of life, then it is not just the capacity to comprehend that is negatively impacted but, subsequently, the stunting in growth of the mental apparatus is also a certainty if this situation is prolonged or permanent. This would be as true of the Dutch example as it would of the Burundi children in the second group, albeit the extent of the arrest in mental development would be exacerbated in the latter group.
The explanation for this is actually straightforward, and can be laid out without the employ of jargon.
Research has already established that education in the mother tongue is a key factor for inclusion and quality learning, and it also improves learning outcomes. This is for the simple fact that, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "... the learning of a second or other language is an activity that is superimposed on prior mastery of one's first language, and is a different process intellectually".
The first language we all learn after birth is called the mother tongue. Under normal circumstances, at the age of approximately four or five, children are introduced to formal education where their mastery of this language is put to use.
At this point in their lives, children already have a basic command of their mother tongue that can get their heads around basic subjects, and possess a basic vocabulary, all of which would enable them to satisfactorily handle the demands of the initial learning process well, a reality clearly demonstrated by the results seen in the first group in Diagne's study.
But when this initial and basic level of linguistic competency is not used for learning to read and write, but for learning how to speak a foreign language, that then is depended upon for uptake, a delay in mental development will be forced on the child.
The African child's competency in the foreign language will take time to be at par with the command they already have of their mother tongue. Where they are supposed to be learning how to spell what they already know, for example tree, car, house, dog, they will instead be learning what the same words are in a foreign language, how to pronounce and spell them while simultaneously learning how to use them to understand what they are learning.
Instead of learning how to use words like multiply, add, subtract, that they already know in their mother tongues, then using this knowledge to do mathematics, the children will have to first learn these words in a foreign language then use them for the same thing.
This is a roundabout process which doesn't just delay in duration the rate at which the children learn, but it also causes a delay in the mental development of the child because, instead of hitting the ground running with their existent linguistic skills, the children are having to suspend this level of linguistic competency. This is what the definition of "arrest in mental development" is, and it is what the poor results that the second group made in Diagne's study demonstrates.
When the difference in pass rates between the first and second group is considered, it becomes plain that much more time is required for the children to master the foreign language to levels that will impact positively on their rate of uptake, as will prevent a scenario where they are in fact held back in terms of their intellectual development.
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Other factors that complicate matters.
According to Rajathurai Ninshathi, PhD, Research Scholar at the Department of Sociology, Bharathidasan University in India, "Fluency in the leaner's home language, also known as the native language, aids the learner in a variety of ways. It connects him to his heritage and promotes intellectual abilities. A child's earliest understanding of the world is through the language in which their mother communicates before they are born and throughout their lives. Several pupils in underdeveloped countries learn next to nothing in school, a fact that can be attributed to the instruction given in a language they do not completely comprehend. This is a technique that results in little to nonexistent information and cognitive ability, school drop out and repetition frequencies".
African children do gradually build their command of English, French or Portuguese to levels that are somewhat useful for learning school subjects. These acquired linguistic skills in the foreign language would however be better if the mother tongue, the foundation upon which the learning of the new language is superimposed, wasn't left to develop outside the realm of the school curriculum.
Throughout Africa where the language of instruction is foreign, there is no attempt to systematically develop linguistic skills in the native language, the consequence of which is that proficiency in a language that is directly involved in the learning process more or less stagnate.
The correct procedure would be that if the children start learning and receiving instruction in English, then their command of the mother tongue, the foundation upon which the second language learning process is superimposed, also gets equal if not more attention, otherwise the arrest in mental development that the poor results in Diagne's study expose will worsen as the years roll on into the future.
The children will never make a full recovery from the delay in mental development caused by learning new things using minimal linguistic skills. The functions of language as it relates to thought facilitation cannot fully be taken advantage of under the circumstances.
The mental growth of the child is effectively put on hold for a while and, at the point in time when their command of the foreign language can be considered at par with the mother tongue, which is usually a good number of years into school, the second language becomes the primary language and takes up the functions of language in relation to mental development.
This is the reason why highly educated Africans who find it easier to express themselves in European languages are few and far between, even when, by way of the process explained above, they in fact possess proficiency levels that are well below those of native speakers of the foreign language.
When educated Africans go abroad to the developed world, particularly places where the languages they have adopted are native, they generally score poorly in tests and exams compared to the locals, compared also to foreigners from countries where tuition in the mother tongue is the norm, for instance Asian students. This is the reason for the fact it is known that on average, African students score the lowest grades of all nationalities.
This isn't just me talking off the top of my head. I have researched the subject matter at length and it is reported the same way, be this in native French (France), English (Britain) or Portuguese (Portugal) speaking countries. I have also been there as a student and observed this phenomenon with my own eyes.
Comparisons done in France of the IQ of black African migrant children to French children revealed that they lagged behind by years, which is no surprise. It was also observed that the Africans were less conceptually dexterous than their French counterparts.
This issue is confounded by the fact subjects are seldom aware that they are underperforming mentally, just as was the case in the Dutch example. This means that we Africans as a whole do not see that there is something wrong. Out of our ranks come the leaders who will make the mistake of thinking there is nothing wrong with the way the education system is set up in our countries, because they are underperforming mentally themselves and cannot as such see this truth. They will make the same error in judgment that the Dutch students made and think that all is well with their mentalities, that the only solution is to build more and more schools while educating and employing as many teachers as possible.
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Loss of the cultural identity.
It is not just the intelligence of the nation that suffers as a result of such gross oversight. In addition, as Rajathurai Ninshathi also reasons in the quote above, the African who goes through such an education process is robbed of his cultural heritage and ultimately loses his mind as a consequence.
Unlikely as this may sound, this process, like the previous one, can be laid out using simple language.
The Encyclopedia Britannica says: "Language interacts with every other aspect of human life in society, and cannot be understood unless considered in this context. Each language is both a working system of communication in the period and in the community in which it is used, and also a product of its past history and the source of its future development".
A simplified dictionary definition states that a language is "a system of terms used by a people sharing a history and a culture".
Language is as such a cultural heritage.
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf), for which research has produced positive empirical evidence of it's validity, that is provisionally accepted by many modern linguists, posits that properties of language affect the structure and content of thought and thus the way humans perceive reality. What this hypothesis stresses is the fact language influences thought rather than the reverse.
According to this hypothesis, "the syntactic-semantic structure of a language becomes an underlying structure for the worldview of a people through the organization of the causal perception of the world and the linguistic categorization of entities. As linguistic categorization emerges as a representation of worldview and causality, it further modifies social perception and thereby leads to a continual interaction between language and perception".
What this means is that in influencing thought, language moulds the worldview of a group. For example, if a language is overly sexist, then sexism will be experienced as normal by the culture that uses the language.
Because language is a cultural heritage that also moulds the worldview of a group, it becomes clear why by forcing English on the Kikuyus, Zulus and Yorubas, French on the Bakongo in the same manner African schools force foreign languages on African children, we take away that which would make the children have a full Kikuyu, Yoruba, Zulu or Bakongo heritage, hence identity.
Africans exposed to education systems that teach in languages other than the mother tongues, and are more conversant in a European language than their own can be considered devoid of a culture, if we also see that language functions as the key that opens the door to a culture. They will find it difficult to fit into the culture of the people whose language they used for education purposes, as well as find their place in their own culture, which can lead to them looking down on it.
Teaching our children foreign tongues, especially at a point in their lives when they are their most impressionable and, considering that children are born culture-less, before they have been introduced to their native culture, is placing them in a situation where they will never know their own culture, nor develop a cultural identity, let alone a worldview with roots in their culture.
An individual without an identity cannot have knowledge of self, knows not the difference between friend and foe, and would under normal circumstances be considered psychotic. The same can be applied to a community or nation. In an antagonistic world, a nation without a worldview is lost among nations with one.
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What Africans who recognize this problem are doing to make things better.
The propositions I have seen advanced for the resolution of this issue, where it has been identified, include allowing children to first master their mother tongue sufficiently before they are introduced to the European language of tuition, which would enhance competency. This entails using the mother tongue some way into the education process before switching to the European language that the country uses as the official language.
Another of the propositions is to simply not wait until they have reached school-going age before introducing them to the foreign language. More and more Africans are introducing their children to the official language while they are infants so that they are more competent in it when they start school. It is hoped as such that this will make it easier for the children to learn in school.
The problem with the former proposal is it doesn't take into account the fact the capacity to learn is always going to be adversely affected when a language other than the mother tongue is used as a medium of instruction, regardless at which point in the schooling process this is done, as evidenced in the Dutch study.
The latter proposal entails substituting a foreign language for the mother tongue at an early stage in the child's development which deprives it of crucial contact with the native culture, which makes matters worse. Also, African parents and/or the African community cannot adequately reinforce in their child the linguistic skills in a European language that will suffice to prevent a poor or second rate command of the foreign tongue, minimal conceptual dexterity, underperformance or retardation.
The reason for this is simply that our African milieu cannot compete with the native French, English or Portuguese environment where this is concerned. Most African parents do not speak these foreign languages as well as native speakers and most Africans do not use foreign languages in and around the home while speaking to other adults.
What this means for the child in Africa is that the language learning process stops at the door/gates of the school, whereas in the countries where the languages are native the child learns new words, new modes of thought, etc., all the time, in school, outside school and in the home ... as long as they are awake and alert.
Incidentally, research done in developed countries has already ascertained that the reason children of minorities who use a language that is different from the official one in their home environment suffer a disadvantage in the learning process is precisely because of this. Their home environment doesn't help them develop linguistic skills the same way that of the children of those who are fluent in the official language does.
This is also applicable to situations where children grow up in homes that do use the official tongue, but where parents possess poor linguistic skills due to the many factors that can cause this, of which a poor educational background, inarticulacy, foreign descent, or general intelligence are some.
For Africa, making the mother tongue or a dialect of it (including any other related language) the medium of instruction is the only way to ensure an end to this problem.
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Debunking the main argument against the use of African languages for tuition.
I read an article on the internet where a well known African writer expressed how he was fascinated by the number of things he can express in the English language as opposed to his local language, and criticized those who wish for what he called "the reinstatement of indigenous tongues" that he considered "poor of vocabulary, awkward, overly and unnecessarily complex of grammar, difficult to read", and as such not modern enough, and definitely not up to the standards of modern times.
This writer didn't give recognition to the fact that his poor grasp of his own language was a result of lack of constant practice. If a vital part of our school years are spent learning how to read, write and express ourselves in our own tongues, then surely the many complex ways we can express ourselves in European languages can be equaled and even surpassed. The adage "practice makes perfect" is apt for this case.
To repeat, the ease with which I can read and understand English is a result of constant practice. The difficulty I experience reading my own language is simply because of lack of practice.
It is very true that, in their present form, African languages are not modern enough. They lack the necessary vocabulary, the numbers of ways one can express self are less than European languages.
For example, in my mother tongue there is only one word for the various conditions that denote a mental challenge such as idiocy, foolishness or stupidity. This means that one has to determine the sense in which the word is being used according to the context, which is an awkward manner of communicating. Most people do not even try to see what the exact meaning they want to convey is, they just use the word and mostly end up with a slight misnomer.
Obviously, the range of consciousness of people communicating in such a manner is greatly diminished. But then all of this is only because we, the users, have not made a conscious effort to upgrade our languages.
One good example that exposes the error in the position adopted by the African writer mentioned before, and a lot of Africans in defense of the present state of affairs is China. The number of characters contained in the standard Chinese dictionary is 47,035 and though only a requirement of from 3,000 to 4,000 characters is necessary for full literacy, it is still a large amount of symbols to master.
The fact the Chinese government has promoted standard simplified sets of Chinese characters that are based partly on phonetic simplifications of the traditional writing form in an attempt to increase literacy is proof of how much harder mastering their own symbols is compared to other systems, yet the Chinese are making economic, technological and social gains without major help from the use of a western language, meaning the language's full functions are in optimum use.
Without the use of simplification, China has achieved a literacy rate of 85% as estimated by UNESCO in its 2000 figures, which is impressive considering the odds.
If the Chinese neglected to learn their language using traditional symbols and adopted English as their language of instruction, then they would have an even tougher time than we do switching back from the foreign language to their own language, written in traditional Chinese characters when practice in one is less than the other
Most world languages are not being used for the purpose of education because they have not been adapted to the demands of the institution, but a look at this tool (language) reveals the process is uncomplicated. In developed countries, it has actually been the norm since the advantage of so doing was realized.
From the Encyclopedia Britannica again, we learn that: "One feature that distinguishes human languages from all known modes of animal communication is its infinite productivity and creativity. Humans are unrestricted in what they can talk about. No area of experience is accepted as necessarily incommunicable, but it may be necessary to adapt a language to cope with new discoveries or modes of thought".
For example, two thousand years ago, the English language was quite different from what it is today. The vocabulary was as basic as that of African languages today. Contact with foreign cultures (Roman, French, etc) is what exposed the English language to new terminology, new concepts, and so on. Slowly but surely English was modernised. Modern English was not handed down to the English in its current form by a god. It went through stages of development, most of them done consciously by the speakers themselves when they realised the advantage of so doing.
This capacity for all languages to undergo change that transforms them in part or completely, from simple to complex, is normal. It can happen by the conscious efforts of its users or naturally. It is possible to modernise any world language, and this is what we need to start doing with earnest in Africa.
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Why it is "idiocation" and not education.
The study done in Burundi by Pathe Diagne exposes the fact Africans are missing out on the use of their full mental potentials. In fact, we are inducing mental backwardness in ourselves.
Africa got stuck with using western languages for tuition that left Africans mired in a cultural existence that is not good for our mental well-being. It is not only that our people cannot be and give their best mentally as a result of this unnatural state of affairs, but also that, even though there is a lot of culture adoption in this setup, there are no pros, just cons.
We Africans become neither ourselves nor complete Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Portuguese, either of which would be better than what we become: carriers of foreign languages who can never even boast of being experts in their use without knowledge of the culture, traditions and customs of the native speakers.
At the time I started researching this issue, I lived in Europe and knew from the numerous debates over the education system: the legislation and policy making responsibilities, the administration, facility maintenance, curriculum planning, teacher preparation and selection, etc., how importantly the "Developed World" regard the role education plays in the maintenance of their way of life.
This much I know, that if there ever was to be a sign that the western education system was flawed in the manner the results of the Burundi study revealed about the institution here in Africa, then efforts to rectify the situation would have been launched in such earnest it would have been as if it were a matter of life and death. It would have come off as a matter that makes the difference between having a meal on one's table or starvation, affluence or abject poverty ... lest the function of education be undermined and society suffer the consequences.
There would definitely have been a public outcry and politicians in the opposition would most definitely have capitalised on this to the point they would have made it a campaign issue. In countries where high achievement is everything, such as Germany, Japan or even China, heads would have rolled, figuratively speaking.
This is not to say Africans do not understand the role education plays in the welfare of their communities, but it would appear from the continent-wide lack of reaction to the Burundi study that a wholesome comprehension of the institution is lacking.
The importance of education in our modern world requires that we formulate the overall objectives, content, organization and strategies of education. It is not just enough to build as many schools as possible like Africans across the continent are doing, but we must see to it that they are able to get us where we want to be as a society.
Here, we must ensure that the quantity and quality of labor required to properly run our corporate entity is just right.
In this light, it is prudent to change aspects of the education process that hamper the objectives we set as soon as we are aware of them, otherwise we settle for second best or, as the case is in the present, schools become the vehicle by which so much goes wrong, by which we fail, the weak link in the system.
The purpose of education is to transmit knowledge and cultural heritage as well as influence the social and intellectual growth of the individual. A more philosophical way of looking at it is provided by Martin Luther King, Jr. In an article published on campus for the Maroon Tiger Morehouse College publication featured from the 1st of January to February 28, 1947, he says:
"...education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life. Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one's self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda...
...The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living."
The Burundi study shows us, and very clearly at that, that the education process in Africa is not good enough where the institution's overall aims and objectives are concerned. When we fully understand the implications of this, we can see how it can adversely affect a country's very prosperity, including among other things its own capacity to hold its own in a competitive world. This is factual when the performance of Africa is reviewed from the time the countries gained independence. This observation remains valid with or without taking into account the negative impact of neo-colonialism. What's at issue here is how competent the people were to understand and address the situation they found themselves in.
Given the African has the potential, the conclusion must be drawn there is something going wrong with his education. Diagne's study actually provides us with the problem and resolution if we can only see this.
It is well known that IQ scores tend to be genetic and that this is also related to performance in school. But because an individual's IQ can be improved, a group's average IQ score can be improved as well. Obviously, an Africa where an average of 65% of students pass exams, as opposed to only 5% in the current scenario, represents an Africa with a significant increase in the average IQ. This means that a lot of our bright people are failing to show their true intelligence in the education process, not because they are genetically dumb, but because there is something preventing them from doing as well as they should.
At the risk of appearing to infer that I am being simplistic, I should state I am aware there are a lot of factors that should be taken into consideration before drawing the kind of conclusions that I have made here, one of which would be a follow up of the Diagne process throughout the education life of the subjects. Only if the margins in the pass rates observed in the study can be sustained throughout the learning process, everywhere that this is done, can the result be considered conclusive.
Frankly, I cannot see how the performance of these pupils at a later stage in the education process could be different given what we are dealing with here is the foundation ... given the fact a good foundation is the most important part of the education process.
To stress this point, Africa does have a low average IQ issue that is fortunately a problem that can be solved in a mere generation's time because it is not genetic, as long as we Africans modernize our tongues and change the language of tuition in our schools.
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The will, the way: Blueprint for the instatement of mother tongues as languages of tuition in African schools.
The usual objection raised whenever the issue of such a massive scale overhaul of the education system is raised, especially on an impoverished continent, is cost. Indeed, the process of changing the language of tuition will cost a lot of money and time, but it is an investment, and a prudent one at that. The Investment will definitely be worth it in the long run. We can be sure of this if we understand the role education plays in the life of man and society and also realise that we cannot go wrong in this.
Quite frankly, this procedure is one of those things that we cannot afford not to do, and it has been too long overdue.
The good news is that such a venture doesn't have to be massively expensive. To spare the costs, it is not necessary to change all the books at once, but to do it gradually, starting with a single age group in a single school year.
As the first group progresses through the system, those to come will simply follow through their footsteps, through an improving system that is being tested and adjusted every step of the way.
The crucial thing is that we abstain from thinking this is something that we can only do with/or through our current African governments. The surest way of ensuring that this fails is to put the people running our governments in charge of the process. They will park it and forget about it, and that will be the death of this precious venture.
We will have no choice but to deal with the establishment where it's imperative. For instance, the schools will have to meet the criteria for registration and be registered. They have to remain in compliance with the law for the duration that they are operating. Other than that we the people have all that it takes to make this possible. We can build these schools the same way we are building private schools. We can create courses that educate the teachers and other staff we hire so that they can do the work that's required of them.
Attracting parents to bring pupils to our schools isn't difficult given what they will learn will be the same that is taught in other schools. They will gain knowledge and skills just like children in regular schools, and even better because they will understand more of what they are being taught.
To ensure that parents aren't put off by the idea their children will have learning difficulties when transfered to regular schools that use a foreign language for tuition, we simply make the official language mandatory to learn. The vocabulary that is learnt has to be derived from that which children in the regular schools attain each school year.
A time will surely come in future when it will become plain that enlightened self interest has become the guiding principe for our governments. But until such a time, the best bet of this succeeding is if it stays a community based project with the option to include government participation if it brings better rewards that way.
Given we will effectively be forging languages, the question of whether we are qualified enough for the task is vital. We should also ask what the right qualifications should be? Is a degree in linguistics sufficient? Do we need grammarians, and if so, what should their language of study be?
Most African languages are already written. The only problem is that the process was guided by foreigners with little to no command of the African languages they were working with, who used unqualified local people for the nitty-gritty. This accounts for the faulty compiling of African dictionaries.
For example, it is not true that African languages are compound languages. The idea that they are was a product of not having sufficient knowledge of the languages, lack of imagination or a lack of proper linguistic training on the part of those who could speak the languages.
It was taken for granted, for instance, that the response given for a request to name an object was the whole noun for that object in African languages. The response or answer would usually include the article, which is the normal manner responses to such questions are made in all human languages globally. Asking an englishman what a metallic object on wheels is will prompt the response of "a car", rather than merely "car" without the article. "A pen", "a cottage", "a ship", is the usual response you get from people when you ask them what something is, which doesn't mean the whole response is what that object is called. In a situation where people aren't aware of this, or are simply not using their heads, then any language can be wrongly considered a compound language, when in fact it's not.
A good example to give of this is how a name for a local Bantu ethnicity got compounded. The noun in question is Luvale, which is the name of an ethnicity found in the north-western part of Zambia, south-west Congo and north-eastern Angola. When a luvale mention their ethnicity by name, they say they are "ka luvale". This would translate as "a luvale" in English. Tribes around them tend to call the group "ba ka-luvale" by adding their own language specific article to what they hear in the response. This would be akin to the Dutch calling the English "De an-Englishman".
Another example is how numbers in Bantu languages are always uttered with an article preceding the noun, and erroneously compiled as compound words in all Bantu dictionaries.
Yet another example is when speakers of African languages who are proficient in a European language find that single words in English/French/Portuguese require the use of more words in the translation because a stand-alone term with the same meaning doesn't exist in the respective African language. This can lead to the error of assuming that African languages use compound words, especially when the translated phrase is already set, and used as is by Africans.
When a language is unpacked completely, new terms that are in fact proper nouns, and sometimes concepts, emerge. Standing alone, these words will sound unfamiliar to most of the users of the language who have become accustomed to only recognizing meaning in them when they are used in a compound word, and will as such be considered not to be stand-alone terms. For example, when the compound word Bantu is removed of the article, the noun we are left with is "ntu", which will sound unfamiliar to users of the language who will erroneously conclude that it cannot possibly be a stand-alone term. Yet "ntu" is in fact a proper noun and concept, abstract and concrete, with manifold uses once freed from the compounded format of the language.
A new breed of African linguists has emerged who are studying African languages and exploring unfamiliar words within compound words, and discovering whole concepts in them. Some are finding a relationship between these concepts and ancient ones that were known and used by ancient civilisations such as Kemet. Discoveries are being made of what words denote and connote that are making sense and adding depth and colour to expressions. And it's not just the nouns that are yielding secrets once they are detached from the articles. Articles themselves are also revealing the same.
African languages in general are much richer and much more complex once they have been properly understood. And it is no surprise that this is the case. They are in fact the oldest languages on the planet, and there should be much more to be found within them compared to the category of the younger tongues, of which all European languages belong, including latin. It is clear from this that the African mind stands to benefit immensely from the proper understanding and use of these ancestral tongues.
Of course, the process of unpacking the languages can get very complicated, and mistakes are possible, but if we put our heads together and use the right people, we can easily straiten it all out, properly.
The thing to always keep in mind here is the fact articles, verbs, adjectives, etc., are as distinct in African languages as they are in any other language on earth. It just takes recognizing each item in the sentences.
Our dictionaries will have to be recompiled and, for this, we shall require qualified grammarians, in foreign languages unfortunately because we have no choice, but they will have to work alongside highly erudite community elders who are demonstratively proficient in their respective African language.
And so on.
As already mentioned, all of this doesn't have to happen at once. It can be just a step ahead of the learning process of the first pupils, all the way up to the completion of their education. Starting by keeping it simple is how we can avoid forging tongues that will cause confusion in the end.
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Further Reading
"The Interaction of Culture and Communication in Africa" Pathe Diagne. Senegalese linguist. UNESCO press.
Url: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000084304
"Understanding of the Importance of Mother Tongue Learning" Rajathurai Ninshathi. International Journal of Trends in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN 2456-5470 volume-5 issue-1, December 2020, pp 77-80.
Url: https://www.ijtsrd.com/humanities-and-the-arts/sociology/35846/understanding-of-the-importance-of-mother-tongue-learning/rajathurai-nishanthi
"An African Computer Revisited: Theory of the Adaptation to Language of the Speech Apparatus" Mukazo Mukazo Vunda. Africa's Lost Generations and other Essays. First published by Lulu Press 2010, pp 125-134. ASIN B005D2XBI8
Url https://www.amazon.co.uk/Africas-Lost-Generations-other-Essays/dp/B005D2XBI8
https://www.lulu.com/shop/mukazo-mukazo-vunda/africas-lost-generations-and-other-essays/paperback/product-14411679.html
"Why Mother Language-Based Education is Essential" UNESCO press. 18th February 2022.
Url: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/why-mother-language-based-education-essential
"Optimising Learning, Education and Publishing in Africa: The Language Factor" A Review and Analysis of Theory and Practice in Mother-Tongue and Bilingual Education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Edited by Adama Ouane and Christine Glanz. Published jointly by the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) in June 2011. ISBN 978-92-820-1170-6.
Url: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263762466_Optimising_learning_education_and_publishing_in_Africa_the_language_factor_a_review_and_analysis_of_theory_and_practice_in_mother-tongue_and_bilingual_education_in_sub-Saharan_Africa
"The Purpose of Education" Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Morehouse College campus newspaper the Maroon Tiger from January 1st to February 28, 1947.
Url: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/purpose-education
"Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" J.A. Lucy, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001
Url: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/sapir-whorf-hypothesis
"Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought" Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt, Webb Phillips.
Url: https://philpapers.org/rec/GETLIM
"How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think" Lera Boroditsky.
Url: https://irl.umsl.edu/oer/13/
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