MOTHER-TONGUE LITERACY AS A MEANS AND AS AN END
John E. Joseph
University of Edinburgh
EU/Saide Conference on Multilingual Resources for Early Literacy Development,
Centurion, Pretoria, South Africa, 3-4 June 2014
1 Introduction
It is an honour to be part of this historic event, and I want to congratulate everyone
who has worked on the African Storybook Project on the great achievement which this
launch represents. The project is something truly wonderful. It also happens to sit at the
intersection of my various professional interests as an applied linguist. These include
applied linguistics and language teaching, obviously, but also language and identity, since
‘mother tongue’ is very much an identity-centred concept;1 and language and embodied
knowledge, since, again, what distinguishes one’s mother tongue from a language learned
later is the extent to which it is not just mentally processed but is absorbed into the whole
of one’s nervous system, indeed has largely shaped one’s nervous system. Another area
in which I work is language and politics,2 and I expect most of you will agree that the
politics of language and literacy are at the heart of what the African Storybook Project
must contend with, particularly in order to be accepted as part of official education.
The other area of my research is the history of linguistics, and I believe you are
making history here. I shall also draw on my knowledge of the history of languages,
writing and education in commenting on where, from my perspective, this project sits,
what obstacles it faces and is likely to face, and what strategies may help overcome them.
But I know that I am speaking to people whose real, practical knowledge is greater than
my own, and I expect, and indeed look forward to having you inflect, correct and contest
the things I have to say.
Last October I gave a talk at the Cape Town Language and Development conference,
which was focussed on the linguistic aspects of the UN Millennium Goals. I pointed out
aspects of these Goals that are in direct or indirect contradiction with the UNESCO policy
on Language Vitality and Endangerment, and hoped to contribute to bridging the gap
between them by rethinking language vitality in terms of “How Languages Get their
Mojo”. I discussed six ‘mojos’ that languages possess in greater or lesser quantity: the
identity mojo – the supra-material mojo – the heritage mojo – the getting-on mojo – the
modernity mojo – the resistance mojo. Three of these, the heritage, getting-on and
modernity mojos, are most closely bound up with the African Storybook Project, so I’ll
begin by revisiting what I had to say about them. After that, I’ll move on to consider
multilingualism and then literacy, each in its cognitive, educational and political
dimension. I’ll conclude by offering some suggestions of things to bear in mind as this
project develops, based on experiences from African and other contexts, though I’m well
aware that such experiences do not always transfer.
2 The heritage mojo
In Europe the term ‘heritage language’ is used in two ways. On the one hand, it
means an indigenous language in a multilingual situation where a colonial or imperial
language is dominant. On the other hand, it means the home language of a minority
immigrant community. So in Scotland, Bengali is a heritage language for many people
born in Bengal, and also – in a significantly different sense – for their children and their
grandchildren, whose knowledge of the language may be limited, often to the
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disappointment of the grandparents, who would like them to be bilingual. Gaelic too is a
heritage language in Scotland, although the last monolingual speakers died in the late 20th
century. There are people for whom it is the mother tongue, but they are all bilingual in
English. The ‘heritage language’ status of Gaelic is not however restricted to people of
Scottish descent; rather, it is regarded as a heritage language of Scotland, the nation,
belonging equally to all who speak it, which includes more than a few Bengalis.
Heritage languages possess for their speakers and partisans the ability to form a
super-material, magical connection to the past, to origins, to ancestors (real or imagined),
to a mythical ‘first time’ in which things were more themselves, truth was truer. Such a
time is mythical just because it has vanished. It has left the realm of the material for a
purely verbal realm of memory-texts, in various forms.
The language itself is that verbal realm in its essence, but it has a lingering
materiality. We certainly speak of languages as though they were things (that can be
‘acquired’, for instance), sometimes even living things (that can ‘die’). If we follow the
Romantic tradition of believing that the structure of a language limits what its speakers
think, or shapes it, or at least inclines it in a certain direction, we risk underestimating
what individuals are capable of.
If we take an unsentimental look around us, we are bound to admit that the heritage
mojo works strongly on a minority, but weakly, or even contrarily, on the majority. In
residually Gaelic-speaking areas of the Scottish highlands and islands, the heritage mojo
casts its spell on recent incomers, who take up Gaelic and send their children to Gaeliclanguage schools (also under the influence of the identity mojo – they do not want their
kids to be permanent outsiders). This can weaken the heritage mojo for some natives to
the area, who reindex Gaelic in terms of a social class identity, specifically middle class, of
which they want no part. But for many, hearing Asians and South Americans speak Gaelic
gives it the mojo of a world language.
It is hard for us as linguists to appreciate the fragility of the heritage mojo, when we
tend ourselves to be under its spell, and to have a vested interest in supporting the
minority for whom the heritage mojo really works. We can fool ourselves into imagining
that they are not a minority at all – or that the majority have been forced into a false
consciousness by greedy corporate interests bent on wiping out all but a small number
of world languages. We should always be wary of conspiracy theories: they can never be
disproven, so it’s impossible to distinguish fact from fantasy.
The heritage mojo finds itself in fairly direct opposition to the modernity mojo. Most
people no longer perceive the two as being in competition for them as individuals, but
that is only because the modernity mojo has become the default, the superior one in the
hierarchy.
There is some complementarity: heritage matters, because it underpins identity,
and for many of us it gives a plot, a meaning, to get us through our lives in the modern
world. It is in societies where heritage is strong that modernity takes on more value,
rather than being assumed as a given. In the so-called Arab Spring of 2011 a shift was
detectable in the perception of Arabic and English in the Middle East and North Africa,
with Arabic taking on more modernity mojo, and this has persisted even as the ‘Spring’
has turned distinctly autumnal.
Nowadays, giving a minority language the modernity mojo usually involves using
recent technologies and media. This can go quite some way to dispelling any exclusive
association of it with the past, though it depends on the content. Most effective is when
members of the language community themselves use the technology to communicate
with one another. There is, however, scope for more creative uses that might develop the
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supra-material mojo: what UNESCO calls “writing, the arts, and/or the media” –
supported by the government, but not in a way that, as tends to happen, sees such support
go almost exclusively to output that appeals only to a narrow élite.
3 The getting-on mojo
The getting-on mojo is the long suit of English and every other world language.
English has so much of it that it is hard to persuade English speakers to learn other
languages. Perceptions of the value of bilingualism set the tone: in the English-speaking
world, it is valued primarily as a middle-class luxury.
Two mother-tongue Gaelic speakers I have interviewed, Dolly and Anna, both in
their 90s, have deep pride in their linguistic heritage yet nonetheless felt it their duty to
help their children “get on”, as they put it, by using only English with them. They are now
unsympathetic to the spell which the heritage mojo casts on their grandchildren, and
unable to comprehend the younger generation’s resentment at the perceived loss.
The disinclination of English speakers to learn other languages actually increases
the mojo of English. It makes it all the more necessary for speakers of other languages to
learn it. But at that point a disadvantage kicks in: Europe is now full of multilingual young
Swedes, Dutchmen, Poles and others who can come to Britain for education and
employment, whilst the number who can move in the opposite direction is woefully
limited. Yet even yes this is an addition to rather than a subtraction from the getting-on
mojo of English.
Job prospects in Gaelic have improved with the expansion of Gaelic broadcasting by
the BBC, the provision of Gaelic-language texts by the Scottish Government and the
increase in state-funded Gaelic-language education programmes. Students of Gaelic can
at least claim some ‘getting on mojo’ that they could not claim a decade ago; and it could
snowball over the years, as with Welsh. Still, against English, even other world languages,
or strong national languages like Afrikaans, do well to hold their own.
4 Multilingualism
Multilingualism is traditionally regarded as a problem, not universally, but by
anyone who has a message he wants to convey to someone who doesn’t know his
language. For the internal purposes of a nation or tribe, having their own language,
different from and above all not understood by their neighbours and rivals, is a great boon
for identity and cohesion. We only have to shift the scale on Google Maps up one notch
for their internal monolingualism to turn into multilingualism on the larger scale. So what
is an asset on Scale One can become both an asset and a deficit on Scale Two. It remains
an asset when you don’t want the next village to know what you are planning, on the
battleground or in the marketplace. But it turns into a deficit when you need to co-operate
with them, for instance to fend off jointly a threat from Country or Village or Clan or Tribe
C from over the mountain. There is also the matter of exogamy, but there the linguistic
considerations aren’t so clear: couples who don’t share a language seem to adapt, and I
know of at least one case where a happy marriage ended after the wife mastered her
husband’s language enough to realise that she couldn’t stand him.
So, three initial conclusions. First, multilingualism is a problem or an asset
depending on the scale at which you’re looking at it, and the particular situation you’re
in. It is as short-sighted for linguists to ignore the problems it poses as it is for others to
treat it as simply a barrier to communication, education and fulfilling the UN Millennium
Goals. Secondly, the multilingual space is an inherently politicised space, where the
getting-on mojo won’t always carry the day but can be expected to frame the discourse
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and the decisions about what language is appropriate in institutional contexts. Some
institutions will favour small minority languages, but their existence must be sustained
by heritage and identity mojos powerful enough to justify their existence in the face of
the getting-on and modernity mojos. Literacy has a delicate role to play in this respect.
Thirdly, we need to bear in mind that the heritage which one person finds liberating,
his sister may find oppressive, and vice-versa. People differ in what they value where
education is concerned. The evidence which linguists and educational psychologists can
offer them will never end these debates; at most it will tip the balance of choice for a
majority at a given moment. And that is as it should be. Science is not meant to offer a
value system: it is not religion.
We can see this principle in action in the cognitive dimension of multilingualism.
Bialystock (2009) provides a summary of research on the plusses and minuses of
multilingualism for cognitive development across the lifespan.3 This development is
measured both through laboratory testing and through physiological scans of brains. It is
by now well established in such research that “bilingual children control a smaller
vocabulary in each language than their monolingual peers”, a finding confirmed to a
“highly significant” statistical degree by Bialystock’s own investigations.4 My colleague
Antonella Sorace, a specialist in second-language acquisition and bilingualism, is always
quick to point out that, if you add together bilingual children’s lexicons in their two
languages, the sum total is significantly larger than a monolingual child’s vocabulary. But
the fact is that children are assessed cognitively and educationally in one language at a
time, and vocabulary size plays an important part. This ‘bilingual deficit’ in this aspect of
language development persists into adult life, though here, as Bialystock notes, “the
measure […] is not usually vocabulary size but rather access to vocabulary, or lexical
retrieval”. Multilingual people “are slower in picture naming ([…]), obtain lower scores
on verbal fluency tasks ([…]), encounter more tip of the tongue experiences ([…]),
demonstrate poorer word identification through noise ([…]), and experience more
interference in lexical decision”. Various explanations have been put forward for this, and
researchers continue to explore and argue over them.
At the same time, the same researchers have consistently found a cognitive
‘bilingual advantage’ when it comes to executive control and conflict resolution. By
executive control is meant the ability to focus and sustain attention, and by conflict
resolution is meant “the ability to solve problems that contain conflicting or misleading
cues”.5 Bilingual children develop these abilities at an earlier age than monolingual
children, and in the case of conflict resolution, bilinguals retain this advantage through
each subsequent stage of life, into old age.
So, from a cognitive developmental perspective, should multilingual education be
encouraged, tolerated or resisted? First of all, I myself don’t believe that it makes sense
to strip away what I would call the ‘political’ aspects of this question and try to answer it
in a strictly cognitive way. But if we did that, we’d still have to admit that our answer
would depend on how much we value the size of a person’s vocabulary versus their ability
to solve problems and how early they can focus attention. We do value both – and yet that
valuing is essentially institutional. Certainly it is bound up with educational values.
We also need to remember that the research which has established these cognitive
correlations with multilingualism is statistically-based, meaning that a finding becomes
a fact when it passes a certain mathematical threshold for significance. It is scientifically
true that “bilingualism correlates with smaller vocabulary” or that “bilingualism
correlates with higher conflict resolution ability” based on six people out of ten, or 53 out
of 100. For each of the individuals tested, too, vocabulary size is not ‘large’ or ‘small’ but
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on a sliding scale. Inevitably, in fact, some monolinguals will show a larger vocabulary
and lower conflict resolution ability than some bilinguals do. So the bilingual advantage
and disadvantage are quite fine-grained – and yet when calculating their value and cost
within an educational context we tend to treat them as black-and-white, binary facts. That
is a mistake.
5 Literacy
The educational context in which the African Storybook Project is set is one in which
European languages, particularly English and French, are dominant. Literacy too is
generally bound up with these languages. In part, the Storybook Project offers a means to
achieve the goal of literacy in the world languages, which opens the doors to secondary
and university education and work opportunities at many levels. These are, remember,
the languages with the getting-on and modernity mojos, and literacy in English lets young
people add these to their individual linguistic mojo hands.
In other respects, the Project contributes directly to the goals of raising the status
of smaller, more localised languages, and of mother-tongue literacy for their speakers.
These are the languages with the strong heritage and identity mojos. But there is no
reason in principle why they can’t also have some modernity mojo, by virtue of being
written and especially of being on-line. It raises their status, changes how they are
thought of, both by speakers and by outsiders witnessing their use. Indeed speakers may
actually regard their mother tongue less as heritage than as obstacle, until they see them
written down, in meaningful contexts.
I said that there is no obstacle in principle to languages being written for purposes
of mother-tongue literacy. But, as you are well aware, there are practical obstacles and
problems. Some of them are technical, and all of them are political in the sense of
involving institutional power of one sort or another. The first problem is that writing a
language is not as straightforward an undertaking as it seems. The African Storybook
Project website mentions this, though it’s tucked away in the FAQs under “How do we
assure the quality of translations of stories in a variety of languages?”:
Many of the languages that are being used are not yet standardised, and others
have competing orthographies, with not much agreement about the ‘correct’
form. So readers are bound to disagree with many of the choices made in
respect of translation. If you disagree, you can always create another version
of the story for your purposes. However, we are attempting to get the basics
right – grammatical and writing conventions should be correct. And we invite
you to assist us to do this.
I think the key statement here is “you can always create another version of the story for
your purposes”. That is the great strength of this Project. It’s essential not to let it get
overwhelmed by considerations about ‘languages’; indeed the first sentence above, with
its “not yet”, implies that the goal is ultimately for all African languages to be
standardised. That may seem important for increasing their modernity mojo, but as I’ll
explain, it’s a double-edged sword where the heritage and identity mojos are concerned.
Nowadays, for African languages, it is assumed that alphabetic writing will be used,
and specifically the Roman alphabet. It seems a neutral choice, but historically it is not:
after all, the Phoenician, Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Amharic, Ge’ez, Hebrew, Syriac, Tifinagh
(Berber); Osmanya, Borama and Kaddare of Somalia, and hieroglyphic writing systems
all have a history in Africa. For some African languages the Semitic systems, which
normally indicate only consonants, are potentially more efficient. There is also the Vai
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syllabary, a system with one symbol for each syllable in the language, developed in
Liberia in the first third of the 19th century; and another ten or so alphabets and
syllabaries developed later for various West African languages. And closer to where we
sit, the Mwangwego script developed in Malawi starting in the late 1970s. The choice of
one of these ‘indigenous’ writing systems for the African Storybook Project is not
unthinkable. It might strengthen the heritage and identity mojo; it might even be a more
effective first step into literacy for some languages. I don’t know that it would diminish
the modernity mojo for those languages, compared to writing them in the Roman
alphabet. But it would be harder to make the case that mother-tongue literacy in the
Mwangwego script is a direct route to literacy in English or French. Who knows whether
that is really so, given that it has never been tested – but the mojos a language has are a
matter of perception, not of science. If the perception is that mother-tongue literacy in
the Roman alphabet is the most effective stepping stone to literacy in English, then
writing in Roman script brings getting-on mojo with it.
Ok, we’ve chosen our alphabet, and now and now the serious technical problems
begin. There may be sound distinctions, phonemic distinctions, without equivalent in
other languages. Moreover, in no language is it obvious where words begin and end. A
popular American song of the 1940s was based on this fact. It went:
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey two wooden shoe
It is impenetrable to mother-tongue English speakers, until later in the song the first line
is rearticulated as Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.
We need to remember too that most of the languages of sub-Saharan Africa are tone
languages, where the relative pitch of vowels, or their contour, rising, falling or level – or
both pitch and contour – are just as distinctive, just as meaningful as the distinction
between a and u in English. There are systems for indicating these tones in writing, but
they are not likely to occur intuitively to speakers of such languages who are trying to
adapt their mother tongue to the Roman alphabet. Simply to ignore the tones would yield
written texts that are ambiguous, potentially embarrassingly so. In Chinese, such an
attempt would make a story about a man riding a horse look like the man was riding
somebody’s mother – possibly a more compelling story, but maybe not for the African
Storybook Project.
The biggest of the sub-Saharan languages are not tone languages, and that notably
includes kiSwahili, which developed, and then was deliberately developed, out of a trade
language used widely as a second language up and down the east coast for
communication amongst speakers with different mother tongues, a process believed to
make languages more regular and simpler than languages without such a history. The
English language too is thought to have simplified in this way between the Old and
Modern English periods, through everyday commerce and intermarriage amongst the
Celts, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans and Danes who populated Britain.
As explained in Joseph & Newmeyer (2012), from the 1940s until the early 2000s
linguists steered clear of any talk of simplicity or complexity of languages, insisting as a
matter of dogma that all languages are equally complex, and that apparent simplicity in
one aspect of a language’s structure, its sound system, for example, must be compensated
for in another aspect, such as its prosodics or its grammar.6 The dogma has now been
overturned as ideologically motivated and anti-scientific, and complexity is not only a
broachable subject but a vibrant area of research. One could well imagine it being raised
in a discussion of mother-tongue literacy, in this sense: becoming literate in a mother
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tongue that has not undergone the simplification that ‘big’ languages tend to undergo
through their use by large and divergent populations, will present certain difficulties that
literacy in a language like kiSwahili does not. This does not affect the case for mothertongue literacy as an end in itself. Neither does it knock down the argument for mothertongue literacy as a means to general literacy. But it may need to be factored into the
‘means’ equation.
Back to the details. Word divisions and phonemic tone present problems on the
prosodic level, but even on the strictly lexical one, we disagree widely over whether
common sense, for instance, must always be written as two words, even in a phrase such
as common sense philosophy, where it functions as a compound adjective, or should
appear as one word, commonsense, or be hyphenated, common-sense. This is for a
language with a long and widespread written tradition, so imagine the problems that
occur when languages do not have such a tradition.
Here is an example from English: Don’t you. If you wrote it phonetically, it would
come out something like Donchu. A native speaker knows that it’s two words, or three, or
two and a half; but where is the break in Donchu? Somewhere in the ch; but it wouldn’t
work to divide it as Donc hu, which I would read as Donk hoo. Speakers of English also
know, though, that the word you is part of Donchu, and that the first part of Donchu is the
same Don’t as in Don’t we or Don’t they. Furthermore, if my mother was really upset, she
would say: Don’t – you – dare. This was rare. I heard it maybe once every three years,
usually directed at my father. Even so, my mother tongue included two variants, Donchu
and Don’t you; and becoming literate in English included learning to write the rarely
heard form, not the everyday one. And there is an advantage in that: first because it lets
me see that Donchu isn’t an isolated word but is composed of meaningful units, and
secondly because my mother tongue can also be read by Scots whose mothers didn’t say
donchu, but djyaenoo in a question (dyaenoo ken? “Don’t you know?”), and dinnaye in a
command (dinnaye dare! “Don’t you dare!”).7
Each language throws up unique problems of its own: Gaelic, for example, has initial
consonant mutation, so the name Màiri [ma:ri] (Mary) becomes a Mhàiri, pronounced [a
va:ri], in the vocative case, when someone is calling to Mary. Similar mutations occur in
some African languages, including Dholuo in Kenya and Tanzania, and Fula in West Africa.
How do you deal with such phenomena? Again, three choices: you could always spell the
name as Màiri, consistently, leaving it to readers to make the consonant change. We do
this with the most common word in English, the, spelling it the same when it is
pronounced [ðǝ] (before a consonant) or [ði] (before a vowel). Or you could consistently
spell it as it sounds, writing [ma:ri] with an M and [va:ri] with a V. That may seem to an
outsider to make the most sense, but not to Gaelic speakers, for whom Màiri and Mhàiri
are the same word and shouldn’t be represented as two different words. That leaves the
third option, the one actually used, which is a compromise: the M is kept for consistency
of the word, but an h inserted after it as a signal of the pronunciation change. It works for
Gaelic speakers, and it utterly confuses non-Gaelic speakers who expect to be able to read
off anything written in the Roman alphabet. That too has certain advantages, acting as a
sort of wall of linguistic identity – though in the long run I think languages gain more mojo
by inviting outsiders in than by keeping them at bay. But that’s a language-political
matter.
Another option would have been to add some mark to the M, a dot or hook
underneath, when it’s pronounced v. Some of you know that this was the solution initially
settled on for Shona, in what is now Zimbabwe, in the writing system devised for it at the
start of the 1930s by Clement Doke, a linguist whose parents were missionaries. The
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whistled sibilants of Shona were written as ȿ and ɀ with ‘swish tails’, which was fine for
handwriting but required specially adapted typewriters. They were replaced in the 1950s
with sv and zv, as in the name Tsvangirai. Shona b d m and u with similar hooks or tails to
represent phonemic variants in Doke’s orthography were replaced with an h following
the unadapted Roman letter, just as in Gaelic.
6 The ‘standard’
A still more vexing language-political question is which dialect should represent the
language in its written form. Shona covers a vast language area from the Kalahari to the
Indian Ocean and from the Zambezi River to the Limpopo, with more than 14 million
speakers. The form which Doke settled on was based on the Karanga dialect; and it has
endured as ‘Standard Shona’, but it is no Shona speaker’s mother tongue, any more than
Standard English is any English speaker’s mother tongue. You don’t speak Standard
English until you’ve learned it in school; child English is non-standard by definition, and
the vast majority of adult speakers speak dialects that may be ‘standard’ in the particular
area they inhabit, but not when it comes to, say, writing for publication. And all English
speakers are schooled in a subject called ‘English’, as I was, all through primary and
secondary level at least. Schools in Zimbabwe make space for mother-tongue dialects of
Shona, alongside Standard Shona and English.
Compare this with Venda, a rather big language, with 1.2 million L1 speakers in
Limpopo Province and another 80,000 in neighbouring countries. It has nine recognised
dialects, but not a settled ‘standard’ one. For purposes of traditional publishing, one of
these dialects would need to be selected as the basis of the written language, and that
selection process has rarely been an easy or uncontested one. Getting one dialect
accepted as the basis of written Venda means that, for speakers of the other eight dialects,
learning to read and write written Venda will not exactly be ‘mother-tongue’ literacy. But
that holds for traditional publication. Part of the genius of the African Storybook is that
dialect versions of stories can be made available without the sort of capital investment
that print requires. Mother-tongue literacy is thus much more viable for millions more
children, and adults. It won’t contribute in the same way to enhancing the status and
‘vitality’ of ‘the Venda language’; on the contrary it could be seen as working against it, in
the interest of mother-tongue, or rather mother-dialect, literacy. People are bound to
disagree over which should take priority.
But let’s say we’ve overcome the dialect problem. There is still another big hurdle
in getting from the storybook level to using the mother-tongue in education, beyond basic
literacy. Course materials will need to be produced, in subjects which all speakers of the
language have heretofore studied in another language. Even basic science and maths
demand adaptation of a Greco-Latin-Arabic-based vocabulary that is ‘universal’. Germans
tried for a long time to resist that universal vocabulary, creating words such as
Wasserstoff (water stuff) for hydrogen, and Sauerstoff for oxygen, but already chlorine is
Chlor, and helium is Helium. They resisted because they thought the ‘borrowed’ words
diluted the essence, the soul of the German language. Such feelings have not entirely
disappeared. During my stay in Cape Town, I met a Xhosa woman who believes very
passionately that it is wrong to speak Xhosa using the click consonants, because they were
borrowed into the language in relatively recent times and thus distort the true essence of
the Xhosa language.
That is a very strong view; but it is related to a much more widespread
phenomenon, or paradox: that the heritage mojo of a language is threatened as its
modernity mojo is increased by applying it to present-day urban contexts. Not only can
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the emergence of a particular dialect as the basis of the standard alienate speakers of
other dialects, but the elaboration of the standard to serve in modern contexts means
introducing modern technological terms. This sometimes threatens the ‘authenticity’ of
the language in the eyes of its supporters, for whom the heritage mojo is very strong, and
who value the language because of how it makes them feel connected to a more
traditional, rural way of life that they or their parents or grandparents grew up in. That’s
the tradition they want to extend to their children, and it can feel watered down when
you elaborate the language with words for shopping malls and blogging. This is what the
linguist-ethnographer Misty Jaffe observed in her more than twenty years in Corsica: the
Corsican language, thrived on its identity, heritage and resistance mojos so long as French
was the official language and the sole language of education.8 When Corsican finally
became the language of early education, and those who had advocated for it opened the
newly published textbooks in Corsican that their children were assigned, the reaction of
many was: what’s this? It’s not my Corsican, the way my mother spoke it. Time will tell
whether the trade-off of heritage for modernity is sustainable in this case, and indeed
whether mother-tongue literacy will empower the getting-on mojo of Corsican.
7 Conclusion
I have tried to lay out some of the difficulties that this Project may encounter,
realising that many of you are already well aware of them, and indeed I admire you for
not letting them impede this wonderful Project unduly. I understand too the need to softpedal the obstacles and encourage people to have a go at writing stories in their mother
tongue. At the same time, it’s best to be prepared for the problems that will ensue. Given
the vast extent of dialect variation, it’s not as though a simple toolkit can be provided that
will mend all that needs mending. People with experience need to be on hand to talk
about what has worked, and how well, with comparable problems in other contexts. And
even when mother-tongue literacy is achieved, it is not going to be the cure-all that we
sometimes make it out to be, particularly when we’re trying to persuade people of its
value as a means to the end of literacy in English or French. Just as the bilingual advantage
and deficit are statistical tendencies, most children may find mother-tongue literacy the
most efficient route to general literacy, but not all will, above all when the mother tongue
isn’t really their mother tongue but a standardised version, giving them three languages
to master.
In the end, the African Storybook Project is a utopian undertaking. I mean that in
the best sense of the word. 77 years ago the Spaniard José Ortega y Gasset published an
essay entitled “La miseria y el esplendor de la traducción” (The poverty and the splendour
of translation). It picks up on a venerable belief, encountered frequently in writings on
translation from the 18th century to the present day, that, actually, translation is
impossible: you cannot make a text say exactly the same thing in Language X as it does in
Language Y. Ortega says that, yes, indeed, translation is utopian, and therefore
impossible, but that at the same time,
[T]o emphasize its impossibility is very far from depriving the occupation of
translating of meaning, for no one would ever think of considering it absurd
for us to speak to each other in our mother tongue yet, nevertheless, that is
also a utopian exercise. [...] Man, when he begins to speak, does so because he
thinks that he is going to be able to say what he thinks. Well, this is illusory.
Language doesn’t offer that much. It says, a little more or less, a portion of what
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we think, while it sets an insurmountable obstacle in place, blocking a
transmission of the rest. (54-5)9
And he concludes that
[I]t is very important to emphasize that everything – that is, everything
worthwhile, everything truly human – is difficult, very difficult; so much so,
that it is impossible [...T]o declare its impossibility is not an argument against
the possible splendor of the translator’s task. On the contrary, this
characterization admits it to the highest rank and lets us infer that it is
meaningful. (53-54)
The same, I submit to you, is true of the African Storybook Project.
John E. Joseph (2004), Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious. Houndsmill, Basingstoke & New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2 John E. Joseph (2006), Language and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
3 Ellen Bialystock (2009), “Bilingualism: The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent”, Bilingualism: Language
and Cognition 12 (1), 3-11.
4 Bialystock (2009), p. 4; and see Bialystock & Xiaojia Feng (2011), “Language Proficiency and its
Implications for Monolingual and Bilingual Children”, in Language and Literacy Development in Bilingual
Settings, ed. by Aysin Yücesan Durgunoglu & Claude Goldenberg, New York: Guilford Press, 121-38.
5 Bialystock (2009), p. 5.
6 John E. Joseph & Frederick J. Newmeyer (2012), “‘All Languages Are Equally Complex’: The Rise and Fall
of a Consensus”. Historiographia Linguistica 39 (2012), 341-68.
7 See Andrew Weir (2013), “The Syntax of Imperatives in Scots”, in After the Storm: Papers from the Forum
for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster triennial meeting, Aberdeen 2012, ed. by Janet
Cruickshank & Robert McColl Millar, Aberdeen: Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and
Ireland, 261-85.
8 Alexandra Jaffe (1999), Ideologies in Action: Language Politics on Corsica. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
9 José Ortega y Gasset (1937), ‘La miseria y el esplendor de la traducción’, La nación, Buenos Aires, 13, 20
& 27 June, 4 & 11 July. Translation by Elisabeth Gamble Miller.
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