Parlais vous Anglais?
on Anthony Lovat in Bolgatanga (Ghana), 10/Sep/2010 16:12, 34 days ago
900 years ago, the language of English in its native country of England was a second class language, only spoken by the plebs at the bottom of society. If you wanted a place in government, administration, the church or law then you had to speak French. French was the language of education and learning. To speak in French was to identify yourself as literate, informed and cultured. Traces of this can be heard in our language today. Words considered to be‘posh’ are likely to be derived from the French. For example, a ‘cordial reception’ is derived from the French as opposed to the more common ‘hearty welcome’ from the English. Similarly, ‘beef’ and ‘pork’ are from Old French, the language of the table, whereas ‘cow’ and ‘pig’ are from Old English, the language of the farm.The director of Ghana’s only veterinary college, where Laura has been teaching, grinned broadly at me when I first met him last year. A middle aged man, he thanked me repeatedly for bringing Laura to Ghana and for enduring their terribly hot weather. England, he told us with a happy smile, is Ghana’s colonial master. Look at all the good things England has done for Ghana - especially, he said, teaching us English. Without English, he told us, Ghanaians could not interact with the outside world. “Look at us now,” he observed triumphantly and gratefully. “We are from different sides of the world but can sit and communicate with English.”A few weeks ago, I was sat in a pito spot talking about what languages we could all speak. Most people could communicate in four or five languages. I told them that I could only really speak English.“But what is your local language?” they asked. “Surely you can speak your local language as well?”“English is my local language,” I told them.They looked confused but I could see them thinking - isn’t English the language of education, of literature, of learning and of privilege? Doesn’t this man have a language to speak in the house or the pub?Caterham is an old Saxon settlement. My home town’s ‘local language’, the language of the house, the farm and the pub, has been English for over a thousand years. It is strange and sometimes quite disconcerting how my local language has become the language of Bolga’s elite.I was talking about language with Priscilla, the matronly owner of the spot (pub) across the road. I asked her in what circumstances she might speak to someone in English as opposed to Fra Fra, the local language. Priscilla explained that when she meets someone, she must make a judgement. If that person looks educated, she will address that individual in English. If the person looks dirty and skinny and not so well educated, she will address them in Guruni.I can only imagine that Caterham was a similar place 900 years ago. Having endured a brutal Norman occupation, the educated native English gentry took control of Norman England. Like Kwame Nkrumah and his fellow Ghanaian freedom fighters, these rich and powerful landowners communicated in the language of the coloniser. The uneducated English speaking people of Caterham were reduced to peasants. They couldn’t even climb the social ladder if they wanted to. Their lack of French labelled them as unrefined and uncivilised in the same way that Bolga people today are labelled if they don’t speak English.Language is considered a considerable barrier to education in Ghana. Every lesson I have seen at the Junior High School (JHS) level has contained several members of the class quite clearly not understanding a word the teacher is saying. Many teachers, particularly at the primary level, cannot speak English to a functional level themselves yet are forced to teach through the former colonial language. Seeing this as a problem, the government introduced an initiative to teach the first three years of primary school in the children’s local language. The problem is that the Upper East Region has a dozen or so languages and each language has a different dialect. Text books needed to be written and printed but, with virtually every town speaking a different dialect, producing resources in each language, some spoken by just a few thousand people, was prohibitively expensive.Supporting minority languages is an expensive task. Wales, Scotland and Ireland spend much of their resources on programmes to develop their local languages, almost lost to my local language.A VSO volunteer in Upper West is an Irish primary school teacher who teaches in Co Mayo exclusively in Irish. Despite all the children speaking English in their own homes with their own families, she finds that they pick up their local language as a second language quite easily. She says it’s important to keep the Irish language – it is part of the culture of Ireland, part of the heritage, part of the identity, something to be valued and not relegated to a second class extinct language. This realisation only came, however, when the Irish language reached the brink of extinction. Government policy in nineteenth century Ireland was to promote English. Schooling, commerce and law were conducted only in English - much in the way it is in Ghana today. Combined with the Great Famine, Irish nearly died before there was a popular effort to revive the language at the start of the twentieth century - in time for my nan to be sent as a small girl to Irish speaking areas in her school summer holidays.It’s sad when a language dies. There is evidence to suggest that language affects our thought processes - affects the way we think. If a language dies, a part of human civilisation dies.Controversially, Kasem has been chosen as the official government sponsored local language for the Upper East Region. All children in their first three years of school can now be taught in Kasem. Sat in a fish restaurant a few weeks ago, a fat woman who works on an educational committee with a loud mouth and a fondness for beer explained why Kasem had been selected. Firstly, the NPP political party is supported by Kasem people - that probably helped their bid because the NPP were in power at the time of selection. Secondly, because the first white missionaries happened to settle in Kasem land, the language has a basic dictionary and an embryonic canon of literature. The problem is that Kasem is spoken by a small minority of the Upper East, most of whom speak Guruni or related languages. Unsurprisingly, the laudable initiative has hit the rocks.It is not just that there are administrative teething problems - many parents actually want their children to be exposed to English from an early age - it is the language of influence, law, government and money. It is the language spoken by the rest of the world. It is the language of money, of opportunity, of travel. It is a point of pride if a child speaks English. Many rich families only speak in English to their children– they grow up never knowing their ‘local’ language.Before the British colonised Ghana, the area around Bolga lived in the shadow of the slave-raiding Ashanti Empire, centred around Kumasi. The Ashanti Empire was one of the handful of African empires strong enough to put up a meaningful resistance to the expansionist nineteenth century British empire. I was recently told by a science teacher that the Ashantis want to replace the widespread use of English in Ghana with Twi. The Ashantis, I was told, are too proud of their language and force it on other people through the TV and radio– they think that Twi is special and superior to local languages. In the north, the teacher said, English is the most widely spoken second language whilst in the south it is Twi. My friend’s preference for English was purely pragmatic – the rest of the world speaks English.Due to its history as the language of the common man, there has never been an accepted‘correct’ form of English. It has been allowed to evolve, to absorb and to diversify. The French language, by contrast, has been the language of the nobility and, as such, had a regulatory body in Paris called the Acadamie Francais set up by the French kings and maintained through Napoleon’s time to the present day. Its job has been to monitor and pass judgment on every minutiae of the French language. It is maintained as a centralised and conservative language as opposed to the fluid and ever-changing English.Interestingly, different sections of the educated Bolga community choose subtly different brands of English. The civil servants and professionals speak English English– the better your English accent, the more seriously you’ll be taken. The young, rich and trendy use American English phrases and accents – adopted from the films they watch and the music they listen to. The Rasta boys take on Jamaican English phraseology – very much looked down upon by theEnglish English speakers (although not this one!).Knowing how precious French language is to the French, it is therefore interesting to visit former French West Africa– now known as the Francophonie. The French have kept far closer cultural, political and economic ties with their former colonies over the past fifty years than the English have – partly in an effort to maintain and promote the French language. The French army even waded into the Rwandan conflict on the side of the Francophone Hutus against what they saw as the invasion of the Anglophone Tutsis who had spent some years of exile in English speaking Uganda – in hindsight, a big mistake. The ordinary French soldiers were reportedly shocked to find themselves entering towns, being greeted asliberators by the Hutus and then discovering the mass graves of Tutsis.Whereas foreign government aid in Ghana, much of which comes from the UK, is almost exclusively given for development and wealth creation, the French government generously sponsors cultural activities and programmes in their former colonies– often with the express purpose of promoting French language through music, art and literature. To take one example, we visited a modern statue park near Ouagadougou where the artists were given free range to carve into the natural granite rock. Contributors were exclusively Francophone – sculptors from Mali, Senegal, Niger, Ivory Coast, Quebec and, of course, France. Every museum and exhibition we visited in Burkina Faso and Mali had writing only in French – as if it were French and not English that is the world’s accepted lingua franca. It is almost sad to see the French throw moneyat efforts to desperately promote their precious language. Almost! It has taken 900 years but the common man’s language of Caterham, not that of the nobility, has emerged victorious. Hurrah! Two fingers to the French!What does this all mean in Bolga? In 900 years time, will the language of the coloniser still be spoken or will, to do what my Caterham forefathers did and anglicise a French phrase, it be déjà vu and the peasant’s language will win out in the end? Listening to people here speak English, it is often difficult to understand what they are saying. Words and phrases are totally different – borrowed from Ghanaian local languages. My grammar-loving prune of an English teacher, Ms Brewis, would hate it – it is an English language purist’s nightmare but, unlike French, English isn’t a purist’s language. It is a language of the people. Indeed, many African and Caribbean words and phrases are working their way back into English in its ancestral home of England. ‘Jafaican’is now a London dialect and I had to learn to understand (and occasionally use) many Jafaican words to teach in London. In 900 years time, I’m sure we’ll be using African words and phrases in Caterham – much in the same way American words and phrases are (reluctantly) accepted today. There are, after all, more English speakers today in Nigeria than there are in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Bolga 900 years from now will, I suspect, be speaking a mixture of Fra Fra, Twi, English and a host of other dialects – in the same way that Fra Fra today is a mixture of forgotten languages spoken 900 years ago. No culture remains stagnant and no language remains constant. Bolgatanga is changing fast – its culture is in a state of flux. The Norman colonisation of England transformed the English language – a 10th century Caterham resident would be unintelligible to a Caterham resident 200 years later. Colonisation’s cultural effects on the Ghanaian local languages are still being felt but it is likely to lead to similar transformations. We should record, archive and treasure Ghanaian local languages and dialects while we still can. They are a historical record that, like Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Galician and Navajo, could all too easily be lost in the winds of time.