The role of colonial languages in language endangerment in Africa
There has been some discussion in the literature on endangered languages
about the role – or lack thereof – of colonial languages in presenting a threat
to African languages. The view most often offered suggests that in Africa it has
typically been African languages, in the form of national languages and regional
lingua francas, that endanger smaller, local languages. If this is the case, the
task of linguists concerned with the causes of language endangerment is to
understand why Africa has not felt the threat of colonial languages in the same
way or to the same extent as other regions of the world, such as the Americas
or Australia. In this paper I re-examine the question of the role of colonial languages
in language endangerment in Africa. A review of literature on colonialist
language ideologies and attitudes towards African languages, together with
the results of several sociolinguistic surveys into language choice and attitudes,
leads me to question the prevailing view. Whether colonial languages are replacing
– i.e. directly replacing – African languages is only part of the story. Their
use reduces African languages in terms of both prestige and structure, and this
contributes to their endangerment. Finally, and from a more general perspective,
the pressure to create a ‘modern nation state’, on a Western (colonial)
model, in requiring a single unifying language, must be seen as an important
factor in language endangerment in Africa.
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