Local Languaging, Literacy and Multilingualism in a West African Society 9781783094219

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Local Languaging, Literacy and Multilingualism in a West African Society

CRITICAL LANGUAGE AND LITERACY STUDIES Series Editors: Professor Alastair Pennycook (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia), Professor Brian Morgan (Glendon College/York University, Toronto, Canada) and Professor Ryuko Kubota (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada) Critical Language and Literacy Studies is an international series that encourages monographs directly addressing issues of power (its flows, inequities, distributions, trajectories) in a variety of language- and literacy-related realms. The aim with this series is twofold: (1) to cultivate scholarship that openly engages with social, political and historical dimensions in language and literacy studies; and (2) to widen disciplinary horizons by encouraging new work on topics that have received little focus (see below for partial list of subject areas) and that use innovative theoretical frameworks. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. Other books in the series Collaborative Research in Multilingual Classrooms Corey Denos, Kelleen Toohey, Kathy Neilson and Bonnie Waterstone English as a Local Language: Post-colonial Identities and Multilingual Practices Christina Higgins The Idea of English in Japan: Ideology and the Evolution of a Global Language Philip Seargeant Gendered Identities and Immigrant Language Learning Julia Menard-Warwick China and English: Globalisation and the Dilemmas of Identity Joseph Lo Bianco, Jane Orton and Gao Yihong (eds) Language and HIV/AIDS Christina Higgins and Bonny Norton (eds) Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being ‘Half’ in Japan Laurel D. Kamada Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism Gregorio Hernandez-Zamora Contending with Globalization in World Englishes Mukul Saxena and Tope Omoniyi (eds) ELT, Gender and International Development: Myths of Progress in a Neocolonial World Roslyn Appleby Examining Education, Media, and Dialogue under Occupation: The Case of Palestine and Israel Ilham Nasser, Lawrence N. Berlin and Shelley Wong (eds) The Struggle for Legitimacy: Indigenized Englishes in Settler Schools Andrea Sterzuk Style, Identity and Literacy: English in Singapore Christopher Stroud and Lionel Wee Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places Alastair Pennycook Talk, Text and Technology: Literacy and Social Practice in a Remote Indigenous Community Inge Kral Language Learning, Gender and Desire: Japanese Women on the Move Kimie Takahashi English and Development: Policy, Pedagogy and Globalization Elizabeth J. Erling and Philip Seargeant (eds) Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity Jan Blommaert Power and Meaning Making in an EAP Classroom: Engaging with the Everyday Christian W. Chun

CRITICAL LANGUAGE AND LITERACY STUDIES: 20

Local Languaging, Literacy and Multilingualism in a West African Society

Kasper Juffermans

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Juffermans, Kasper, author. Local Languaging, Literacy and Multilingualism in a West African society/Kasper Juffermans. Critical Language and Literacy Studies: 20 Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Multilingualism—Africa, West. 2. Languages—Africa, West. 3. Literacy—Africa, West. 4. Sociolinguistics—Africa, West. I. Title. P115.5.A358J84 2015 404'.2096651–dc23 2015015278 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-420-2 (hbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2015 Kasper Juffermans. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Techset Composition India (P) Ltd, Bangalore and Chennai, India. Printed and bound in Great Britain by the CPI Group (UK Ltd), Croydon, CR0 4YY.

Contents

Figures and Tables Series Editors’ Preface

vii ix

1

How Many Languages Do You Speak? From Language to Languaging The Local in Languaging Coming To and Being in the Field Outline of this Book

1 3 8 14 24

2

Gambia’s Local Languages A Note on Terminology Language and Ethnicity in Gambian Society Language Use in Social Domains Summary

26 30 32 45 54

3

Englishing and Imaging in the Linguistic Landscape Public Horizons Signs and Sites in Context Grassroots Englishing Campaigning with Local Languages Multimodality and Audiences

56 58 60 62 68 73

4

Voices on English and Local Languages in Education One School and its Language Policy An English Writing Contest Black People’s Language Engaging With Voices

79 81 84 90 98

v

vi Local L anguaging, Literac y and Mult ilingualism in a West Af r ican Soc iet y

5

Collaborative Literacy Repertoires A Modern Multi-ethnic African Village The Old Man and the Letter The Nescafé Booklet Collaborative, Heterographic Literacy

103 105 108 114 120

6

Writing Mandinka in the Presence of English Burama’s Texts on Paper and on the Wall The Donkey Story in ‘Good’ and in ‘Bad’ Mandinka Spelling Mandinka in the Presence of English

124 125 129 137

7

Local Languaging Regimes Globalisation Literacies Sociolinguistics

141 143 148 151

References Index

154 168

Figures and Tables

Figures Figure 1.1 Map of key research locations

23

Figure 2.1 Map of The Gambia and its location in Africa

27

Figure 2.2 Genetic classification of Gambian languages

33

Figure 3.1 The Sayerr Jobe Avenue

61

Figure 3.2 The Banjul-Serrekunda Highway

62

Figure 3.3 Graffiti in Bundung-Tallinding

63

Figure 3.4

Gamcel, Africell and Comium’s visual publicity and branding

64

Figure 3.5 Details from shop doors of HIGH CLASS FASHION SHOP

78

Figure 4.1 ‘Dictation’

86

Figure 4.2 ‘Because want to be teacher’

87

Figure 4.3 ‘Because I want to learn the language if I finish school I will help my mother and father to buy rice’

88

Figure 4.4 ‘English is very important because if I don’t learn English I am going to suffer’

89

Figure 5.1 Scrap of the letter

109

Figure 5.2 Photograph of the letter writing event

110

Figure 5.3 Participants of the letter writing event in a communication scheme

111

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Figure 5.4

Mandinka and English in the repertoires of the participants 112

Figure 5.5 L’s Nescafé telephone booklet, cover pages

115

Figure 5.6 L’s Nescafé telephone booklet, all 20 pages

116

Figure 5.7 Designed entry space

117

Figure 5.8 Entering my number on page 12 (‘LM’) on the left

120

Figure 6.1 (a) and (b): Interpreting the inscriptions on the wall (courtesy of A. Janneh)

126

Figure 6.2 (a) The donkey story, Burama’s original spelling. (b) The donkey story, Dembo’s respelling

130

Tables Table 1.1

Overview of fieldwork periods

Table 2.1 Administrative division of The Gambia Table 2.2

Gambian population by ethnicity 1973–2003, in percentages

Table 2.3 Immigrants in The Gambia 1973–2003 Table 2.4

Religion in relation to ethnicity and nationality, in percentages

17 28 34 43 48

Table 4.1 Compositions according to text length

85

Table 4.2 Attitudes towards English in the compositions

86

Table 5.1

Schematic overview of the booklet (columns represent pages; Xs represent entries)

Table 6.1 A comparison of Burama’s and Dembo’s spelling systems

117 135

Series Editors’ Preface

In this carefully researched and textured book Kasper Juffermans takes us into the world of literacies, language practices and multilingualism in The Gambia (West Africa). This is a welcome return to a focus on literacy in this series, taking up the discussion of the books by Hernandez-Zamora (2010) and Kral (2012) that look at literacy practices among working class Mexicans and Indigenous Australians respectively. Hernandez-Zamora shows how learning and literacy are tied up with the changing life trajectories of his participants, drawing our attention to the interplay between class and the conditions of possibility for making decisions about learning and change. This sheds light not only into the situatedness of literacies, but also the material and personal conditions that make different forms of learning and literacy possible, as well as the changes that such practices may also then bring about. This view takes us far beyond a notion of literacy as merely a technical capacity for decoding and encoding script; it presents instead a view of literacy as a practice in authoring one’s place in the world. For Hernandez-Zamora the question was what in the lives of marginalized, alienated, unschooled, and colonized subjects enabled them to move from silence to a capacity to articulate their worlds. Once we understand the deeply political nature of literacy, of poverty, and of voice, we can start to think in terms of a literacy education that may enable multiple and diverse futures. Kral’s focus, by contrast, is on the literacy practices in Ngaanyatjarra communities in the Western Desert region of Australia. A continuing question for education in so-called remote communities is what literacy is for, who uses it in what languages for what purposes. Is there a place for literacy in Indigenous literacies aside from a stepping-stone towards the schooled literacies of English? What are the consequences for oral and written communication and learning of the introduced language and literacy practices of the Western world? And what roles do new technologies and literacies play? Kral looks at the different social and physical spaces for literacy amid a ix

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community undergoing rapid change. Whereas in earlier times, linguistic practices were linked to the particular social and cultural practices of a nomadic lifestyle, missionary and ‘native welfare’ changes eroded the influence of Ngaanyatjarra Elders and parents by reducing sustained interactions between the young and the old. Thus intergenerational cultural and learning patterns changed, leading to profound shifts in socialisation and learning processes, from former practices of observation and imitation of Elders to sedentary and institutionalized learning and socialization practices. Kral is careful here to locate these shifts within the context of a much longer historical trajectory of changing Ngaanyatjarra social practices and forms of communication, a long historical process of change, adoption, adjustment and adaptation. While a focus on Mexican, Ngaanyatjarra and Gambian communities might seem impossibly diverse, these studies share a number of common features. All are located in what has been called the new literacies, a focus following the work of Heath (1983), Barton and Hamilton (1998) and Street (1995) that insists that we have to understand literacy not in cognitive isolation, not in terms only of reading and writing, but rather as a set of local social and cultural practices. All locate these literacy practices within complex histories of colonialism and disposession as well as contemporary conditions of material access and inequality. And all seek to show how local practices are not completely confined or determined by conditions of poverty, remoteness, and lack of access to education: In each case we see local practices that transcend and transgress such conditions (writing on walls turns up everywhere). Juffermans takes us to a context that is both vastly different from Mexico and Australia, yet which also resonates strongly. He shows how in a semiotically rich, multimodal linguistic landscape English remains the default language for public signs, with local languages playing only a minor role. The Mandinka moo fi kao ‘black people’s language’ is the term often used to refer to local languages. He goes on to show, however, that texts that may appear to be in English are often produced through heterographic collaboration involving a range of different people and linguistic resources. What appear to be monolingual texts thus have multilingual undercurrents. Writing in Mandinka, on the other hand, is harder to find and less stable orthographically. Public, educational and private spaces thus offer different yet interrelated sets of literacy practices that draw on linguistic resources in varied ways. In its focus on multilingualism, languaging and language practices, this book also takes up other themes alongside literacies. Juffermans questions the idea of language as a noun (that there are such things as languages) and favours instead an idea of languaging. Not everyone, of course, is in favour

Ser ies Editors’ Pref ace

xi

of such moves, Edwards (2012), for example, suggesting that the “rebarbative term ‘languaging’ has been unnecessarily coined to refer to the ways in which languages are used” and that ‘those that write in this way have forfeited any claim to our serious attention’ (p. 35). Edwards’ rather intemperate critique overlooks what has clearly been a strongly-felt need among a range of socio- and applied linguists to get away from static and enumerative approaches to language (languages can be clearly identified and counted) and to talk instead in terms of translanguaging. García and Li Wei (2014) suggest that we are witnessing a ‘translanguaging turn’ (p. 19) with the term now referring to ‘both the complex language practices of plurilingual individuals and communities, as well as the pedagogical approaches that use those complex practices’ (p. 19). Juffermans’ approach to understanding language and literacy in The Gambia draws on and contributes to this emerging focus. This book also engages with idea of the local, drawing on Higgins’ (2009) argument that we need to understand the way languages such as English become part of local multilingualism (multivocality) amid the complex interplay of of local and global relations, and the need to understand local language ideologies, literacies, and relations of power. Following the notion of language as a local practice (Pennycook, 2010), Juffermans argues that things are never just local – they are always connected to other times, people and places – but at the same time things always happen locally – they cannot be understood without an understanding of local conditions of power, place and people. Language cannot be dealt with separately from speakers, histories, cultures, places, ideologies. This is why both historical work as well as close ethnographic study are crucial here, showing how any understanding of language and literacy practices has to be set in the context of people’s lives, their communities and of their historical trajectories. In conclusion, we would like to make a slightly different acknowledgement. When we started this series, it was argued that as editors we should devote particular care to the task of writing these prefaces. We wanted to have prefaces that located the book in relation to other books in the series but also in relation to the field as a whole. The goal was to provide not a summary or introduction to the book – that’s up to the author – but a broader consideration of why we have chosen to include the book in our series, why we think the topic and the book matter, and where it sits in relation to other work. How well we have achieved this, we will leave to the reader to judge. The models for this kind of preface-writing, however, were those written by Chris Candlin, whose death on May 10, 2015, was recently mourned. Chris was a towering figure in our field, larger than life (as Tim McNamara put it at the memorial service in Sydney on May 15), and one of the things Chris did best was editing book series and writing prefaces. Many of these were

xii Local L anguaging, Literac y and Mult ilingualism in a West Af r ican Soc iet y

exemplary in the ways they located a book in the wider field of applied linguistics and explained what was at stake in the discussions taken up in each book. We may never achieve that knowledge or erudition but we may still aspire to it. Alastair Pennycook Brian Morgan Ryuko Kubota

References Barton, D. and Hamilton, M. (1998) Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. London: Routledge. Edwards, J. (2012) Multilingualism: Understanding Linguistic Diversity. London: Continuum García, O. and Li Wei (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Heath, S.B. (1983). Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work on Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hernandez-Zamora, G. (2010) Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism. Bristol: Multilingual Matters Higgins, C. (2009) English as a Local Language: Post-colonial Identities and Multilingual Practices. Bristol: Multilingual Matters Kral, I. (2012) Talk, Text and Technology: Literacy and Social Practice in a Remote Indigenous Community. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pennycook, A. (2010) Language as a Local Practice. London: Routledge Street, B. (1995) Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education. London: Longman.

1

How Many Languages Do You Speak?

The question the title of this chapter asks is an ordinary one, at first sight not very different from questions such as How many children do you have? or How often have you been to Africa? This book argues that this question, however, is deeply problematic and reductionist, and leads us nowhere in terms of understanding literacy and multilingualism in society. To give away the book’s main argument on the first page: as multilingual people we do not speak an x number of languages but we language, making use of whatever linguistic resources are available to us under the local circumstances and conditions in which we lead our lives. To ask somebody how many languages he or she speaks is to presuppose qualities of countability and enumerability on his or her language repertoire. When we are asked this question at a party, for instance, there are two options. The first is the easy way out, to answer that one speaks a bit of this and a bit of that, has learned some of this and is still learning more of that. That would be an appropriate answer and would do justice to the complexity of sociolinguistic life. The second option is the hard and unpopular option: giving a critical lecture on how language is fundamentally uncountable and on how such a question rests on false assumptions about language and that language is actually to be regarded as a verb rather than as a noun. With the second option we risk never being asked this question again (or being invited to the next party). This book at large may be read as a critical answer to this question asked about one country in West Africa, the smallest country on the African continent, The Gambia. How many languages are there in The Gambia? Or: What languages do Gambians speak? Linguists often survey research populations asking versions of this question in order to map or measure the linguistic pluralism in a multilingual family, a neighbourhood, a school or an entire society. When a researcher addresses such a question, research participants may choose to accept the 1

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Local L anguaging, Literac y and Mult ilingualism in a West Af r ican Soc iet y

validity of such a question or they may choose to resist this question as a false question and teach the linguist a lesson about what language really is from their perspective. The outcome of the ethnographic journey that I report on in this book is an understanding of multilingualism which conceptualises language not routinely in the plural as presupposed in the question How many? – but which treats language rather as a verb, emphasising the fluidity and creativity as well as the local resources and conditions for language and literacy practice. The focus of this book is on a particular aspect of language – ‘visible language’ or literacy. Literacy is understood here in the tradition of the New Literacy Studies (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Street, 1995) not as an autonomous skill residing in our mind (Literacy with a big ‘L’ and single ‘y’), but as a concrete ideological and social practice (local literacies with a small ‘l’ and plural ‘-ies’). Literacy refers to everything related to reading and writing. Literacy appears in our daily lives either as ‘products’ (e.g. books, inscriptions, signs, signatures, letters, leaflets, bills – things we usually call ‘texts’) or as ‘events’ (i.e. moments revolving around reading or writing such texts). These products and events constitute literacy practices – culturally modelled or socially patterned ways in which language is used (‘practised’), in activities such as reading and writing. This aspect of language is often also approached through numbers counting crudely how many can and cannot write. For instance, according to a national survey (GBoS, 2007a: 44), only 43% of women aged 15–24 were literate in The Gambia in the mid-2000s. Following another official source, The Gambia’s literacy rate is, unspecified for age, estimated at 46% overall and 28% for women (DoSE, 2006: 44). The statistics tell us that women are more likely to be non-literate than men, elderly persons more likely than younger persons, and rural dwellers more likely than urban dwellers. Literacy in Gambian society, as in much of ‘the global South’ (Martin-Jones et al., 2011), is far less widespread and commonly acquired than in the post-industrialised societies of the North. The same applies to schooling. According to the aforementioned survey report, in the mid-2000s, only 61% of children of primary school age (i.e. aged 7–12) are attending school in The Gambia (GBoS, 2007a: 56). Now that we know these numbers, we could ask what this really tells us. What does it mean that only 28% of women are literate? What does it mean to be among the 39% of children that are not attending school? What does it actually mean to be non-literate in this society? And to be literate? Of those that are literate, in what script and in what language are they literate, and to what extent? What do they read and how do they write? Is it the same thing to be literate in the official and world language English as in a local language such as Mandinka or Wolof? Where do we find texts in a

How Many L anguages Do You Speak?

3

society with such low literacy rates? Does this perhaps mean that literacy is hard to find? How do those who are counted as ‘non-literate’ in the above statistics relate to texts and how do they manage with reading and writing when they need it? By now I have raised more questions than I am able to answer in the course of this book. The aim of this book is to give a broad and in-depth description of literacy and multilingualism in various public and more private domains of Gambian social life, and at the same time to challenge and diversify our understanding more generally of multilingualism and literacy. This description of literacy in Gambian society is given from a local, Gambian viewpoint, without constant recourse to other worlds. I will not extensively contrast The Gambia with other societies, but describe language and literacy in Gambian society in its own terms as far as possible. This is done on the basis of observable events, material products and their generalisable practices. My analysis is also deliberately synchronic, rather than historical, because descriptive work needs to be grounded in both space and time. The concluding chapter, however, will interpret the book’s main findings in a wider historical perspective. In the remainder of this opening chapter, I will discuss the two elements of the central concept of ‘local languaging’ that is advanced here. First, I will explain the turn from language to languaging in recent sociolinguistics, and next I will discuss the relevance of the local in languaging. After that I will give a personal account of my fieldwork in Gambian society, including my own language learning, coupled with reflections on the ethos and theory of an ethnographic sociolinguistics.

From Language to Languaging The main concern of this book revolves around understanding how literacy is practised in the context of multilingual Gambian society. To arrive at such an understanding, there is not a ready-made theoretical framework at hand. Social realities are incredibly complex and varied and, in order to understand them, we need first of all to describe them. In order to describe, we need a vocabulary that allows us to name the processes and phenomena we observe. Some of the vocabulary items that are needed can be found in the field, locally in use, whereas others are pulled together from reading academic articles and books. Just like a surgeon needs instruments she cannot find in the human body itself to carry out surgery, so do ethnographers need conceptual tools to analyse society that are not readily available in the society itself. In combining local-ethnographic and

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global-theoretical understandings of literacy and multilingualism, I want to produce a locally relevant and comprehensible narrative and engage in a translocally meaningful discussion at the same time. In telling this story – a story, not the story – of literacy and multilingualism in a West African society, I attempt, like Wright (2004), to tell a story of a very small place in a big world. Whereas key theoretical notions will be explained and developed in the respective chapters, there is one notion that needs to be explained and refined before we proceed, i.e. the notion of language itself. In default notions of language and ethnicity it is often assumed that nations, communities or ethnic groups are real groups with a life of their own, rather than just social categories (Brubaker, 2002; Rampton, 2000). I assume that languages and ethnicities are not naturalistic givens, but dynamic cultural constructs that were not fixed and compartmentalised as units prior to scholarly descriptions, but in great part in the process of and as a result of such descriptions (cf. Blommaert, 2008a; Ranger, 1983). By pointing at the dynamic, fluid and hybrid nature of literacy and multilingualism as social practices, this book is meant to contribute to a new, postcolonial generation of descriptions of language in society in Africa and to deconstruct (some of) the constructs made in the colonial enterprise. The problem with mainstream notions of language and culture is that both are primarily conceptualised as countable nouns. Generations of sociolinguists have described how language is always different rather than the same across different regions, social classes, individuals, situations, audiences, etc. and yet, language is routinely pluralised – here is one language, there is another one – rather than seeing language as a material noun (i.e. nouns such as earth, water, air, money, wood, etc.) that cannot meaningfully be pluralised. This tendency also exists to some extent with the notion of culture as witnessed in utterances such as ‘anthropology is the study of different cultures’, but this plural notion of culture finds support only among non-specialists. Anthropologists themselves have long resolved this issue, either explicitly by stating that ‘culture is a verb’ (Street, 1993), or more practically by avoiding the use of the word culture in nominal form, which is easy with an adjective at hand. Anthropology is thus not the study of different cultures, but of cultural diversity, cultural behaviour or cultural practices. Language, by contrast, does not have a ready-made adjective available, at least not in English, which is a Whorfian relativity effect that has shaped the course of our scientific worldview and ability to think about language. That we have thought of language in the way we do is in part due to this arbitrary grammatical peculiarity (Whorf, 1956). Silverstein (2005), in an article reviewing the changing interconnections between linguistic and sociocultural anthropology within the four-field

How Many L anguages Do You Speak?

5

configuration of American anthropology, sees as a common achievement of both sub-disciplines that they have declared languages and cultures (in their nominal form) dead. Instead, he puts the linguistic-cultural at the epistemic centre of both fields. Language and culture are not nouns here but adjectives, and are intricately connected and inseparable: to a great extent, the linguistic is the cultural and vice versa. There is indeed a longstanding tradition of linguistic anthropological work that describes language in terms of actual resources, events and behaviour (Bauman & Sherzer, 1974; Blommaert, 2008b; Gumperz & Hymes, 1986; Kroskrity, 2000; Schieffelin et al., 1998), but it is only more recently that this problem has been explicitly addressed and problematised in applied and sociolinguistics. One of the first to use the term ‘languaging’ in a linguistics publication is the translation specialist and scholar of Southeast Asian languages, A.L. Becker. In critiquing Saussurean structuralism and Chomskyan universal grammar, Becker (1991: 34) observes that ‘there is no such thing as Language, only continual languaging, an activity of human beings in the world’. Languaging, Becker continues, ‘is a skill learned over a lifetime, not a system of systems perfected in infancy’. Key to learning language, Becker argues, is memory: always imperfect, such learning is based on mimicking and repeating and gradually reshaping bits and pieces of language from one context into new contexts. ‘Understanding another person is possible to the extent that an utterance evokes memories’ (Becker, 1991: 34). And ‘learning a foreign language is tough because one has to acquire a large repertoire of prior texts even to play a very few new language games. It takes time to rebuild memory’ (Becker, 1991: 34). Becker points to the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela (1998 [1973]) as a source for his ideas about languaging. Their theory of autopoeisis (literally, self-creation), García and Li Wei (2014: 7) explain, ‘argues that we cannot separate our biological and social history of actions from the ways in which we perceive the world’. For Maturana and Varela (1998 [1973]: 235, cited in García & Li Wei, 2014: 8), ‘we are constituted in language in a continuous becoming that we bring forth with others’ – hence their emphasis on dynamic languaging as agentive meaning-making and self-creation at the same time, rather than on languages in the plural as pre-given signs of systems that are acquired and then applied in use. Postcolonial literary scholar Mignolo (1996: 181) underscores this when he asserts that ‘languages are conceived and languaging is practiced’. For him, the linking of languages and territories and their naturalisation in linguistic thought is a Western (and colonial) inheritance fraught with political interests in creating and transforming imagined communities. Moving beyond ‘the idea that language is a fact (e.g. a system of syntactic, semantic, and phonetic rules)’, Mignolo asserts that speaking and writing are orienting and manipulating moves

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Local L anguaging, Literac y and Mult ilingualism in a West Af r ican Soc iet y

creating fractures within and between conceived languages, and means of critical self-articulation. In applied linguistics proper, Joseph (2002) traces the use of language as a verb back to at least the 17th century and calls attention to the potential of these hitherto largely ignored verbal properties in the semantics of language for (applied) linguistic theory. In an often-cited article, Swain (2006) coins languaging to avoid the conduit metaphor of language as output (seeing language as a container for thoughts). She considers that language itself is an agent in meaning-making, that meaning or understanding is not merely conveyed but emerges in the process of speaking and writing. For her, languaging is the ‘dynamic never-ending process of using language to make meaning’ (Swain, 2006: 96) and the agentive and collaborative mediating process in learning. Jørgensen (2008a) distinguishes between language as the communicative system of humankind and a language, which is an ideological construct, and proposes the terms ‘languaging’ and ‘languagers’ to describe language behaviour without counting, labelling and delineating varieties when language is practised. According to Møller and Jørgensen (2009: 147), ‘as human beings, we do not primarily use “a language”, or “some languages”, [but] we use language, linguistic features, and we do so to achieve our aims’. They therefore propose a shift in the attention of sociolinguistics away from languages as codes or linguistic systems, to ‘languaging’ and ‘languagers’. Shohamy (2006), in her work on language policy, makes use of the same strategy to expand the meaning of the word ‘language’ into a more agentive and creative semiotic activity, giving examples of languaging through food, fashion, architecture, images and numbers. Whereas language practices are inherently ‘open, free, dynamic, creative and constantly evolving with no defined boundaries’, she argues, language policies often have as a goal and effect to freeze and manipulate languaging into ‘a closed, stagnated and rulebound entity’ (Shohamy, 2006: xvii). In her work on modern language learning and tourism, Phipps (2007) also invokes the notion of ‘languaging’ to address the playful ways of learning language outside the language classroom while ‘greeting, meeting and eating’ in a new language. For Lankiewicz (2014), who comprehensively reviewed the literature on the concept of languaging, languaging presents a challenge to traditional approaches of language acquisition. It calls for ecological language awareness and a perspective on language learning and teaching that puts central not the language system but the idiosyncratic languaging experiences, individual agency and learners’ voices. Danilewicz (2011, cited by Lankiewicz, 2014: 3) reminds us that ‘each person’s linguistic system is different from the other person and can be properly compared to one’s particular fingerprints or DNA’.

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Closely related but not synonymous to languaging, the notion of ‘translanguaging’ has recently been theorised as a critical alternative for codeswitching and language mixing as it occurs, for instance, in the bilingual classroom (Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García & Li Wei, 2014). Translanguaging is different from codeswitching, not phenomenally but theoretically, in that codeswitching grosso modo takes a structural perspective on bilingual text and talk, on codes, whereas translanguaging focuses primarily on the speakers in their social context. A translanguaging perspective looks at people not as users of language or owners of an identity but as performing a repertoire of identities through linguistic-discursive resources acquired through participation in various communities of practice, in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) sense, across one’s lifespan. Pushing a radically critical agenda, Makoni and Pennycook (2007) have most influentially argued that languages do not exist as autonomous entities in the world or in the mind but have been ‘invented’ as part of colonial and nationalist projects. Languages are historical inventions, they argue, rather than naturalistic givens, in both nomenclature and development, as well as in their establishment as discrete entities with boundaries that separate one language from another. They assert that as long as accounts of multilingualism depart from such notions of language as objects, or countable entities, they will fail to adequately describe the nature of so-called ‘multi’-lingual realities in the complex contemporary world. Note in passing the parallels between Makoni and Pennycook’s critique of autonomous languages and Street’s (1995) critique of autonomous literacy. Coming from a different research tradition, French anthropologist Canut (2002) concludes that in many parts of the world (such as West Africa) it is empirically impossible to determine where one language begins and the other ends. This is true for regions, but also for individuals and even for utterances, as Pietikäinen and colleagues (2008) showed in their study of the language life of a Sami boy in Northern Finland. Coming from a different angle, Guiora’s (1992) psychological studies on the language ego of bilingual speakers similarly suggested that, in cognition and emotional experience, language boundaries are permeable. This resonates in Zentz’s (2013) idea, inspired by Heller’s (2011) post-nationalism, about the porosity of borders of both language and nation in globalisation. The list of related concepts proposed in the sociolinguistic literature that share the same intention to critique and reconstitute established and institutionalised notions of bi- and multilingualism is growing: ‘bilanguaging’ (Mignolo, 2012 [2000]); ‘linguistic citizenship’ (Stroud, 2001); ‘transidiomatic practices’ (Jacquemet, 2005); ‘truncated multilingualism’ (Dyers, 2008); ‘polylingualism’ (Jørgensen, 2008a); ‘multivocality’ (Higgins, 2009);

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‘metrolingualism’ (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010); ‘polylanguaging’ (Jørgensen et al., 2011); ‘codemeshing’ (Canagarajah, 2013); ‘grassroots multilingualism’ (Han, 2013); ‘supervernacular’ (Velghe, 2014); and ‘translingual practice’ (Canagarajah, 2013). Seminal for many of these theoretical innovations is Rampton’s (2005 [1995]) linguistic ethnographic work among multi-ethnic peer groups in ‘late-modern’ Britain. In this work he analysed how urban youths ‘crossed’ in and out of each other’s languages and varieties in actual practice without ‘real’ bilingualism. Other sources of inspiration include among others Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, Vygotsky’s psychology of language, Gumperz’s work on repertoires and Hymes’ ethnography of speaking. The idea of languaging reflects a human turn in applied and sociolinguistics, i.e. a move away from languages (in plural) as linguistic systems that are used by people, towards language (in singular or as a verb) as a sociolinguistic system that is shaped by and also shapes people. In this type of sociolinguistics (a sociolinguistics of language resources as opposed to a sociolinguistics of languages), the analysis revolves around human beings engaged in particular activities and situated in particular networks in time and space. Multilingualism is thus understood not as the co-occurrence of multiple languages in a particular context, i.e. as multiple monolingualisms, but as ‘polylingual’ practice, i.e. languaging with ‘whatever linguistic features are at [speakers’] disposal’ (Møller & Jørgensen, 2009: 146). We come to see sociolinguistics no longer in such terms as the study of ‘who speaks (or writes) what language (or what language variety) to whom, and when and to what end’, as Fishman (1972) classically defined the field, but in terms of who languages what to whom, when and where, with what resources and under what conditions? In what follows I will speak of ‘local languaging’ to capture the dynamic, performative and agentive use of language in situated, local contexts. Whereas English and literacy have in the past strategically been pluralised to emphasise diversity in practices across cultural contexts (see, for example, the fields of New Literacy Studies and World Englishes), I argue that it is now time to singularise them again and think of language and literacy as material nouns or verbal concepts. This book can be read as an exercise to unpluralise language, which is necessary for a more realistic, ethnographically grounded understanding of local language and literacy practices.

The Local in Languaging Since the turn of the Millennium, globalisation has become a major focus in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, investigating themes such as: learning and teaching in diverse urban classrooms (Karrebæk, 2012; Spotti, 2011);

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complementary education (Blackledge & Creese, 2010); internationalisation in higher education (Hu, 2013; Piller & Cho, 2013); the changing lifeworlds of indigenous communities (Kral, 2012); digital language practices and virtual identities (Norton & Williams, 2012; Varis et al., 2011); hip-hop culture (Wang, 2012; Williams & Stroud, 2010); graffiti (Jørgensen, 2008b); travel and tourism (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010b); and labour migration (Dong, 2011; Lorente, 2012). Papers in Coupland (2003, 2010), and such monographs as Fairclough (2006), Blommaert (2010) and Heller (2011), among others, have attempted general statements outlining a sociolinguistics of globalisation. Such work points at the relativity of language functions, meanings and uses in mobile, shifting and intercultural contexts of interaction. It emphasises the change and fluidity rather than the stability and fixity of language and communication in globalisation, and generally calls attention to the inequalities as well as creativities that emerge in such new mobile contexts. It considers how distant locations, communities and individuals are connected through movements and processes of appropriation, borrowing and bricolaging. This tradition of work includes a critical analysis of the role of English in globalisation (e.g. Lo Bianco et al., 2009; Phillipson, 1992; Piller & Cho, 2013). These scholars consider how English has come to take such a dominant position across the globe, alongside or in competition with local multilingualisms, and often point at the (neo) colonial and neoliberal ideologies that have produced this. At the same time, it is acknowledged that English is often used and appropriated in a range of creative and autonomous ways in many contexts of use that were previously served by other languages (Lee & Norton, 2009). Thus, the focus of sociolinguistic work on globalisation is on both the more imperialistic-global (centrifugal) and the more agentive-local (centripetal) forces behind such changes, whereby globalisation is seen as a ‘cause’ of the homogenisation of language and culture as well as a source of the diversification of linguistic and cultural practices (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011). We appear to be living in a world in which nothing is local anymore; everything is imported, comes from somewhere else, and is the result of global cultural ‘flows’ (think of the ‘Made in China’ tags in your clothes or the multinational tax-evading brands of almost anything we buy, eat and drink). Yet, nothing is just global, as everything happens somewhere, and is inserted in local webs of social meanings and cultural references, as repeatedly stated in the rich tradition of research on ‘glocalisation’ (e.g. Robertson, 1995). Eating Japanese sushi or ‘authentic’ Brazilian picanha in Luxembourg are, as much as they may be seen as the effects of globalisation, also very local eating practices that derive their meaning in distinction from the other options available on the local culinary market, including the more traditional bouneschlupp or bouchée a la reine.

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In this section I will discuss the significance of locality in a sociolinguistics of globalisation, and I will do so on the basis of two books that have shaped my thinking on the local. These are Higgins’ (2009) English as a Local Language and Pennycook’s (2010) Language as Local Practice. The former is based on linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in East Africa and forcefully argues for considering English in postcolonial contexts not only as a ‘foreign’ or ‘imposed’ language, or as produced by exclusively imperial and hegemonic forces, but as an integral and integrated part of local linguistic ecologies. English, Higgins argues, is not foreign but part of local identities and local language practices in East Africa. The local is not what has been isolated from or unaffected by the global, but the node in which local and translocal are meaningfully combined in the practice of everyday life. Higgins situates her work in dialogue with Bakhtin’s work on multivocality, heteroglossia and polyphony as well as postcolonial theory and contemporary sociolinguistics. The book’s main ambition is to ‘destabilize the dominant conceptualizations of English as global language by drawing attention to the cultural and linguistic bricolage in which English is often found’ (Higgins, 2009: 4) and to move beyond the dichotomy in the literature ‘that treats English as either an oppressive force or as creative resource’ (Higgins, 2009: 5). While the book leans more towards the latter end of this dichotomy, it concludes with the observation that ‘Kenyans and Tanzanians use English alongside Swahili and hybrid languages to operate in the interstices of globalization and localization, and to double-identify as local and global actors’ (Higgins, 2009: 148). One professional group studied by Higgins consists of journalists on the Tanzanian Gazette. Having both Swahili and English forms of address and politeness formulae at their disposal, they appear to favour the English good morning, sir to the Swahili shikamoo (‘I hold your feet’). This, she argues, creates a more egalitarian and harmonious ethos within the workplace, avoiding the reproduction of undesired hierarchical relationships associated with the overly respectful Swahili greeting formula. Higgins also discusses the competing discourses of African (female) beauty that are anchored either in Western/modern or African/traditional morals. She demonstrates how English mediates both access to and success in the ‘beauty’ marketplace, and how winners of Western-oriented pageants (Miss Tanzania, leading to the Miss World contest) are more highly rewarded than the winners of local, alternative Afrocentric contests (e.g. Miss Bantu). At the same time, Western beauty ideals – skinny and light-skinned women with straightened hair and high heels, etc. – are fiercely mocked and ridiculed in newspaper columns and cartoons, and humorously juxtaposed with the traditional (East) African ideal of more voluptuous, darker skinned bodies,

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braided hair and bare feet. All of this being local, the female body and mediated discussions over authenticity in aesthetics are shown to be sites of conflict and contestation between the local and the global. In her discussion of linguistic landscape, Higgins considers whether product names or slogans such as bomba, Chombeza time, X-TRA longa are English, Swahili, or both. She does this, interestingly, not by introspective or ‘objective’ linguistic analysis, but by listening to and reporting the voices of informants she asked to interpret these signs, allowing her to unpack and locally situate the multiple meanings and readings of these hybrid signs. The book culminates in a concluding discussion that suggests that we are entering ‘a new wor(l)d order’, characterised by a simultaneity of reference points – local and global – and double meanings in multilingual practices, and asks how long it will take for language in education to follow suit and open up to these more fluid, heteroglossic, hybrid, multivoiced language practices. Language as a Local Practice by Pennycook (2010) then develops a theory of language as local practice, drawing on a wide range of scholars and ideas, most notably on the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus’ idea that ‘everything flows’ or that one ‘cannot step into the same river twice’. The book combines a rich theoretical anthology of language, the local and practices with empirical cases and illustrations from diverse contexts and practices including: bricolage art; the language of wine tasting and wine critics; debates about graffiti and graffiti tourism in Melbourne; the cultural practice of worshipping elephants in South India; and the author’s pastime activities of scuba diving and sailing. Pennycook develops his ideas of practice as the ‘generic social thing’ by problematising the theory/practice divide in applied linguistics which sees theory as either based on or feeding back into practice, and suggests that practice itself has not been theorised sufficiently. He goes on to theorise practice as repeated, sedimented, regulated or habituated action, as ‘bundles of activities organised into coherent ways of doing things’ (Pennycook, 2010: 25) and as the bridge between individual behaviour and social structure. Practice, for Pennycook, is the organising principle behind concrete, situated activity. This paves the way for an understanding of language variation and change in terms of repeated social activity, of creative repetition or repetitive creation, i.e. of saying the same things over and over again, similarly yet differently, and differently yet similarly. Just as it is impossible to step into the same river twice, it is impossible to say the same word, express the same idea twice, because – echoing Heraclitus – they are and are not the same. Borrowing from Babha and Taussig, Pennycook calls this fertile mimesis: ‘copy that goes slightly wrong . . . repetition that is something else . . .

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sameness that is difference’ (Pennycook, 2010: 37). Drawing parallels with the world of art, the organising principle behind contemporary art is not total newness emerging from the mind of the artist but the re-assembling, bricolaging of ready-made materials to create something new. In language and art alike, difference is the norm with sameness in need of justification. Here the thin line between erudite intertextuality and plagiarism in academic writing comes to mind, where authors have to work in highly generic, similar, but not identical ways, about similar but not identical topics, questions and problems. Grammar, Pennycook suggest, ‘is not a set of norms that we adhere to or break, but rather, the repeated sedimentation of form as a result of ongoing discourse’ (Pennycook, 2010: 41). Because ‘repetition always entails difference . . . no two events, words can be the same’ (Pennycook, 2010: 43). Allowing ourselves some repetition here, we may be reminded of Pennycook’s repeating Heraclitus that one can never step into the same river twice, for they are and are not the same. I repeat: one can never step into the same river twice. With respect to the local, the two key ideas developed in the book are the notion of relocalisation as a broader and more dynamic concept than recontextualisation, and the idea that globalised language practices (English, hiphop) have multiple, co-present origins and are in fact ‘already local’. Taking a social semiotic rather than linguistic perspective, relocalisation refers to practices recontextualised in language, locally. Pennycook develops a subtle distinction between recontextualisation and relocalisation, replacing the more abstract notion of context in the former with a more concrete notion of locality in the latter. Thus, while recontextualisation is more exclusively concerned with transposing linguistic or cultural items/features from one context into another (‘occurrences of the same things in different contexts’, Pennycook, 2010: 35), relocalisation is more inclusively concerned with the creative (i.e. repetitive but different) adaptations and appropriations of language and cultural practices, and the co-occurrences of similar/different practices in time and space. Relocalisation of language and culture relates to recontextualisation somewhat like ‘practices’ relate to ‘use’. While the notion of recontextualisation for Pennycook leaves the text across contexts the same, relocalisation draws our attention to what changes in the text when it is not used again, but practised anew. This view of relocalisation as an alternative to perceptions of creativity as total newness, difference and invention, allows us to appreciate borrowing, recycling and bricolage as potentially creative, original or authentic practices. At the same time, it allows us to see questions of the origins of language and culture as highly suspect. Instead, we may recognise multiple,

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simultaneous origins of hip-hop, Christianity and Islam, global English, etc., and understand Australian Aboriginal hip-hop, Islam in The Gambia, etc. as already local, as local Aboriginal musical practices relocalised in hiphop, and as local Gambian religious practices relocalised in Islam. A lesson Pennycook and Higgins offer us here is that English in Gambian society, despite its foreignness, is also a local language, since all language is local practice but, more importantly, because local practices are relocalised in English and such Englishings serve local practices. The local, in Pennycook’s and Higgins’ work, as well as in this book, is understood as a nexus of translocalities and globalities of various sorts. Nothing is just local – isolated from other localities – but everything happens locally, in some location. By saying that language is always local I mean that it is always spoken/written from a particular ‘locus of enunciation’ (Mignolo, 2012 [2000]), i.e. a uniquely situated perspective in the world from where we speak and/or write. It is from this locality, often an ‘extreme locality’ (Williams & Stroud, 2010), that language performances as in hip-hop battles derive their authenticity and credibility, even if they are at the same time extremely global (Wang, 2012). Language and identities that are insufficiently local risk being seen as fake, i.e. not recognised for what they purport to be. What makes something global is precisely its authentic adaptability at local levels. Global languages would not be global (and would not be languages) if they were not also at the same time habituated in local practices across the globe. The concept of local languaging as opposed to bi- or multilingualism and the other concepts in the family of languaging (translanguaging, metrolingualism, etc.) first of all situates language in a specific locality with a specific local history. Whereas it is not clear how polylingualism in Copenhagen or metrolingualism in Sydney differ from similar poly- or metrolingual practices elsewhere, local languaging emphasises the local specificity of language and literacy in practice. So this book is a study of multilingualism and literacy in a West African society, not in West African society more generally. And within that society – Gambian society – it is again situated in specific localities that raise questions about rather than assume their generalisability for the society as a whole. This is of course acknowledged also by the proponents of the other terms, but their arguments are more framed in terms of global, cosmopolitan and migrant identities than in terms of local, ordinary and sedentary practices. To borrow Mignolo’s words in his critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology: ‘I am also concerned with those who did not move, but around whom the world moved’ (Mignolo, 2012 [2000]: 72). Secondly, the concept of local languaging as proposed here is also more than the other terms concerned with the periphery, with off-the-beaten-track multilingual identities

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and literacy practices, i.e. with subaltern and grassroots rather than cosmoor metropolitan literacies and multilingualisms. These more marginal literacies and multilingualisms should equally be studied if we are to understand language and society in a globalised and globalising world. Therefore a sociolinguistics of globalisation cannot do without the local.

Coming To and Being in the Field Doing ethnography means working with people in so-called ‘fieldwork’ and gives rise to a whole range of ethical issues. Ethics is not, however, or should not be, primarily an institutional affair as appears to be the case in the ethics review boards many universities have embraced. Ethics remains in the first place a problem of intersubjectivity. A too rigorous institutionalisation of ethics means that research needs to be meticulously planned in advance and that all research tools and instruments are subjected to pending approval before the research can actually be carried out. The danger of subjecting ethnographic research to meticulous planning and bureaucratic consent is that it mortgages the freedom to ‘fool around’ in the field and jeopardises the ‘dialectic of surprise’ (Willis & Trondman, 2000: 12) that is vital for ethnographic research. In this dialectics, the relation between researcher and research participants is particularly precarious and is key in the construction of ethnographic knowledge (Briggs, 1986; Fabian, 1995). This is something that is well known to anthropologists, the foundational discipline of ethnography as a method and ethnographic theory, but is less explicitly recognised in sociolinguistic work. A notable exception is the seminal work of Cameron and colleagues (1992, 2006). They suggest that there are three positions language researchers may take up in relation to the people they work with. The first of these is an ethical position which involves an awareness and attempt to minimise ‘the potentially exploitative and damaging effects of being researched’ (Cameron et al., 2006: 139), directly as well as indirectly, on the short term as well as on the long term. This position is characterised by Cameron and colleagues as research ‘on’ human subjects. The second position is one of advocacy, and involves the researcher getting involved in local concerns and agendas and using ‘her skills or her authority as an expert to defend subjects’ interests’ (Cameron et al., 2006: 140) as service to the researched community as return for the knowledge that was acquired. This position is characterised as research ‘on’ and ‘for’ human subjects. The third position language researchers may take up is one of empowerment and does away with the positivist notion that researchers need to keep distance from the object of study

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in order to be objective. This position recognises that knowledge about people is fundamentally constructed in interaction and collaboration with people. Cameron and colleagues put forward three principles that follow from this post-positivist awareness: (a) ‘persons are not objects and should not be treated as objects’; (b) ‘subjects have their own agendas and research should try to address them’; and (c) ‘if knowledge is worth having, it is worth sharing’. This position is characterised by Cameron and colleagues as research ‘on’, ‘for’ and ‘with’ human subjects (Cameron et al., 2006: 143f ). Ethnography is a collaborative practice between researchers and research participants, and ethnographic research falls or stands with the input given and the collaboration granted by human subjects in the field that is being researched. The cultural anthropologist van Beek (1991) documents a case in which the renowned French ethnologist Marcel Griaule, who worked among the Dogon in Mali in the 1920s–1950s, has been misled by his participants, leading to the fabrication of highly improbable, yet at the time commonly accepted ethnographic knowledge about their cosmology. An even more controversial case, sometimes referred to as an anthropological ‘hoax’, is that of Carlos Castañeda, who ‘earned’ much of his way into the anthropological hall of fame in the 1960s by allegedly inventing the central persona of his ethnography, the shaman Don Juan who would have initiated him into many forms of secret ancient knowledge, involving the use of hallucinogenic drugs (see Fikes, 1993). To avoid this type of ethnographic enigma, ethnographers should perhaps not, unless required by the sensitive nature of the data collected, anonymise the people they have worked with. The terror of anonymity strips human subjects from their subjectivity and turns them into objects that can be manipulated and inserted into the ethnographic narrative at the will of the ethnographer. Ethnography belongs to the realm of non-fiction and people in the field are not literary characters in a book that can be employed by the ethnographer to narrate a story. Although there are many parallels between ethnographic and literary texts and although much can be and has been said about the poetics and politics of ethnographic writing (see, for example, Clifford & Marcus, 1986), research participants are real people of flesh and blood, often with telephone numbers, email addresses and social media accounts. Just as the ethnographer takes up responsibility for his work by signing it with his or her name and contact details, and just as the work of colleagues referred to in the body of the text is not anonymised for their protection or privacy, so should participants in ethnographic research not be made invisible by default, unless of course warranted by special circumstances. Ethnographic research participants are not nearly as powerless as the subjects of experimental or survey research as far as the research questions,

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procedures and outcomes are concerned. Research participants are not passive researchees, but agentive human beings instead, ‘with an attitude’ towards the research object and a voice of their own (Fabian, 2001). In fact, it is their attitude and their voice that is the central concern of ethnographic research. Ethnographers arrive at ethnographic knowledge in negotiation with agentive research participants, or not at all (cf. Collins, 1998).

My hosts and their stranger In this section I want to make explicit when and how I entered the field and what relationships emerged in the process. The story of my ethnography and my becoming an ethnographer, reads as a chain of coincidences, choices and opportunities that came on my path. This story is necessarily a very personal story. Where I say that ethnography is not the same sort of scientific exercise as literary criticism or multivariate analysis, I mean that in ethnography lives and bodies are invested, including the ethnographer’s own, but also those of hosts and informants who are inevitably implicated in the research. Between 2004 and 2009 I spent an aggregate 12 months ‘in the field’, divided over nine visits ranging from three weeks to three months, mostly during the semester breaks in the European summer and the Gambian rainy season (see Table 1.1 for details). This makes up roughly one-sixth of my life in that period. My first Gambian fieldwork trip in the summer of 2004 was not my first visit to the country. Earlier, in August 2001, the summer after graduating from secondary school, and again the next year in July 2002, I had paid short twoand three-week visits, together with my then girlfriend, for holidays. This is where I enter, quite banal as a tourist. This experience was for both of us our first time to ever venture outside Western Europe. During this vacation, we became friends with some of the security staff in our hotel, in particular with Lamin Sonko, who would later become the epicentre of my network. On that first visit, Lamin invited us over to visit his family for lunch, something he as a member of security staff was not supposed to suggest, but yet something that was (and still is) commonly suggested by various members of hotel staff as part of informal hospitality. On our second visit to the country in 2002, we visited Lamin again, both at the hotel, which was closed for renovation but still under security surveillance, and at his house. After our return home, Lamin and I kept in touch through the old-fashioned medium of airmail. What started as an ordinary case of a fleeting tourist–host encounter characterised by all the economic and sociopolitical asymmetries defined by our relative positions in the world (Lawson & Jaworski, 2007: 88), developed

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Table 1.1 Overview of fieldwork periods Length

Period

Location

Focus

Chapter

2 weeks 3 weeks

Aug 2001 Jul 2002 Jun–Jul 2004 Sep–Oct 2004 Jan–Feb 2005 Jul–Sep 2005

3 weeks

Jan 2007

Kombo

1 month 3 months

Jun–Jul 2007 Jun–Jul 2008

5 weeks

Jun–Jul 2008

Kombo Kombo; Foni Kombo; Foni

3 weeks

Feb–Mar 2009

Kombo

11 days 1 week + 2 days 36 hours

Jan 2013 Jan–Feb 2014

Kombo Kombo

Jan 2015

Kombo

vacation with partner vacation with partner, brother and friend English as a medium of instruction English as a medium of instruction English as a medium of instruction linguistic landscaping; surveys of multilingualism (with Ellen Vanantwerpen, as embedded researchers in the Forum for Youth Empowerment) tourism and migration; linguistic landscaping migration; language in education migration; language in education; linguistic landscaping linguistic landscapes; Mandinka literacy; supervision of three students from Tilburg University linguistic landscapes; Mandinka literacy; supervision of two students from Tilburg University return visit, with family en route to and from Guinea Bissau (for a new project) en route from Dakar to Bissau

– –

5 weeks 3 weeks 3 weeks 2 months

Banjul tour; Kololi Foni Foni Foni Foni; Kombo

– 4, 5 – 3

– 2 2 3, 5, 6

3, 6

– – –

into friendship. Although there were and still are important inequalities between us, e.g. in our mobilities and spending power, due to my position in the rich North and Lamin’s location in the poor South, this did not preclude us from engaging with each other on a basis of equality and reciprocity. In our correspondence during my first years as a university student – inspired by these two visits, I changed my course from philosophy to African studies – two letters crossed each other at one point, one from him requesting my assistance with building his house, and one from me asking him for help with finding a research site for my planned research on English and multilingual classroom practices in rural Gambia. I replied to him that, even though I was

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a poor student at the time, I would try to help him how best I could. He replied that his family in Foni (pronounce [fo:ñi]; see map in Figure 2.1) would be ready to host us and help me with my research and that there was a school not far from his village. Thus, in 2004, I travelled with my partner and another friend for a good month of fieldwork to study ‘the problem of the medium of instruction’ as I identified my research then, in rural Gambia. This time we would not be guests in a seaside resort, but guests in a Mandinka family in a village in Foni. Although there were some setbacks (e.g. ‘our’ house not being finished in time, and the school closing earlier than anticipated – see Chapter 4), this first period of fieldwork was unforgettable and an extremely rich experience in many respects. This is where I had my first grassroots lessons in Mandinka, starting with basic greetings and the words for the animals around us (siisee ‘chicken’, niiso ‘cow’, faalo ‘donkey’, etc.). This is also the first time I took a bath outdoors from a bucket of water and the first time I woke up in a house with mud walls and a grass roof topping – conditions that I saw partly changing over the years I visited Lamin’s family and village. This was also the first time I was at more than a one-hour walking distance removed from the nearest telephone (something that I also saw changing in the course of my fieldwork). In brief, it was this summer of 2004 that I experienced what could be described as a ‘culture shock’, a radical experience of ecological, cultural and linguistic difference, an experience one can probably experience only once. I was welcomed in Lamin’s family in Foni as a younger brother to Lamin and as a son to his mother (‘our’ father had already passed away). I have heard his mother in both serious and more playful situations refer to me as her son (n dio le mu). After Lamin got married in 2005, his wife too has named me in the presence of others as her husband (n keema le mu), in the associative sense of the word that is common for kinship organisation in West Africa. As part of my integration into Lamin’s family, I was also given a Gambian name, consisting of a variation of Muhammad Lamin (Malang) and Lamin’s surname (Sonko). Thus, I was ‘rechristened’ Mandinka and Muslim. Of course I was never fully assimilated into Lamin’s family. Throughout my fieldwork, I continued to be recognised as a ‘stranger’ or ‘guest’, which is one word in Mandinka (luntao). Often, I was referred to as someone’s stranger, or someone’s guest (e.g. Lamin na luntao), suggesting a sense of ownership. As I can speak of my hosts or my participants or informants (the people I have lived with in my fieldwork), so do they speak about me as their luntao (the person they have hosted for a while). As a member of the family, I was given a room and parlour in Lamin’s newly built one-house compound. With Lamin’s father no longer alive, and Lamin as the only male descendant, the family was among the smallest

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families of the village. Whereas the neighbouring compound consisted of a man with three wives and many children, two of his sons’ wives and children and other relatives, in our compound there were only four adults and just three children. At the beginning of my fieldwork, the household consisted of just Lamin’s mother, his divorced younger sister with three of her four children, and the eldest son of Lamin’s elder sister, whose name was also Lamin, but is here nicknamed L. Because of his work in the coastal area, Lamin himself only occasionally stayed overnight in his family’s compound, spending most of his days in urban Kombo. At the beginning of my fieldwork, Lamin took his annual month’s leave to accommodate us. This responsibility was later extended to his younger relative Almameh, who as a student initially had more time to look after us. As time went by, they trusted me to stay in their village without a special escort from the city. In Lamin and Almameh’s absence, I was closest to L, with whom I shared a room when I travelled alone. L will feature prominently in Chapter 5, which is a discussion of a notebook he kept, even though he claimed to be unable to read and write. Also featuring in Chapter 5 is the old Ba-Abdoulie who, before he passed away in January 2007, frequently spend time in our compound and had a special, fatherly relation to our family. Through Almameh, my network extended to urban Gambia as well. In more or less the same way as I became part of Lamin’s family in rural Foni, I also became part of an urban Jola family in Greater Serrekunda, however keeping my adopted Foni roots and Mandinka name. I am equally indebted to these people, even though they play less visible roles in this book. A third family that is important for my ethnography is the family of Almameh’s elder brother, Burama, who is the central persona of Chapter 6. My entrance to Lamin’s village and the school, and my fieldwork in general and educational and professional achievements were greatly helped by Lamin and Almameh. This is a great reward that is hard to value in simple monetary terms or even in terms of ‘gift exchange’ (see Janson, 2002 for a Gambian anthropological perspective). What I offered Lamin’s family at the beginning of my fieldwork in 2004 were three packets of corrugated iron sheets and a few bags of cement to roof and floor the new house, as well as more regular daily contributions (dapanso or ‘fish money’) for our subsistence. We have in the process of my repeated visits learned a lot from each other and become close friends, even family in the inclusive African sense of the word.

Learning to language locally So how many languages do I speak? How did I communicate in the field? How did I acquire the knowledge about literacy and multilingualism in

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Gambian society, sociolinguistically speaking? How was I immersed in the multilingual research contexts of the different localities and practices I studied? Although some of these questions regarding my repertoire of language will become evident through the discussion in the subsequent chapters, I will say a few words here about how I was socialised into Gambian local languaging as part of my fieldwork praxis and in relation to my positioning in the field. I only began learning Gambian local languages during my fieldwork in The Gambia, as the African studies programme I took in Belgium prepared me linguistically for fieldwork in Central Africa, not West Africa. The languages offered in the programme at Ghent University at the time – Lingala and Tshiluba spoken in D.R. Congo – were about as useful a preparation to my fieldwork as studying Russian and Polish would be for research in France. The little support I could get came in the form of self-study materials such as a Peace Corps grammar and dictionary for Mandinka (Colley, 1995a, 1995b) that I brought along to the field. Lamin’s village, however, was a very encouraging environment in which to learn Mandinka, with numerous people around me with the patience and the interest to teach me, and enough persons – usually elders – who did not, or pretended not to, speak English. The elaborate routine greeting formulae were a useful entry point into speaking Mandinka, and allowed me to penetrate a little deeper into Mandinka vocabulary with each conversation. I turned many casual moments into language lessons, compiling and writing down in my fieldwork diary thematic word and phrase lists of, for example, animals, body parts, numerals and adverbial constructions. This apparently amused my teachers – young children, the boys in my own age group such as L, an occasional elder such Ba-Abdoulie on the cover of the book – as I was often asked to start a new list on a new theme, or in a new language. I also took a few sessions of more formal lessons with the certified adult literacy instructor of the village – Gallow, a tailor and farmer of about the same age as me – on the basis of the stories and vocabulary of the adult literacy course materials he used in his periodically organised classes that were attended by women from the village. The more time I spend in the village, the better my Mandinka became. As I moved my research to the urban areas in Kombo, I didn’t progress as quickly any more as Wolof and English were more prominent there. Return visits to the village were productive immersion classes. Before long my communicative skills were comfortably enough to surprise and impress strangers on first meetings and to engage in small talk with fellow passengers in public transport, street vendors, neighbours, etc. Before long I also became aware that my skills were not only impressive but equally insufficient as to warrant

How Many L anguages Do You Speak?

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reactions of frustration from my closest friends that I kept forgetting what they had taught me. A difficulty in learning Mandinka was that I could not seem to find anyone who could teach me grammar. I only partially figured out the functions of the many aspect marking particles (e.g. mu, le, ti, ma) or the plural person pronouns which seemed to work rather differently than in the European languages I knew. I was also notoriously bad in recognising the tonal and vowel-length distinctions in words such as kaanoo ‘pepper’ and kano ‘love’. A good book published by a contemporary missionary organisation (Lück & Henderson, 1993) was helpful in this respect, but was brought to my attention only towards the end of my fieldwork. Lüpke and Storch (2013: 8) note that the African experience of multilingualism is one of a ‘resourceful, dynamic multilingualism, entirely outside the formal sector and without any official reinforcements or resources available to any of the languages that are part of it’. Throughout this learning experience, I often deplored the lack of a formal foreign language learning infrastructure (language schools, user-friendly learner manuals, professional teachers, a common orthography, etc.) as had been available for any of the other languages I had attempted to learn so far. Or I deplored my own personal lack of talent for learning languages informally that some famous Africanist field linguists allegedly had. I eventually acquired pidginesque basic interpersonal communication skills in Mandinka and later, to a lesser extent, also in Wolof. These skills served me in a range of domains, to greet and interact with most friends and strangers, to ask for directions, to negotiate prices on the market, to make an occasional joke, etc. Very often a conversation would start in Mandinka and turn to English or a kind of bilingual interpreting mode (or I would be excluded from the conversation) when the topic required a richer verbal repertoire than my basic Mandinka. As a result, I spent lots of time listening to and trying to pick up bits and pieces of conversations I could not understand entirely or not at all. As soon as I achieved this pidginesque basic level of Mandinka, or even before that, people would challenge me and ask me if I could, or why I didn’t speak their language – Wolof, Jola, Fula. In this way I also learned to recognise and greet in these other languages, developing what Blommaert and Backus (2013) call minimal and recognising multilingual competence. More than I had to learn the local language – Mandinka – I had to learn to language locally, to respond appropriately in greeting sequences involving Arabic, the interlocutors’ ethnic language (e.g. Jola, Fula) and the lingua franca of the situation (often Mandinka or Wolof). I had to learn to choose the right momentum to switch, and get the cultural pragmatics of turntaking and backchanneling right. All of this is not learning different languages,

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but learning ‘multilanguages’ (Makoni et al., 2010) or learning to ‘trans-’ or ‘polylanguage’, or what I prefer to call ‘local languaging’. It seems true that learning Mandinka on the ground, or any West African language, necessarily takes place in a situation of extensive societal multilingualism and dramatic language contact, which in Lüpke’s (2010: 1) words, ‘makes notions like “mother tongue” and “first” and “second language” problematic in many ways and is reflected in vague, multiple and easily changeable ethnic affiliations’. Successful, dynamic and resourceful but informal multilingualism is ‘the – under-reported – normality in present-day Africa,’ argue Lüpke & Storch (2013: 8) with special reference to the Casamance region south of Gambia. They list a range of strategies for social exchange, mobility and cohesion across ethnolinguistic boundaries that nurture exogenous marriage patterns; language acquisition in peer groups and age classes; widespread child fostering (not only for crisis situations); joking relationships (relations à plaisanterie); and mobility and migration for ritual, religious, economic and educational purposes (Lüpke & Storch, 2013: 33). Crossings and translanguaging indeed appeared to be the norm, i.e. part of normal language practices in the field. As noted, I was also expected to cross into other local languages, even if only minimally, as part of my local language learning. I disagree, however, with Lüpke (2010: 1–2) that ‘the (ex-colonial) official languages play only a minor role in the most common multilingual repertoires, contrarily to their visibility, status and representation in research’. Throughout my research English remained an important mode of communication, and I always found many persons ready to speak English. Where Owusu (2012 [1978]: 100), in his classic and provocative essay, strongly stated the case of the ‘simple commonsense truth’ that ‘no person, not even a de Toqueville studying African cultures, can understand another whose language he does not speak, read, and understand, and, hence, whose world view he cannot truly share’, it now also seems true that the ex-colonial language is part of Africans’ multilingual repertoires and gets you a long way as far as communication is concerned. English simply never was very far away in my fieldwork. The children in the village seemed as interested in trying out their English on me as they were to hear me trying out Mandinka on them. And many of the ‘boys’ in the village seemed to have a great interest in talking with me – in English – about global stuff, where I came from and had travelled, and their dreams and imaginations of life in Europe. It seems true that English has become a local language (Higgins, 2009) – fully integrated into the local ecology of language and playing a major role in most Gambians’ multilingual repertoires. My multilingual research praxis evidently reflects this.

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Locating field sites Spatially, my research radius evolved from the village and the school in Foni where it all began, to various locations in the urban sprawl of the Kombos in the west of the country. As we shall see, Kombo and Foni refer to old precolonial polities and constitute the two westernmost polities on the South Bank. Kombo is the upbeat urban heart and the political, administrative and commercial centre of the country. The capital Banjul and the two largest towns, Serrekunda and Brikama, are situated here. Foni borders Kombo to the east and constitutes the westernmost part of ‘the provinces’ or rural Gambia, i.e. the part of rural Gambia that is within shortest distance (one to three hours travel by public transport) of the urban Kombos. Although I also visited other places upcountry and on the North Bank, my fieldwork was principally concentrated in the Foni and Kombo districts. It should be noted that while Kombo is the urban centre of the country, forming in fact one continuous urban region, Foni cannot be taken to represent rural Gambia as a whole. This study does not attempt to generalise beyond the two regions studied, and where I write about Gambian society in general (or West African society in the title), this should be seen as shorthand for Kombo and Foni.

Figure 1.1 Map of key research locations

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The map in Figure 1.1 presents the most important research locations and places mentioned in the book. For the village and the district school in Foni, these are indicated only approximately as I was asked to anonymise the name (and thus the location) of the school. For the research locations in Kombo, more precise references are possible. The four data-driven chapters are each set in different but connected research location. Chapter 3 deals with public signage around the Kombos. The discussion of language-ineducation in Chapter 4 is set in and around the district school in Foni. The ethnographies of literacy Chapter 5 presents are situated in the context of the Foni village mentioned here. The context for Chapter 6, finally, is the ‘periurban’ village of Farato near Brikama. These places are connected not only through my research praxis, but also as nodes in the lives and family networks of my adopted extended family in Foni.

Outline of this Book The present chapter has introduced the main theme and approach of this book and outlined the two elements of the key theoretical concept advanced in the book – local and languaging – as well as set the wider ethnographic scene of the book. Chapter 2 sets out to describe the linguistic, ethnic and social diversity in Gambian society against the background of increasing globalisation. It should be noted that this chapter takes a special position within the book as a whole. Whereas the following chapters deconstruct the view of multilingualism as the sum of nameable language entities, this chapter takes stock of what we know of language in Gambian society precisely in terms of the labels and names that are available to talk about language and ethnicity in Gambia. This is not in overall contradiction to the aims of the book since labels and names are part of the discourse about language in any society and are unavoidable. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to talk about literacy and multilingualism without referring to those labels and names in current use, these labels and names of languages are also part of the local languaging situation. For Baumann (1996), as explained by Risager (2009), there is a double discourse of culture, a dominant and a demotic discourse, both of which are legitimate and used for specific purposes in various contexts. The dominant discourse is essentialist in the sense that it posits the existence of cultures, communities, religions and languages as finished objects. At the same time, there is a competing discourse, which Baumann calls ‘demotic’ (literally, of the people) that reifies as well as questions and redraws the dominant or essentialist discourse. Chapter 2 is thus concerned with this dominant discourse of language and

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ethnicity as it charts the various labels and names and lists of language and ethnicity and their connections. After this macro-sociolinguistic description of the linguistic, ethnic and social diversity in Gambian society, the following two chapters discuss literacy and multilingualism in public practices. Chapter 3 offers an ethnographic and multimodal analysis of the urban linguistic landscape or multilingual signage in the public space. Chapter 4 investigates another public dimension of literacy, i.e. the issue of language-in-education, and engages with local voices in the debate on the medium of instruction. The following two chapters leave the public space behind and detail how literacy is used in the more intimate domain of people’s private and social lives. Chapter 5 explores literacy practices in one modern multi-ethnic village in Foni (i.e. Lamin’s village described above) and juxtaposes a microdescription of a letter-writing event with a detailed analysis of an everyday literacy product, a personal telephone booklet, as handled by a low-literate young man. Chapter 6 investigates literacy inequalities and the infrastructure of local language literacy through one man’s Mandinka writing in an environment where everybody else who writes, routinely writes in English or Arabic. The concluding chapter reviews the material discussed in the four databased chapters and theorises about what this all means for our understanding of the world (globalisation), literacy and sociolinguistics.

2 Gambia’s Local Languages

With a latitude of 13–14 degrees north and a longitude of 17–13 degrees west, The Republic of The Gambia – with a definite article and a capital ‘T’ – is located in the extreme west of West Africa and is the smallest of the mainland African countries (Figure 2.1). It has a land surface of 10,380 km2 and measures 338 km from east to west and on average 25–35 km from north to south. With its peculiar elongated shape it follows the meandering River Gambia that divides the country into a north and a South Bank. Apart from a small Atlantic coastline, the country is completely surrounded by Senegal. It has a tropical climate and a relatively flat terrain that contains mangroves, flood plains and savannah. The territory in its current shape and size is a construct of the colonial 19th century which saw French and British powers struggle over its possession as a trading post and resource area for the transatlantic slave trade until it was, in the years after the Berlin Conference, declared a British Crown Colony in 1889. It would remain a British colony until it peacefully achieved Independence in 1965. Since Independence, The Gambia has been reigned by only two presidents: by Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara as a prime minister in the years preceding Independence and formally as a president since 1970, until he was replaced in a coup d’état in 1994 by a young lieutenant, the current president, His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh, Nasirul Deen Babili Mansa, as his full name and decoration at one point read. The Gambia had a population of 1.9 million people in 2014. It is currently ranked as the 172nd country (of 187) in the Human Development Index (a country index on the basis of life expectancy, education and income), which means that it is considered to be among the poorest or ‘least developed’ countries in the world. The Gambia is administratively divided into five regions, eight local government areas (LGAs) and 37 districts, as shown in Table 2.1. Apart from this official, colonially inherited division, there is also a popular division of the country using the names of precolonial polities. These precolonial states, most of which transcend the current national boundaries, are mainly ancient Mandinka kingdoms: for example, Kombo and Foni on the South Bank and 26

Kombo Central

Lower Niumi

Liberia

Sierra Leone

Guinea

Foni Bondali

Kiang Central Kiang East

Ghana

Source: Adapted from Jaiteh & Saho (2006).

Jarra Central

Benin

West

Mansa Konko

Jarra

Upper Baddibu

Burkina Faso

Mali

Foni Jarrol

Ivory Coast

Kansala

Foni

Kiang West

Kerewan

Lower Central Baddibu Baddibu

Togo

Figure 2.1 Map of The Gambia and its location in Africa

Guinea-Bissau

The Gambia

Jokadu

Foni Bintang

Foni Brefet

Senegal

Kombo East

River Gambia

Upper Niumi

Banjul

WEST AFRICA

South

Brikama

Kombo

Kombo North

KMC

Kanifing

Upper Saloum

Jarra East

Niamina Dankunku Niamina West

Lower Saloum

Nianija

Niamina East

Janjanbureh

Niani Sami

Fuladu West

Janjanbureh

Fuladu East

Sandu Kantora

AFRICA

Basse Santo Su

Wuli

N

Gambia’s Local L anguages 27

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Table 2.1 Administrative division of The Gambia Regions

Local government areas

Districts

Banjul LGA Kanifing LGA

Banjul City Kombo St. Mary/Kanifing Municipality Kombo North, Kombo South, Kombo Central, Kombo East, Foni Berefet, Foni Bintang, Foni Kansala, Foni Bondali, Foni Jarrol Kiang West, Kiang Central, Kiang East, Jarra West, Jarra Central, Jarra East Lower Niumi, Upper Niumi, Jokadu, Lower Baddibu, Central Baddibu, Upper Baddibu Lower Saloum, Upper Saloum, Nianija, Niani, Sami Niamina Dankunku, Niamina West, Niamina East, Fulladu West Fulladu East, Sandu, Wuli West, Wuli East, Kantora

Western region(WR)

Brikama LGA

Lower River region (LRR)

Mansakonko LGA

North Bank region (NBR)

Kerewan LGA

Central River region (CRR)

Kuntaur LGA Georgetown LGA

Upper River region (URR)

Basse LGA

Niumi and Baddibu on the North Bank. In addition, there are the Serer/Wolof states Sine and Saloum in the Central River region, and Fuladu ‘land of the Fula’ in the Upper River region (see Sonko-Godwin, 2003 for notes on Gambia’s precolonial history). In common with many developing countries, there is an urban–rural dichotomy that dominates the geography and economy of the country. The most urbanised area is located in the Kombo districts on the South Bank, comprising the city of Banjul and the towns of Serrekunda, Kanifing, Bakau, Fajara, Kotu, Kololi, Abuko, Lamin, Yundum and Brikama. The Kombos accommodate the largest proportion of the Gambian population, the largest number of schools per head, most of the industry and the best access to tap water supply and electricity. Most of the country’s tourism activity, embassies and international organisations are also concentrated here. The southern and eastern parts of these districts, however, remain predominantly rural, which is why the term urban Kombo is used in this book to designate the conglomeration of towns and urban settlements in the western part of the country.

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Countrywide, the rural areas are dominated by agricultural land that is predominantly used for cultivating groundnuts for export, and rice, fruit and vegetables for domestic consumption. In the rural areas, villages are made up of family compounds. Traditionally, men remain in the compound they are born into and women transfer to their husband’s family on marriage. Where polygamy is practised, each marriage unit occupies a house in the compound. The occupants of all the houses would be closely related and share chores, resources and childcare. Familial compounds are also found in the urban area. However, with a more transient population and more rented accommodation, the ethnic make-up of urban compounds is more diverse. Families renting a house in towns may find themselves sharing facilities with members of different ethnic and language groups, a situation that is relatively rare in the rural areas. Despite its size, The Gambia is culturally, ethnically and linguistically diverse to an extent that goes beyond traditional notions of diversity. As a result of increased flows of people, images, technologies, money and ideas (Appadurai, 1996), this diversity could be characterised as ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec, 2006, 2007). In the literature, superdiversity (with or without hyphen) refers to the post-1989 changing nature of immigration in metropolitan Europe that has caused ‘a transformative “diversification of diversity” in terms of ethnicities and countries of origin, but also with respect to a variety of significant variables that affect where, how and with whom people live’ (Vertovec, 2006: 1). I apply this term here to diagnose the current situation of ethno-social and linguistic diversity in Gambian society and aim to demonstrate that the effects of superdiversity are not limited to metropolitan areas. Empirically, superdiversity in this West African context indexes the conviviality and complex forms of interaction of Nigerian businessmen, Senegalese prostitutes, Sierra Leonean refugees, American peace corps volunteers, Cuban doctors, Lebanese corporations, Guinean wheelbarrow pushers, Mauritanian grocers, witch doctors from Niger, Dutch and Finnish tourists, Bollywood films, Ghanaian Pentecostal priests, Indian entrepreneurs, Taiwanese development workers, Pakistani missionaries, and internal migrants of various types. The term is also useful, to some extent, to decolonise African ethnographies from persistent singular, monolithic and homogeneous notions of culture, community, ethnicity and language. In this background chapter, I set out to map the general contours of the linguistic, ethnic and social diversity in Gambian society which as of yet has not systematically been treated in the literature on language in society, with the exception of limited and old surveys by Weil (1968) and Richmond (1980). The dearth of reliable and up-to-date published specialist information about language in Gambian society explains the many ‘errors, confusions and misinterpretations’ in currency (Gamble, 2004), and also in

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sociolinguistic knowledge about the country. This book, and this chapter in particular, is meant to fill this gap in the literature and provide first-hand information on the sociolinguistic profile of The Gambia. Much of the information presented here is commonly shared knowledge in The Gambia, and was mainly obtained informally and orally in the course of my fieldwork, as well as that of my colleague Caroline McGlynn with whom the article that this chapter is based on was written (see Juffermans & McGlynn, 2009). Where relevant, reference has also been made to official sources and (locally) published materials, either to corroborate the ‘facts’ presented here, or to indicate that the assertions made are under discussion. It is against the background of the general sociolinguistic profile sketched in this chapter that the present study on multilingual and literacy practices has taken place. In the following chapters frequent recourse will be taken to the information provided here, including the names for the local languages and ethnic groups.

A Note on Terminology This chapter makes use of rather conservative sociolinguistic metalinguistics to describe the linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity in Gambian society. It makes reference to convenient labels such as English, Mandinka and Wolof. This can indeed be seen as countering the general argument that is laid out in the book about deconstructing language as countable entities. While the book indeed aims to deconstruct received notions of language and culture and to explore alternative, locally meaningful ways of speaking about language and culture, the present chapter illustrates how powerful ‘monolith orthodoxies’ (Rymes, 2014) are and how difficult it is to escape the tendency to count and name languages. The point here, however, is not that language cannot or should not be named at all. Naming and labelling is quite inevitable for any scientific or folk metalanguage. The point is that language names – English, Mandinka, Jola – need to be seen not as natural givens or sui generis entities in the real word, but as historical constructions or human inventions that may be resisted and may change again. This chapter will exemplify that language constructs often have multiple names and that these sometimes reflect different power relations vis-à-vis the language/ ethnic group in question. The chapter also exemplifies – to some extent – the fluidity of ethnic and linguistic identifications. In deconstructing notions of language and culture that are unfit to describe the dynamic and versatile multilingual practices and repertoires of

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Gambian individuals, this book joins the conversation on language and superdiversity. This work has called for a critical reengagement of the basic theoretical toolkit of sociolinguistics, through empirical work in the metropolises and the margins. Various authors have remarked that what are seen as spectacular implications of superdiversity in metropolitan Europe or Australia (e.g. forms of polylanguaging or metrolingual practices among urban youth, cf. Jørgensen et al., 2011; Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010) are hardly spectacular when compared to post- or precolonial sociolinguistic realities in the global South (see, for example, Canagarajah, 2013). Translanguaging and transidiomaticity are not patented in inner-city environments of the global North, but find old and vivid precursors across the global South. This is why for Arnaut (2012) and Deumert (2014) superdiversity is more than a phenomenon of growing social complexity as a consequence of diversifying migration patterns and new technologies of long-distance communication, an emerging perspective on society and social change. In urban Gambia, the simultaneous presence of Nigerian hardware entrepreneurs, Senegalese architects, Sierra Leonean refugees in the teaching business, European holidaymakers, etc. in the same geographic space indexes a similar level of social complexity as can be observed in metropolitan Europe. And so does the choice between Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood films and the latest releases from the Senegalese, Malian, American and Jamaican music scene for entertainment, satellite television from across Anglo- and Francophone Africa and the Middle East, America and Europe, and the choice between second-hand clothes or mobile phones from Europe or new ones imported from China via Dubai. And nearly every family has a son (or less commonly, a daughter) in Libya, Catania, Hamburg, Birmingham or Oslo sending (or receiving) remittances. Opposition politics and critical news reporting are organised from the east coast of the United States and London. Gambian society is clearly deeply globalised, the effects of which are felt in almost any aspect of popular cultural life. But more importantly, the ordinary diversity in everyday interactions in urban and rural Gambia alike give rise to similarly complex repertoires of identity as those branded as superdiverse in metropolitan Europe. This of course begs the question: what’s so super about superdiversity in urban Europe? Maybe what is perceived to be new in Europe has been around for a decent amount of time in West African societies (cf. Lüpke & Storch, 2013). Even if superdiversity is not judged to be the best way to describe the context of diversity here (migration researchers Czaika & de Haas, 2014 term it a Eurocentric idea), globalisation needs to be seen as transforming the entire world system, i.e. not only the global metropolitan centres but also its more remote margins (Wang et al., 2014: 23).

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Language and Ethnicity in Gambian Society This section first gives an overview of the country’s local languages and ethnicities, then describes the role of English and Arabic in Gambian society and finally outlines the sociolinguistic situation regarding various groups of immigrants.

Local languages and ethnicities None of the languages and ethnic groups is exclusive to The Gambia as each can also be found in Senegal and in other geographically nearby countries such as Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Mali. It is often conveniently stated (in government publications, tourist guides, or other sources) that there are nine ethnic groups (and corresponding local languages) in The Gambia. This number, however, can easily be extended or reduced depending on what one cares to include or exclude and how one draws the boundaries between languages and ethnic groups. The census data, for instance (GBoS, 2007b), list Mandinka, Fula, Wolof, Jola, Serahule, Serer, Manjago, Bambara and Creole (Aku) as ethnic groups. The Ethnologue counts 11 ‘living languages’ for Gambia: English, Jola-Fonyi, Karon, Mandinka, Mandjak, Maninkakan, N’ko, Pulaar, Serahule, Serer-Sine and Gambian Wolof (distinguished from Wolof in Senegal). The website of the International Roots Festival lists ‘eight indigenous tribes’: the Mandinka, the Wolof, the Fula, the Jola, the Serahuli, the Serer, the Aku and the Manjago. The website maintained by the Gambia Tourism Board (www.accessgambia.com) similarly writes about ‘8 main ethnic groups’, listed alphabetically as Aku, Fula, Jola, Mandinka, Serahule, Serer, Tukulor and Wolof. Yet another source (Levinson, 1998: 134f ) talks about ‘at least 20 separate ethnic groups’ but lists only 18: Mandinka, Fula, Wolof, Jola and Serahule (as major groups) and Bainouk, Bambara, Bayot, Jahanka, Diola, Kalanke, Kassonke, Krio, Mandyak, Mankanya, Mansoanka, Serrer and Sonninke (as other groups, comprising together about 4% of the population). Different considerations lead to different numbers. While in these lists Bambara and Mandinka are often seen as separate languages/ethnic groups, they are in some contexts regarded as one. The Ethnologue does not list Bambara as a Gambian language but as an immigrant language, but is the only source here to list Maninkakan as a Gambian language as well as the N’ko script. The last list of 20 (or 18) lists two alternative spellings (Jola and Diola) as different languages and counts the alternative names Serahule/ Sonninke as two separate entities. The Gambia Tourist Board as the only source names Tukulor as a Gambian language but forgets Manjago/Mandyak. The smaller lists omit languages that the longer lists give, perhaps because

Gambia’s Local L anguages

33

they are considered too insignificant to be listed or because they are defined as non-indigenous or immigrant languages, or simply because more detailed information has not been accessed. The longer lists list languages that the shorter lists omit, perhaps because spellings or variants of a name are confused for different languages, because more detailed data were available, or perhaps because these sources are more inclusive or committed to comprehensiveness. Whatever the case, these lists of languages are always messy and vary greatly from source to source. Counts of languages should therefore always be mistrusted, or taken as ultimately arbitrary indications of relative linguistic diversity. In terms of genetic classification, where the same caveat should be applied, all Gambian languages except English and Aku are commonly classified under two families of the phylum of Niger-Congo languages – Mande and Atlantic languages (Ethnologue, 2009). Figure 2.2 presents a schematic overview of this genetic classification. Within the group of Mande languages, a central cluster of Manding languages can be discerned, including Mandinka, Bambara and Jahanka. These Manding languages are to a certain degree mutually intelligible and the people share a common history and culture (Sullivan, 2004 [1983]; Vydrine et al., 2000). This has led both locals and scholars to argue that Manding languages could be, or should be, regarded as a single language (e.g. Canut, 2002; Prah, 2003). Serahule is related to the Manding languages, but not closely enough to be included in the Manding group. Gambian languages in the Atlantic group all belong to the northern branch of this language family and have been subdivided into Senegambian

Figure 2.2 Genetic classification of Gambian languages Source: After Ethnologue (2009).

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Local L anguaging, Literac y and Mult ilingualism in a West Af r ican Soc iet y

(Fula, Wolof, Serer) and Bak languages (Jola, Manjago, Balanta, Karoninka), plus Bainunka. The internal differences within the Senegambian and Bak groups are reportedly more substantial than those between languages of the Manding family. Not included in Figure 2.2 is Aku, an English-based Creole language. In government publications and policy documents (e.g. DoSE, 2004, 2006), five of the local languages are often cited as the main local languages. These five languages correspond to the five largest ethnic groups in The Gambia and are: Mandinka, Fula, Wolof, Jola and Serahule (usually cited in that order). In the decennial housing and population censuses that are organised by the Gambian Bureau of Statistics (GBoS), there is a question on ethnicity but not on language use. Table 2.2 provides an overview of the share of the different ethnic groups in the Gambian population as counted in the censuses of 1973–2013. It is important to note that, even though each local language in The Gambia corresponds to an ethnic group, there is no one-toone relation between language and ethnicity. While individuals are categorised as belonging to only one ethnic group (their fathers’), they often speak several languages, and not necessarily the language of their ethnic group. The following is a description of each of The Gambia’s ethnolinguistic groups, with attention to historical, social and linguistic details.

Mandinka The Mandinkas are descendants of the Mali Empire that was founded by Sunjata Keita in the 13th century (Faal, 1997: 7; Sonko-Godwin, 2003: 3) and Table 2.2 Gambian population by ethnicity 1973–2003, in percentages

Mandinka Fula Wolof Jola Serahule Serer Manjago Bambara Creole (Aku)

1973

1983

1993

2003

2013

42.3 18.2 15.7 9.5 8.7 2.1 1.3 0.4 1.0

40.8 19.0 13.7 10.4 8.3 2.5 1.7 0.5 0.8

39.5 18.8 14.6 10.6 8.9 2.8 0.8 0.7 1.8

35.9 21.9 14.5 11.4 8.2 3.1 2.0 1.1 0.5

32.3 22.6 13.9 9.9 7.7 2.9 1.7 1.2 0.5

Source: After GBoS (2007b), with an update from the 2013 Census obtained in personal communication, April 2015.

Gambia’s Local L anguages

35

are almost exclusively Muslim (99.8%) (all cited percentages on religion and ethnicity are from the 2003 Housing and Population Census, GBoS, 2007b). As the language of the largest ethnic group, Mandinka is the most widely spoken language in The Gambia, both as a first and second language, and carries some prestige because of its numerical majority and historical royal connections. In the majority of rural areas, as well as in most of the towns located outside the Banjul and Kanifing LGAs, Mandinka functions as a lingua franca. Mandinka is used in radio and television broadcasting, although Wolof is increasingly being used in advertising and Kombo-based productions. Mandinka has an official, standardised orthography in Latin script with a strict phoneme-to-grapheme correlation (e.g. with the use of and and double vowel marking for long vowels; see Chapter 6 for more details), but as it is not taught in schools, written Mandinka does not usually adhere to the standardised version. Mandinka written with Arabic characters was taught in madrassa schools until fairly recently and still features on the official dalasi bank notes. Dalasi bank notes contain the denomination in English (e.g. TEN DALASIS) and under that, from right to left, the denomination in Mandinka (‫‘ ﺩﻠﺴﮟ ﭡﺎ‬dalasi ta’) and Wolof (‫‘ ﻓک ﺩﻠﺴﮟ‬fuki dalasi’) in Arabic script. It is not possible to confirm to what extent Ajami, the practice of writing local languages with Arabic characters, is still practised in everyday life. The N’ko alphabet, invented by Souleymane Kanté from Kankan in Guinea in 1949 (Oyler, 2005; Wyrod, 2008), has virtually no currency in The Gambia. Current organised efforts to promote and teach literacy in Mandinka use the Latin-based standard orthography. However, public written materials beyond learning materials (second language learner manuals and adult literacy syllabi), dictionaries and an occasional news bulletin, Kibaari kutoolu, are not readily available.

Wolof Wolof is the language of the third largest ethnic group in The Gambia, but is more widely spoken as a second or additional language than Fula. The Wolof people, almost exclusively Muslims now, originate from the area north of the Senegal river, but migrated southward into the Senegambian region when their homeland ran dry, and established the states of Jolof, Kayor, Walo and Baol and subjected the Serer states Sine and Saloum (Faal, 1997; SonkoGodwin, 2003). Wolof became the lingua franca of most of present-day Senegal and is becoming increasingly important in urban Gambia. In Banjul and the Kanifing Municipality, children of multi-ethnic parents increasingly grow up speaking Wolof as a first language and it is often also the preferred language of communication in ethnically mixed gatherings, for example school playgrounds and marketplaces. This process of Wolofisation as described for

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Senegal (Mc Laughlin, 1995, 2008b; Ngom, 2004) takes a similar shape in The Gambia. The Wolofisation of ethnic identities (Ngom, 2004), however, may not be as pervasive in The Gambia as in Senegal, as it appears it is taking the form not of ethnic assimilation but of increased multilingualism, with Wolof becoming a more evident second or subsequent language (but see the notes below on language shift for Jola and Serer). Pace Ethnologue, Gambian Wolof should not be regarded as independent or unconnected to Senegalese Wolof. It is recognised by speakers in both The Gambia as well as Senegal that despite lexical differences they are the same language. Urban Gambian Wolof is characterised by extensive ‘monolectal code-switching’ (Meeuwis & Blommaert, 1998) with English, French and Arabic, even though the level of hybridisation is reportedly not as advanced as in urban Senegal (cf. Haust, 1995; Ngom, 2004; Swigart, 1992). In addition to frequent use on television and radio, Wolof is also the language of mbalax – i.e. popular music with Wolof lyrics, made world-famous by Youssou N’Dour. The popularity of mbalax in The Gambia leads to the language having some prestige among the younger population. As with Mandinka, Wolof is also used in adult literacy classes, but not in formal education. Wolof has an official, standardised orthography in Latin script (with conventions that differ slightly from those in Senegal), but its use is not widely distributed. At the same time, Wolof literacy in Arabic script (Wolof ) continues to exist (on bank notes for instance, e.g. ‫‘ ﻓک ﺩﻠﺴﮟ‬fuki dalasi’), and is believed, by some of our informants, to be more widespread than literacy in Latin script. Lüpke and Bao-Diop (2014) attest that its use in Senegal is widespread, albeit ‘beneath the surface’.

Fula The Fula, or Peul as they are known in French, are arguably the most dispersed African ethnic group. It has been stated that the Fula can be found ‘in every modern West African state from Mauritania to Cameroon and the Republic of Sudan’ (Sonko-Godwin, 2003: 42). The Senegalese Futa Toro and Guinean Futa Jalon highlands are believed to be the historical origin of all Fulas in West Africa. Fulas take pride in being among the first of all West African peoples to embrace Islam (Faal, 1997: 16) and today 99.7% of Gambian Fula assert to be Muslim (GBoS, 2007b). Many Gambian Fula are first or second generation migrants from Guinea, where Fula is a national language, which explains the growing numbers in Table 2.2. Originally nomadic cattle herders, rural Fulas are now cattle farmers and often rear the livestock of people from other ethnic groups for agreed benefits. Many Fula also run grocery shops and are sometimes involved in more substantial retail business, for instance the supply of textile and

Gambia’s Local L anguages

37

building materials. As rural tenants and urban traders in multi-ethnic environments, many Gambian Fula have gained fluency in the languages of their neighbours (Mandinka, Wolof, Jola, Serahule), thus removing the necessity for members of other ethnic groups to acquire high-level second language proficiency in Fula. There are areas, however, especially in Fulladu (in Central and Upper River regions; see Figure 2.1) where Fulas form the majority and where Fula functions as a language of wider communication.

Jola Jola, spelled Diola in French, is classified as an Atlantic Niger-Congo language and is, according to Ethnologue (2009) rather a family of languages than a single uniform language (see also Lüpke & Storch, 2013). Little is known about the precolonial history of the Jola, but their origins are believed to be in the lower region of Casamance and parts of what is now Guinea-Bissau (SonkoGodwin, 2003: 68). In The Gambia, Jolas are most populous in the Foni districts, the rural area east of Kombo. Although in Casamance there are substantial numbers of Christian and ‘Animist’ Jola, most Gambian Jolas are Muslim (91.6%) with a notable minority of Christians (8.4%) (GBoS, 2007b). Large numbers of recent refugees and settlers from troubled Casamance have ensured this ethnic group has grown slightly in the past decade (see Table 2.2). Jola is the ethnic group of the current president Jammeh (former president Jawara was Mandinka). Notwithstanding the recent increase in Jola speakers (see Table 2.2) and the association with power through the president, the language has come under pressure, especially in urban Kombo where, because of the mixed ethnicity of non-familial compounds, many Jola families are increasingly shifting to Mandinka, Wolof or both. The domains in which Jola is used are minimal; therefore children of Jola families increasingly grow up speaking limited Jola, with Wolof or Mandinka as a first language. This situation also applies, albeit to a lesser extent, to the rural Foni area. Although Jola is not listed in the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages (Heine & Brenzinger, n.d.), a decline in the functions and domains of Jola in The Gambia is undeniable. Perhaps due to the constraints on their language, the Jola are among the most multilingual people in The Gambia. Jola informants recognise this fact and confirm that they ‘pick up’ the languages of other ethnic groups if they live with them for a short time. They also lament the fact that majority language speakers can live with Jolas for years without understanding even the simplest and most common Jola phrases. It is further worth noting that the ethnonym Jola was given to the Jolas by the Mandinka. Jola has overtaken the people’s original name, Ajamataw, and is now used by all neighbouring ethnic groups. In Mandinka, joolaa

38

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means ‘(to) pay’. The anecdotal etymology is that in precolonial times, Jolas used to be hired by Mandinkas for domestic and menial work and in this context reminded their masters – in Mandinka – to be paid for their work. The same ethnonym is used among Mandinkas in Guinea-Bissau for an unrelated ethnic group (Biafada), reflecting a similar historical power relationship there.

Serahule Serahule is a Mande language that developed from the proto-Mande branch before the Manding languages developed and dispersed into West Africa. The Serahule, also known by the French name Soninké, are the descendants of the Ghana Empire (9th–13th centuries) in what is now Central Mali, where they are still more populous than in Senegambia (Faal, 1997: 18f; Sonko-Godwin, 2003). In The Gambia, they are concentrated in the eastern parts of the country, particularly around Basse, but also live in urban Kombo. Except for the area around Basse, members of other language groups generally do not speak Serahule. Gambian Serahule almost always speak Mandinka. They are also increasingly speaking Wolof, particularly in urban Kombo. The Serahule, 99.9% of which are Muslim in the 2003 census (GBoS, 2007b), are known to be transnational businesspeople trading in various commodities, including precious stones. A more recent enterprise is the building and renting out of apartment blocks in Greater Serrekunda and provincial towns.

Serer The Serer, known as Kassinko in Mandinka, are a minority in The Gambia, but have a more significant population in Senegal. In The Gambia they are mostly found on the North Bank and in Greater Serrekunda. As measured by the 2003 census (GBoS, 2007b), the Serer are predominantly Muslim (97.3%) while a small number of Serer families are Christian (2.7%). As has been reported for Senegal, the Serer are Wolofised to a great extent. The Serer, who are culturally and linguistically related to the Wolof, have a precolonial history of both Wolof and Mandinka domination (Faal, 1997: 14). Today, many Serer, especially those whose mothers are of different ethnic groups, grow up speaking Wolof and sometimes also the mother’s ethnic language instead of Serer. Indeed, our informants suggest that it would be ‘virtually impossible’ to find a Serer in The Gambia who does not also speak Wolof. As Ngom (2004: 102) suggests for Senegal, many Serer ‘regard themselves as native Wolof speakers and lose their language and Seereer cultural identity’. Few Gambians speak Serer as a second language.

Gambia’s Local L anguages

39

Of all the Gambian languages Serer is perhaps the one closest to being ‘endangered’ (Ngom, 2004: 103).

Manjago The Manjago form one of the smaller ethnic groups in The Gambia and originate from an area that is now Guinea-Bissau. Manjago is the only ethnic group in The Gambia that is predominantly Christian (78.9%), although significant numbers (20.8%) have converted to Islam (GBoS, 2007b). They typically live on the South Bank on the outskirts of villages that are ‘owned’ by Mandinkas and Jolas, or in urban Kombo. Very few persons of other ethnic groups speak even a limited amount of Manjago. Manjagos themselves, however, are, like Jolas, usually highly multilingual.

Bambara Bambara is the branch of the Manding people that are still living in the area in southern Mali bordering Guinea from where all Manding peoples originate. In Mali, Bambara is a national language and is spoken as a lingua franca in and around the capital, Bamako (Canut, 2002). There is a small group of native Gambian Bambara, who are sometimes referred to in Mandinka as Tilibonkas, literally meaning ‘those from the East’. Gambian Bambara migrated from the Manding area to what is now known as The Gambia long after Mandinkas inhabited the shores of the river Gambia. Having lived in The Gambia for several generations with limited possibilities of going back and forth, Gambian Bambara have become detached from the Bambara in Mali. Mandinkas often claim that Bambara is ‘deeper’ than their own language, by which they mean that Bambara is closer to the ancient language of the Mali Empire, and that they cannot understand much of the language. Gambian Bambaras, and Bambara speaking migrants from Mali, on the other hand, are culturally and linguistically integrated into Mandinka and have no difficulties learning Mandinka. Like Mandinkas, Gambian Bambara are almost exclusively Muslim.

Aku The Aku people settled in The Gambia around 1850. They are descendants of the Krio whose ancestors were former slaves in England and the Americas and re-captives from various parts of Africa brought together by the British in the province of freedom (Freetown) after the abolition of the slave trade (Faal, 1997: 20–23). Therefore, the Aku language, an Englishbased Creole, is closely related to Sierra Leonean Krio. Members of the Aku ethnic group are most populous in the capital Banjul, where they often own large colonial houses, witnessing the privileged position they had in the

40

Local L anguaging, Literac y and Mult ilingualism in a West Af r ican Soc iet y

Bathurst-Freetown colonial administration. Aku is the only other ethnic group, after the Manjago, that is not predominantly Muslim: 51.1% were Christian while 48.8% were Muslims in the 2003 census (GBoS, 2007b). It has been claimed in some sociolinguistic literature (e.g. Crystal, 2003: 51; McArthur, 2003: 274; Todd, 1984: 40f ) that Aku is used as a lingua franca in The Gambia. This was challenged by Peter and Wolf (2003: 125), who rightly argued that Aku is only used by a limited number of people in Banjul. It indeed seems to be the case that today Mandinka and Wolof, not Aku, are used as lingua franca in The Gambia.

Other ethnolinguistic groups Several smaller ethnolinguistic groups inhabit the shores of the Gambia river. Among these, the Jahanka, Karoninka, Bainunka and Balanta are mentioned here. Their size is too small (less than 1%) to make it to the official figures such as those given in Table 2.2. Their status as Gambian ethnicities is further not commonly acknowledged as the historical and cultural gravity of these groups is situated outside the state borders of The Gambia. The Jahanka originate from Guinea and Mali and are traditionally Muslim. Like the Bambara, the Jahanka are an ethnic group that is closely connected to the Mandinka, so much so that many Gambians will refute that the Jahanka are a separate ethnic group. However, many Gambian Jahanka maintain that they are in the first place Jahanka and not Mandinka. Linguistically, the differences between the Jahanka and Mandinka appear to be limited to some lexical, tag and inflectional differences. The Karoninka originate from Casamance and have a similar ethnic origin to that of the Jola. Indeed, some claim they are the same people; however, with a similarity to the Jahanka–Mandinka relationship, the majority of Karoninka will declare they are a separate ethnic group despite the relatively mutually intelligible language. Due to their small numbers, marriage to members of other ethnic groups is common among the Karoninka and has been identified by the elders as one of the reasons for assimilation into both Islam and other language groups. The Bainunka originate from Casamance in Senegal and southern Guinea-Bissau. While recent field linguistic and language contact research on Baïnounk in the Casamance has been carried out (Lüpke & Storch, 2013), verifiable information on this group in The Gambia is lacking. The Balanta are one of the smallest ethnic groups in The Gambia and are concentrated in the Central River region. Their origins lie in GuineaBissau, where they form the majority ethnic group. In Guinea-Bissau, most Balantas are Animist or Christian, but in The Gambia many have reportedly adopted Islam. The Balanta language is related to Jola and Manjago.

Gambia’s Local L anguages

41

Global languages Whereas the previous section discussed The Gambia’s local (i.e. ‘endogenous’ or ‘vernacular’) languages and ethnicities, the current section shall discuss the other, more global languages that are used in, and indeed are part of, Gambian society – English and Arabic.

English English was introduced to The Gambia by the British, who colonised the country from the early 19th century until Independence in 1965. In 1816, a decade after the abolishment of the slave trade by Britain (1807), the island of Banjul (renamed Bathurst) in the mouth of the River Gambia was established as a British military post to control inland trade. At this time, the French had already taken possession of the land immediately north and south of it. For two separate periods in the 19th century (1821–1843 and 1866–1888), the Gambian colony and protectorate was governed from Sierra Leone, only to become a separate (Crown) colony in 1888 (Faal, 1997; Hughes & Perfect, 2006; Wright, 2004). The British installed their language as a language of administration, civil service and jurisdiction in the Colony. Western education, which was left under the care of Christian missionaries (Quakers, Methodists, Catholics, Anglicans), was organised in English only and remained extremely exclusive throughout the colonial period. Faal (1997: 80) reports that by 1938 there were only six elementary and four secondary schools, and apart from teacher training no opportunity for higher education. As the independent Jawara government inherited the colonial state’s infrastructure, English remained the sole official language in the postcolonial era. Today, English is widely spoken by young people, particularly in the urban areas. Generally speaking, however, Gambians do not speak English with each other, unless in a specific domain. In urban Kombo, written English is highly visible, being used in street signs (see Chapter 3), on television and in newspapers. In the provinces, access to written English is limited to the labels on food products, occasional billboards and school textbooks. There are likely to be several people in each village able to communicate orally in English. However, the number of people with literacy levels sufficient to be able to undertake administrative tasks, such as letter writing and election duties, is usually extremely limited (see Chapter 5). British English is the standard in teaching materials, but Gambian English, or ‘Gamblish’ as it is sometimes called (e.g. Bojang, 2004), is the de facto standard in newspapers and other media output. Gambian English differs from British or American English through phonological and syntactic

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Local L anguaging, Literac y and Mult ilingualism in a West Af r ican Soc iet y

peculiarities, but also through lexical Gambianisms and local proper names (Peter et al., 2003; Richmond, 1989; Wolf & Juffermans, 2008). What is clear from these initial accounts is that Gambian English can be seen as a variety in its own right within the (West) African branch of World Englishes. However, Gambian English does not exist in isolation from other varieties of English and is continuously exposed to and influenced by other varieties of English in the world. Subsequent chapters attempt to situate English in Gambian society, investigating where and how it occurs in public and in more private spaces.

Arabic As a predominantly Islamic country (95% of Gambians are Muslim, see below), Arabic features considerably in The Gambia as part of religious practices. During traditional ceremonies, which are conducted in indigenous languages, frequent switches to Arabic occur for prayers and blessings. Arabic is not usually spoken between Gambians; however, formulaic phrases are mixed with all the local languages as well as English (cf. Mc Laughlin, 2008a; Ngom, 2002). The most common Arabic insertions are inshallah ‘if God wills it’, alhamdulillahi ‘thank God’ and the exclamation Allahu akbar ‘God is great’. For many, Arabic is also the default language for swearing, as in bilahi ‘by God’. In addition to topic based code-mixes, the use of Arabic features in the ritual greetings: in common with Muslims across the globe salaam aleikum ‘peace be with you’ and the response maleikum salaam ‘peace also with you’ is used as an initial greeting, also used by non-Muslims. As stated, Arabic script is widespread in local literacy practices, including Ajami and reading the Qur’an.

Migrants’ ethnicities and languages Its small size, political stability, the absence of serious crime and the relatively low cost of living make The Gambia an attractive place for citizens from the West African region and beyond. Table 2.3 shows the evolution of immigrants against the total population as measured in the censuses of 1973–2013 (GBoS, 2007b). Notwithstanding the official census counts, it is hard to obtain a reliable estimate of the total number of migrants, as the official numbers (e.g. 113,032 or 8.3% for 2003) are believed to be considerable underestimations of the actual number of migrants in the country (see also Immigration Department, 2007). It is highly unlikely that the share of migrants in relation to the general population has in actual fact declined between 1993 and 2003, and again between 2003 and 2013. The estimate of the World Bank of a stock of 231,739 immigrants in 2005, comprising 15.3% of the Gambian population, is therefore more plausible (Ratha & Xu, 2006).

Gambia’s Local L anguages

43

Table 2.3 Immigrants in The Gambia 1973–2003

Senegalese Guineans (Conakry) Bissau-Guineans Malians Mauritanians Sierra Leoneans Nigerians Ghanaians Liberians Other West Africans Other Africans Non-Africans Total immigrants Total population % of population

1973

1983

1993

2003

2013

25,309 10,137 6817 5467 1883 436 – – – – 794 1159 52,002 493,499 10.5

32,385 12,599 5626 4295 1828 517 – – – – 1023 2523 60,796 687,817 8.8

81,567 27,797 8488 6370 2243 1607 – – – – 2564 3484 134,120 1,038,145 12.9

61,862 23,386 5516 3329 2446 7568 2864 1487 310 228 375 3661 113,032 1,360,680 8.3

49,075 30,716 6131 3747 2131 5277 4678 – – – 1378 6533 111,217 1,967,634 5.6

Source: After GBoS (2007b), with an update from the 2013 Census obtained in personal communication, April 2015.

It was admitted at the GBoS (2007b) and also at the Gambia Tourism Authority (GTA, 2007) and the Immigration Department (2007) that, in spite of principles of anonymity, many migrants may have claimed they were Gambian for fear of becoming traceable by the immigration authorities and having to pay the annual alien tax. Aliens who can most successfully claim Gambian identities are migrants from Senegal, the two Guineas and Mali, because their ethnolinguistic identities are compatible with Gambian ethnicities. Note that the number of migrants from these countries dropped in the official figures after 1993, while figures of immigration from the more distant West African countries (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria) became visible or increased over the same period. As an enclave in the vast area of what used to be l’Afrique Occidentale Française, The Gambia receives most of its immigrants (80%) from countries with French as an official language. The majority of ‘Francophone’ migrants come from Senegal, both from northern Senegal and the southern Casamance region, where a longstanding, at times violent, conflict has caused many to flee their homeland. Culturally, historically and linguistically, Senegal and The Gambia form a unity that is hardly interrupted by the national boundaries

44

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(except when the national football teams clash). Senegalese nationals generally experience no communication difficulties in their daily dealings with Gambians and gain easy access to the job market as most trades function in a predominantly oral and informal economy. A significant number of migrants also come from Guinea and Mali, countries at a distance of approximately a two- to three-day overland journey. Guinean migrants are mainly Fulas and Mandinkas and often work as grocery shopkeepers or taxi drivers in urban Kombo, while Malians, often Bambaras, are employed in various sectors. The Gambia also receives a significant number of Anglophone West African migrants (11%). In contrast to the ‘Francophones’ who have also settled in the rural areas, the Anglophones are predominantly urban based. The two largest groups in this category, Sierra Leoneans and Nigerians, present two different motives for migration. Nigerians are usually travellers by choice (economic migrants), while Sierra Leoneans until very recently were travellers by force (political refugees). Nigerians, like Ghanaians, have generally come to The Gambia to establish businesses or to work in education. Many Sierra Leoneans, on the other hand, came to The Gambia to flee the civil war of the 1990s and many have taken up jobs in the public and private education sector. Sierra Leoneans, generally referred to by Gambians as Freetownians, whether or not they are from Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown, are mainly speakers of Krio, the national lingua franca, but also of languages including Mende and Temne. Gambian-based Nigerians say that Nigerians involved in business are often of the Igbo ethnic group, while those working in the secondary and tertiary education sector are typically Yoruba. It has been noted that few (male) Anglophone West African migrants, even those who have married Gambians, have found it advantageous to learn any of the Gambian local languages beyond basic communication. The problem with the terms ‘Francophone’ and ‘Anglophone’, as used in this context, is that Francophone here has a rather different meaning from Anglophone. ‘Francophone’ West Africans in The Gambia may be from French ‘postcolonies’ (Mbembe, 2001), but this does not guarantee their ability to communicate in French. In their daily lives, their Francophoneness is less useful to them than their respective ethnic identities and local language competencies. For the Anglophone migrants, however, it is precisely their Anglophoneness that they share with Gambians. Therefore English, or a Creole variety of it in the case of Sierra Leoneans (Krio) and Nigerians (Pidgin English), is widely used in their daily routines. Also from West Africa are migrants from Guinea-Bissau. As for the ‘Francophones’, their official language Portuguese or their national lingua franca, Portuguese-based Creole or Guineense, do not hold currency in The Gambia. Instead, in order to communicate they must rely on mutually

Gambia’s Local L anguages

45

intelligible local languages, or their ability to learn a Gambian language. In fact, migrants from Guinea-Bissau are often of ethnic groups that are already present in The Gambia, particularly Mandinka and Fula. A fourth category of migrants consists of Arabophones, including Mauritanians from West Africa and Lebanese from the Middle East. Mauritanians are sometimes Wolofs from the area north of the river Senegal, but mostly of Arabic or Berber descent. Most of them speak Hassaniya Arabic and French; some also speak Wolof. Mauritanians based in The Gambia for an extended period of time, typically running wholesale provisions shops, will usually learn the vehicular language of the community in which they settle (Mandinka, Wolof). The Lebanese are speakers of (Lebanese) Arabic and are a small but significant immigrant group that are often involved in substantial business and trade. For instance, two of the four mobile telephone providers in The Gambia – Africell and Comium – are Lebanese-owned corporations. Two relatively new categories of immigrants to The Gambia, both of which rely on English in their communication with Gambians, are Indians and Chinese. Individuals from both the People’s Republic of China (Mainland China) and the Republic of China (Taiwan) are often involved in retail businesses selling clothes, shoes and other materials that are made in China, and in other sectors as well. Diplomatically, The Gambia maintains relations in particular with the Taiwanese government, which is an important foreign aid donor (Baker & Edmonds, 2004). Similarly, Indians are involved in the business of selling goods imported from India, focusing on household electronics and building materials. Although increasingly more visible in The Gambia, reliable information on the economic and sociolinguistic circumstances of Indian and Chinese immigrants remains open for further investigation. Other temporary migrants, or long-stay visitors, are American Peace Corps volunteers, British Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) volunteers and Cuban doctors. The former two, of which there are several dozen at any time in the country, receive language training and spend long uninterrupted periods in communities where English is not used outside the classroom and therefore become fluent in the local language of the community they are resident in. The Spanish-speaking Cubans generally do not achieve functional proficiency in Gambian local languages (see also the section on health care below).

Language Use in Social Domains This section discusses aspects of language use in eight different social domains, ranging from education, through popular culture to health care.

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Education The education system in The Gambia is organised in a 6-3-3 structure, consisting of six years of lower basic school (Grades 1–6) and three years of upper basic school (Grades 7–9), forming a nine-year basic education cycle, followed by three years of senior secondary schooling (Grades 10–12). Nursery schooling is necessary as a preparation for lower basic school, but is not provided by the government, confining it to the private sector. In all other levels of education there are expensive private schools that are organised for profit, non-profit private schools that are supported by (European) charitable organisations (Juffermans, 2012) and public schools run by the government. Section 30(a) of the Gambian Constitution stipulates that ‘basic education shall be free, compulsory and available to all’ (GoTG, 2002), but in practice school attendance is not enforced, and small composition fees are nevertheless collected, also in the public sector. In 2004, the Gambian government adopted a new education policy for the period 2004–2015 (DoSE, 2004, 2006), which includes as a guiding principle ‘[r]espect for the rights of the individual, cultural diversity, indigenous languages and knowledge’ (DoSE, 2004: 3.1.ii), and as a policy objective to ‘[i]ntroduce the teaching of the five most commonly used languages – Wollof, Pulaar, Mandinka, Jola and Sarahule to be taught at the basic, senior secondary, tertiary and higher education levels as subjects’ (DoSE, 2004: 4.2.xiii; spelling of languages as in original). Further on in the same policy document, this statement is rephrased in slightly more detail as one of the measures to be taken to improve the quality and relevance of the curriculum: ‘[d]uring the first three years of basic education (grades one to three), the medium of instruction will be in the predominant Gambian language of the area in which the child lives [and that] English will be taught as a subject from grade one and will be used as a medium of instruction from grade 4 [whereas] Gambian languages will be taught as subjects from grade 4’ (DoSE, 2004: 11.1.6). For early childhood education (nursery schooling), the policy states that ‘[t]he medium of instruction at this level will be in the child’s mother tongue/area language’ (DoSE, 2004: 5.2). Although we are now halfway through the 2004–2015 period, little of these objectives have been put into practice yet, leaving English as the official medium of instruction at all levels (cf. McGlynn & Martin, 2009). On the ground, the policy document has little prescriptive power (cf. Webb, 1999) as it is not accompanied with a step-by-step plan for its implementation in schools across the nation. Note also that there is no explicit specification in the policy as to whether local languages are to be used for literacy learning,

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or only as spoken media of instruction. Perhaps the policy document should not be regarded as a legally binding framework with immediate effect, but rather as a statement of intent or long-term vision. In contrary to the English-only policy, switches to local languages are common within Gambian classrooms. It is local languages that are usually used in the non-teaching areas of schools: pastoral care and playground activities. Which local language is used depends on several factors, including the most dominant local language and the proficiency of teacher and child. Switches to minority languages have been witnessed to assist a distressed or sick child, with teachers calling on other children to step in as translators where necessary (see McGlynn & Martin, 2009). Teachers are among the most multilingual persons in Gambian society, having opportunities to develop their language repertoires when they are posted to communities with a different ethnolinguistic profile. Children in Gambian schools have regular religious education lessons that are conducted in Arabic. During these lessons children receive instruction in the Qur’an, the daily prayers, washing and other rituals. Christian children are usually withdrawn from these lessons and, if possible, alternative Christian religious classes are organised in English. Parallel to the English education system are two types of Islamic schooling: daara and madrassa. Daara are informal classes, organised by men who are versed in the Qur’an (often imams), where children are taught to recite and write the suras of the Qur’an. Madrassa is the Arabic-based Islamic alternative to English-based secular schooling and offers a full curriculum, although the majority of the time is spent on Islamic tuition. Our informants advise that the language used in the classroom is a mixture of Arabic, local languages and some English, depending on the topic and the level of the students. A madrassa teacher advised us that from nursery to Grade 4 the local language of the community is used, in Grades 5 and 6 Arabic is used as the language of instruction, with support from the local languages as often as the children need it, and from Grades 7–12 only Arabic is supposed to be used, with English reserved for English lessons.

Religion There are only two religions dominantly practised in The Gambia – Islam and Christianity. Muslims make up more than 95% of the Gambian population and despite their numerical dominance respect the religious otherness of the Christian minority which amounts to 3% or 4%. Contrary to descriptions in travel guides of Gambian culture, adherence to traditional religions is, percentagewise, negligible (see Table 2.4). The 2003 census also

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Table 2.4 Religion in relation to ethnicity and nationality, in percentages

Mandinka Fula Wolof Jola Serahule Serer Manjago Bambara Creole/Aku Other Gambians Total Gambians Francophone West African migrants Anglophone West African migrants Migrants from Guinea-Bissau Other African migrants Non-African migrants Total population of The Gambia

Islam

Christianity

Traditional

99.8 99.7 99.7 91.6 99.9 97.3 20.8 99.2 48.8 75.7 96.6 96.0 38.5 55.5 72.6 28.8 95.4

0.2 0.3 0.3 8.4 0.1 2.7 78.9 0.8 51.1 24.2 3.4 3.9 61.1 43.5 25.7 55.9 4.3

0.02 0.01 0.01 0.06 – – 0.22 – – – 0.02 0.03 0.07 0.65 0.50 0.44 0.03

Source: After GBoS (2007b).

identified a fourth category of ‘other religion’, which yielded, except in the category of non-Africans, even smaller numbers than in the column of traditional religion (GBoS, 2007b). In his book Translating the Message, the Gambian American scholar Sanneh (1989) contrasts the Islamic stance regarding the untranslatability of God’s word with Christianity’s emphasis on translation to transmit the word of God. In Islam, God’s word has been revealed and transmitted in Arabic and people access this message through the Qur’an in Arabic and recite suras in Arabic as part of their daily prayers. Christians, however, access God’s word in a variety of local languages in the form of Bible translations. During the Friday prayers, the imam preaches in Classic Arabic followed by an explanation in the most widely understood local language of the community. At other times of the week, Muslims say personal prayers on a mat at home, at work or in a mosque in Classic Arabic. Christians pray in English and/or their respective local language. Catholic and Anglican services on Sunday are organised in a mixture of local languages and English. The

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sermon or homily in Christian churches is given in English with a concurrent translation into a local language. Newborn congregations in urban Kombo receive many Nigerian and Sierra Leonean worshippers and are organised in English only. Christian radio and television programmes are also in English, while Islamic broadcasts are in Arabic with accompanying clarifications in English and/or one or more local languages.

Politics and law In common with many postcolonial countries where governance is conducted in the language of the former colonial occupier, The Gambia uses English in all its national political dealings. The Gambian Constitution provides that ‘the business of the National Assembly shall be conducted in the English language or any other language prescribed by an Act of the National Assembly’ (GoTG, 2002: §105). Informants involved in the political community have advised that meetings, even minor committee meetings, are always held in English and all documentation is only produced in English. Informal discussions, greetings and general talk are conducted in local languages; however, if the topic of the conversation becomes official in any way, the interlocutors switch to English. Local-level political rallies (bantaba) held during election campaigns by both government and opposition parties generally use the lingua franca of the local community. Concerning law enforcement, the Gambian Constitution contains a provision that ‘[e]very person who is charged with a criminal offence’ ‘(b) shall be informed at the time he or she is charged, in a language which he or she understands and in detail, of the nature of the offence charged’ and ‘(f ) shall be permitted to have without payment the assistance of an interpreter if he or she cannot understand the language used at the trial of the charge’ (GoTG, 2002: §24(3)). Police officers generally speak Mandinka and Wolof in addition to their ethnic group language. Court judges, who are often Nigerian nationals, speak English, relying on translation into whatever the defendant claims to be their first language.

Media Television in The Gambia has become more popular with the electrification of many areas and the availability of equipment, and is no longer the sole pleasure of the (urban) elite. There is only one national station, GRTS, although some urban households have access to satellite television from across the Anglophone, Francophone and Arab world. On GRTS, the daily news bulletins are in English, Mandinka, Wolof and Fula, with ‘minority languages’ Jola and Serahule used on alternate days. Television is targeted for

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an urban audience and therefore the majority of programmes and advertisements make use of Wolof and/or English. There are several radio channels in The Gambia. On urban-based stations, including Radio Gambia and West Coast Radio, English and most of the local languages can be heard every day. Many programmes offer the opportunity for listeners to call in and voice opinions on current issues or specific debates. Here, the ethnolinguistic diversity is reflected in multilingual radio broadcasting, with English, Wolof, Mandinka and other local languages co-occurring in a single programme. Despite persistent critique of Gambia’s human rights record with regard to freedom of speech (e.g. N’Diaye et al., 2005), there are several newspapers produced either daily or two to three times a week: The Daily Observer is a privately owned pro-government newspaper; The Point is opposition minded, as is Foroyaa/Freedom, which is edited in association with one of the main opposition parties. Although they are all referred to as national papers, the editorial offices are exclusively based in urban Kombo (Banjul, Bakau) and their organised distribution is limited to the urban west. Newspapers feature news that is first and foremost made in the Kombos with occasional stories about the provinces. All newspapers are written in (Gambian) English. Some newspapers feature occasional news in French and local languages, or have a religious column in Arabic on specific days of the week. There are news bulletins available in Mandinka, Wolof, Fula and Jola that are produced by voluntary organisations such as WEC International; however, they are not widely circulated and do not follow a strict distribution timescale. The most critical news reporting (newspapers and radio) are online- and diaspora-based and organised from the US or the UK and are not easily accessible from within The Gambia.

Traditional and popular culture Traditional celebrations are still very much a part of rural Gambian life and also feature in urban areas. Marriages and naming ceremonies are common in both areas, but circumcision rituals, both for boys and girls, tend to be rural activities with many family members returning to their home village for these occasions. Traditional weddings and naming ceremonies are undertaken in the local language of the participants but have several phases, particularly blessings and prayers, which are conducted in Arabic. Although entry to circumcision rituals is generally not possible for an outsider (Hudson, 1990), initiates inform us that only local languages are used. The Mandinka character of Kankurang, a full-length mask that deters evil spirits and actually conducts the circumcision of boys, does not speak at all, but its behaviour is interpreted

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into the local language by initiated members of the community. Kankurang performances, as well as the masquerades of other ethnic groups, the Wolof Zimba, Jola Mamapara and Kumpo and Aku Agugu, bear deep historical-cultural meanings; however, they are also staged for urban and multi-ethnic audiences for the sake of art itself and increasingly as fundraising activities (Ebron, 2002; Weil & Saho, 2005). Popular music in The Gambia varies from African, (African) American and Caribbean genres. Of the African styles, Wolof mbalax (literally meaning ‘music’) and Afro-Manding are the most popular. Both have their origins in griotism. Several popular Senegalese mbalax artists, including Youssou N’Dour, Baaba Maal and Vivian, regularly perform in The Gambia. The most popular AfroManding group, singing in Mandinka, is the Gambian group Jaliba Kuyateh and the Kumareh band. Malian music with lyrics in Bambara (an example is Oumou Sangaré) also fills the public space. Of the non-African music styles, reggae, hiphop and R&B are most often heard. Apart from reggae legends Bob Marley and Burning Spear, Siddy Rank and Anthony B. are immensely popular, owing to regular visits with live performances. Local reggae musician Njie B, as well as R&B/hip-hop artists Sing’a’teh (Freaky Joe) and Nancy Nanz, enjoy celebrity status in The Gambia, singing primarily in English. Urban Gambians watch a variety of films produced by the three major centres of film production in the world: Hollywood (America), Bollywood (India) and Nollywood (Nigeria). Nigerian films are often preferred by young Gambians over American films, because of their greater adherence to realism and the choice of its themes (cf. Omoniyi, 2008). Indian films are becoming increasingly popular in The Gambia, as evidenced by the growing number of titles in rental stores (cf. Vander Steene, 2008 for observations from Senegal).

Tourism Since 1966, when some 600 Swedes visited The Gambia on the initiative of Bertil Harding of Vingressor Club 33, the number of tourists visiting The Gambia every year has grown steadily. At 21,000 in the season of 1975/1976 and over 100,000 in the early 1990s, the number has risen to over 100,000 again since the mid-2000s after a decline following the 1994 coup d’état (Dieke, 1993; Farver, 1984; GTA, 2007). The tourism high season falls from November to April and coincides with the dry and cooler months of the year. Despite continuous attempts by the Gambian government to promote allyear-round tourism (Thompson et al., 1995: 579), for most tourists The Gambia is still a ‘winter sun’ destination, thus avoiding the Gambian rainy season (June–September).

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A first category of tourists is ‘sun and sand seekers’ from the UK (53%), the Netherlands (15%), Scandinavia (10%), Germany (5%), Finland (3%) and, more recently, Spain (3%) (GTA, 2007; calculated percentages exclude 6% Gambian nationals returning home by air after overseas travelling or as residents abroad). Although a large number of these tourists are one-off visitors, many are also returning visitors. Some of the returning visitors become involved with The Gambia in a way that goes beyond the usual activities of tourism: some become romantically involved with Gambians (see Nyanzi et al., 2005), while others privately initiate small-scale development projects (Juffermans, 2012). A smaller, second category of tourists consists of Americans and Canadians, who account for 2% of Gambian tourism with an average 2200 visitors annually. Many are African Americans following in the footsteps of Alex Haley in search of their roots, which is also the title of Haley’s (1976) book in which he traces his ancestry through the trajectories of slavery back to the village of Juffureh in Niumi (see Wright, 1981 and Gamble, 2000 for critical reviews of Haley’s portrayal of Gambian society, and Ebron, 2002 for a critical study of roots tourism). Both Europeans and North Americans communicate primarily in English with Gambians, and although there are inevitable communication difficulties due to the differences between American, British, the various mainland European Englishes and Gambian English, gross communication breakdowns are rare. Both Gambians working in the industry as well as most tourists, including those from non-Anglophone countries, usually speak enough English to manage service encounters and engage in more meaningful conversations (cf. Lawson & Jaworski, 2007). In addition, a number of Gambians working in the tourist industry have obtained knowledge of European languages (German, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish) in order to be able to greet or offer more extensive services to tourists in their own language.

Health care The Gambian health sector relies heavily on foreign doctors and senior medical personnel, especially from Nigeria and Cuba, which often results in communication difficulties. It is understood that visiting doctors rarely learn any of the local languages. The Cuban doctors, employed by The Jammeh Foundation on temporary contracts, tend to speak Spanish and varying extents of English, whereas Nigerian doctors are generally fluent in English, but not in Gambian local languages. Many of their patients, especially rural women and their children, do not generally speak English. As a result,

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doctors and patients manage with limited English, ad hoc sign language and the assistance of other patients acting as translators. It has been noticed that, in order to reduce confusion, medicines are frequently distributed with pen strikes on the labels to indicate how often they should be administered. In healthcare facilities in urban Kombo, including the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital in Banjul, Wolof is the lingua franca, whereas Mandinka is used in the majority of areas outside the Kombos including the second largest hospital at Bansang. Both Fula and Mandinka are used in the major healthcare facility in Basse.

Public transport, markets and streets Public transport, which in actuality is privately owned transport organised for the public, is a sector that thrives with a lingua franca (cf. Makoni & Makoni, 2009). In urban Kombo this is Wolof. When taking transport from the Kombos to the provinces on the South Bank, it is usual to change vehicles at Brikama garage, a major hub for travellers. From Brikama to the rural areas Mandinka is spoken in the vehicles. When travelling to eastern towns on the North Bank it is more usual to cross the river using the Banjul to Barra ferry. Wolof is the vehicular language along this route. However, from Farafenni, a town some 80 km beyond Banjul, the language of the communities is predominantly Mandinka and therefore vehicle drivers are usually able to communicate in both languages. Markets are eclectic places where everything from food to batteries to clothes to building materials can be bought. Wolof appears to be the dominant language in the urban area, even though Mandinka is still used by many of the older generation. One informant expressed very strongly how he refuses to speak Wolof in the marketplace, even though he can speak it perfectly adequately, as he dislikes the way younger people have adopted Wolof so readily. In the rural weekly markets (lumoo), the respective lingua franca of the area (very often Mandinka) is used. In the streets, one notices the functional dichotomy of spoken and written language: whereas local languages can be heard ubiquitously, it is only English, and Arabic to a lesser extent, that can be seen on shop signboards and other public inscriptions in the linguistic landscape. The emergence of Wolof slogans in visual advertising such as mobile telephone provider Gamcel’s YAAY BOROM (literally meaning ‘it’s yours’), may signal a change to this situation. Chapter 3 provides detailed analyses of the use of English, images and local languages in the linguistic landscape, including a discussion of the use of local languages in the advertisement campaigns of the three mobile telephone operators.

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Summary To summarise, the main ethnolinguistic groups in The Gambia are Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, Jola and Serahule, although these groups function as social categories (like gender, age, occupation, etc.) rather than as groups in the sense of self-contained units. Although the names of the ethnic groups (‘Mandinka’, ‘Fula’, ‘Jola’, etc.) correspond to nameable languages, there is a rather weak relation between people’s ethnic and linguistic identities. Being a member of a particular ethnic group does not always mean that one also speaks the language of that ethnic group. Multilingualism and cultural heterogeneity prevail and there are no one-to-one relations between languages and ethnicities. As we have seen, The Gambia’s local languages are diverse in their origin, structure and uses. The two most widely spoken languages, Mandinka and Wolof, are typologically quite different and fall under two distinct language families, Mande and Atlantic languages, respectively. It is fairly hard to find a Gambian person of any age or ethnic group who speaks neither Mandinka nor Wolof. It is equally hard, however, to find a Gambian person of any age or ethnic group who speaks either of these languages in a pure, unmixed form, as it is to find anyone speaking just one language. As previous studies have demonstrated (Haust, 1995; McGlynn & Martin, 2009), multilingualism, codeswitching and language mixing are the norm in this multi-ethnic country. With regard to the social uses of language, this chapter has indicated that the languages are domain dependent, geographically determined and age related. This chapter has also maintained that longstanding but increasing patterns of migration and urbanisation along with other processes of globalisation are changing the ethnic, linguistic and social make-up of Gambian society. As I explained at the beginning of this chapter, I have made use of rather orthodox sociolinguistics to describe the linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity in Gambian society. This chapter has listed – and so reinforced – convenient labels for people and their communicative practices. In the spirit of a critical sociolinguistics of diversity (Arnaut, 2012), these labels are given not from the theoretical position of classification by an objective observing outsider but out of an ontological concern of a subjective interpreting insider (Parkin, 2012). Or, to speak with Jaspers (2008), labels such as Mandinka and Jola as used here are ‘ethnographic facts’ (established local categorisations Gambians identify with) rather than ‘social acts’ (a linguist’s intervention in labelling a set of linguistic practices).

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In what follows, I will be proposing ways of describing language in society that depart from this traditional usage. Starting from descriptions of actual literacy products and practices, I will attempt to develop a sociolinguistics that can give a meaningful account of language in society, without a priori assuming the existence of languages per se, or without taking languages as named and listed here as necessary starting points of analysis. Instead, I will rely on local language practices and also take alternative local metalanguage as a basis for theorising local languaging.

3 Englishing and Imaging in the Linguistic Landscape

In recent years, linguists and other social scientists have turned their interest to visible discursive phenomena in the public space. The object of these studies can be identified as the linguistic landscape. Most authors concerned with this field of study acknowledge that the concept of ‘linguistic landscape’ was coined by Landry and Bourhis (1997: 25) in a psycholinguistic study of ethnolinguistic vitality. They advance that ‘[t]he language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration’. The linguistic landscape in their work is a psychological factor among other correlatives influencing language attitudes and the (perceived) ethnolinguistic vitality of one language in the presence of another. Although the context for Landry and Bourhis’ study is French–English bilingualism in Québec, their work is actually less sociolinguistic and descriptive than social psychological and experimental, which makes it of rather limited interest for an ethnographic sociolinguistic project. More interesting are the articles in Gorter (2006b) and the monograph by Backhaus (2007) in which linguistic landscaping becomes a descriptive project. Thus, detailed (quantitative) descriptions are given of the relative presence of Hebrew, Arabic and English in the streets of selected municipalities in Israel (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006), of the relative public visibility of minority languages Basque and Frisian alongside national (Spanish and Dutch) and international languages (English) in the capitals of the Basque country in Spain and the Dutch province of Friesland, respectively (Cenoz & Gorter, 2006), and of the uses of multiple scripts and languages in Bangkok (Huebner, 2006), and Tokyo (Backhaus, 2006, 2007). These studies indeed open a ‘new approach to multilingualism’ (Gorter, 2006b) and introduce several interesting concepts (e.g. the distinction between government-issued ‘top-down’ signs and local, often commercial ‘bottom-up’ signage). These early days linguistic landscape studies 56

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tended to be primarily concerned with counting the occurrences of different languages in a multilingual ecology in order to measure linguistic diversity or evaluate the ethnolinguistic vitality of minority languages – a clear inheritance from the field of social psychology from where the term was borrowed. Significant theoretical innovation was provided by Shohamy and Gorter’s (2009) volume, which included contributions by all of the authors in Gorter (2006b) as well as others. The chapters there expanded the scenery of linguistic landscape studies empirically by including work from a larger number of geographic, historical and social settings and domains of use, but also theoretically by engaging inter alia with geosemiotics and nexus analysis, social semiotics and multimodality research, and performativity theory. Malinowski (2009: 123), for instance, warned about too simplistic assumptions of linguistic landscape authorship: ‘code choice and positioning on signs may result as much from the agency of landscape as they do from the intent of any individual or group of people’. Where early days linguistic landscape studies tended to be rather positivistic (see Leeman & Modan, 2009 for critical comments), it quickly expanded to include broader semiotic, critical and ethnographic concerns and methodologies (Blommaert, 2013; Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010a; Milani, 2013). For Blommaert (2013: 44), ‘every signs tells a story about who produced it, and about who is selected to consume it’, and calls for three analytical questions: ‘Where does it come from?’ (a question of history – about the sign’s past); ‘For whom it is meant?’ (a question of audience – about the sign’s future); and ‘Why here?’ (a question of emplacement – about the sign’s syntagmatic and paradigmatic present). The notion of ‘emplacement’, developed by Scollon and Scollon (2003), suggests that a sign’s meaning not only depends on the symbolic, iconic and indexical meanings it conveys or triggers, but also on the place it occupies in the physical world. Linguistic landscaping thus requires a theory of space that regards space not as a neutral sociolinguistic variable, but as ‘constitutive and agentive in organizing patterns of multilingualism’ (Blommaert et al., 2005a). Spaces or landscapes are not semiotically empty, but are filled with signs that demarcate spaces and neighbourhoods and give linguistic clues about the social environment. Such a theory of space acknowledges that people inhabit spaces and make use of them, but also orient to them and are influenced by them. In this chapter, I am concerned with the linguistic landscape as an environment of language and literacy production in a twofold perspective: as shaping the material world itself and as the environment in which every-day literacy practices take place. Literacy practices thus stand in a double relationship with the linguistic landscape: they produce the linguistic landscape as much as they are produced by the linguistic landscape.

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This chapter is organised in seven parts. The following section discusses methodological and ethical considerations of investigating visual linguistic phenomena before contextualising the environments from where the signs discussed have been collected. Next I focus on how English is being spelled on signs in one of these sites, followed by a description of the functions of local languages in the recent advertising campaigns of the three mobile telephone providers. The final section takes multimodality and audiences as a theoretical point of departure and explains the salience of images in the Gambian linguistic landscape as a vernacular strategy to accommodate lowor non-literate readers.

Public Horizons The main tool with which to approach the linguistic landscape and render it into an object of study is the digital camera (Gorter, 2006a). Thus, the horizon of our analytic gaze or the filter through which we attempt to see the world in linguistic landscape studies is a visual, photographic horizon. The analytic gaze adopted in this chapter is also primarily geared towards visible phenomena of public communication but not in isolation of the ‘soundscape’ (Scarvaglieri et al., 2012), as communicators often make use of both visible and audible means of public communication. The linguistic landscape does not exist in isolation from and in separation of visual and audible channels of public communication; an analysis of the linguistic landscape can only be meaningful insofar as that broader public context is also described. The observations made in this chapter are based on the analysis of a dynamic corpus of photographs taken between 2005 and 2009 in a range of urban and rural locations. The main criterion for including a sign in the corpus is not its representativeness for Gambian (urban) public signs, nor a predetermined geographic area, or an agreed technique on what (not) to capture. Instead, the criteria for photographing signs in the linguistic landscape are inevitably eclectic and impressionistic: determined by my gaze and a range of practical considerations in actually taking the photograph. In linguistic landscape data collection, signs are not randomly recorded but inevitably only after they have entered the researcher’s gaze and have passed the judgement of being noteworthy to capture. This, however, is not only an issue for linguistic landscape research, but for all research in the humanities: ‘all data involve selection and analytical preparation, guided by their relevance to particular issues and their tractability within different methods’ (Rampton, 2006: 397).

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The linguistic landscape is first of all understood as a visual environment and the proclaimed new approach to multilingualism is a visual approach. The camera is not a neutral instrument nor an innocent extension piece of one’s eyesight and memory; it changes and mediates the fieldwork experience in several ways. As a result of this visual and photographic approach, literacy products rather than practices are described and analysed, away from their contexts of production and reception (but see Juffermans & Coppoolse, 2012). This detachment from immediate contexts of use is not unproblematic methodologically, theoretically and ethically. Are texts in the public space free to be photographed and analysed or should we seek to obtain permission for our obtrusive behaviour? Does everything observable in the public space belong to the public realm, or should we be concerned with issues of privacy and/or ownership here? Is there a clear-cut boundary between public and private spaces? These questions emerge if we approach languaging not just with our eyes and ears, but with a camera or an audiorecording device. It could of course be argued that, in principle, everything put up in public is offered to the public and may be read and interpreted (or photographed and studied) by anyone. However, shop façades (thus the most studied objects of the linguistic landscape) are located in the borderland of what is public and private. A shop in a shopping street remains someone’s private property, and is open to the public only under certain conditions. The public, called ‘customers’, are welcome to enter and ‘use’ the premises of the shop for reasonable purposes including buying or enquiring about goods or services offered there, but not generally for other purposes, e.g. to hold meetings or to loiter about. The social world we inhabit is full of these more informal rules. I often experienced a certain suspicion or interest in what I was doing from people ‘inhabiting’ the linguistic landscape. Shopkeepers often expressed a desire to know what I intended to do with the photos of their shops. These questions desired an answer, which I normally tried to give. As a general guideline, I attempted to approach people that could be identified as (associate) ‘owners’ of the signs I wished to photograph, but only if they were immediately present. In all but a few occasions, I was instantly granted permission to photograph the signs, and was often given interesting interpretations, histories and explanations of the signs and their meanings. On rare occasions, however, ‘sign owners’ preferred their signs not to be photographed, which I had to accept, or they asked me, seriously or humorously, to pay for the ‘copyright’. It is not clear if I in fact did anything wrong when I photographed signs without obtaining permission, e.g. when nobody was around or when taking the photo from a distance. As Gorter (2012) explains, it is or was common

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practice in linguistic landscape research to choose quiet moments such as on Sunday mornings for data collection. In general I found it difficult to find these quiet moments at most sites I was interested in. A street such as the Sayerr Jobe Avenue generally remained busy until after midnight and got lively again at fajr prayers early in the morning. Practically I could not collect linguistic landscape data in the absence of people or ignore them as I found that people in the landscape claimed all sorts of rights on signs and spaces. There did not appear to exist any clear-cut boundary between public and private spaces or signs. Where possible, or necessary, I attempted to approach people – shopkeepers, customers, residents – and offer explanations for what I was doing to whoever was interested in hearing about it. As indicated, these casual, unrecorded conversations often led to further insights into local language and literacy practices. Yet, the notion of ‘informed consent’, the central concept in codes of research ethics, seems too rigid and technical to be applied wholesale in linguistic landscape research.

Signs and Sites in Context As indicated above, data collection in the Gambian linguistic landscape is a dynamic process unfolding over different fieldwork visits between 2005 and 2009. Areas where data have been collected more or less systematically and that are discussed below, include (1) the Sayerr Jobe Avenue, (2) the Banjul-Serrekunda Highway, and (3) a part of the urban wards of Bundung and Tallinding. In addition to this, (4) advertising signs of the mobile phone companies were collected wherever they could be found. A selection of signs from each of the sites is offered in Figures 3.1–3.4. The Sayerr Jobe Avenue is a major shopping street that runs from Westfield over Serrekunda Central to London Corner in the direction of the Atlantic coast. There is probably nowhere in The Gambia more expensive than here to rent a business place. The street is a busy traffic artery connecting the suburbs in the south of Serrekunda with Westfield-Banjul and the coastal area. The Sayerr Jobe Avenue is saturated with literacy: nearly every shop has a signboard with its name, logo, products or services offered in text and/or image (see Figure 3.1). The four-lane Banjul-Serrekunda Highway runs from the transit point of Westfield and the industrial zone of Kanifing through the mangroves over Denton Bridge to the (pen)insular capital Banjul. On a stretch of approximately 10 km, there are large and conspicuous single- and double-sided billboards placed on both sides of the road exposing health information, political propaganda and commercial advertisements to thousands of daily

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Figure 3.1 The Sayerr Jobe Avenue

commuters that live in Greater Serrekunda, but work in the city of Banjul (see Figure 3.2). My ‘home’ in Greater Serrekunda is with an extended Jola family whose family compound is located on the smaller of the two Six Junctions in Bundung, in the area around Bitik Yasin, at approximately 15 minutes’ walking from both the Tallinding Highway and the Sayerr Jobe Avenue. During repeated stays here, I gradually explored the wider neighbourhood on foot (sometimes alone, sometimes with Almameh) and photographed selected signs here, including graffiti on walls and doors (see Figure 3.3). In addition to these three sites, a series of signs of the publicity campaigns of the three mobile telephone providers were also collected, wherever they could be found, e.g. on Westfield, the Banjul-Serrekunda, Brikama and Tallinding highways, the Coastal Road, the tourist area, or in Foni. Directors

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Figure 3.2 The Banjul-Serrekunda Highway

of the respective companies were interviewed in order to gain insight in the stories behind the signs their companies installed in the linguistic landscape. The signs across these different sites differ in their size, purpose, materials used and their overall semiotic functioning, including their emplacement, but share their predominant use of English and images as part of their meaning-making.

Grassroots Englishing A first observation about Gambian public signs is that only very few contain text in a language that is not English. This is the case along the

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Figure 3.3 Graffiti in Bundung-Tallinding

Banjul-Serrekunda Highway (Figure 3.2) and the Sayerr Jobe Avenue (Figure 3.1), but equally in the urban neighbourhood (Figure 3.3) and the rural village where I lived (see Juffermans & Coppoolse, 2012). In spite of my purposeful searching for literacies in local languages, virtually all signs were in English, albeit in a somewhat local variety of English. (Although I will be arguing in this section that English is also a local language, for convenience I will refer to ‘local languages’ in the plural to refer to those named languages such as Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, Jola, etc., excluding English and Arabic.) Worldwide, English has spread so much that it has been argued, e.g. by Widdowson (1994), that it has begun to fall apart. There is a rich body of literature describing varieties of English in the world that conceptualises English in plural as ‘Englishes’ (e.g. Todd, 1984) and there are journals and

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Figure 3.4 Gamcel, Africell and Comium’s visual publicity and branding

conferences dedicated to this. In his book Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, Pennycook (2007a) argues that the canonical presentation of World English into three concentric circles (‘inner’, ‘outer’ and ‘expanding’) proposed by Kachru (1985) is inadequate to understand the complexity and diversity of English in the contemporary world. ‘Pluralization of English’, argues Pennycook ‘does not take us far enough and remains an exclusionary paradigm. Just as [. . .] the concept of multilingualism may do little more than pluralise monolingualism, [. . .] the concept of world Englishes does little more than pluralize monolithic English’ (Pennycook, 2007a: 22). Instead, he argues ‘for an understanding of global Englishes that focuses on both a critical understanding of globalization and a critical understanding of

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language’ (Pennycook, 2007a: 12). English is not a discrete entity with physical reality (in the mind or in the world), but only comes into existence when it is performed. And when it is performed, it is performed somewhere by someone for an audience. English is not some thing, but ‘is’ only in a more abstract sense of the word: it comes into existence only when and insofar as it is performed, enacted or embodied (Pennycook, 2007a: 58ff). Ontologically speaking, there is no such thing as English: Although the effects of the global spread of English are of very real concern [. . .], it is at the same time much less clear that English itself is equally real. While it is evident that vast resources are spent on learning and teaching something called English, and that English plays a key role in global affairs, it is less clear that all this activity operates around something that should be taken to exist in itself. (Pennycook, 2007b: 90) Saying that English does not exist is something of an overstatement, for what is meant is that English does not exist as a concrete entity, only as an idea, a myth, albeit with real consequences in people’s lives and for people’s sense of identity. Pennycook’s argument is similar to the atheist position in theology: arguing that there is/are no God(s) is not to deny the existence of churches or temples built to worship these God(s). It is only to say that the practices directed at God(s) are based on a myth, a fictitious idea. Much in the same way as the philosopher Feuerbach in the mid-19th century argued that God is an illusory projection of humanity, Pennycook argues that languages are not divine creations or naturalistic givens ‘out there’, but human inventions, historical constructions (see Nye, 2000 for a discussion of developments in religious studies that resonate with this critical argument about language). If we accept this ‘no-language-ism’, then our task as scholars of critical language and literacy studies becomes the following: We need to disinvent English, to demythologise it, and then to look at how a reinvention of English may help us understand more clearly what it is we are dealing with here. (Pennycook, 2007b: 109) The linguistic landscape offers us ideal terrain to explore what ‘language’ or ‘English’ looks like away from the institutions of knowledge production and transfer where particular, normative versions of the English language are propagated. The linguistic landscape offers insight into what language or English means in an environment where form is not immediately evaluated and measured against central (inner circle) notions of what counts as (good) language or (good) English; it instead offers insight into real language and real English.

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Through linguistic landscaping, we can disinvent English as ‘a language’ and reinvent English as a set of situated and distributed languaging practices. Turning English into a verb, i.e. a fluid, flexible, unthing-like concept that is better captured by a verb than by any other grammatical category of word (cf. Joseph, 2002) is indeed a step further from turning English into a countable noun (one English, many Englishes). What we are dealing with in the Gambian linguistic landscape is not the global spread of English or of the use of a Gambian variety of English, but local language practices that we may term ‘grassroots Englishing’. The term ‘grassroots literacy’ was first used in sociolinguistic theory by Fabian (1990, 1992, 2001), in his study of the Vocabulary of Elisabethville, a historical manuscript produced by an ‘amateur historian’ in a vernacular variety of Swahili in Southeast Congo. The concept was further developed by Blommaert (2008b) in relation to similar historiographic and autobiographic documents from the same part of the world, and documents produced in the context of asylum procedures in Western Europe. It was subsequently taken up by others in social practice accounts of literacy in other African contexts (Blommaert et al., 2005b; Coetzee, 2012; Mbodj-Pouye & Van den Avenne, 2009). Grassroots literacy is a form of sub-elite literacy, common in what used to be called ‘Third World’ contexts (see Randall, 2004 for a critical discussion of this term). Grassroots literacy is produced at a distance from the institutions of prescriptive elite-linguistic normativity (secondary schools, libraries, the internet) and under poor material and infrastructural conditions (with no dictionaries, spell-checkers, reference material, Google, or even a standard orthography at hand). Formally, it is characterised by at least the following features: (1) instable and/or non-standard (‘heterographic’) sound–letter correspondences; (2) miscellaneous use of lower and upper case characters; (3) unsystematic (near-random) word and sentence boundaries and punctuation. Fabian comments on grassroots literacy that it ‘is a literacy which works despite an amazingly high degree of indeterminacy and freedom (visible in an erratic orthography, a great disdain for “correct” word and sentence boundaries and many other instances of seemingly unmotivated variation)’ (Fabian, 1992: 90; note that in Fabian, 2001: 65 the word ‘correct’ has been dropped). Fabian argues that this type of literacy draws only in a distant sense on literate traditions and conventions, but more immediately and primarily on oral traditions and the ‘rules’ of oral performance. Reading grassroots texts such as the Vocabulary of Elisabethville, he suggests, ‘demands a capacity to re-enact or re-create the oral performance that is the source of the text’ (Fabian, 1992: 90; 2001: 66). Where Fabian emphasises the orality of grassroots writing, Blommaert stresses its visual and material aspects, as well as the economy of

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educational hardship in which grassroots literacy is produced. While Fabian (1992, 2001) urges us to keep listening to writing, Blommaert (2008b: 20) urges us, above all, to keep looking at grassroots texts. The signboard of KAWSU COLLEY’S INTERNATIONAL HAIR DRESSING SALON on the Sayerr Jobe Avenue (Figure 3.1), for instance, features COSMETICS, FACIALS, MECHE, PEDICURE and MEDICURE. The final word here is MEDICURE, in which a ‘d’ appears where the standard spelling of the word (‘manicure’) would read ‘n’. Perhaps enforced by the association of both manicure and pedicure as something medical, MEDICURE is thus spelled like ‘pedicure’. This is not a misspelling in the sense of an error committed against the rules of the standard English language, but a spelling that reveals that the Latinate etymology of ‘manicure’ (manu ‘hand’ and cure ‘care’) and its conventionalised Anglo-spelling are not habituated or enregistered here. This spelling reveals that the rules of English hold limited practical value or prescriptive authority in a place such as the Sayerr Jobe Avenue. This is not bad language, but language that does not conform to the imagined and invented rules that are maintained in the historical or economic centres of the language. This is unmonitored and unedited, peripheral English – English of necessity as opposed to English of luxury, to borrow from Stroud and Mpendukana (2009): language produced away from its centring institutions such as the English language classroom which have the power to monitor or edit text in order to ensure it is ‘proper’ – i.e. normative – English. In other words: MEDICURE is more creative than it is wrong. Another example of peripheral English involves creative spellings that deliberately violate orthographic norms and make use of non-standard features, such as ‘eye-dialect’, a type of non-standard spelling that is visible to the eye, rather than audible when read out loud. This happens in SHOES DOCTA and HARLEM NIGGAZ (also Figure 3.1). These spellings make only a minor difference to the ear, but a great difference to the eye. The spellings ‘niggaz’ and ‘docta’ do perhaps reveal pronunciation particularities of colloquial Gambian English (see Peter et al., 2003 for an account), but the point here is that these spellings draw on the creative use of linguistic features without regard for the centre’s norms. Violating these norms invokes identities that seek to distinguish themselves from the centre – the Shoes Docta and the Harlem Niggaz plumber distinguish themselves by referencing subversive, non-standard identities of, for example, African American gangsta rap music and culture, whereas ‘niggers’ in standard spelling would be a racist slur. These streetwise spellings occur in commercial areas on shop signboards, but are more common in the graffiti on the streets of residential neighbourhoods (see Figure 3.3). For instance, in youth gang markings or what appear to be innocent imitations of this genre, this type of usage is the norm. In the neighbourhood where I lived during my fieldwork, an otherwise peaceful and

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relatively crime-free area, textual traces could be found of dangerous-sounding gangs like OUTLAW BOYZ, BLACK BOYS CREW, NUBIAN SOLJAZ ‘soldiers’, CAMBODIA STREET SOLJAHZ ‘soldiers’, RUFF RYDERS ‘rough riders’ and POWERFUL NIGGERS, each of which construct their identities and their sheer existence by means of creative use of ‘gangsta English’. Here again, the imaginary identity display is very rich. Global connections with North American gangsta rap culture are creatively imagined in both form and content. Intertextuality with hip-hop or Hollywood-mediated images of street gangsters and pan-Africanist denotations (Nubian being a signifier of mythic Blackness) are applied as ingredients in a playful subversive appropriation of the public space. Standard English does not belong here. The Nubian Soljaz and the Ruff Ryders would be far less streetwise in standard spelling than in their current spellings. Answering the question whether this is still English requires a definition of language and of English, of the kind I have tried to outline in the Introduction. Yes, this is English, but in a broader than only a linguistic sense. This is English that carries a heavy transnational and postcolonial cultural baggage. This is English if English is a local and at the same time global vernacular, if English is a ‘local language’ (Higgins, 2009) or a dialect of the global medialect supervernacular, in Velghe’s (2014) terms. This is English if English is understood as ‘local languaging’.

Campaigning with Local Languages As noted, very few signs in the Gambian linguistic landscape display text in language other than English. Notable exceptions, however, are the billboards and marketing products by Gambia’s mobile telephone operators, where we find text in Wolof, Mandinka and Fula, albeit in the presence of surrounding discourse in English. Androutsopoulos (2007: 214) calls this ‘minimal’ or ‘emblematic’ multilingualism: multilingualism that requires minimal receptive and productive language competence and exploits the symbolic, rather than the referential, function of language. The signs in Figure 3.4 were photographed after a third mobile telephone operator, Comium, had entered the market in May 2007 and an intense competition for market share was fought out in the public space between Gamcel, Africell and Comium. Two years later, another provider, QCell, would also join the market, making the competition even steeper. As a newcomer, Comium introduced itself on the Gambian market with nakam!, the Wolof equivalent for ‘what’s up?’ – a fashionable, fun greeting used among young and cool urbanites. (For greeting elders, a more elaborate

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formula, e.g. naka wa kerr-gi? ‘how are your people?’, would be more appropriate.) Nakam! was printed in conspicuous white letters on a pink background on large billboards (sometimes accompanied with NOW YOU’RE TALKING) in various key urban locations and also on smaller display boards in front of the shops selling their products, as well as on the scratch-cards for prepaid credit and even on the back of their SIM cards. At the same time, two versions of a publicity song could frequently be heard on the radio – one in Mandinka and one in Wolof, both of which opened with nakam!. In a matter of weeks, the whole of urban Kombo was filled with both visual and audible signs of nakam!, making it very hard for anyone to have missed Comium’s loud introduction on the Gambian market. At about the same time, Africell launched a publicity campaign celebrating their self-acclaimed victory in the battle over market share with Gamcel, informing the public about this on large billboards as pictured in Figure 3.4. Take, for instance, the ‘Thank You’ sign. The main proposition in the message, ThanK You / For making us / YOUR FIRST CHOICE, is divided into three lines, each in its own typography, colours and letter size. ThanK You is printed in yellow in a large italicised typeface. In the next line, the ‘thank you’ is repeated in the same font but in a smaller size in three local languages: Baraka (Mandinka) in red, Jere Jeff (Wolof) in blue and Jarama (Fula) in green. The Baraka – Jere Jeff – Jarama line can be read linearly from left to right, placing Mandinka in first, Wolof in second and Fula in third position, but it can also be read centrically, placing Wolof in the centre and Mandinka and Fula at the margins (cf. Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). For making us, YOUR and CHOICE are rendered in the same blue colour as the Africell logo in an upright Arial-like font, with the middle word FIRST underlined and in the same font and colour as ThanK You. The Africell logo placed on top is a bold readable word in capital letters, with an antenna and a dot on the ‘I’ in the middle of the word that transmits three rays of connectivity in the colours of the Gambian flag (green-white-blue-white-red). As part of that same campaign, the signboard in the bottom right corner of Figure 3.4 could be seen in June 2007 in Kotu, a relatively up-market residential area in the heart of the coastal tourist area. In the same four languages, the following message was put up: We’re going to amaze you . . . (English), Nyung Lena Jomal si . . . (Wolof ), Mbinal al Jakalindila . . . (Mandinka), MENG JAKINAI ONG . . . (Fula). Here, full multi-word propositions in four languages are used in public display. We may wonder, however, whether the use of these four languages has primarily a communicative or rather a symbolic function. This begs the question whether there are people out there that are not literate enough in English to understand ThanK You but are able to extract and decipher the parts in Wolof, Mandinka or Fula. What is displayed here

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is the idea of local languages (Seargeant, 2009) for strategic, advertising purposes, rather than the use of local languages for denotational communicative purposes. Like the Comium campaign, Africell’s campaign too was not only played out in the linguistic landscape by means of visual advertising, but simultaneously the same and other messages could be heard and/or seen in other public channels of communication such as radio and television. Gamcel, the only public company of the three, proactively asserting and defending its position on the market against the aggressive and foreign-owned newcomers, spearheaded a publicity campaign around the Wolof slogan YAAY BOROM ‘you own it’. In an interview with Gamcel’s Director of Customer Services, Mr Almamy Kassama, it was disclosed that the YAAY BOROM slogan was used to replace an older slogan expressing the same idea, MOOM SA REEW, LIGEEY SA REEW ‘own your country, work for your country’ (also in Wolof), which was put up on the Banjul-Serrekunda Highway after sponsoring the refurbishment and electrification of the Denton Bridge police checkpoint. The eventual YAAY BOROM slogan was suggested by a griot praising Mr Kassama and Gamcel for the job they had done for the police. It was suggested that reframing this message using just one or two key words would render it more catchy. This suggestion was welcomed with open arms and the billboard at Denton Bridge was soon replaced with a large and conspicuous GAMCEL YAAY BOROM. Gradually, YAAY BOROM became the company’s central philosophy, as explained by senior director Mr Almamy Kassama in an interview: You own this company. It belongs to you and your family and even the next generation. We are here to stay. Whatever we generate we plough it back into national development. [. . .] Competitors on the other hand, go and build mansions in Palestine or Lebanon and then the next day Americans back Israel to go and destroy it. (Interview with Mr Almamy Kassama, Gamcel House, February 2009) Note the politics in Mr Kassama’s statement. He juxtaposes international neoliberal capitalism with local nationalism and brings the broadcast mediated geopolitics of the US and Israel/Palestine and the Israel–Lebanese wars to the scene to justify the loyalty of Gamcel’s local Gambian clients as patriotic, implicitly criticising support for the other foreign-owned (both Lebanese) companies as against Gambian people’s interests. Only choosing Gamcel, Mr Kassama suggests, guarantees non-interference in the Middle Eastern conflict. Shortly after the placement of that single billboard at Denton Bridge, the occasion of May Day Sports on Worker’s Day was used to put billboards with YAAY BOROM and GAMCEL FOR LIFE all over the Independence Stadium and

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distribute 3000 flyers with the same text among civil servants attending the programme. Before Africell and Comium could counter this very successful campaign, a rising young musician, Nancy Nanz, was sponsored to come up with a ‘very nice track’ to carve the YAAY BOROM slogan not only into people’s eyes but also into their eardrums. Gamcel bought airtime to broadcast the song on all the radio stations and on GRTS television, several times per day for a period of four months. In an ecology of news media where there is only one television channel available on antenna, the impact of this could hardly be overestimated. In addition to that, during the 2007 presidential elections, 20,000 T-shirts were printed with the picture of President Yahya Jammeh on the front and GAMCEL YAAY BOROM on the back. The president accepted the T-shirts and his team even helped distribute them in a country-wide tour. As a fourth provider beginning operations in July 2009, Gambian-owned QCell copied the strategies of Gamcel and Comium in terms of language choice and, like Gamcel, chose a slogan that thematised national roots and development. From its website: Sunu Buss is the QCell philosophy. ‘Sunu Buss’ means ‘ours’ in Wollof. We believe that QCell is for all Gambians by Gambians. Sunu Buss is Gambians coming together and supporting each other in the development of our nation. (http://www.qcell.gm, ‘About us’, accessed December 2014) The publicity campaigns of Gamcel, Africell, Comium and QCell, each of which left long-lasting echoes in people’s memories and durable marks in the public space, are novel and creative in the sense that these commercial actors experimented with something that very few had done before, i.e. the use of local languages for communicating public written messages on a large national scale. The prominent position of Wolof as the only language alongside English in the Comium (nakam!) and Gamcel (YAAY BOROM) campaigns, and as the most salient language next to English in the quadrilingual Africell signs, could be interpreted, in the style of Landry and Bourhis (1997) as a sign of Wolof’s ethnolinguistic vitality in urban Gambia. The linguistic landscape could thus be taken to provide tempting evidence of an ongoing process of Wolofisation in the wider Dakar-Banjul region (cf. Mc Laughlin, 2009). True as all of this may be, ‘language in the landscape is not always a question of ethnolinguistic vitality’ (Leeman & Modan, 2009: 347). Exclusive attention to the linguistic landscape as a factor measuring the vitality of different ethnolinguistic groups falls short in two ways. In the first place, it departs from the supposition of a straightforward link between language and ethnicity. It assumes that ethnolinguistic groups can easily be defined and delineated, that each ethnic group has its own language and that every

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individual also speaks that language as a first language or mother tongue, an idea that has been deconstructed time and again in Africanist scholarship (Canut, 2001; Lüpke & Storch, 2013; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Wright, 1999). Suffice it to say that people’s multilingual repertoires contribute as much to their identities as their ethnicities. A too heavy analytical reliance on ethnolinguistic vitality also presupposes a too direct link between the visibility of written languages in public and the vitality of spoken languages. It assumes that ethnolinguistic diversity is necessarily visually reflected in the linguistic landscape and that a group’s vitality (i.e. its ‘survivability’) correlates with its members’ ability to inscribe their presence in the public space. Mr Kassama explains: I say no I don’t use Wolof more in my language because the television adverts are done in the four major languages: English, Wolof, Mandinka, and Fula. And our radio programmes, we do it in all the four major languages too. YAAY BOROM is my catch phrase. And I believe that seventy per cent of Gambians must speak Wolof to some extent. I think it to be a brand name like Coca Cola which everybody should be able to understand. They don’t see it as Wolof. It’s Gamcel. It has the same effect from Brikama onwards [where Wolof is no longer a lingua franca]. Because for example on the TV whatever advertisement we did, at the end of the day the message is Gamcel YAAY BOROM, whatever language you use. You see we don’t have that much tribal differences here in The Gambia. I said no, in whatever advertisement we do in their own languages. Don’t worry we’ll try to make them understand. When we do a radio talkshow, a Jola talking to his Jola communities, we use the same Gamcel YAAY BOROM and interpret it to them that this phrase means the company belongs to you and nobody else. And they do understand, oh that’s the meaning of YAAY BOROM. (Interview with Mr Almamy Kassama, Gamcel House, February 2009) As expressed by the key architect of the Gamcel campaign, the use of local languages in the linguistic landscape does not merely reflect the ethnic composition of Gambian society. Like other words that have acquired national, supra-linguistic status (e.g. dalasi (the currency), fankanta ‘family planning’, bantaba ‘traditional court, forum’, set-settal ‘cleaning operation’, tapalapa ‘bread’), YAAY BOROM has become a language-independent resource ready for use in each of the Gambian languages, including English. Local languages are used in visual local languaging in the Gambian linguistic landscape, but their use is minimal (Androutsopoulos, 2007); their use is therefore salient and emblematic for very specific communicative

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purposes. Local languages in the Gambian linguistic landscape appear to be used to achieve an effect of conspicuousness and markedness in an otherwise English-dominant visual environment and for their potential to appeal to an urban (and national) public of potential customers.

Multimodality and Audiences A final point needs to be made about local languaging in the Gambian linguistic landscape, that linguistic landscaping or local languaging is not all about language. A focus on the linguistic landscape as primarily a space of multilingualism is limited as that would ignore the rich multimodal meaning-making signboards and billboards represent. Reading the linguistic landscape with a purely linguistic lens, i.e. searching for the co-occurrence of or contact between different languages, leaves a lot out of consideration that is well worth investigating. It is therefore useful to approach the linguistic landscape with the more elaborate toolkit of a semiotician. This is the position taken by Jaworski and Thurlow (2010a) who prefer the term semiotic landscape over linguistic landscape. A key notion in this respect is that of ‘multimodality’, as theorised by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) and Scollon and Scollon (2003). Multimodality can be defined as ‘the [combined or layered] use of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event’ (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001: 20). Multimodality is a fundamental principle underlying all discourse, as all discourse involves interactive semiotic collaboration between different modalities to form a ‘text’. Types of modes or modalities include colour, typography, layout, size, position, vectors, etc. in visual discourses, and pitch, timbre, gesture, body movements, gaze, etc. in spoken discourse. The media involved in producing these modes include paper, ink, paint, telephones, computers, our voices, faces and the rest of our bodies. All text and talk is multimodal and multi-mediated, even when there are no images or body language involved. As far as literacy is concerned, images can be ‘read’ as texts and texts can be ‘seen’ as images, both with an underlying ‘grammar of visual design’ (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). Signs in the linguistic landscape are often intrinsically multimodal and their meaning simply cannot be grasped by adding up the meanings of the composing parts. They are rather understood as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a ‘total’, ‘integrated’ or ‘complete’ artwork, which the 19th century composer Richard Wagner held as an ideal for his operas – a combined spectacle of orchestral music, vocal lyrics, décors, costumes, dance, and a dramatic storyline. Any of the subsidiary arts alone would have little artistic value, but when

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compositionally integrated and finely tuned to one another, they can work together to form the grand spectacle of an opera. As Kress and van Leeuwen (2001: 1) observe, much contemporary discourse, e.g. newspapers, magazines, films, video clips, websites, art, etc., are organised around the same principles of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. The signs in the linguistic landscape should also be analysed as an integrated, multimodal product containing text in a particular language, colour, typography, style and (com)position, which may or may not be attributable to one or more ‘languages’, and image in a particular realisation, colour scheme, position, size, etc. Just like in Wagner’s operas, each of these modes contributes to the full meaning of the sign. Such creative multimodality is not restricted to elite literacies, or what Stroud and Mpendukana (2009) have called the ‘signage of luxury’, but can be achieved under poor, grassroots conditions of literacy production as well. Papen (2006) notes that, although creativity has a material aspect, it does not only take place in exceptional, idealised circumstances, but indeed ‘often happens in situations which at first glance do not appear to be conducive to creative activity at all’. Even under poor conditions of literacy production, in ‘signage of necessity’ (Stroud & Mpendukana, 2009) people manage to produce rich, creative and multimodal literacies, even if this richness may be denied in its uptake (cf. Blommaert, 2008b). The ‘please don’t urinate here’ sign in Figure 3.3 is an example of a ‘rich’ text (in meaning and in composition) produced under conditions of necessity rather than luxury. To state the obvious, all of these public signs are meant to be read (Coulmas, 2013) and have been designed with a ‘public’ or an audience in mind (Warner, 2002). Authors in the linguistic landscape style their messages in a particular way so that they can be read and understood by a particular audience. In making these observations we are reminded of the sociolinguistic theory of audience design. Developed by Bell (1984) as a result of his analysis of variation in the speech of radio newsreaders in New Zealand, this theory was formulated partly as a critique to the overemphasis on the production of speech in the Labovian paradigm of sociolinguistics which explained style as a function of the amount of attention paid to one’s speech. Bell’s critical rereading of Labov’s (1972) famous work on the pronunciation of the ‘post-vocalic’ /r/ in words such as ‘fourth’ and ‘floor’ in three New York department stores associated with different social classes suggested that the most determining factor in stylistic variation is not the speaker’s own social group, but that of the addressee. Bell observed that the same individual newsreaders in New Zealand were styling their speech differently on the news bulletins for a prestigious national radio station and on a lower-status local community station (Bell, 1997: 242).

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The fundamental insight from this theory is that communicators always conform the form and contents of their message to the audience they target. It is of vital importance for businesses to be as inclusive as possible in the design of their messages. It is fairly basic commercial common sense that commercial enterprises aim to sell their products as much as possible (to produce maximal turnovers), and that insofar as they choose to inform (or persuade) the public about the products and services for sale, that these messages should be designed in a way that is optimally understandable and attractive to the target audience in mind. When Comium markets their pre-paid mobile telephone product with nakam! instead of with kasumai? (a greeting in Jola), or with nafio? (a greeting in Serer), then that makes perfect commercial sense as for many Gambians Wolof indexes an urban, non-traditional, post-tribal identity (cf. Chapter 2). The particular form of nakam! (the slang greeting with an exclamation rather than question mark versus the question-response format of traditional greetings) is targeted at young, modern, urban Gambians of various ethnic affiliations rather than at rural Fanafana dwellers in the Central River region, a day’s journey away from all the action of the modern nation-state. A na nga def? ‘how are you?’ or jaama ngeen am? ‘are you in peace’ simply would not mean the same thing. Note, however, that Comium has used the greetings Hello! (English), Abedii (Mandinka) and Aa nyaga moho (Serahule) as secondary slogans on certain posters and billboards (see Figure 3.4). Except in situations where there are strict legislations regulating the use of language in the public sphere (see, for example, Backhaus, 2009), linguistic landscape authors are generally little concerned with official language policies. In The Gambia there are few (if any) explicit rules regulating the use of language in public, and so authors in the linguistic landscape are left in relative freedom to design their shop façades in whatever way they deem appropriate and advantageous. Whether a customer is a Mandinka or Serer, a newly arrived migrant, male or female, is schooled or not, matters very little from a seller’s point of view. A challenge for authors in the Gambian linguistic landscape is not so much how to deal with the great multilingual diversity of their target audience but with their literacy diversity. A specific sub-group with ‘special communicative needs’ is formed of those who are surveyed to be ‘non-literate’ – 42% of urban women between 15 and 24 years old, and 54% of adults overall (see Chapter 1). Although ‘non-literacy’ correlates with poverty to some extent, it is commercially commonsensical not to ignore this group as they are not without purchasing power. Authors in the linguistic landscape do not only have different languages at their disposition, but can draw on a broader semiotic toolkit to communicate visual messages. Therefore, if ‘[a]udience design [. . .] applies to all codes

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and repertoires within a speech community, including the switch from one complete language to another in bilingual situations’ (Bell, 1997: 245), it must also apply to different modes of communication, such as text and image. Large corporations such as the mobile telephone providers as well as small businesses respond to this challenge of communicating meaningfully for an audience including non-literates by designing their messages in explicitly multimodal ways. The Gamcel, Africell and Comium campaigns are all multimodal and multigeneric in their use of various media and modes of communicating, using pop songs and commercials on radio and television, giving out T-shirts and caps, placing signboards in front of shops, erecting billboards in key public locations, etc. Not only the range of communicative options (languages, modalities, media) in the campaigns is multimodal, but individual messages (billboards, television spots) are also designed multimodally. The Gamcel and Africell billboards in Figure 3.4 are predominantly textual, but also the picture of attractive young women talking on their mobile phones, as well as the colour schemes and logos, give away clues as to what these signboards represent. Small retailers with a much smaller budget for publicity and communication, such as NENNEH BOUTIQUE and HIGH CLASS FASHION SHOP on the Sayerr Jobe Avenue in Serrekunda, employ a similar mode of operation. They may not be able to spend millions of dalasis on an ambitious advertising campaign and reach out to television and radio audiences to inform a nationwide public about the products they offer. They can, however, spend a couple of hundreds or perhaps several thousands of dalasis to design the space in front of their shop to inform an all-day steady stream of walking and driving passersby. Although employing entirely different means, we find the same strategy to be as meaningful as possible in signage in sites of necessity as in sites of luxury, to borrow Stroud and Mpendukana’s (2009) distinction. So-called bottom-up authors in the linguistic landscape often also choose to design their messages multimodally by supporting their more exclusive text (in English) with more inclusive images. Textual information on shop façades may include the enterprise’s name, some product info or a slogan, as well as contact details. Although some shops remain predominantly textual in the information they display on their façades, a great number of shops choose to be conspicuously visual in the design of their messages. Visual information may be more powerful and explicit about the nature of the goods on offer. At HIGH CLASS FASHION SHOP (Figure 3.1), text and image work together to convey the meaning of the message. That this shop specialises in high-class ladieswear, shoes and cosmetics is not only readable from the words on the signboard, but is simultaneously ‘spelled out’ (Kress, 2000: 117) by several

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images on the signboard and on both the back and front sides of the doors. Textual and visual information are only partly overlapping here. Some information (e.g. that handbags are also sold) is only conveyed in visual modality, and not textually. That this shop does both wholesale and retail, on the other hand, can only be read from the text, or found out by asking. It would be interesting to repeat Siber’s (2005) sophisticated photographic experiment and present the image and text layers of information in two separate reproductions and ask what mode is the most salient source of information here. The bottom line is that there is, and deliberately so, a lot of visual communication out there that non-literate readers can accessibly decipher. NENEH BOUTIQUE (Figure 3.1), on the same street, makes even less use of text on its signboard, presenting only the shop’s name, an inconspicuous NICE BABY in the top left corner and two telephone numbers in the bottom left corner. Here, detailed product info is given in the visual mode only, showing a carefully drawn baby, baby clothes, baby shoes, baby cosmetics and other specialised baby equipment like a baby bath and baby chair. The three bottles drawn in the middle of the signboard contain text: baby lotion, baby oil and baby powder. The textual inscriptions, however, are far too small to be read from a pedestrian’s point of view as this signboard is put up rather high above the entrance of the shop. The function of the text here is not giving readable information about the actual types of cosmetic products offered, but rather depicting the products as realistically as possible (thus with a clue of the inscriptions such bottles have in the real materiality). If we zoom in close enough on the shoes and handbags pictured on the doors of HIGH CLASS FASHION SHOP (Figure 3.5), we find similar textual inscriptions: first of indications of the brand names Givenchy and CK, as well as the name of the shop, High Class or HC, sometimes appended with the qualification ORIGINAL, but also, as hidden details, the artist’s signature (FEMI ART) and the phrase WHO CARES! (on the handbag in the top right). The function of these inscriptions here too is not giving readable and accurate information about the products offered (it is doubtful if original Givenchy or Calvin Klein handbags are really sold here), but rendering the shoes in a high realist modality. In his commitment to realism, the artist has observed the practice of printing brand names on the imported luxury shoes and handbags sold here. At the same time, the artist has exerted his artistic freedom by hiding some information in sub-layers of his signed work of art. In conclusion, this chapter has presented an argument for a multi-semiotic understanding of the linguistic landscape in which language is just one, and not necessarily the most crucial analytic category in a descriptive linguistics of the public space. I argued that the occasional use of local languages in an otherwise English-only environment serves a symbolic rather

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Figure 3.5 Details from shop doors of HIGH CLASS FASHION SHOP

than communicative function and has more to do with the creativity of commercial publicity campaigns than it with reflecting ethnolinguistic relations. Striving for all local languages to be given equal functions in publicity campaigns may be politically correct, but it is judged to be practically impossible or communicatively inefficient. Mr Kassama from Gamcel maintained that ethnic (‘tribal’) differences should not be exaggerated and that using a single catch phrase in one language (nakam!, YAAY BOROM) while communicating the entire message multilingually elsewhere does not need to be seen as a threat to diversity and other ethnolinguistic groups’ vitality. Linguistic landscaping as the study of language and literacy as spatial and semiotic practice invites us to disinvent and reconstitute our understanding of language. This is necessary because African literacies force us to look beyond and beneath languages as bounded systems that are given in time and space. African literacies such as those in urban Gambia impose on their observers a more dynamic, fluid and creative view of language as implied in the notions of Englishing, imaging and local languaging.

4

Voices on English and Local Languages in Education

After the analysis of English and local languages in the linguistic landscape of the previous chapter, this chapter turns to literacy and multilingualism in another domain of public life, school. It is concerned with the problem of the medium of instruction in the Gambian education system and draws on collaborative research with Kirsten Van Camp in and around one rural school and the surrounding community (Van Camp & Juffermans, 2010). The chapter presents an argument for a bottom-up approach to language-in-education policy and considers that that both policy and academic discourses on language in education need to account for voices from the field while also reflecting on their/our own voices. Australian education and literacy researcher Allan Luke (2005) has advocated for a post-postcolonial language education and has suggested that we may reach solutions for problems concerning language in education by taking local actors more seriously. In a similar vein, the current chairman of the West African Examinations Council, Pai Obanya (1999: 85) has recommended that many problems related to African linguistic diversity and the organisation of educational systems ‘can be tackled through greater reliance on Africa’s sociolinguistic realities’. This echoes Ramanathan and Morgan’s (2007) call for enhanced practitioner agency and increased attention to locality in the realisation of language policy practices. Likewise, Makoni and Trudell (2009) have argued that we need to include African perspectives on linguistic diversity in theories and policies of language in education. I understand these calls as invitations to theorise about language in education in ways that are locally relevant and take locally grounded views of language seriously. Drawing on research in and around one rural school community, this chapter foregrounds the notion of voice as an ‘analytical heuristics’ (Hornberger, 2006) for understanding language, education and society (see also Juffermans & Van der Aa, 2013). Voice here is articulated in a rather literal sense as that 79

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which is voiced to the researcher on a particular matter, articulating a local perspective on things in dialogue with the researcher. Voice here is a tool of agency and of collaborative research praxis. In this chapter I am concerned with how ‘ordinary people’ – i.e. school children, teachers, parents, and other community stakeholders – voice their opinions and concerns about the language-in-education issue against the background of the official language-ineducation policy and practice. The chapter combines and compares two different methods into researching language in education, the first implemented by myself in 2004, and the second by my colleague Van Camp in 2008, in the same rural school community in Foni. The first of these methods asked primary school children about their attitudes and ideologies towards English in the form of a composition-writing exercise. The second method consisted of a focus group discussion with parents, local politicians, teachers and a teacher-interpreter. For both of us, these were our very first steps in the field and our earliest encounters with Gambian language-in-education policy. These two methods are adopted as a means to investigate local language ideologies and to form an empirical basis for a locally informed understanding of linguistic diversity in and out of school. The objective here is not to describe attitudes vis-à-vis ‘scientific evidence’ concerning the importance of mother tongue or indigenous language education (e.g. Cummins, 1991; Hornberger, 2009). The goal here is rather to listen carefully to what local actors in the field of education (pupils, teachers, parents, etc.) have to say, without dismissing their voices as emerging from ill-informed folk beliefs in need of correction (see, for example, Choi, 2006). Voice provides an analytical heuristic in the sense that it helps us look at our data from ethnographic fieldwork and bring ideas to the surface (regarding language and education here, but it could be applied to a wider field of enquiry) that potentially challenge received ideas and push our theoretical gaze in new directions. Voice here is the key element of a sociolinguistic programme that takes ethnography not just as a method but as a perspective in the Hymesian tradition, where theory is descriptive and analytical, and description and analysis are also theoretical (Copp Mökkonen, 2013; Van der Aa & Blommaert, 2011). While working with voices and ideologies, we must also be aware of our own voices and reflect on how our ideological perspective on the world contributes to the construction of ethnographic knowledge. In an article on language ideologies, Collins (1998) draws on his work with Native Americans to problematise the potentially conflictual exchange of two sets of ideologies in ethnographic encounters: our ideologies, and theirs. He asks: Can we study Tolowa language ideology (their emic beliefs about language structure and use in relation to collective order) in some neutral,

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descriptive, etic metalanguage, or must ideological analysis also interrogate our ideologies (our beliefs and practices in relation to partially shared social arrangements)? (Collins, 1998: 267) The answer to this question, I believe, lies in adopting a reflexive and dialogic attitude in analysing our data. Since there is no ‘view from nowhere’, we are compelled to reflect on and bracket our own ideologies and sometimes put them on hold as we do research and attempt to make sense of choices and ideologies in language and education in a society different from our own. Part of the answer to Collins’ question lies in giving a more prominent role to voices from below in academic narratives, and in engaging with these voices in a serious way. As Luke (2005) suggested, these voices may contain answers to questions we have been struggling with for a long time. At the same time, we are compelled to inspect our ethnographic practice as intercultural communication (cf. Briggs, 1986; Fabian, 1995) and to interrogate our own epistemologies about linguistic diversity and education. In short, we have to learn to become ethnographers of our own ethnographies.

One School and its Language Policy Since colonial times, the Gambian public education system has operated an English-only policy in which all subjects (except Qur’anic education) are taught in English, from pre-school to university level – a situation Gambia shares with many other African countries and which is commonly linked to low literacy rates and poor performance in school (e.g. Early & Norton, 2014; Igboanusi, 2014). In 2004, however, the Gambian government adopted a new education policy for the period 2004–2015 (DoSE, 2004) as outlined in Chapter 2. Let me repeat here the policy document’s guiding principle (DoSE, 2004: 13), policy objective (DoSE, 2004: 17), and the quality and relevance statements (DoSE, 2004: 35) as they are relevant for the discussion of language in education here: • •

•

Respect for the rights of the individual, cultural diversity, indigenous languages, and knowledge. Introduce the teaching of the five most commonly used languages – Wollof, Pulaar, Mandinka, Jola and Sarahule [original spellings preserved] to be taught at the basic, senior secondary, tertiary and higher education levels as subjects. The preschool curriculum will aim at developing the child through play and prepare the child for the formal education system. The medium

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of instruction at this level will be in the child’s mother tongue/area language. During the first three years of basic education (Grades 1–3), the medium of instruction will be in the predominant Gambian language of the area in which the child lives. English will be taught as a subject from Grade 1 and will be used as a medium of instruction from Grade 4. Gambian languages will be taught as subjects from Grade 4.

Although our research was conducted well into the 2004–2015 period, few of these objectives appeared to have been put into practice, leaving English as the commonly accepted medium of instruction at all levels (McGlynn & Martin, 2009). On the ground, the policy document appeared to have little prescriptive power as few steps have been taken for its implementation in schools across the nation. The policy also left unspecified whether local languages were to be used for literacy learning or only as spoken media of instruction. Policy documents such as that cited above should perhaps be regarded more as long-term vision statements than as a legally binding framework with immediate effect. (Igboanusi, 2014, reports that the 1988–2003 policy already contained similar provisions for the national languages to serve as media of instruction in the first years of education.) Against this backdrop I and my colleague Van Camp took an interest in linguistic practices and language ideologies in Gambian education and sought to explore how the language-in-education policy was being interpreted and received on the ground. The school that is central in the discussion of this chapter is the rural district school in Foni on the South Bank that I was introduced to by Lamin as I began my research trajectory in 2004. The school is a district school serving the children of six or seven villages within a radius of about 10 km. Most of these villages are modern multi-ethnic and multilingual villages, meaning that no ethnic group forms an absolute majority even though they are ‘owned’ by Jolas, i.e. the alkaloship of the village remains in the lineage of its Jola founders. The student population is generally made up of a majority of children from Jola and Mandinka families and smaller numbers of children from Fula, Manjago, Wolof and Balanta backgrounds, as well as children from parents who migrated to this area (e.g. through marriage or as refugees) from Casamance, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, or northern Senegal. Teachers pointed out that virtually all pupils were able to speak Mandinka, the lingua franca in the area, before they entered school. As an indication of the wide age range of pupils in classes, in September 2004 the two fourthgrade classes listed pupils between the ages of 8 and 17.

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Teaching staff originated from different parts of the country and had, as part of a centrally organised posting system, often taught in various parts of the country prior to their employment in this school. Due to this fact, the ethnic makeup of the teaching staff differed from that of the local pupil population, with more Mandinkas, Wolofs and Manjagos among teachers than pupils in the school. In 2004, only two teachers were from the surrounding communities. Most of the teachers were living apart from their families, visiting them during holidays and weekends. Throughout our classroom observations, every single word of written language that appeared on the blackboard, in exercise books, on the walls of the classroom or in the handbooks was in English, except during classes of Qur’anic education when Arabic was used. In spoken interaction, the situation differed, as teachers both in and out of the classroom frequently used Mandinka in the more informal domains of learning (cf. McGlynn & Martin, 2009). In an interview, the 2004–2006 headmaster of the school explains the school’s language policy and practice as follows: In fact English should be the medium of instruction throughout. The teacher is only pardoned to use another language, that is a first language to the children, where she finds it difficult to make them understand a certain lesson. That will help the child relates that that Fula text will be English. As they get used to it they would always catch it up in English. Generally, English should be taught as a lesson or subject and at the same time should be used as a medium of instruction to all subject areas in the school, yes. [. . .] We are taking English because it’s our official language. It has been an English colony and everything started with English and it’s still English in our offices. So it is inevitably chosen as a language that should be learned to perfects you, which is very difficult here because it is a second language and it is never easy learning such to a standard that we espair for. I think we are trying at this way, we keep ourselves on it I mean . . . (Interview with the headmaster, at the schoolyard, October 2004). The headmaster describes the school as a place where in principle only English is used as a language of instruction; however, this rule was often mitigated to accommodate understanding. Thus, although the 2004–2015 education policy included provisions to change the linguistic regime in Gambian schools from one that prescribes ‘English only’ to one that accommodates the linguistic diversity of the student population and the community, the practical implementation of this part of the policy remained largely

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invisible throughout my research. This is despite the fact that the school discussed here was elected to participate in a government pilot project to teach local languages as a subject in lower basic schools. Following a two-day national training workshop in August 2001, the pilot programme – in Jola – ran in one classroom in the school year 2006–2007. Although the school positively evaluated the project, no follow-up was ordered by the government and throughout our respective fieldwork the school continued using English as the supposed medium of instruction, especially in regard to literacy, except in Islamic religious education.

An English Writing Contest The first method used to elicit local voices on the language in education issue is a metalinguistic writing contest I organised in September 2004. In consultation with the senior teacher and the headmaster of the school, it was decided that students from Grade 4 and above were supposed to be able to do the exercise and that a contest was an appropriate and playful format that would motivate the students to do their level best. Because not all teachers had reported back after the summer holidays, Grades 5 and 6 were not yet split up in this third week of the school year, but Grade 4 was. Thus four classes took part in the contest: the combined Grade 6 (n = 61), the combined Grade 5 (n = 67) and the two Grade 4 classes (n = 38 + 33). In total, 199 children participated. The teachers and pupils had become accustomed to my presence in their school as I had spent two and a half weeks in the school in July before the summer holidays and another three-week period after the holidays. I had observed teaching and learning practices in all of the six grades and had introduced myself and the purpose of my visits both informally to the staff and pupils as well as formally at one of the twice-weekly school assemblies during which children gathered to listen to practical announcements in English and in Mandinka by the headmaster or his deputy and to sing the national anthem. I had an ambiguous identity within the identity options available in the school as I fitted neither the category of teachers nor of pupils. As an adult, I had the same height as the teachers and interacted with them as equals, but behaved somewhat like a student when taking notes sitting at the back of the classroom. During the writing contest, however, I assumed the role of teacher. The pupils were given two different topics to comment on. They could either write a composition on the theme Why it is important for me to learn English, or on the theme Why I don’t like English. Every pupil was given a double

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sheet from a regular exercise book. The students were asked to write the date, their name, age, sex, grade, and the name of the school on their sheets. The two topics were written on the blackboard and, except in Grade 6, difficult words were also spelled on the board on request. The pupils were instructed to comment on only one of the two themes. As a starting point for analysis, the 199 compositions from the four classes were classified in categories of relative text length. This classification was also used to find the winners of the contest (there was a third, second and first prize for each grade). The compositions of pupils who could not or did not produce anything original but only copied from the blackboard were grouped in Category 0; the compositions of those who only produced one single original word were classified in Category 1; compositions that offered beginning sentences were subsumed in Category 2; compositions with at least one original full sentence were put into Category 3; and finally, the compositions consisting of a more or less coherent text with several sentences were assigned to Category 4. The results of the classification according to text length are given in Table 4.1. The table shows that the number of copy writers is higher in Grade 4 than in Grades 5 and 6 (39 out of 71 versus 19 and 12 out of 67 and 61) and that the number of multi-sentence texts is lower in Grade 4 than in Grades 5 and 6 (8 out of 71 versus 24 and 15 out of 67 and 61). This suggests that general progress in composition writing is made across the grades. The table also shows that each grade has a group of relatively good writers (Categories 3 and 4) and a group of relatively poor writers (Category 0), with fairly little in between. Most of the Category 0 and Category 1 compositions are not very interesting for our purposes here because there is too little content to analyse. The remaining compositions (n = 114) were divided into three heads: those voicing exclusively positive attitudes towards English, those voicing exclusively negative attitudes, and those voicing both positive and negative attitudes. The results of this division are given in Table 4.2. Table 4.1 Compositions according to text length

(0) ‘Copy writers’ (1) Word(s) (2) Beginning sentences (3) Full sentence (4) Multi-sentence text Total pupils

Grade 4

Grade 5

Grade 6

Total

39 12 5 7 8 71

19 5 8 11 24 67

12 5 7 22 15 61

70 22 20 40 47 199

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Table 4.2 Attitudes towards English in the compositions

Positive Positive and negative Negative Total pupils

Grade 4

Grade 5

Grade 6

Total

28 1 3 32

35 – 5 40

25 12 5 42

88 13 13 114

This table shows that the vast majority of the pupils expressed positive attitudes towards English in their essays. Although they were asked to make a choice and not to comment on both topics, 12 pupils in Grade 6 and one in Grade 4 commented on both topics anyway. (In the fifth and the two fourth grades it was emphasised more explicitly than in the sixth grade that only one topic should be chosen.) Text examples are given in diplomatic transcription (attempting to remain as close as possible to the original with regard to spelling, spacing, punctuation, capitalisation, etc.) or in photographic reproductions. A slash, , is used in the transcribed examples to indicate a line break. All examples are accompanied with a four-digit reference number of which the first digit refers to the grade, the second to the categories of text length (Table 4.1), and the latter two to an internal classification number of the compositions within the same grade and category – 63.12, for instance, should be read as the 12th composition in the sixth grade of Category 3 (i.e. consisting of a full sentence). Almost nine out of 10 pupils reported positive values in English, with more than three-quarters of them pointing exclusively at positive values. Less than a quarter of the pupils revealed negative attitudes, with only a marginal 11% indicating only negative attitudes towards English. Of the 114 pupils who handed in an essay containing more than just the assignment, only 26 voiced negative attitudes towards English. Most of them articulated a dislike of English because it was (very) difficult, e.g. ‘because it is difficult / English is difficult for me but it / d’ont like that subject’ (54.03).

Figure 4.1 ‘Dictation’ (61.05)

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In line with the argument of difficulty, others argued that their selfdeclared incapability was a reason for not liking English, e.g. ‘because if you can not read you cannot do EnogliSh.’ A sixth-grader cited ‘Dictation’ as a reason for not liking English (see, for example, Figure 4.1). A fifth-grader wrote that ‘English is not good for me’ (54.15), and a sixth-grade child simply wrote ‘no’ as a response to the assignment question ‘why it is important to learn English’. In most of the compositions that comment negatively on English, English appears in the first place to be regarded as a school subject and not as a means of communication. Most of the 114 pupils, however, chose to comment on the theme ‘Why it is important for me to learn English’ and expressed exclusively positive attitudes. The reasons why the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders found it important to learn English can be classified into two broad categories: affective (or sentimental) and instrumental (or practical, or economic) reasons (cf. Gao, 2007; May, 2006). However, in expressing affective attitudes, there is often an underlying instrumental value and vice versa. Positive affective attitudes towards English were found in formulations starting with ‘I like’ or ‘I love’, e.g. ‘because i like english and I want to speak english / topic 2: / why I like english / because I like englis / I want to learn english’ (44.02). As the official language and the language of education, English carries a special status that sets it apart from all the other languages in the Gambian ecology of languages. Children at an early age recognise this and talk about English in highly marked ideological terms, e.g. ‘Because I am very hapey to speak / a language. English is very good for / all. I am very happy to ledrn / I want to / English is very good’. A far-reaching affective argument pro English is the assumption that proficiency in English will lead straightforwardly to happiness, e.g. ‘I like English very well because I want very happy’ (53.03). Instrumental pro-English arguments underscore a toolbox-vision of language. In these attitudes, English is regarded as a useful tool to achieve something in the real world, such as an educational degree, a good job (notably as a teacher, see Figure 4.2), or the opportunity to travel. Some children linked proficiency in English with very basic material needs such as food or money.

Figure 4.2 ‘Because want to be teacher’ (52.08)

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Others noted their desire to assist their parents in their struggle against poverty and claimed their education and proficiency in English to be the key to well-paid jobs and better futures for themselves and their families (see Figure 4.3). A fourth-grader insisted that English is important ‘because if I d’ont learn / English I’m going to suffaî’ (43.35, see Figure 4.4). The positive attitudes towards English articulated by the students can be read in terms of ideology as hegemony, i.e. as ‘nothing but an ideological reflex of linguistic imperialism’ (Pennycook, 2000: 114). Yet, as Pennycook argues, such a position ‘lacks a sense of agency, resistance, or appropriation’, and analyses the students’ voices away as false consciousness. Except for those writing that English is ‘too difficult’ and expressing other negative attitudes, the students seem to consider English a ‘placed resource’ (Norton and Williams, 2012) that can help them in achieving a variety of practical economic goals. With Morrison and Lui (2000), I agree that linguistic imperialism cannot provide a full explanation here as it is unable to account for the multiple motivations, purposes, uses and issues behind the students’ attitudes. Bourdieu’s notion of linguistic capital provides us with a more comprehensive explanation here: English can be seen as a desirable commodity interchangeable in the market for other (nonlinguistic) capital or commodities. These nonlinguistic commodities can – although more in potentiality than in actual reality – be an educational degree, a professional position with a good salary, or a ticket to go abroad as well as more altruistic desires to assist parents or family in their ‘struggle for life’. For the very different postcolonial context of Hong Kong, Morrison and Lui (2000: 472) argue that ‘English is not a necessary passport to success, but, like other non-ideological passports, it helps’. For The Gambia, we are inclined to say that English is necessary, although not a guarantee, for success in the formal economy. While we do not deny the symbolic power and imperial history of English in Gambian society, we also see agency, intentionality and rationally informed choices in the pupils’ overwhelming enthusiasm concerning English. When we take their voices seriously, we can appreciate how the students manifest themselves as ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘capable’ individuals (Long, 2001: 24) who are making conscious choices and pursuing ambitions within the constraints

Figure 4.3 ‘Because I want to learn the language if I finish school I will help my mother and father to buy rice’ (54.16)

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they and their families are facing. In their compositions they imagine trajectories of empowerment and social mobility through English and education. We have so far engaged with students’ articulations of ideas about English in education and society only in so far as these students succeeded in expressing themselves. Apart from the fact that the students’ writings contain a wide array of nonstandard spellings, unsystematic use of lower and upper case lettering, unconventional word and sentence boundaries, omission of pronouns, ‘faults’ in the flexion of verbs, and an unsteady organisation of text between the lines, 70 of the 199 pupils across the three grades as shown in Table 4.1 did not produce any original content in their compositions. Apparently, three to five years of instruction is for most students hardly enough to write a short multisentence text. For the majority of fourth-, fifthand sixth-graders, it remains extremely difficult to make themselves understood, to produce voice in written English in the classroom. These difficulties are not something to lightly dispose of as growing pains but are inherent in the educational system that follows a ‘sink-or-swim’ approach whereby children are thrown into an English-only learning environment without much well-considered pedagogy. In this system, only the brightest students learn to swim and bridge the gap between spoken local languages at home and in the community on the one hand, and written English in school on the other. This system arguably forces large numbers of students to drop out prematurely or to stay in school for years without effectively becoming literate and without developing the voices and literacies they need to pursue their dreams (Igboanusi, 2014). As discussed above, the new education policy (DoSE, 2004) has included a number of provisions to change this regime of learning, from one that prescribes ‘English only’ to one that prescribes the use of five local languages as media of instruction and as subjects. As far as my colleague Van Camp and

Figure 4.4 ‘English is very important because if I don’t learn English I am going to suffer’ (43.35)

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I could observe in our fieldwork, schools de facto continued to use an Englishonly approach. In the next section, we shall explore community members’ attitudes towards the planned introduction of local languages in the public school system and investigate their responses to the question as to which language they would expect or advise to be used in their school.

Black People’s Language In this section, I will turn to the focus group discussion my colleague Kirsten Van Camp organised four years after my writing contest during a community meeting in the same district school. Although these data differ from those presented in the previous section, the methodological rationale remains the same: if we want to understand the language-in-education issue in Gambian society, we need to listen to the voices of local persons concerned with education and mobilise their voices as a starting point for a locally grounded understanding of linguistic diversity in and out of school (Makoni & Trudell, 2009). In taking voices from below seriously, we need to critically interrogate our own ideologies and reflect on our professional practice and our own conceptualisations of language. The interview transcripts below are particularly useful for this purpose as they make visible how ethnographic interviewing is really a form of intercultural communication in which all sorts of miscommunication may occur (recall Briggs, 1986 or Fabian, 1995). The meeting was held in March 2008 and chaired by the district chief, who hosted the meeting in his compound opposite the school. It was attended by a number of alkalolu ‘village heads’, male elders, and some 25 parents, mainly fathers. In the background, there were a group of women overhearing the discussion without participating. The entire discussion lasted for about 70 minutes and was largely bilingual in Mandinka and English with limited use of Jola and Fula as well. The first fragment is taken from the very beginning of the group discussion. We can read how the district chief, who is aware of the researcher’s interest in language issues, does not await the researcher’s first question to start talking, and puts forward two key principles: (a) the importance of learning English, and (b) the importance of learning the local language (‘our language’). We also note how the chief’s interruption of the researcher is coupled with a switch from English to Mandinka.

Fragment 4.1 Two key principles 3 4

Res: Ch:

(xx [my question x) [wo lemu . . Angalais kao kara . . .

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it is that, learning the English language kaatu diyaakuja fo ntelu sii duniyaa ñooka because willy-nilly, we will have to sit together in the world hm bari ñna kao but our language fo na ñente kara la beteke . . . we have to try to learn this very well

The interpreter has an ambiguous role as he not only translates what the district chief and parents have said in Mandinka but also voices his own opinions as a teacher himself. Here, he repeats the points made by the chief. In both the chief’s and the interpreter’s lines, all mentioning of local language(s) is done in singular form: ‘ñna kao’ (line 6), ‘the local language’, ‘our language’, ‘our own language’. In the next fragment the researcher introduces the key question of her interview: is it possible ‘to use the local language as an official language [in education]?’ Note that she first speaks about language in singular form (‘the local language’, ‘an official language’), but then restates this in plural (‘different local languages’, ‘official languages’). The interpreter, the chief, and the parent who reacts in line 63 do not seem to pay attention to this subtle distinction, and answer fairly straightforwardly that this is indeed possible (lines 61–65).

Fragment 4.2 Local languages and moo fi kao 55 56 57

Res: Ipr: Res:

58 59 60

Ipr: Res: Ipr:

61

Ch:

62

Ipr:

an

[d [ye:s do you think it is possible . . . to use the local language as an official language, like different local languages? uhu [uhu] [as in] official languages? uhu, saayi a ya ko foon (saayi) a a a be a be possible la le ba ñna moo fi kao .. waa ke ñna office langu-uh office kao ti now she asked me if it is possible (now) if our black people’s language can be official language kome ja na Angalais ka [o fo le fo xxx x ((chuckles))] like here we can speak English [a fa, a fa. a-afa x possible (x)] tell her, tell her, tell her (x) possible (x) haa ((chuckles)) yes

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63 64 65

Px: Ipr: Px:

[ye:s] [he said] yes, it’s possible ((chuckles)) it’s possible (x xxx x xx)

Through a critical reading of the transcripts, it becomes clear that there is, right from the beginning, a rather crucial misunderstanding in this discussion. The researcher’s ‘local languages’ of line 57 is translated in Mandinka by the interpreter in line 60 as moo fi kao ‘black people’s language’. This shows that the researcher and her interviewees hold radically different conceptualisations of local language(s) and that they subscribe to competing discourses on language in education. The researcher, embracing a mainstream Western-academic discourse on language in education, conceptualises local languages in plural form, as the sum of a number of distinct languages, i.e. more or less as presented in Chapter 2. Languages here are understood as separate, nameable and ultimately countable entities. The interviewees, exponents of a local discourse on language in education, conceptualise local language in singular as a generic term for the whole communicative-linguistic practices and behaviour of ‘Black people’. This local discourse on language in education (their ideologies, in Collins’ 1998 terms) should be taken seriously not insofar as I would like to suggest that the interviewees hold that all black people in fact speak one, mutually understandable language with the same syntax, semantics and pragmatics, but that, in the context of this discussion on the medium of instruction, the most significant distinction is between White people’s language (tubaab kao) and Black people’s language (moo fi kao). Somewhat later in the discussion, with respect to the policy objective to introduce the five most commonly used languages in education, the researcher attempts to discover which local language is going to be used in the context of this particular school. The interviewees have already expressed their support for the introduction of local language(s) in their school, but the question as to what that language should be for this school is left unanswered:

Fragment 4.3 Jola or Mandinka? 1106 1107 1110 1111 1112 1113

Ipr:

he said now they cannot it-it will be very (much) difficult for them to discuss to say (as to one) uhm to select one uhm language to be [sp]oken in the in the schools [ Res: [hm] [hm Ipr: because he doesn’t mind-they don’t want to point out one Res: hm Ipr: cause here in the village here .. the Jolas are more than the other language [other] Res: ((quiet) [yes])

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Ipr:

1115 1116 1117 1118

Res: Ipr: Res: Ipr:

1119 1120 1121 1122

Res: Ipr: Res: Ipr:

1123 Res: 1124 Ipr: 1125 Res: 1126 Ipr: 1127 Ch:

1128 Ipr: 1129

Ch:

1130

Ipr:

1131

Ch:

1132 1133 1134 1135 1136

Ipr: P1: Res: Ipr: P2:

1137 1138

Ipr: P3:

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tribes you have the Jolas, then you have the Fulas, then you have the Mandinkas .. so but if he if if if he’s asked for him he will say the Jola [okay] [but what of] the other language what would they (feel) hm they will (see) that now what he is trying to bring some sort of a tribalism he’s trying to have the Jolas and then leave us b- leave us behind .. he said now it is left to the government [hm] [the] policy makers [yes] [they] are making the policies .. let them decide as as to which which language to be to be the official language [ok] [or to] be taught in the school … [ye:s because other] [and other people] think? and other people [yeah] ((loud) [fine]) a fo a ye a ko ntolu si ntolu si mu fono lafita le kaa jee ko na local languages ya karandi karambuo to fine, she said, she asked if we want to have local languages for teaching in school they don’t want to they don’t want to be (xxx) be they don’t want to be specific to say this language be spoken but ha! yes! that’s it, but then let them let them let a lang- let the local language be taught in the schools haa moolu be sola le wo le mu yes, people will need that yeah let the local language be taught in the schools but (haa xx xxxx xxxxx) hm they cannot decide as to say let this language (xxxx) Western Region foloo to ka Bulock be Kalaji Western Region starting from Bulock to Kalaji be the the leading language and ( ) wo le mu wo le be kayitoo bala that is what is on the paper

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The issue brought up by the researcher as to which local language would have to be selected for their school is not a welcome topic of discussion for the interviewees (e.g. line 1106: ‘they cannot’, ‘difficult for them’; line 1110: ‘he doesn’t mind’, ‘they don’t want to’, repeated in lines 1128, 1135). Although the labels Mandinka, Wolof, Jola, etc. are commonly used, and are often referred to in such old-fashioned terms as ‘tribe’ (e.g. line 1114), Gambian ethnicities are really post-tribal ethnicities. Choosing between either Mandinka or Jola language is something the interviewees prefer to stay away from, for fear of tribalism (line 1118), which is generally regarded as a backwards tendency that should not be indulged in modern Gambian society. Provoked to answer this question anyway, the interviewees more or less unanimously conceptualise language without clear-cut, hard boundaries (Canut, 2001, 2002; Zentz, 2013). Here is a conceptualisation of language with a low degree of ‘groupness’ (Brubaker, 2002). This response is offered in reaction to our over-ethnicised view of local language(s) as ‘putative thingsin-the world’ or ‘fundamental units of social [or linguistic] analysis’ and as belonging to ‘our empirical data’ rather than ‘our analytical toolkit’ (Brubaker, 2002: 163ff). The interpreter, the chief and the parents manage to speak about local language(s) without compartmentalising them and ‘without employing the language of bounded groups’ (Brubaker, 2002: 185). What we have here is a ‘postmodern perspective’ on local languages voiced in the field (Stroud, 2003). Through their construct of moo fi kao, interviewees articulated a view of languaging rather than languages for their local language practices, and situated this within their locality of ‘black people’. In her assumption that a pluralist perspective on language is universally valid, the researcher judges that her second question has not been adequately addressed, and she thus proposes an alternative strategy to obtain the answers she seeks. She suggests a vote among her interviewees. Her question, now posed in a playful manner, elicits a collective outburst of laughter. It results in the paradoxical situation that most interviewees, ethnically affiliated to Jola, raise their hands for Jola even though they are all making use of the lingua franca Mandinka in this discussion, and not of the language of their voting, Jola. This strategy of voting introduced by the ethnographer may be seen as an unwitting act of ‘epistemic violence’ (Branson & Miller, 2007; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007) as she imposes her own culturally specific knowledge system on that of the participants. This strategic question forces her interviewees to think of local languaging in a modernist, pluralised/compartmentalised way, and to make exactly that reductionist choice they have so far refused to make. Short turns in Jola and Fula notwithstanding, the discussion is entirely carried out in Mandinka and English. And yet, interviewees seem to agree that

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if a particular local language should be selected for use in the classroom, then the only feasible option for this school is Jola. As previously mentioned, the school is located in the Foni region which is historically dominated by Jola, and is surrounded by villages with Jola alkaloship. Despite the cultural and historical association of this area as a Jola area, the language of wider communication in many villages in this area is not Jola but Mandinka (recall the general description of Jola in Chapter 2 and see also the description of the ‘modern multi-ethnic village’ in the next chapter). We need to understand this unanimous vote for Jola from an ethnohistorical perspective as the school is located in what is considered a Jola area, even though the language of wider communication in and around the school is Mandinka. This univocal choice for Jola, however, is only voiced in a jocular, low-key atmosphere caused by the researcher. Later, when the discussion turns more serious again, it is repeated that they accept whatever the policy makers decide. Despite this brief concurrence with the researcher’s compartmentalisation of local language(s), on the whole, the participants are successful in resisting the researcher’s notion of local language(s) as bounded, discrete objects. In Fragment 4.4, the interpreter paraphrases the chief in making a relativising remark about language, emphasising that ‘language doesn’t matter’ (line 1719), and that, in fact, ‘language is just taught to communicate’ (line 1725).

Fragment 4.4 Language doesn’t matter 1719 1720 1721

1722 1723 1724 1725 1726 1727

Ipr: he said that language is language doesn’t matter, Res: hm Ipr: but just you know what you are supposed to do, that’s what, that is it, so language doesn’t matter even if it they (x) any language they select they will adhere to the government and accept that language, but [just know] Res: [so. if] Ipr: what you know what you are supposed to and you do that and that’s (sort [of) thing ] Px: ((quiet) [(xx xx) is ] better now) Ipr: language is just taught to communicate and [that’s all] Res: [hm] Ipr: yes . yes

Makoni and Trudell (2009: 45) explain that there is often a tension in discussions of linguistic diversity in Africa, ‘between regarding language as simply a means of communication and regarding language as profound marker of cultural identity’. This tension is also present in the focus group

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discussion here. The local discourse here generally downplays the languageas-identity view in reaction to a perceived overemphasis of this view on account of the ethnographer. However, when forced to make an either/or choice, the interviewees turn to their sentiments of pride and assert their ethnic identity. The ethnographer becomes increasingly frustrated with the course of the discussion. She is surprised by this relativising view on language and identity, and feels that they are back at square one. If language really doesn’t matter, do they at all care whether or not local language(s) will be introduced in their school? Or have they just gone along with her supposed preference for the introduction of local language(s)? To resolve her own confusion, she repeats the basic tenet again: do they prefer an education system with English only, or one that accommodates local language(s) as well, and if so, which one? At this point, the participants become frustrated as well, because they are asked the same question over and over again, while in their perception, this question has already been answered in a nuanced way. This mutual frustration goes back to the participants’ singular conception of local language practice as moo fi kao, while the researcher sees local language as made up of separate entities and is repeatedly trying to single out particular local languages. The distinction that matters for her informants is between English, i.e. White people’s language, and moo fi kao, not between various local languages. The researcher is still not satisfied with the answer and insists on getting an answer to the question that is so important for her research. In Fragment 4.5 she tries one last time and again asks about the language of instruction in their school.

Fragment 4.5 You don’t like that? 1775 1776 1777 1778 1779 1780 1781 1782

Res: but do they like the uh local language to be selected? or English language or the English language? Ipr: I think they have said that yeah [(that they don’t want)] Ch: ((loud) [a fa ye! x xxxx] xxx xxx xxx xxxx) tell her Ipr: yes . (they said) they they’ll they told you that you know the local language to be taught in the schools Res: they’re [not particular about] Ipr: [and the children take that] Res: which local language? Ipr: they’ll not be particular, they told you yes, yes they prefer local languages yeah yeah this is it

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Ch: Ipr: Ch: Res: Ipr: Res: Ch:

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we have tell them already [yes] [you wa] [nt (xx x) be]cause we have told you [okay] uhum (xx) (x) you don’t like that? (you x)

Here it becomes ultimately clear that the researcher and her participants speak different languages. Note that the interpreter no longer stands between the researcher and the research participants, but assumes the role of advocate for the interviewees, trying to make clear that they do not want to make this choice. In lines 1783–1790 we can hear the frustration of the district chief grow as he starts to speak English himself and addresses the ethnographer directly. As far as he is concerned, her question has already been answered. As she keeps on repeating this question he feels she rejects their answer (e.g. line 1790: ‘you don’t like that?’). To contextualise this, the researcher was educated in Flanders and grew up with a historical consciousness of the Flemish language struggle and the present political sensitivities in the relations between the linguistic communities in the federal state of Belgium (Willemyns, 2002). As a result of this upbringing, she enters the interview with an implicit attachment to the value of mother tongue education. That mother tongues, first languages and second languages are less legitimate constructs in a West African context where almost everybody grows up multilingual, and where language is not necessarily understood as a countable concept (Lüpke & Storch, 2013), is the cause for the clash of ideologies presented in the interview. When asked, the ethnographees indicate that they are in support of a greater role for local language(s) in Gambian education. However, they refuse to separate moo fi kao (Black people’s language) into nameable languages. They wish to stay away from deciding beforehand what specific local language should be included for use in the classroom, as it would then become a matter of exclusion rather than inclusion. By avoiding the researcher’s question, they appear to make a collective statement against monolingualism, or against compartmentalising multilingualism. Introducing local language(s) in Gambian schools, they seem to suggest, should be possible without formally determining which one or which ones are legitimate to use in particular schools. Even if this may be practical from a policy makers’ point of view, pointing out one particular language (or several languages) should perhaps be avoided altogether because that would impose unwarranted restrictions on local languaging.

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Engaging With Voices In the discussion of the focus group interview I have shown how serious misunderstandings can arise in ethnographic encounters, but that these can be turned into rich learning moments when they are seen as intercultural communication. That is, they can be a heuristic for locally grounded knowledge about language in education. The metalinguistic writing contest certainly also qualifies as intercultural communication; however, it is more difficult to identify possible miscommunication in this data set due to the fairly standardised form which restrained the informants’ answers and capability to negotiate the researcher’s questions. We are now able to compare both methods to investigate local language ideologies in education and take on the question: what kind of voice emerges from both ethnographic encounters? I discuss this in relation to the research methods and the power relations that emerge from both research methods. The difference in the set-up of the two ethnographic encounters is primarily a difference in the amount of control the ethnographer and research participants had over the situation. In the writing contest, the question was formulated in such a way that responses to only two questions were elicited. Although open-ended questions, this format is fairly rigid in steering the answers in predetermined directions on a positive– negative spectrum. The format of a focus group discussion, on the other hand, allows participants to articulate more nuanced and more complex ideas about language in education, to reject elements of the question and to introduce new issues and concepts into the research process. The questions and answers are embedded in a dialogue between researcher and researched, in which both parties can make themselves understood on their own terms – the definition of voice Blommaert (2006: 166) provides, ‘the capacity to make yourself understood on your own terms’. It is this format of dialogue that allows us to recognise a fundamental misunderstanding in the subject matter (the researcher’s ‘local languages’ versus the researchees’ moo fi kao). The different dialogic dynamics in both encounters also result in and are part of different power relations between researcher and researched. In both cases, the research praxis involves one researcher engaging with a large number of research participants. The situational and institutional power relations, however, are significantly different in both cases, with qualitatively different types of voices emerging from the different research praxes. In the case of the writing contest, I as a young and novice, male researcher organised, with the support of the deputy headmaster and teachers involved,

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a written poll on attitudes towards English among fourth-, fifth- and sixthgraders in a lower basic school. In the case of the focus group interview, my colleague – also young and new to research, but female – faced a collective of prominent elderly men including the district chief – the most powerful man in the district. Leaving gender issues aside here, it is obvious that the researcher here, as a guest in the chief’s compound, is not the most powerful person in this encounter. To an important extent the interactional order and the ethnographic data that emerged from this interaction were determined and controlled not by the researcher but by the chief, the interpreter and the deputy headmaster. Although I was equally young and inexperienced when I organised the writing contest, my participants were even younger and, due to the situation and institutional setting in which I assumed the role of a teacher, relatively incapable of transforming the question and its assumptions into their own terms. In sum, the writing contest was more rigidly researcher controlled than the community meeting focus group interview. In research, control is not necessarily a good thing. In their Manifesto for Ethnography, Willis and Trondman (2000) refer to the dialectics of surprise as one of the strengths of ethnographic research. The focus group interview brings out much richer ethnographic data about what language means in Gambian education than the writing contest. The conditions of the focus group discussion were such that it provided us with a conceptual tool that challenged rather than confirmed our understanding of language and language-in-education policy. We are reminded that a community meeting is more directly susceptible to local power dynamics than administering individual student compositions. As a more open and public form of interaction, the community meeting leaves little room for individual community members to express idiosyncratic opinions that depart from a collective, shared understanding of the world or to contest others’ voices. The chief, parents, alkalolu, teachers and interpreter all speak from their unique positions and represent different institutional and social voices, but they do not enjoy equal speaking rights at the community meeting hosted in the chief’s compound (this is evident, for instance, in the silent role women assumed in the community meeting). The voice in the focus group discussion is largely a collective voice, whereas the writing contest accommodates many individual voices. The chief’s voice, which could be heard most prominently, is not a bottom-up voice to the same extent as the students’ voices. His voice is rather one from above or from inbetween due to his political office and association with central state power. Despite these reservations, engaging with voices can provide us with a heuristic tool for locally grounded and locally relevant knowledge about language in education. Knowing how language is conceptualised locally, along with how language is dealt with in the community as well as in school, may

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be helpful in designing locally sensitive and relevant language-in-education policies and in avoiding institutionalising epistemic violence. As an additional note, as researchers we are lifting local voices out of their temporal and spatial frames to entextualise and circulate them in academic writing, in this case arguing for using local voices and local understandings of language in the context of language-in-education policy. It is legitimate to ask to what extent this does justice to any of the intentions the speakers may have had when they allowed us to record their voices. Do research participants contribute to research out of a desire to be heard, or rather out of sheer Gricean cooperation? And here we may be tempted to ask: does it matter, if their voices are worth hearing? To recapitulate, the argument put forward in this chapter is threefold: (1) academic and policy discourses of language in education need to take practitioners’ and local stakeholders’ voices seriously; (2) we need to make an effort in understanding how language is conceptualised locally in the society we study (by also critically investigating researchers’ own voices); and (3) international pedagogical theory therefore cannot be applied wholesale to an African context but needs to be locally situated. If researchers and their participants (or policy makers and their subjects) are at variance on the most crucial aspect of the object of research (or of policy), i.e. the conceptualisation of language itself, then we cannot expect any real understanding (or any effective policy) in the end. What is needed in order to understand linguistic diversity and the language-in-education issue in a particular society, is a critical understanding of the concept of language itself (cf. Makalela, 2005; Makoni & Mashiri, 2007; Stroud, 2001, 2003). There is a long tradition of scientific arguments advancing the idea that it is psychologically and educationally favourable for a child to learn in a first language as opposed to a second language (see Williams, 2006 for comparative evidence from Malawi and Zambia). Cummins (1991: 77), who is one of the key voices in this tradition, suggests that there is a cognitive interdependence between a first language or literacy (L1) and an additional language or literacy (L2): L1 literacy and conceptual knowledge constitute central attributes of the individual that help to make academic input in the L2 comprehensible. If a second language learner already understands concept X in her L1 then L2 input containing that concept will be considerably more comprehensible than if she does not understand concept X in her L1. On the ground, such arguments are not unknown but are often countered with other arguments, defending the postcolonial status quo.

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According to the headmaster of the school at the time of the writing contest, for instance, the main reason for not offering education in local languages is economic. In the same interview cited earlier in this chapter, he suggests that: I want to believe it will come for more costs and The Gambia is a poor country. If you want to look for an English teacher, who would teach English as a medium of instruction from a letter class you are certainly looking for another teacher who will teach other subject areas. And as you have seen the problems now usually in schools are all connected to resources. I think that’s one of the major reasons. The Gambia also started teaching some languages like Mandinka, Fula and Wolof in schools at one time, but I think all is connected to resources. [KJ: Yes, I see.] Secondly, we are taking English because it’s our official language . . . (Interview with the headmaster, in the schoolyard, October 2004). Even beyond such practical concerns, Cummins’ proposals might be persuasive in a country like Canada or Belgium where multilingualism is nicely compartmentalised in geographic, administrative (and cognitive) domains, but not necessarily also in a West African context where all language is multilingual (Early & Norton, 2014). Even if the interviewees in the focus group discussion seem to be in support of a greater role for the local language (moo fi kao) in their school, they are unable or unwilling to offer any practical solution concerning the choice of any of the local languages of the community. To conclude, if empowerment and democracy are integral to the kind of sociolinguistics pursued here, then a focus on voice as analytical heuristics has much to contribute to our understanding of educational discourses and language within education. Research is empowering, according to Cameron et al. (1992) if it does not only do research ‘on’ and ‘for’, but also ‘with’ human subjects. Throughout my research, however, I felt that the research community – the teachers, headmasters, the pupils, etc. – were there for me more than I as a researcher could be there for them. If we agree with Velghe (2014) that ethnography is essentially a learning process, a humble and prudent attitude in returning knowledge is justified. If this research has made any impact at all, then this should be sought at a small, interpersonal level as some of the teachers and some of the pupils will remember some of the interactions we have had, or some of the curious questions I asked. Research that aspires to be empowering at least needs to be open and open-minded about its objectives (in explaining to participants what we want to understand and write about) and also needs to actively engage ethnographic research participants in the construction of knowledge, both

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during and after fieldwork. What this boils down to is giving voice to people who otherwise remain unheard and using these voices from the field to see the ideological in our own voice, rather than only in theirs. Doing this in an engaged way (Davis, 2014) will enhance our understanding of the multiple meanings of language across cultural and educational contexts.

5

Collaborative Literacy Repertoires

The Introduction chapter stated that sociolinguistics is no longer the study of who speaks (or writes) what language (or what language variety) to whom, and when and to what end (Fishman’s classic question), but the study of who languages what to whom, when and where, with what resources and under what conditions. Such a languaging perspective assumes that there is no such thing as full competence in a language or full literacy skills. What we speak or what we achieve linguistically is a lapidary repertoire, a collection of linguistic features of particular varieties, styles or ways of speaking, rather than a sum of languages. When speaking, we only make use of certain features that are available to us, never of an entire language. There is nobody who speaks an entire language (‘language’ being defined here as the sum of all features that are recognisable as ‘belonging’ to a particular language). Multilingual people do not speak two or more languages, but they language, making use of features that may be recognised by themselves or others as ‘belonging’ to two or more different sets of features. What features we display in languaging and what features we prefer to hide is determined by our individual histories of learning as well as by ‘the whole aggregate of conditions under which any given community of speakers operates’ (Vološinov, 1973 [1929]: 93). Hymes’ (1967, 1986) ethnography of speaking forms a more useful starting point than Fishman’s question for sociolinguistic investigations of actual, local situations of languaging. In reality, speakers are always constrained by a variety of limitations – situational, interactional, biographical, social, structural. An ethnographic sociolinguistics is primarily concerned with these constraints and urges us to start by describing lived realities, i.e. real events with real people using real language. Ethnography of speaking is part of a qualitative descriptive programme of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology that originated in the 1960s and 1970s as a development of Jakobson’s 103

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(1960) communication scheme. Part of its success is due to the fact that Hymes turned SPEAKING into a mnemonically convenient acronym with a contextual factor for every letter of the word: Situation – setting and scene, Participants – speaker, addressor, hearer, and addressee, Ends – outcomes and goals, Act sequence – message form and content, Key, Instrumentalities – channel or medium, and forms of speech, Norms – of interaction and interpretation, and Genres. This model should be taken not as an instant recipe but rather as an imperative for descriptive holism. Interestingly, in the ethnography of speaking there is no explicit reference to language or languages, but to forms of speech as part of ways of speaking – what we now call languaging. Communication, and not a particular language, is at the centre of this model. Speaking is not locked up in a particular language, but can spread out over multiple languages and idiomatic practices. With the ethnography of speaking (or of writing, see Basso, 1974), the research focus is also not on a particular language at a particular time, but on a particular community of practice in which multiple modes and media of communication (including what are usually traditionally considered ‘languages’) are available and used at the same time. In this chapter I will offer two ethnographies of literate languaging, focusing on a literacy event that I witnessed more or less accidentally – by ‘surprise’ as Willis and Trondman (2000) would say – and a small text, a booklet in use, that I also discovered accidentally. The former can be analysed with the toolkit of Hymes’ ethnography of speaking, while the latter requires a ‘ethnography of text’, an analysis on the basis of the text’s materiality without direct access to the context of production itself (see Blommaert, 2008b). The first case I am concerned with here dates from 2004 and involves a letter that was ‘written’ (collaboratively) by an old ‘non-literate’ villager in the process of arranging the marriage of his stepson with a girl from the same village. The analysis I present here is a contextual analysis of the writing event which took place right in front of me, however without having been able to read the letter itself. By analysing the immediate and wider context surrounding this text, meaningful insight can be gained into literacy as a situated practice, even without the text itself at hand. The second case I present here dates from 2008 and involves an everyday literacy document from the same village. It relates to a telephone booklet that was kept by a low-literate young man from the same village and apparently inscribed collaboratively. The second analysis is a textual analysis or an ethnography of text. Here the booklet itself is analysed, without having been able to observe much of how it was concretely used in practice. By analysing the text in detail, however, significant aspects of the social world in which the text was produced can be reconstructed.

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Both events are fairly ordinary, trivial even, but can be mobilised to arrive at an understanding of the social and cultural organisation of language and literacy in this village community and Gambian society at large. By juxtaposing these two types of analysis, I aim to demonstrate how on the one hand an analysis of the context can reveal much of the text, and how on the other hand an analysis of the text can reveal much of the context. This chapter also further destabilises the idea of language(s) as fixed and separable entities. I will begin by describing the setting and scene.

A Modern Multi-ethnic African Village The two descriptions of literacy in this chapter are both situated in a modern multi-ethnic village in Foni, in southwest Gambia (see Figure 2.1). The village is referred to as a modern village because people have lived there for only three to four generations and because it was built around the structures of the modern state. The village stretched out on each side of a T-junction that is formed by the main road on the South Bank and a secondary road going to a riverine village further north. To the south there was only farmland and bush and some small villages before the border with the Casamance region of southern Senegal. The East–West axis is an important orientation to people of the village as they face East when they pray and head West when they travel to the city. The village is referred to as a multi-ethnic village because no ethnic group formed an absolute majority, even though the village was located in an area that is historically dominated by Jolas, and also ‘owned’ by Jolas; that is, the alkaloship of the village remains in the lineage of the Jola founders of the village. In a survey of multilingualism I carried out with my colleague Ellen Vanantwerpen in July–August 2005 among 248 villagers (including longterm guests) of all ages, representing roughly one-third to half of the population, 33% responded by saying that they were Jola, 31.5% Mandinka, 17.5% Fula, 9% Manjago and 6.5% Wolof. Further, 10.5% of interviewees declared that they had been born into an ethnically mixed marriage, and 8.5% reported that they were married to someone from a different ethnic group. With regard to the linguistic resources available to this rural population, there were the languages of the above and other ethnic groups, but also international languages such as English, French, Arabic and Portuguese-based Creole (Guineense). There was a clear lingua franca in this village, as revealed in the high number (95%) of respondents who declared themselves to be speakers of Mandinka. Multilingualism is the rule here, however, as Jola and Wolof were also spoken by more than half of the questioned population

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(59% and 57%, respectively), and Fula by over one-third of the villagers (35%). English was claimed to be understood by 43% of the questioned population, Arabic by 14% and French by 9%. It was not possible to get reliable answers to our questions regarding literacy, perhaps due to over-differentiation in our questionnaire grid. It may be estimated, however, that about half of the young men in the village were literate to some extent in either English or Arabic and that this number would be somewhat lower for young women and middle-aged men. Very few elderly persons are likely to have been literate, either in English or in local languages. A good number of young and middle-aged women participated in the seasonally organised adult literacy classes. Although women of all ethnic groups took part, these classes were organised in Mandinka only. In the linguistic landscape of the village there was little evidence of any language other than English (see Juffermans & Coppoolse 2012). To further contextualise the literacy practices of the protagonists, I need to explain the material and communicative resources of the protagonists, as well as how they relate to each other. The main agents featuring in the two analyses of this chapter are all related to the Mandinka and Muslim family that hosted me during my fieldwork there from the very beginning in 2004 to my most recent visits in 2014 and 2015. As explained in Chapter 1, I was introduced to this family by Lamin. His family in this compound consisted of Lamin’s mother, Lamin’s younger sister Fatou with three of her four children, and L, whose mother was an elder sister of Lamin and Fatou. Lamin and Fatou’s father, the second husband of their mother, had already passed away, making Lamin as the only male descendent the owner of the compound (kordaa tiyoo). Lamin was roughly 10 years older than me, being in his early to mid-30s at the beginning of my fieldwork. At this time, family pressure was high for Lamin to get married and ‘become responsible’. Being in his mid20s, L was of the same age group as me and was still a bachelor. Lamin and L both grew up in this village in Foni. Lamin’s paternal as well as maternal ancestors are from Niumi, while L has paternal family in Jarra further (see Figure 2.1). Lamin’s mum (L’s grandmother) is not Mandinka herself, but Fula. Her brother, Lamin’s uncle, also lived in the village with his family. Thus, Lamin and Fatou’s cousins (mbarindiolu) were not Mandinka but Fula. Through L’s married elder sister (Lamin’s elder sister’s daughter), the family also had Jola consanguinity. Lamin attended the public lower basic school in his district and continued his education at secondary level, for which he had to move to a larger town upcountry where he could stay with his uncle (mbari) and his family. Upon completion of his education, his elder brother Yusupha arranged for Lamin to work as a seasonal security officer in a Banjul hotel where Yusupha

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himself also worked. When Lamin gained promotion and was hired as a member of security staff for the entire year, he started building a new house on his father’s land. L never attended English-medium public schooling but had a few years of Arabic-medium madrassa instead, and was described as ‘farmer’ under his profession on his ID card, although he also worked as baker (of tapalapa bread) when flour was available and when the oven in the village was not broken. In his leisure time, L liked to listen to raggae and mbalax records in English and Wolof respectively. Each of these categories of identity – being of a particular age, being of a certain ethnicity, practising a particular religion, having gone through a certain type of schooling, etc. – have consequences for L’s language repertoire, i.e. the lapidary composition of linguistic and semiotic-communicative resources at his disposal. Materially, both Lamin and L led lives that they would characterise as ‘not easy’ or ‘just managing’. In the beginning of his work in hotel security, Lamin occupied a room with Almameh in his family compound in Greater Serrekunda. He later moved to stay with his brother Yusupha, who acquired land and built a house elsewhere in urban Kombo. However, Lamin led a life that both would consider more comfortable than L’s. His job as a security agent for a tourist hotel gave him a modest monthly salary, most of which he spend on commuting to his work, ‘fish money’ to his brother’s wife and supporting his family in the village. L occupied a room and parlour in his uncle’s house, which he shared with me when I was around. L had decorated his room with empty packs of the cigarettes he smoked, a poster of hip-hop artists like 50 Cent, and pages from a UK magazine on the wall showing the marriage of a Welsh rugby star, a reportage of Hollywood celebrities with their mums, the Beckhams before David’s transfer to Real Madrid, sexy film stars in tiny swimsuits, and more glitter and glamour. He possessed two or three pieces of furniture, a box with clothes and a two-deck radio-cassette player powered by a car battery. The third person introduced in this chapter is the old Ba-Abdoulie, a father to Lamin and grandfather to L (in the associative sense of the word). Ba-Abdoulie is a Fula immigrant who grew up in the town of Labé in central Guinea before coming to Foni in The Gambia as a young man. Not uncommonly for people of his generation, Ba-Abdoulie did not receive any formal, classroom-based education and did not become technically literate (in the sense of able to read and write). Having spent several decades in The Gambia without ever going back to Guinea, like many Guinean immigrants, Ba-Abdoulie had fully integrated into Gambian rural society and was to my knowledge no longer considered an immigrant. Married to a young wife,

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Ba-Abdoulie was blessed in his old age with three young children. His compound was located at the other side of the road, just two minutes away from our compound. During my fieldwork he frequently came to our compound to pass time and chat with us. He took great joy in teaching me words and phrases in Mandinka as well as in his native Fula. Verbally, Lamin, L and Ba-Abdoulie were very articulate and highly multi lingual. Although it is not straightforwardly possible to assess their language proficiency in such terms as are used by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 1996), it is clear that L, for instance, was ‘effectively proficient’ in, or in fact ‘mastered’ several languages (Mandinka, Fula, Wolof) and could draw upon resources from a variety of other languages in which he had a ‘basic-level’ or ‘threshold’ competence (Jola, English, Arabic) as well as from languages he would not recognise any proficiency in (Manjago, Creole Guineense). Although highly multilingual in speaking, interacting and listening, as a result of his short-lived educational career, L is only low-literate in Arabic, something he himself barely recognises. It is these minimal literacy competences and their collaborative social mediation that I am interested in in this chapter.

The Old Man and the Letter Let us now turn to the letter writing event I announced at the beginning of this chapter. To start with a caveat, the only thing I have of that letter, or rather of the draft of that letter, is a scrap of paper ripped out of an exercise book which only shows the words ‘the’ and ‘will’ (see Figure 5.1). That is certainly not enough to perform good discourse analysis on. It is good to remember Hymes' (1986: 60) comment that ‘[o]nly painstaking analysis of message form – how things are said – [. . .] can disclose the depth and adequacy of the elliptical art that is talk’. In ethnography, however, one must make shift with what one has got. Not having the letter itself constrains the analysis, but may a posteriori even be considered an advantage if we manage to turn the scarcity of available material into a strength. Although it would have been interesting to have access to the content of the letter, the text itself forms only a small part of the whole literacy event. There is so much surrounding the text that when all of that is taken into account, one does not really need the text itself anymore to describe what is going on. It was a typical hot afternoon in the village. I had returned from my obser vations in school (see Chapter 3) and tried to make myself comfortable

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Figure 5.1 Scrap of the letter

under the veranda with a wooden stool, leaning against the wall of the house to make a few field notes. I had not been sitting there for long when teenager Buba, whom I did not know that well, asked me for a pen and a piece of paper. A little while later, Ba-Abdoulie and Buba installed themselves within arm’s reach of where I was sitting and started writing a letter together. I sensed that great ‘data’ were in the making, and decided not to go anywhere. Instead, I started noting down what I saw happening right in front of me, making a somewhat free use of the ethnography of speaking model as outlined at the beginning of this chapter. In order to be as little intrusive as possible, no sound recordings were made, but it was possible to take the photograph in Figure 5.2 without disturbing the situation too much. In the background, we could hear children playing and people chatting while brewing attaya ‘green tea’, and see chickens and goats passing by in search of something to eat. The cause for Ba-Abdoulie to write this letter – certainly not a very common event in this setting, or in Ba-Abdoulie’s life – was the following: Lamin was preparing to marry a girl from the same village, Isatou. In keeping with cultural traditions, Lamin’s family had to supply a dowry to the bride’s family before the wedding could take place. Isatou’s family wanted their house surfaced and requested a number of bags of cement as well as the manpower to carry the work out. The manpower was no problem;

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Figure 5.2 Photograph of the letter writing event

however, the cement was. At the end of September, the situation between the two families was in such deadlock that Ba-Abdoulie decided to interfere in the situation. He decided to request the assistance of a well-off relative, Lamin’s elder brother Yusupha, who was residing in urban Kombo, and to made his request official by putting it in writing. Only Ba-Abdoulie had never learned to write. Ba-Abdoulie searched and found assistance in the person of Buba, a senior secondary school student from a neighbouring family visiting his home village. It is not immediately clear how many participants there are in this letter writing event. First of all, there are the persons who form the core of the event, i.e. Ba-Abdoulie and Buba. There is an addressee who is absent from the scene itself – Yusupha. Physically present at the scene and visible in the photo but claiming a less prominent role is Lamin’s mother. She was not actively involved in writing the letter and could perhaps best be described as a concerned ‘overhearer’ or ‘auditor’, using the terminology of Bell’s (1984) audience design. She would, from time to time, interrupt her household work to listen to how Ba-Abdoulie and Buba write the letter. Other overhearers included L, who was brewing attaya a stone’s throw away from where we were sitting, and the girls Kumba and Aja who came to seek my attention, without much avail. My role is a bit ambiguous here. Clearly, what I am doing is participant observation. I was sitting at arm’s length of Ba-Abdoulie and Buba and I am the one who took the photo (accidentally also capturing my own knee). I am also a concerned onlooker, for different reasons, and was actively involved in

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the event in several ways: I was asked to supply the literacy materials (pen and paper) and later also to deliver the letter to Yusupha. Not strictly participating in this letter writing event are Lamin and Isatou, who want to get married, and Isatou’s family, who is imposing the burden of the dowry on Lamin’s family. They are, however, the cause and raison d’être of this letter, and therefore also participants (parties) here. The different roles assumed in this event are depicted in a communication scheme in Figure 5.3. Although I was able to photograph the event and participate as an observer, the letter itself was kept away from my inquisitive gaze and quickly put into an envelope. The draft was shredded into pieces and thrown away. As an inexperienced, compliant ethnographer, I did not pursue this any further. Opening the letter, or not delivering it, I thought, would be an improper way of gathering ethnographic data. And when I delivered the letter in Yusupha’s compound, I only found Lamin there, who also did not think it appropriate to open the letter before his brother came back from work. I thereby lost the opportunity to get access to the letter itself. From the two times the letter was read aloud, I wrote down in my field notes that the letter was basically a brief explanation of the problem that was most likely already known to Yusupha anyway, as well as a formal request for support to help successfully to arrange this marriage. As the request came from a fatherly person, and in the form of a letter, the request could not be taken lightly, and refusing assistance when in a position to do so would be disrespectful. With high stakes at play, the letter was taken very seriously. It took a whole afternoon to write it: the letter was first drafted and then neatly copied out on a new sheet of paper. As an indication of time, three rounds of attaya were brought to us while this letter was being written. The interval between each brew was about one hour. Further, a lot of formal and polite figures of speech were used in the letter. The choice to write a

Figure 5.3 Participants of the letter writing event in a communication scheme

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letter, and the time spent on it, illustrate how seriously this communicative act was taken. The most interesting component of Hymes’ SPEAKING model is perhaps the notion of instrumentalities, which stands for ‘means or agencies of speaking’ (Hymes, 1986: 63) and is used to avoid any explicit reference to a concept of language, although what is traditionally called language is part of the instrumentalities of speaking (and of writing). Instrumentalities comprise the medium and mode of communication and the semiotic resources of participants in general. Writing a letter requires the materials of a pen and a piece of paper (both of which were supplied by me), but it also calls for a particular set of linguistic resources in the participants’ repertoires – literacy skills and a language one can write in. If we focus on the ethnolinguistic identities of the sender, mediator and receiver in the communication scheme (as is visually represented in Figure 5.4, focusing on the productive rather than receptive dimension of their repertoires), we see that we are dealing with persons of three different ethnic groups and three different generations. As a Fula in Foni, the old Ba-Abdoulie was fluent in both Mandinka and Fula. Since he had not been to school, he did not speak what he called tubaab kao ‘White people’s language’ (either English or French) and had not learned to write. The same holds for Lamin’s mother who, unlike her four sons but like her two daughters, had not been to school and had never learned to write either. As a Fula, she spoke Mandinka most of the time as she married twice into Mandinka families. Since many of their neighbours were Jolas, Ba-Abdoulie and Lamin’s mother could also

Figure 5.4 Mandinka and English in the repertoires of the participants

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speak the Jola language. Buba, the neighbour boy, was Jola, but spoke Mandinka most of the time as this was the lingua franca of the village. He knew Jola as well and had, as a result of his education in the urban areas, also learned to speak Wolof and English. The only language he had learned to write in, however, was English. Lamin’s brother Yusupha was a Mandinka, and spoke Mandinka best and most often, but was, due to his work in a major hotel in Banjul, fluent in Wolof and English as well. He also understood his mother’s Fula, but did not speak it as often as the other languages in his repertoire. Also for Yusupha, the only language he would read and write in was English. There is a common language in the repertoires of all the participants, i.e. Mandinka, but this language is not sufficient to write the letter in. The channel or medium of communication (speaking versus handwriting) and the forms of speech (the languages Mandinka and English) are closely interconnected here. Mandinka was spoken and English was written and read out (to be paraphrased in Mandinka again). The answer to the question as to why this letter was written in English lies in the norms and genre conventions and expectations attached to letters and writing in general in Gambian society. Letter writing and ultimately literacy presupposes English (or Arabic) in this setting. These norms and genre conventions have their source in the national school curriculum that uses only English for literacy instruction (see Chapter 4), as well as in the linguistic landscape which also presents an (almost) Englishonly environment (see Chapter 3). It becomes apparent here that public literacy regimes are reflected in private literacy products and practices. In the language repertoires of Ba-Abdoulie, Buba and Yusupha, English is the only language that lends itself to writing. In the present education system, English practically equals literacy, and vice versa. As a result of that, when Ba-Abdoulie asked Buba to help him write a letter, Buba routinely understood that the letter was supposed to be written in English. Local languaging here involves several persons in Ba-Abdoulie’s network, each of whom brings along different linguistic resources to the communicative event. Ba-Abdoulie himself is equipped only with oral instrumentalities of speaking, which do not enable him to produce a letter autonomously. It is Buba, acting as mediator, who brings the instrumentalities of writing to the event. Local languaging is a collective, multilingual affair in this context, with an unequal distribution of the functions and instrumentalities in participants and in languages. This analysis demonstrates how much context there is surrounding a text, and how that context shapes ways of writing. In the next section I will demonstrate how much of the wider material context can be read in the text itself, when available.

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The Nescafé Booklet The second ethnography of literacy presented here is an ethnographic analysis of a small booklet I found in the possession of L, who lived in the same compound where Ba-Abdoulie ‘wrote’ his letter. A few years after the event described in the previous section – Lamin and Isatou were already married and had a their first child, and the old Ba-Abdoulie had passed away – I found L thumbing through a small booklet by candlelight. It was a thin telephone booklet that had Nescafé and some French text on the cover. In the Introduction to this book, I suggested that ethnographers have to theorise from below and make best of use of all the means at their disposal in an eclectic methodology in order to narrate a meaningful story that offers insight into the matter that is being investigated. In the analysis of the old man and the letter, I did not have access to the letter itself, but was able to witness up close the making of the letter. In this second micro-ethnography, we do have full access to the material text itself, but only indirect access to the interactional context in which it was produced. There are two approaches to analysing a chunk of discourse like L’s Nescafé telephone booklet ethnographically. First, it is possible to attend to the form and content of textual detail, whereby the design as well as the use of the booklet can be analysed (see Blommaert, 2008b; Mbodj-Pouye, 2013 for rich examples of such ‘ethnography of text’). Secondly, it is possible to observe, interrogate and describe the use of the booklet in action (see Norris & Jones, 2005 for examples of action-based discourse analysis). The former allows us to reconstruct (parts of) the discursive history of the booklet and the latter gives us insight into the practice in the moment of the action itself. In what follows, I first discuss the booklet’s design and attempt to reconstruct its trajectory from the designer (Nescafé) to the user (L). I shall then attempt to reconstruct how the booklet was used by L (and his collaborators) on the basis of the existing entries in my direct observations.

The booklet’s design and trajectory The booklet was a free gift with a family pack of Nescafé and was designed by Nescafé Senegal, witnessing the slogan in French Goûte la vie côté café ‘Taste the coffee side of life’, which is used as a commercial slogan in Senegal (see http://www.nescafesenegal.com) and elsewhere in Francophone West Africa (e.g. in Mali). The booklet has probably travelled from neighbouring Senegal to The Gambia, most likely together with a shipment of Nescafé instant coffee for sale on the Gambian market in urban Kombo. It was subsequently given to L by a friend, as he recalled. L left the booklet at home when

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he went out to work, but often carried it with him when hanging around with friends in the afternoon and at night. He also took it with him on a recent trip to his relatives in Jarra. When I inspected and photographed the booklet in July 2008, it had 20 pages and was in the same old, cracked and used condition as most other written material I had seen in this part of the world. The images on the cover pages were considerably bleached by the sun and faded by the many times moist fingers had opened and folded it (see Figures 5.5 and 5.6). The images were still visible and showed on the front page a good-looking and well-dressed young urban couple talking on the telephone and four equally fashionable young men and women in conversation while eating bread and drinking hot drinks from four different cups on the back page. These persons represent the urban elite youth lifestyle that I suspect L aspires to live himself, like many young men in his village. However, many of the activities pictured on the cover pages, like talking on the phone, wearing trendy sunglasses, eating bread and drinking Nescafé, are luxuries L has not been able to enjoy on a daily basis. Besides these images, the front and back cover have vertically from bottom to top the bold white capitalised NESCAFÉ imprint with the final leg of the initial ‘N’ angling and reaching towards the accent aigu of the final ‘É’. At the bottom of the front page, there is the slogan Goûte la vie côté café, and at the top there is the genre indication Répertoire Téléphonique ‘telephone index’. The verso sides of the front and back cover (pages 2 and 19 of the booklet as shown in Table 5.1 and Figure 5.6), provide a calendar of 2003 with the names of the months and the first letter of the days of the week in French. January to June can be found on page 2, and July to December on page 19. The logical ordering of the booklet suggests a reading path from left

Figure 5.5 L’s Nescafé telephone booklet, cover pages

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Figure 5.6 L’s Nescafé telephone booklet, all 20 pages

to right, i.e. from page 1 to page 20 in Table 5.1, although booklets like this are of course not meant to be read from cover to cover but to store and retrieve information. The inner pages of the booklet, which are made of a lighter material than the cover, are organised alphabetically following the Roman alphabet (from

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1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Calendar

C

C

D

D

GH

GH

IJK

IJK

LM

LM

N

N

OPQ

OPQ

RS

RS

Calendar

Back

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

NESCAFÉ

X JUILLET–DECEMBRE

X JANVIER–JUIN

Goûte la vie côté café

Répertoire Téléphonique

Front

Table 5.1 Schematic overview of the booklet (columns represent pages; Xs represent entries)

a, b, c to x, y, z) to enable storing and retrieving information. Some of the letters have been grouped together to gain space, e.g. ‘GH’ and ‘IJK’. Several letters in the alphabet are missing, however, which is an indication that entire pages have been torn out and used for other purposes. It is thus possible to reconstruct that four double-sided pages have been removed, plausibly ‘AB’, ‘EF’, ‘TUV’ and ‘WXYZ’, bringing the original number of pages to 28. Further, also parts of pages 3/4 (‘C’) and 7/8 (‘GH’) had been torn out. Every inner page of the booklet provides five entry points as in Figure 5.7, with four lines to fill in surname and first name, address and three telephone numbers: a house line (DOM: domicile), an office line (BUR: bureau) and a mobile phone number (GSM). In the alphabetical ordering and the layout of the pages in five four-line entries, the booklet’s designers have provided several textual resources for users to organise their contacts in a structured way, but it is left to actual users whether or not to make use of these resources in the suggested way. This structuring and the implicit directions for use assume a certain level of NOM-PRENOM: ADRESSE : TEL. DOM :

Figure 5.7 Designed entry space

BUR :

GSM :

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literacy and a particular personal profile from the booklet’s users. The booklet is designed for people who are literate, for people who have friends with addresses and colleagues with an office, house and mobile telephone number. In its design, the booklet is obviously not meant in the first place for people like L. L’s literacy skills are below the level that is needed to handle this booklet. L also lives in an environment where people do not have two-line addresses, but where streets are unnamed and houses unnumbered. And it is unlikely that L knows many persons with anything other than a mobile telephone number. Inevitably, L uses the booklet in an alternative, appropriated way.

The booklet as used by L In terms of the Common European Framework, L’s demonstrated proficiency in writing is below the A1-level (in any language). As he lacks these basic skills, L has to resort to his friends and other members of his community to help him use this telephone booklet. The point of this section is that non- or low-literate people like L (‘literate’ in the sense of able to read and write) can still do literate things when they make use of the human resources in their community. The booklet reflects a trajectory of collaboratively established entries. There is no consistent use of colour (alternately blue, black, grey, green), nor of writing materials (sometimes pen, sometimes pencil, sometimes fibretip) or handwriting styles (different letter sizes, different styles of writing between the lines). On the 16 pages and 41 entries, approximately 13 different handwritings can be distinguished, which indicates that many different persons on different occasions were involved in filling out L’s booklet. Nonetheless, L arguably remains in charge as the main user of the book, and that there are traces of his own personal history of learning in the way the booklet has been inscribed. L ignores the alphabetical order possibilities and presents the book to his helpers from right to left, thus opening page 18 first, thereby following an Arabographic logic. Pages 18–13 are filled out most systematically, with isolated entries on pages 8, 5 and 3 (see Table 5.1 and Figure 5.6). In general, pages have been filled out from top to bottom, which is a convention that is shared by both Roman and Arabic script traditions. Except for one or two, all entries (both names and numbers) appear in Roman script. On page 5 (‘D’), there is an entry that is entered upside down as well as a name without a phone number in Arabic ( , Ajami for perhaps Isatou Camara). Also on page 5, the beginning of a name has been struck through, and on page 13 (‘N’), an entire entry has been crossed out, to be replaced by the same name with a different number a few lines below. Largely beyond L’s control is the use of

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the lines and the suggested organisation of personal details. There are no addresses in the entire booklet. Also the suggestion to enter names with the surname first (nom-prénom) has been ignored. Of the 32 names, 28 are first names conventionally followed by a surname; the remaining four are first names only or initials. Of the 48 entered telephone numbers, 47 are mobile numbers, recognisable by the first digit (6, 7 or 9). The phone numbers are not entered in the positions where they are designed to be entered, i.e. on every fourth line between ‘TEL. DOM :’, ‘BUR :’ and ‘GSM :’. On the contrary, this line is generally avoided, as the ‘BUR :’ and ‘GSM :’ are indeed awkward obstacles standing in the way of a blank line.

The booklet’s use observed When I showed an interest in L’s booklet and asked him if I could photograph the pages with my digital camera, L laughed as he usually did when I asked weird questions about the most banal things to do with his sociolinguistic life, but he kindly gave me the booklet, and waited until I was done inspecting it. Then he asked me if I could enter my number in his book. I replied by asking him whether he would be able to do that himself and handed the booklet back to him. I dictated my number to him, 6222606 (first in Mandinka, then in English), which he wrote down in a shaky, unstable right-to-left handwriting and with the twos in mirror-image (line 2 in Figure 5.8). He was all but done when his younger sister (‘cousin’ in Western kinship terms), Jaineba, interrupted him laughingly and took over. L also laughed, uncomfortably as I interpreted it, while Jaineba asked me to repeat my number. ‘Six triple two’, I said, which she entered (from left to right) as . She soon realised she had written double-three instead of triple-two, and started over, writing my name (Malang Sonko; see Chapter 1) first. She then wrote the correct number in the double space between the fourth line of the third entry and the first line of the fourth entry. When she was done, she was pleased with the result and gave the book back to me. I looked at it, and turned to L again. I reminded him about telling me that he had attended madrassa and knew some Arabic, and asked him if he would be able to enter my name and phone number in the booklet himself, making use of Arabic script. He took the booklet and pencil out of my hands again and started copying the digits I dictated to him one by one (in English). He did so in (Eastern) Arabic numerals, from right to left: (line 6 in Figure 5.8). Under that, he wrote my name, complete with diacritics and vowel markers: < > (line 7 in Figure 5.8). Both the phone number and the name as written by L are fairly problematic. Arabic numerals, when they are used to transcribe telephone numbers, are

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Figure 5.8 Entering my number on page 12 (‘LM’) on the left

usually written from left to right and not from right to left. This is a convention L is not aware of. The sixes are written in mirror-image with the horizontal stroke of placed to the right of the vertical stroke instead to the left of it (visible in Figure 5.8, not in the transcription above). Further, the zero is indicated with a circular form, like in Roman numerals instead of with a floating dot ; the form L has used for zero is confusingly the character for the number five in Arabic. A proficient reader of Arabic may thus not be able to dial my number on the basis of L’s inscription. But that is not the point here. What matters is that even though his proficiency in Arabic is far from flawless, L demonstrated, at my request, elementary independent literacy skills in Arabic that were (almost) good enough to enter names and numbers in a personal record. Yet, for some reason (insecurity?), he does not normally put these skills into practice. He declared to me that he could not read or write, and allows friends and (younger) family members to help him. L’s booklet should be seen as a collaborative textual product that is mediated by a network of diverse users of literacy, and a social regime of language that favours English and Arabic as languages of literacy and disqualifies local languages for everyday literacies such as record-keeping (cf. Gebre et al., 2009).

Collaborative, Heterographic Literacy In conclusion, I would like to draw a few generalisations about the local economy of literacy in Ba-Abdoulie and L’s village.

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First, L’s Nescafé telephone booklet and Ba-Abdoulie’s letter are typical documents or moments of ‘grassroots literacy’, i.e. ‘writing performed by people who are not fully inserted into elite economies of information, language and literacy’ (Blommaert, 2008b). Many of the characteristics described in Chapter 3 as features of grassroots literacy (non-standardness, draft-like quality, distant genres, rooted in orality, etc.) are also pertinent here. Anticipating the discussion in the next chapter, I want to elaborate on one characteristic here, i.e. the hetero-normativity of orthographic conventions, or in one word ‘heterography’. Orthographies are more or less powerful conventions prescribing how to write right. One of the ‘consequences’ of schooled literacy, to echo Goody and Watt’s (1963) classic paper, is that it selects and fixes one variety of written language as the written language, i.e. the right, correct or normative variety, and transmits the idea that all deviations from this norm are wrong, incorrect, abnormal. In heterographic situations, there is not one, but several prescriptive regimes on how to write right. In the absence of a single set of norms, individual and situational variation, as in spoken language, is not abnormalised but normal. L’s Nescafé booklet and Ba-Abdoulie’s letter are heterographic or polycentric texts because they reflect multiple orthographic traditions. They simultaneously orient to multiple centres of normativity. This is most apparent in the Nescafé booklet, which manifests itself as a contact point between three of the most important script traditions in this part of the world, Anglo, Franco and Arabic literacies. All but two of the entries are in Roman script but the book as a whole follows an Arabic rightto-left reading path. On a smaller scale, the first names and surnames in the book follow Anglo-Gambian and not Franco-Senegalese or vernacular spelling, e.g. it reads Jobe, Colley and Bah instead of Diop, Coly and Bâ (FrancoSenegalese), and Fatou instead of Faatu (vernacular). In Anglo-Gambian spelling, local surnames that are composed with the morphonemic sounds of local languages are interpreted through the lens of 20th century English orthographic rules, and likewise for borrowed Qur’anic (originally Arabic, but vernacularised) first names (e.g. Ebrima versus Ibrahim; see also Chapter 6). What seems to be the case here is not an absence of standards – there are indeed double or triple, imported standards operating at the same time – but the absence of a locally developed uniform, ‘monoglot standard’ (Silverstein, 1996). The next chapter will further develop this notion of heterography and will show how English orthography influences local language spelling practices. Secondly, L and Ba-Abdoulie are low-literate men of two different generations that live(d) their sociolinguistic lives in a local economy of literacy that is characterised by the co-existence of Arabic and Anglo-Franco

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orthographies as well as by the scarcity of all sorts of literacy resources, including literate expertise itself. L has enjoyed a very brief educational career, the results of which have given him only a very thin basis to deal with the bureaucratic requirements of the modern nation state. Ba-Abdoulie who was born in Guinea in the final decades of the French colonial empire, grew up entirely without formal, classroom-based education. As far as filling in forms, written correspondence and other more demanding literacy events are concerned, both L and Ba-Abdoulie are functionally ‘non-literate’ when literacy is regarded as ‘a complex set of skills defined in terms of the print demands of occupational, civic, community and personal needs’ (Verhoeven, 1997: 128). Within these material and educational constraints, a commercial free gift like L’s thin Nescafé telephone booklet becomes a valuable object. Entering the numbers of his friends and relatives in a private booklet empowers L in the sense that the booklet gives him the relative power to manipulate his own social network at times that are important to him. Yet L is not capable of entering the names and numbers in his booklet independently. To compensate for his own problematic writing skills, L appeals to people in his environment to produce the entries in his booklet. With the help of these different persons in various situations, it becomes possible for L to do literate things in his life, and in fact to ‘be literate’ in a very restricted sense of the word. Also in the case of Ba-Abdoulie’s letter, literacy is collaboratively established. Whereas L could resort to people of his own generation (friends, younger siblings), the sort of skills Ba-Abdoulie needed to write his letter are not shared by members of his own generation, nor by members of his family present at that time. Here, writing is the result of intergenerational and interfamilial collaboration. Ba-Abdoulie is a respected elder and has the authoritative voice to formulate the request to his stepson Yusupha. Yet, he does not have the linguistic capital to express that request in the desired medium of the written word and in the language associated with that medium – English. Buba does not have that authoritative voice quite yet, nor is he a party in the nuptial negotiations, but he has the skills and knowledge to compose the message in the style and form of language that is required for a letter. Together, the old Ba-Abdoulie and the young Buba form a successful couple and get the message across. As a result of the collaborative nature of literacy in this community, personal writing (notebooks, letters, etc.) is not an exclusively private affair, but a rather public event. One of the characteristics of rural Gambian, perhaps rural African life in general, is that the more educated and literate family members will often leave their home village to work and/or continue their education in the urban areas. Very few literate people stay behind in

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villages like that of L and Ba-Abdoulie. Consequently, there is not in every family at all times someone who can read and write, and in families where there is somebody like that, that person is often still school-going, like Jaineba. As a result, literacy is a fairly communal affair, a collective good rather than personal skill (cf. Papen, 2005). Ba-Abdoulie could not ask any direct family member to help him with his letter, but had to appeal to a neighbour boy. In this ecology of literacy, it is obvious that it is very hard to keep secrets or to solve family affairs in private. Everything appears to belong to the village here. The letter writing event took place in September 2004 and that was the first and only time I have seen literacy (writing) take such a prominent place in the activities of people outside the walls of the school. This letter occupied Ba-Abdoulie, Buba, Lamin’s mother (and myself) for a full afternoon. I have revisited that same village and family many times since 2004 and have noticed a number of changes in their daily lives, one of which is the spread of mobile phones. I wonder if Ba-Abdoulie today (if he were still alive) would still find a letter the most appropriate genre to carry across this message. He might now just as well ask someone to lend him a mobile phone in order to have live contact with Yusupha. L too might not need to keep a telephone booklet if he were in possession of a personal mobile phone in which he could have his numbers stored. Mobile phones may be redrawing the sociolinguistic map of this part of the world, as they redistribute symbolic capital making certain groups of people less dependent on competences normally learned at school (such as classic literacy skills), but here too, the assistance of young members of the community is often needed to enable elderly persons to employ these new technologies. The language of literacy in The Gambia is one language predominantly, not many. While The Gambia as a whole is very much multi-ethnic and multilingual and indeed many urban and rural communities and individuals are too, at the level of writing, this linguistic diversity is reduced to only one, or perhaps two languages: English and to a lesser extent also Arabic, but not Gambian local languages. Despite the education policy objectives adopted in 2004, that situation is not likely to change any time soon. Still, we may wonder what will happen with writing in local languages now that the majority of young people develop confident literacy skills in English and/or Arabic. Will there be an informal breakthrough into local language literacies?

6 Writing Mandinka in the Presence of English

The following aphorism summarises much of the discussion on local languaging, literacy and multilingualism in the previous chapters. Imagine a research team consisting of a deaf and a blind researcher assigned to investigate multilingualism in Gambian society. If they manage to communicate with each other despite their respective handicaps, they would discover that they arrive at two diametrically opposed findings. The blind researcher, who would have to rely on his or her ears, would discover that a great number of African languages are used with a word of English and Arabic inserted here and there. The deaf researcher, who would have to rely on his or her eyes, would discover that mainly English and occasionally Arabic are used, with words in African languages inserted here and there. This contradictory finding is possible because, like many African countries, The Gambia is audibly very multilingual, but multiliterate or visibly multilingual only to a limited extent. As noted in Chapter 3, the most striking feature of the Gambian linguistic landscape is the virtual absence of languages other than English as anything more than proper names or occasional slogans embedded in otherwise monolingual English discourse. English clearly is the default medium of visual communication in the public space. This reinforces the language ideological trope that Gambian local languages are not written languages, but only oral ‘vernaculars’. And as we saw, Gambia’s educational systems privilege the exogenous languages (English and/or Arabic) as languages of instruction at all levels of education. Despite recent mission statements and policy objectives to introduce local languages into the formal secular school curriculum and the emergent use of local language literacies in mobile phone operators’ advertising, the oracy/literacy divide strongly separates functions of moo fi kao and tubaab kao (cf. McGlynn & Martin, 2009). When it comes to literacy education, children and adults are subjected to two radically different regimes of learning. Children are taught to read and write in English; adults who have missed this 124

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opportunity in their youth are offered an alternative education model consisting of ‘adult literacy classes’ with ‘adult’ being synonymous with ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’. In Brandt’s (1997) terms, the most powerful ‘sponsors of literacy’ in The Gambia (i.e. the Department of State for Education, Islamic clergy, various educational stakeholders) are only marginally concerned with literacy acquisition and production in local languages and invest few resources into the systematic teaching of reading and writing in local languages. Literacy in local languages remains more or less marginal, and this is what we see reflected in the public space: a lot of English, occasional Arabic (in Arabic or in roman script) and only a very small amount of local languages. This chapter precisely investigates these marginal local language literacies. In particular, it is about writing practices – spelling practices, more precisely – in Mandinka. To study these spelling practices, we need to leave the public sphere and enter into private domains. Since the beginning of my research, I had an explicit interest in local language literacy and planned to study adult literacy classes as part of my enquiry into literacy and multilingualism in Gambian society. However, reading and writing in local languages remained well hidden for me as a researcher. For a long time, I only got to talk about literacy in local languages (e.g. with an adult literacy teacher) but never witnessed people practising literacy in local languages. When I observed people practising literacy in private domains, it was always either in English or occasionally in Arabic. Only after a series of fieldwork visits was I introduced to someone who practised local language literacy on a regular basis and in whose everyday life local language literacy played a significant role. After Ba-Abdoulie and L in Chapter 5, this chapter introduces Burama. This chapter is about him and his texts, and investigates Mandinka spelling as social and ideological practice (Sebba, 2007). Burama will be more properly introduced (he will rather introduce himself) in the following section. Next I will narrate two key incidents I experienced while working with these texts and offer a comparative ethnographic analysis of two versions of the same text (a story about a stolen donkey), the original prepared by Burama, and the respelling by a more highly educated, English literate person. The chapter culminates in a series of remarks on linguistic inequality and Mandinka spelling practices in the presence of English.

Burama’s Texts on Paper and on the Wall I first met with Burama Janne in July 2008. As we shall see, Burama is a middle-aged man who lived with his large family in the village of Farato, near

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Brikama – halfway between the signboards of the Sayerr Jobe Avenue and the graffiti in Bundung discussed in Chapter 3 and the village that was the scene of the previous chapter. My visit to him was pre-arranged by his younger brother and my friend Almameh, with whom I moved around a lot throughout my fieldwork. Burama, I was told, kept notes and stories in Mandinka and wrote the names and phone numbers of their relatives in ‘funny’ spellings on the walls of his house. His own name as used here, Burama instead of ‘Ebrima’ or ‘Ibrahima’, and Janne instead of ‘Janneh’, is exemplary of this. Almameh had informed Burama about my interest in his local language writing. On my first visit, little time was spent on exchanging courtesies before I was presented a series of texts, on paper as well as on the walls of his house (see Figure 6.1). On paper, Burama presented nine loosely kept texts, two of which were written especially for me, including one in my presence. Six of these

Figure 6.1 (a) and (b): Interpreting the inscriptions on the wall (courtesy of A. Janneh)

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texts were professional reports dated between 7 April 1991 and 7 October 1995 of business trips to various places within and outside The Gambia (Basse, Jara Soma, Bissau, Casamance), documenting in considerable detail the quantities and prices of purchased cow skins and the repayment instalments of outstanding debts, as well as miscellaneous fees and duties that had to be paid. Burama explained that he owed his job as a travelling hide merchant primarily to his ability to keep records of these transactions in writing. The first text shown and explained to me was a short autobiographical note that is represented in transcription and translation in Fragment 6.1.

Fragment 6.1 Self-introduction: Nte toomu Burama Janne le ti 1

5

10

15

20

NTe TooMu BuRAMA JAnne Le Ti FARATO Tel _# BuRAMA JAnneH NdooMA KARAMo JAnne TL # ALiMAMu JAnne NdooMA #

My name is Burama Janne. Farato, Tel.: # Burama Janneh My younger brother Karamo Janneh. Tel.# Almameh Janneh my younger brother. #

KonTAAniTA NMA nTa KARAn bungoTo Fo NGA LeTARo SAFe MAndinKA – KAngoLA KAATo. NTe Mu MAndinKo LeTi WoTo NFAn Si sarono, woLALu WoTo KonTAniTA BAKe BAKe

I am pleased. I did not go to school. But I can write letters in Mandinka language. I am a Mandinka. Therefore I can be my own tutor in this. I am very very pleased.

MNA nyin KoLongo Sing 4/6/1995 woTo Mo Moolu Menubu Jan MAAFAngla Ebe KAnaa Giibiyoola NNa suwo le KoNo BARi kolongo TinyaaTAle sanyi nna Moolu KATA Mola Le la Konongo Le To nyin KoLon ye. MnaFaa BAKe BAKe Tenbo Menna Aye Giyoo SoTo

I dug this well on 4/6/1995. Then people in this surrounding came to fetch water in my compound. But the well is broken now. My people now go to other people’s well. This well was very very important in that time to have water.

AdeReCi BuRAMA JAnne FARATO F #

Address: Burama Janneh, Farato, Tel.#.

The first paragraph of this text states Burama’s personal details as well as those of Almameh and another brother that I knew. The second paragraph anticipates my interests in his local language writing and outlines his learning history with regard to literacy. It begins and concludes with the statement that he is ‘pleased’, either with his competence in Mandinka writing, and/or with my interest in this. The third paragraph explains something of Burama’s social and economic status with reference to an old well in the corner of his fenced compound. Burama explained to me that he settled on this land,

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coming from a more eastern and more rural part of the country (i.e. from the village described in the previous chapter) in a time when few people had settled here. He explained that he built one of first wells in the area at the time and that people came from far to fetch water in his compound, which made him proud. This was followed, however, by the remark that the well is broken now, and that his own people now have to go out to fetch water, which is indicative of their current situation of material hardship. The short text repetitively concludes with Burama’s address and phone number as a sort of signature. Apart from the texts on paper, Burama had also written a series of short notes with charcoal on the white-painted walls of his house. These notes, three of which are reproduced below (Fragments 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4), elaborate on the autobiographical note on paper in Fragment 6.1 above. They give particulars of the construction of his house, including the date when it was built (line 23), his means of livelihood and the composition of his family (lines 29–30). These notes were written especially for me as didactic material and to illustrate his writing in Mandinka. It should be noted that these texts are not naturalistic data in the sense of texts that existed prior to and independent of this research, but that they instead emerged in the interactive context of ethnographic data collection.

Fragment 6.2 Note on the wall (about his house) 22 25

Be M na

nyin bungo loota

4/3/1993 molo le Joo KA BuRIloo Koo KoSi N yaa Modo Jao KA n Bungo

loo Fo APAR eTA ASA WonTA nang

My this house was built

on 4/3/1993. I paid people to lay blocks

and I paid others to erect the house up to its completion now.

Fragment 6.3 Note on the wall (about his literacy and his family) 26

30 32

A dun Mna

nyin Keeba karango mnaFele KATu ndingolo nKeelaKAnbango Joo Nyin K ango LelA Nga musu FulA le SoTo Din Kononto le Soto WoTo nyin KARAngo ye MnaFea BAKe BAKe Nyi

And my this adult education/literacy has benefit to me because I pay my children’s education through it. I have two wives [and] have nine children. Then this education/literacy is of great great benefit to me.

Fragment 6.4 Note on the wall (about his migration) 33

N yin FA naa Mu K eK ende

yAA bAA leTi ka koridaa soTo.

This is also great goodness: to have a compound,

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35

Kombo JA ng

nii EbotA

BA nTA EyAA Moyi Ko Eye

Koridaa SoTo KoMbA JAng

39

ELA Moolo M enube BA nTA Eka,kontA n BAK e BAK e

La

129

in Kombo here, if you come from outside. If they hear [you] say you have a compound in Kombo here, your people who are outside [will be] very very happy.

In the final of the three notes reproduced above, Burama points to the important divide in Gambian society between Kombo (the west, the urban areas) and the rest of the country (the provinces, the rural areas). Socioeconomically, urban dwellers have different access to educational provisions and professional markets compared to those who reside in the rural areas. His move is socio-economically and sociolinguistically moderate, as the place of his new settlement is not truly urban but rather peri-urban (essentially rural but close to the city and its modes of life) and the dominant language remained the same (Mandinka). The fragments discussed so far are meant to give an impression of Burama’s social and language life. In the following section, we will consider one of Burama’s texts and its subsequent entextualisations. It is a story of a lost or stolen donkey. I will offer an ethnographic comparative analysis of two versions of this short story in Mandinka, Burama’s original and a respelling.

The Donkey Story in ‘Good’ and in ‘Bad’ Mandinka One of the nine texts on paper Burama gave me is a story, narrated in the first person, of a dispute over the ownership of a donkey. This text, which I shall call the donkey story, is reproduced in Figure 6.2(a) and transcribed in Fragment 6.5. I photographed and prepared electronic transcriptions of the texts in the field, but the translation and annotation of the documents was something I worked on at home in interaction with Gambian ‘informants’ (friends) over Skype and email. In this section, I will narrate two key incidents that occurred in the process of translating and working with the texts. Both incidents are ‘key’ because they reveal important formal and social characteristics of the texts and point at fundamental linguistic inequalities in Gambian society. These incidents are instrumental in understanding how smaller languages are not equal to world languages, in ways that go beyond discussions of linguistic imperialism or language rights (cf. Stroud, 2001). By narrating these two events, I aim to show that there is an inequality in local language writing that is inherent in the structure and infrastructure of the language itself.

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Figure 6.2 (a) The donkey story, Burama’s original spelling. (b) The donkey story, Dembo’s respelling

The first incident occurred in the field, i.e. while I was conducting fieldwork in urban Kombo in July 2008. I gave the first page of the donkey story to my friend Ansu, who is a well-educated young professional and ‘family man’ living in Greater Serrekunda. I gave the piece of paper (an enlarged blackand-white printout of the digital photograph) to him with the request to help me translate this text, which he accepted. As he was in a hurry to go home, he took the paper with him and promised to get back to me soon. The page was then passed on to a third, mutual friend of ours – Dembo, a similarly educated urbanite a couple of years older than both of us. Dembo returned the photographed text to me in Ansu’s house a few days later, together with a respelling of that original version instead of a translation. The respelling as reproduced in Figure 6.2(b) and transcribed in Fragment 6.5(b) was accompanied by the comment that this was the ‘correct writing’ and that ‘the first writing [i.e. Burama’s version] has some mistakes’, and is how you write ‘if you don’t know the language very well’. Translation of the text, or rather a paraphrase, was only given to me orally. The second incident is an emailed reply I received from Burama’s younger brother Almameh. Almameh, or Alex, is the person who is perhaps most central in my network, and also the person I am most in touch with over email (or occasionally over the telephone) when I am not in The Gambia. I often ask his

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opinion or consult him to get certain facts right for the pieces I write. He also feeds me with information of the most important events in the lives of the people we both know (marriages, births, deaths, travels, etc.). In the course of our regular email conversations, I asked him on 23 April 2009 at 3.20 PM from my office in Tilburg ‘for another favour’ and made a semi-serious joke that ‘I should almost start paying [him] for [his] help’. I explained that I was ‘working on the texts [his] brother Burama has given me last year’. I asked him if he could ‘please help me translate the text below one line after the other’. His reply at 2.36 AM [0.36 Gambian time] while on night duty at work with free internet access rebuked my semi-joke, suggesting that my request was formulated too politely (‘cuz dont asked me to give you a favour pls just tell Alex do this for me’) and that ‘payment’ is inappropriate among friends and kin (‘cuz we cannot pay for each other, how much do you think you can pay me? we ar now Baading [relatives, lit. father’s children]’). This was, however, followed by a suggestive request for assistance (but not as payment for any services), and an explanation of his hardship at the time related to an involuntary professional posting to the far east of the country. The email ended with an appeal to clarify my translation request: ‘Do you want me to translitre this mandinka texts in English for you or in a better mandinka langauge?’. I replied to him that I just needed it in English, which I got from him at 12.53 [10.53 GT], less than 24 hours after my initial request. The two incidents – the first where my request for translation was not met with a proper translation but with a respelling, and the second where I received an explicit request for clarification whether I meant a proper translation or a respelling – served as ‘rich points’ (Agar, 1995) in my understanding of vernacular literacy practices and products in The Gambia. Rich points are moments in ethnographic praxis in which one witnesses an at first sight meaningless or mundane event that renders an increased understanding of the research subject. According to my translators, the original text was not written in the ‘best’ or most ‘correct’ of all conceivable forms of Mandinka. And if I requested for help with understanding the text, what I most likely needed help with was with transforming the text into another, ‘better’ form of Mandinka. Dembo’s claim that his spelling is a more ‘correct’ way of writing Mandinka than Burama’s is a peculiar language-ideological appreciation of his own and Burama’s writing that is based more on social than on textual analysis. Dembo’s value judgement of the original appears, however, not to be based on linguistic, but on sociolinguistic ‘analysis’, on the recognition of Burama as a non-formally educated writer. In spite of Dembo’s disqualification of Burama’s writing, however, Burama’s spelling remains relatively close to the ‘official’ spelling employed

65

60

55

50

45

40

Polıso Ko Mo wo Mo Eye TAMAn seRo MenTo ELA Faloo BALA nın-woMAn TARAJee Nbe soRonna polıSolu Ko TAA FA loo KAMAneng EyA AKoroce NTe MenTA Mu FAlooTı ngaMen Fo Jee Wole naaTa TARA Je. keedıngo ko Abe dıyAAmulA doRon polıColu YA ATule bun EYA FAYı Seli, woToWo mo Wo EnyAn ElA Fengo SuuTe lAAle ngıne mu KiıTıyooTı

Nna FAloo FılıTA Aga Ayını nyını Fo MnATA AJe Modoo bulu AyAA ASSıTı SARee ToobAlA KAbıRın ngana FAloo Je dooRon ngaa ASuute KAATo nga suuTeRengo le Ke. FAloo . BAlA . KARınne SAlAMA le Kun AKo MAle Kun SAlaMu NKo Nna Foloo le Mu nyınTı, ATeKo HAnıı. nyın MAnKe . E lA FAlooTı. nga nyuu , SAbAn ,SAnbAng . Fo NTATA PolıCe . Nganna KuMo . SAaTA. Ete.fana YAAlA KuMo-SAatA . PolıColo. Ko Mun TAMAn sere Juma le be . ElA Falo ba la YAA Fo NTe FAnaa ngaa Fo

(a) Transcript of Burama’s original dAnKı 1985 danKı KeSSı

AYAA-FOO-. NTEH FANANG NGAA FOO

MUNG-TAA MANG-SERR JUMAA LEH–BEH ELA FALOO BALA

YAALA KUMOO SANTA. POLICO KO

POLICO. NYANG-NA- KUMOO SAATA. A RTEH FANANG

NYONG SABANG-SAABANG FOR AR NAT NTATA

HANEE NYING MANG-KEH ELA FALOO TEEH– NGA

NKO – NA R FALOO-LEMU NYING-TEEH A R-THE-KOO

KOO– SALAMU-ALAY-KUM NKO – MALAY-KUM-SALAM.

RANGO LEKEH FALOO-BALA. KARIM.

NGA A R SUTAY, KHA.TUNG NGA SUTAY-

KABERING NGANA FALOO JEH DORONG

NY A RYAA SEETEH SARE-TOO BALAA

NYENE FOR NNATA A RJEH MODOU BULUU

NAA – FALOO FEE LEE TAH FOR – NAA NYAA

(b) Transcript of Dembo’s respelling

Fragment 6.5 Transcription of the donkey story, in two spellings and translation

The police asked both of us, your mark, where is it on your donkey? If it does not match, I will lock you up. The police said, go bring the donkey and let me observe that where on the donkey I was described to see, is indeed what we see on it. The man wanted to talk immediately. The police slapped him and put him in the cell. Therefore, everybody must recognise his property. This is a court.

My donkey got lost. I searched and searched for it. I found it on Modou’s hand. He tied it on a [donkey] cart. When I saw my donkey, always I recognised it, because I put a mark on the donkey. Then [I said] salaam-maleikum, he said maleikum-salaam I said this here is my donkey. He said no, this is not your donkey. We argued and argued until we went to the police. I told my story. He too told his story. The police asked: what mark, where is it on your donkey? He said [his] and I also said [mine].

(c) Translation (based on both spellings) Donkey 1985 Donkey Problem

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and prescribed in language materials prepared by the Gambian government and international (Christian) NGOs concerned with (adult) literacy development in Mandinka (Faye & Sillah, 1956; Sidibe, 1979; WEC International, 2010 [n.d.]). If these standards are anything to go by, Burama’s spelling is indeed ‘more correct’ than Dembo’s. But the point here is that this standard is not commonly ‘enregistered’ (i.e. socially recognised as norm; Agha, 2005), and thus not known to most people, especially not to formally, English-only educated persons. Mandinka has an ‘official’ spelling only in the sense that it is established by the colonial and postcolonial governments and by NGOs, but the fact that it is not commonly known or recognised as the norm makes it official only in theory, not in practice. Spelling Mandinka remains, for a large part, a creative and heterographic affair. Figure 6.2(a) shows a reproduction of Burama’s original spelling of the donkey story and Figure 6.2(b) shows Dembo’s respelling. Fragment 6.5(a) is a transcription of the original in Figure 6.2(a) and Fragment 6.5(b) corresponds with the respelling in Figure 6.2(b). The translation in Fragment 6.5(c) is based on the various translations I received (first orally by Burama and Dembo, later in writing by email by Almameh and Dembo) and complemented with my own comparative textual analysis and interpretation. In comparing the two spelling systems as produced by Burama and Dembo, there are a number of general remarks to be made. First, there are only nine words that are spelled the same in these texts: faloo (occurring twice), ngana, nko, ntata, saata, yaala, ela, ngaa. Secondly, we also notice a striking difference in capitalisation. Burama’s version uses lower and upper case letters in an unsystematic, somewhat miscellaneous way (e.g. ‘Nna FA loo FılıTA’) while Dembo’s text is entirely in capital letters (e.g. ‘NAA – FALOO FEE LEE TAH’). In what follows, abstraction is made of the original capitalisation and words are represented in lower case. We also observe a rather sparse use of punctuation marking in Burama’s spelling, whereas Dembo punctuates rather abundantly, with dashes at the word level and dots and commas at the sentence level. Fourthly, an innovative feature that is unique for Dembo’s spelling is the use of superscripts as a spelling device. This happens for the double (geminated) n in nnata, the aspirated word-final vowels in seeteh and teeh and the lengthened /a:/ vowel in arjeh, aryaa, arsutay, nar and ar-teh-koo. Finally, we also notice that the word boundaries are organised differently in each version. Excluding the title, the first page of Burama’s text has 83 words compared with 93 words (not including the five words that are struck through) in Dembo’s version. Compare the following sentences meaning ‘he said no, this is not your donkey’: ‘ateko hanıı. nyın manke . e la falootı’ (seven words, Burama’s version) and ‘ar-the-koo hanee nying mang-keh ela faloo teeh’ (10 words, Dembo’s version).

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According to the Mandinka language materials prepared by the American Peace Corps (Colley, 1995a, 1995b) and the missionaries of WEC International (Lück & Henderson, 1993; WEC International, 2002, 2010 [n.d.]), all the consonants of the English alphabet are used in the Mandinka alphabet except for , , , and and there are two special characters that do not occur in English, namely for the velar nasal // and with a tilde (Spanish accent) for the palatal nasal //. These two graphemes are proposed in order to adhere to the ‘phonemic principle’, which supposes that a one phoneme–one grapheme relation is ideal (see Lüpke, 2011). Burama and Dembo, however, depart from this principle and use other, double graphemes to represent these nasal consonants. Although their spelling systems differ in many respects, they agree on representing // with (e.g. ngana, suuterengo versus ngana, sutay-rango) and // with (nyini, nyinti, nyin versus nyene, nying teeh, nying). In word-final position, Burama also uses for // (e.g. kabirin, dooron, nyin manke). The letter is prescribed in the language materials as representing the /t/ sound as in the verb kacaa ‘to chat’, but in both Burama’s and Dembo’s spelling systems, is also used to represent /s/ (police, policolu, akoroce versus polico). In Burama’s spelling we also find the loanword police with an (poliso, polisolu). In Dembo’s spelling it is constantly written with . In Dembo’s spelling we also find examples of post-aspirated consonants (kha.tung) and (ar-the-koo). Refer to Table 6.1 for more details and examples. The vowels in Burama’s and Dembo’s spelling systems present an even more interesting point of comparison as the diversity of sound–letter correspondences and the divergence of the phonemic principle is greater here. The /i/ sound, for instance, is represented in three different ways in Burama’s spelling and even in four different ways in Dembo’s spelling. Phonologically, only two different types of /i/ can be distinguished, the lengthened close front unrounded vowel /i:/ and the near-close near-front unrounded vowel /ı/. The long /i:/ is represented by (filita, nyini, kabirin), (hanii) and (e la, ete) in Burama’s system and by (fee lee ta), (teeh) and (e la, nyene, kabering) in Dembo’s system. The short, more centralised /ı/ is represented in both systems with (kabirin, nyin versus kabering, nying). The /e/ sound, which is either realised as lengthened close-mid front unrounded vowel (/e/) or as short open-mid front unrounded vowel (//) in the phonology of Mandinka, has three realisations in each spelling system. The long /e/ is represented by (suute, nte, je) or by (saree, jee) in Burama’s spelling and by (nteh, jeh) or (sutay) in Dembo’s spelling. The short // is represented in Burama’s system with (suute-rengo) and in Dembo’s system with (sutay-rango).

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Table 6.1 A comparison of Burama’s and Dembo’s spelling systems Original spelling, Burama

Respelling, Dembo

General characteristics (1) (2) (3)

(4) (5)

only nine words in same spelling: faloo (2x), ngana, nko, ntata, saata, yaala, ela, ngaa entire text in capital letters: NAA – FALOO miscellaneous use of lower and FEE LEE TAH upper case letters: Nna FAloo FılıTA sparse use of punctuation symbols: abundant use of punctuation, at word/ / level: / ; at sentence-level: / superscript as spelling device -nnata, teeh, arteh word boundaries are organised differently: one page only: 93 words (+5 struck p.1: 83 words (excl. title); p.2: 63 through) -naa – faloo fee lee tah (5) words -nna faloo fılıta (3) -ayaa -aryaa seeteh sare-too balaa (5) -nko – assıtı saree toobala (4) -nko nna foloo le mu nyıntı (6) -ateko hanıı. nar faloo-lemu nying-teeh (6) -ar-the-koo nyın manke . e la falootı (7) hanee nying mang-keh ela faloo teeh (10)

Representation of consonants // // /n:/ /s/





/k/



/t/

ngana, ngaa, suute-rengo kabirin, dooron, nyin manke nyini, nyinti, nyin nna, nganna, soronna (mnata) poliso, polisolu, saree, suute, salama/ salamu, saban sanbang police, policolo, policolu, akoroce assiti kabirin, le ke, manke, kumo kaato assiti, suute, kaato, ti ateeko

ngana, nga, sutay-rango kabering, dorong, nying mang-keh



nyaa, nyene, nying teeh, nying naa, nyang-na nnata





seeteh, salamu/salam, sare-too, sutay, sabang-saabang polico, polico kabering, lekeh, mang-keh, kumoo kha.tung seeteh, sutay, kha.tung, teeh ar-the-koo



fee lee ta, hanee, seethe teeh e la, nyene, kabering

Representation of vowels /i/



filita, assiti, kabirin, nyini hanii e la, ete

(Continued)

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Table 6.1 Continued Original spelling, Burama

Respelling, Dembo

/ı/



nying, kabering

/e/



arjeh, jeh, nteh, mang-keh

/ε/ /a/



nyin, nyinti, kabirin, keedingo aje, je, malekun, manke, suute, le ke saree, tarajee, jee suute-rengo, fengo faloo, filita, mnata, ngana

/a:/

ngaa





/o/



faloo, toobala, dooron kaato, nko, fo dooron bulu, salamu, le mu, kumo, juma suute

sutay, alaykum sutay-rango faloo, salamu, sabang, fanang fee lee tah arjeh, aryaa, arsutay, nar, arteh naa, nyaa, saabang, yaala, jumaa faloo, too balaa, foo dorong, nko dorong buluu, sutay, salamu, le mu, kumoo, jumaa buluu

// /u/





The open front unrounded vowel /a/ which may have either long (/a:/) or short (/a/) vowel quality is represented in two ways in Burama’s spelling and in as many as four different ways in Dembo’s spelling system. Burama uses for the unlengthened variant (faloo, filita, bala) and for the lengthened variant (ngaa). Dembo also uses for the lengthened /a:/ sound (naa, jumaa), but three different graphemes for the short /a/: (faloo), (fee lee tah) and (arjeh, arsutay). The close back rounded vowel /u/ and the mid back rounded vowel /o/ present less variety in both spelling systems. Both Burama and Dembo use and for the short variants // and // and and for the lengthened variants /o:/ and /u:/. However, they do not always agree on whether a vowel in a word should be a long or short one (e.g. compare dooron and bulu in Burama’s spelling with dorong and buluu in Dembo’s spelling). Table 6.1 summarises the linguistic comparison of Burama’s and Dembo’s spelling systems in a more systematic and detailed way and gives additional contrastive examples. In the next section, this comparison is interpreted sociolinguistically. Changes in meaning as a result of the respelling are noticed on only one or two occasions. The most striking difference in meaning is the

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misinterpretation of karinne in line 46 as a person’s name with a verb form (Karim koo ‘Karim says’) instead of a spelling of kabiring ‘when, since’ with the second syllable -bi- omitted. Subsequently, in line 47, the verbal form ako ‘he says’ is changed into nko ‘I say’ to cover up for the previous misunderstanding of ka-bi-rinne. Thus, the respelling reads karinne salama le kun, ako male kun salamu (‘then [I said] salaam-aleikum, he said maleikum-salaam’), whereas the original reads karim koo salamu-alay-kum, nko malay-kum-salam (‘Karim said salaam-aleikum, I said maleikum-salaam’). On the other hand, certain ambiguities in Burama’s spelling are also clarified in Dembo’s spelling. The visual image of the word nguu/nyuu in the sequence nga nguu/nyuu saban sanbang in line 50 suggests that the second letter of this word is a , which does not lead to a dictionary entry. This is easily detected by Dembo as an awkward spelling of and respelled as nga nyong sabang saabang, which is recoverable in the dictionary as ñoo saba meaning ‘to fight, pull, compete, argue’.

Spelling Mandinka in the Presence of English The most striking difference between Burama’s and Dembo’s spelling is the difference in degree of English orthographic influence on their spelling systems. Both Burama and Dembo spell in relative ‘freedom’ (Fabian, 1992), not being hindered by strictly regimented rules governing how they should spell. Even though orthographies for Mandinka and other local languages have been developed, their use is not promoted or enforced in formal education, and is not practically enregistered. Burama and Dembo both live in an environment that is poor in terms of access to and support for literacy production in Mandinka, or indeed any other local language. As a result, spelling in local languages remains an affair of creativity rather than convention (Kress, 2000). In other words, spellers are left in a normative vacuum, leaving them to spell without orthography. As Jaffe (2000: 506) observes, ‘it is not only important for [smaller languages] to “have” an orthography but it is also critical for that orthography to have prescriptive power – to be standardised and authoritative, like the orthographies of dominant languages’. Both Burama and Dembo are, however, surrounded by and exposed to a fair amount of written English in their private and public lives (e.g. through their children’s education, in the linguistic landscape, on television and in newspapers). And English, as we know, has an extremely complex and messy system of sound–letter correspondences and yet a rather strict orthographic regime. English imposes very clear ideas of what is right (standard) and wrong (non-standard) in writing, even if these norms differ somewhat on

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either side of the Atlantic. What we witness in Dembo’s respelling of Burama’s text is that the relative normative vacuum for writing in Mandinka is filled with norms that are available for writing in English. We also witness that writing not reflecting this English orthographic influence very much is qualified as ‘bad Mandinka’, as writing with an accent, as an index of poor education. In fact, non-formal education is disqualified here by my translators and by Burama himself (see Fragment 6.1, line 8) as not being education at all. The differences between Burama and Dembo’s spelling systems lie in their different learning histories, their educational biographies, and their differently valued routes to and investments in literacy. Burama has learned to write in Mandinka in adult education and Dembo has learned to write in English in primary and secondary school. Burama has not received any formal education and has thus has not learned to write conventional English. As an educated man, Dembo never attended adult literacy classes and thus did not learn to write conventional Mandinka. As a result of these different personal histories of learning, Burama’s spelling reflects only a mild influence of English spelling rules, while Dembo’s spelling draws extensively, almost exclusively, on typically English sound–letter correspondences. Where Burama writes nna faloo filita ‘my donkey got lost’ in three words with careful detail for the geminated /n:/ in the possessive pronoun nna (‘my’) and presents the verbal construction filita (verb stem fili-, past aspect suffix -ta) in a single word, this is respelled as ‘naa faloo fee lee tah’ without doubling the of nna/naa but reinterpreting the vowel here as a long vowel ( instead of ) and respelling filita without apparent semantic reason in three words as fee lee tah. Moreover, the two /i/ sounds in filita are in Dembo’s version graphically represented with , ‘fee lee tah’. The same replacement of the /i/ = rule into /i/ = is applied in respelling nyini as nyene, and in changing kabirin into kabering. Another changed sound–letter correspondence rule adopted in Dembo’s spelling is the introduction of two graphic signs, and , for the representation of /e/. In both cases it is clear where Dembo’s inspiration for these ‘innovations’ comes from, English orthography. Burama spells the way he does primarily because he has learnt how letter combinations ‘sound’, whereas Dembo spells the way he does primarily because he has learnt how sound combinations ‘look’ (cf. Kress, 2000). The improvements Dembo deems necessary are ironically not informed by his own experience with reading and writing Mandinka, but are drawn from his knowledge of English literacy conventions. Dembo rewrites Burama’s texts the way he does not because he knows the conventions of Mandinka literacy, but because he knows the conventions of English literacy. In the process of

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respelling the text, Dembo invents an ad hoc spelling for Mandinka that is far from a ‘more correct’ or ‘better’ spelling. The linguistic resources used for writing Mandinka are located outside a self-referent tradition, located instead in the tradition of another language, English. This also applies to Burama’s spelling; witness his occasional use of for /i/ (e la, ete), his neglect of the special Mandinka characters and , and the occasional use of for /s/ (polico, akoroce). Herein lies a powerful inequality that is inherent in smaller languages. Due to the much more salient visual presence of English in various domains in Gambian society, and the absence of formal education in Mandinka in particular, ordinary persons spelling in Mandinka often resort to borrowing elements of other spelling systems that are more readily available to them, i.e. the conventions of written English. This inequality is only indirectly related to the social and economic condition of a literacy community. It is inherent in the very nature of smaller languages, and it has to do with what Spolsky (2009) has called the ‘state of literacy’, i.e. the infrastructure of linguistic, semiotic or symbolic resources there are for writing in ‘a language’ (e.g. a tradition of written text production, circulation and consumption, the currency of grammars and lexicons, a commonly recognised and known standard orthography, etc.) This is an inequality that has to do with the very size and power of the language. Despite the inequality that is inherent to the medium of his literacy (roman-script Mandinka), and despite the non-standard, heterographic, grassroots character of his literacy (which is due to that inequality), and despite the reported negative comments by more schooled persons, Burama’s texts are by no means defunct in the personal and professional contexts in which he used and produced them. This literacy, in his own words, has (had) great benefit to him and his family (see Fragment 6.3). It has given him an interesting job with a certain amount of (trans)national mobility, and has indirectly enabled him to feed his children and pay for their education. As is obvious from the series of texts presented here (in particular Fragments 6.3 and 6.4), Burama is a proud and content man, not despite his literacy but, in great part, because of his literacy. The implications of this small-scale ethnographic case of Mandinka spelling practices for postcolonial language policy and educational development should not be overestimated. If there is anything, however, that this case does not call for, then it is for standardising Mandinka spelling practices from above, or for the development and recognition of one orthography, i.e. one single set of norms for how to write right. In heterographic situations such as we witness here, there is not one, but several prescriptive regimes on how to write. In the absence of a single set of norms, individual and situational

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variation like in spoken language is not abnormalised, but normal. If Mandinka spelling is to standardise, it will be most effective if it standardises from below. Standardisation in this context would best be left for people like Burama and Dembo to sort out in practice, in producing the texts they produce, locally. Efforts to impose a particular spelling system on grassroots spellers would probably create more inequalities than it would empower spellers like Burama who are already subjected to negative evaluation. A lesson designers of adult literacy campaigns may want to draw from this study is that we need to become aware of the potential for further disadvantaging adult literacy learners by proposing spelling conventions that depart too much from already existing spelling practices. African local languages exist in a multilingual ecology and in contact with powerful languages such as English, French, Portuguese and Arabic, including Ajami literacies (e.g. Lüpke & Bao-Diop, 2014). Although these languages may provide awkward models for writing in local languages, they do provide readily available sets of rules that serve as actual resources for writing, and should be built upon in programmes of literacy and educational development (Stroud, 2003). Spelling Mandinka, to conclude, is never just spelling in Mandinka, but is spelling in a complex multilingual ecology in which the postcolonial language, English, assumes a powerful position. Spelling Mandinka in periurban Gambia is always spelling in the presence of English.

7

Local Languaging Regimes

In this book I have tried to cover as much terrain as possible in describing literacy and multilingualism in Gambian society. The chapters of the book have been organised as a reverse funnel from broad macro-perspectives of language in society (Chapters 2 and 3) to more narrow and focused microdescriptions of events and artefacts in people’s personal lives (Chapters 5 and 6), with the school (Chapter 4) as a mediating field of practice in between. To recapitulate, Chapter 1 introduced the the concept of local languaging and outlined the theoretical and methodological foundations of ethnographic sociolinguistics. Chapter 2 sketched the general contours of Gambian society as regards language and ethnicity in a range of social domains and pointed at the diversities underlying literacy and multilingualism in Gambian society. Chapter 3 described the use of language in public signage in key urban sites and identified local shopkeepers and corporate sign-makers as central figures in shaping the public space. It showed that local languages play only a marginal (emergent?) role in the visual public space and that English remains the default language of literacy in a semiotically rich, multimodal linguistic landscape. Chapter 4 further explored the equation of English and literacy in Gambian society by documenting pupils’ voices through the means of a writing contest, and parents’ and local politicians’ voices through the means of a focus group interview. Both cases showed how highly English was socially valued in contrast to local languages. It was the Mandinka term moo fi kao ‘black people’s language’ which was used as a translation for ‘local languages’ in the meeting that helped me conceptualise language in terms of local languaging. Chapter 5 then moved to more private, personal literacy practices and described how two particular low- or non-literate ‘writers’ write, i.e. collaboratively and heterographically, involving several individuals and several (bits and pieces of) languages. This chapter showed that although the final products are often monolingual in English (at least at first sight), the process of arriving at these textual products is inherently multilingual. Chapter 6 141

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turned to fully fledged writing in Mandinka, which proved to be relatively rare (and hard to find) in Gambian society. The chapter was an ethnographic analysis of a series of texts from one individual, retrieved from his personal archive, but also produced in situ. The texts, including both professional and more personal texts, were written in a stable however idiosyncratic spelling of which the linguistic resources are located in the ‘shallow’ orthographic tradition of Mandinka that stands in the shadow of the 'deep' and messier but omnipresent orthography of English. I have made an ethnographic case that demonstrates a multilingual literacy ecology that operates at three different scale-levels (Dong & Blommaert, 2009). These scales include the public space of the linguistic landscape, the publicly regulated (institutional) space of the education system, and private spaces in the lives of ordinary people. Although the linguistic landscape and language in village life are not publicly regulated and are in principle ‘free’, how language and literacy are practised here is in fact not free and is indeed regulated by various informal mechanisms of interaction between these scales. Local language writing is deeply influenced by the hegemony of English in the public space while at the same time there are all sorts of localisms visible in the public space (e.g. with respect to grassroots Englishing). Throughout this work a dialectic relationship is assumed between language and literacy in the public space and in private life. People speak the way they speak because they have informally learned to creatively copy others speaking in similar ways (what Pennycook referred to as ‘fertile mimesis’). People write the way they write because they have learned how to write (typically in formal or non-formal education rather than in informal settings). But the public space here functions as an informal template for writing. The repertoires of individuals such as L, Ba-Abdoulie, Burama and others are regimented through the wider social and ideological ecology of their society. Their ecology allocates privileged functions to English both in the formally unregulated public space as well as in the policy and practice of public education. The linguistic landscape, for example, creates an informal learning environment that is more widely accessible but less organised and more heterographic and polycentric than formal education. Predominantly filled with English-only signs, the linguistic landscape sends a meta-message about how writing is done, or what good writing is like. This public frame of Englishonly literacy informed the school children in my writing contest (Chapter 4) about the value of English and the practical societal equation of English with literacy. Although writing in local languages is possible and is indeed practised and emerging in the public space through mobile phone companies advertising, writers such as Burama writing in the local language are often ‘minoritised’ (Mufwene, 2008: 264) and subject to negative evaluation.

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In Gambian society, there is a strong equation of literacy with English and Arabic, in public and institutional as well as in private spaces. Although there is now an education policy in place that promotes the use of local languages in education this has not been implemented in most schools yet. In practice, Gambian schools continue to use English as a medium of instruction throughout, especially where literacy is concerned. Although local languages are in fact used alongside English in the classroom (cf. McGlynn & Martin, 2009), this structurally does not apply to written language. While teachers and students smoothly switch in and out of languages and display great creativity in mixing them orally, there is virtually no sign of this fluidity and permeability of languages in officially endorsed school literacy practices, e.g. on the blackboard, in exercise books or in textbooks. By and large, English and Arabic occupy strong hegemonic positions in the linguistic market as preferred languages of literacy. It remains to be seen if the mobile phone companies’ languaging with local languages will bring about change in that postcolonial status quo. Despite these conditions and limited resources for local language literacy, people make use of literate resources in various ways and for various reasons, and manage to ‘do literacy’ even if they are declared (or self-declare) illiterate. The moments of languaging we observed in the chapters of this book are multilingual and collaborative in practice and resulted in heterographic products. The repertoires of the local languagers presented in this book are essentially multilingual and multiliterate, even if these index the limitations or ‘truncations’ (cf. Dyers, 2008) of local languaging practice. By means of a conclusion, I would like to reflect a little more on the issues that were raised in the separate chapters and explore their implications for how we understand notions such as globalisation and literacy, and for how we may want to equip a sociolinguistics that is to understand language and society (not just language in society) in the contemporary world.

Globalisation In The Gambia, current globalisation is clearly a stage in a longer process of globalisation, of which colonisation is a central part (Mufwene & Vigouroux, 2008). So we need to see globalisation as a long process that develops in stages, not as a revolution (as suggested by Fairclough, 2006), but as an evolution (see also Mufwene, 2008). To tell the story of globalisation in The Gambia we need not begin in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the internet, but much, much earlier. ‘Globalisation’, writes Wright (2004: 9) ‘was not so much a new phenomenon as an old

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process only newly recognized; [. . .] in fact, globalization had been going on for a long time – centuries, for certain’. The European presence in the Gambia (no capital is conventionally used for colonial Gambia, cf. Ceesay, 2005) dates back to the mid-15th century when the Venetian captain Cadamosto and the Genoese captain Usidimare explored the estuary of the River Gambia under the flag of Portugal in 1455 and 1456. On their first journey they returned almost immediately following armed resistance from Gambians in canoes. The next year, they were escorted some hundred kilometres upriver and were received by the King of Baddibu who signed a treaty of friendship and traded with them (Hughes & Gailey, 1999: 46f, 177). These Portuguese expeditions marked the beginning of an era of Atlantic trade. The Portuguese brought cloth, liquor, mirrors and beads to the Gambia in exchange for gold dust, hides, ivory and slaves (Sonko-Godwin, 1988). It was not until about a century later (in the 1530s) that the Atlantic trade became a triangular trade involving not only Europe and West Africa but also the Americas including the Caribbean. In the 17th century, the Portuguese trade monopoly in the Senegambia region was challenged by the Courlanders, Dutch, French and English. After a brief episode of Dutch supremacy (1640s–1677), commercial interests in the region were competed over in a century-long British–French rivalry (Sonko-Godwin, 1988). Throughout this period, European involvement in the area remained commercial and in the hands of companies, concentrated in small fortified insular places such as James Island in the River Gambia. The inlands of the Gambia remained unexplored until Mungo Park’s expeditions of 1795 and 1805 (see Duffill, 1999). The colonial era proper in the Gambia commenced in 1816 with the British occupation of Banjul Island (renamed Bathurst) in the estuary of the River Gambia in exchange for an annual payment of 103 bars of iron to the King of Kombo (Hughes & Perfect, 2006: 42). Gambia was placed under the jurisdiction of the Governor of Sierra Leone from 1821 to 1843 and again from 1866 to 1888. It was only in 1889 that the British and French reached final agreement on the partition of the Senegambia region and that the borders of the Gambia were fixed at 10 km north and south of the river. This agreement meant the division and weakening of the existing polities such as Kombo, Niumi, Foni and Baddibu (Hughes & Gailey, 1999: 10). In fact, until 1889 colonial rule and influence in the Gambia remained restricted to a small number of settlements on the estuary of the River Gambia – St Mary Island (with the capital Bathurst) and British Kombo on the South Bank, and the Ceded Mile, James Island and Albreda on the North Bank – and MacCarthy Island (Georgetown) as the only settlement upriver. These settlements formed ‘the Colony’ and were administered through

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direct rule; the rest of the territory partitioned in 1889 was known as ‘the Protectorate’ and was administered through indirect rule (Hughes & Gailey, 1999: 52f, 143f; Hughes & Perfect, 2006: 6f). European colonisation, however, was not the first or only stage of globalisation that effected and indeed shaped Gambian society. An earlier and perhaps more radical globalisation occurred in the wake of the trans-Saharan trade, which was not a bilateral trade between North African and West African groups of traders, but a world system in itself, linking manufactured products of European origin such as cloth, paper and weapons with tobacco, dates, salt and cowries from the Sahara and gold, slaves, pepper, ivory, kolanuts and leather from West Africa. This trade began as early as 1000 BC, but reached its height between the 11th and 16th centuries (Faal, 1997). Islam was able to spread into West Africa in part as a side effect of this trade system. The already Islamised North African merchants brought along their religion on these voyages and some of the most pious of them were appointed by traditional chiefs and kings for their morals, scholarship and literacy. Whereas the first West African polity to embrace Islam were the Tukulor of Futu Toro in northern Senegal in the 11th century, it took a good number of centuries more before the entire Senegambia region was Islamised to the extent it is today. Faal (1997) reports that by the 15th century, when the first Portuguese explorers arrived, there were marabouts (Muslim clerics and teachers) attached to most of the chiefs’ courts in the Gambia region. In addition to peaceful coexistence and a natural and slow spread of Islam through marriage and offspring and ‘relocalisation’ (Pennycook 2010) of local customs and morals into Islamic practices and vice versa, Islam was in the 19th century further spread through military intervention of Jihadists such as Maba Diakhou (in Baddibu) and Foday Kabbah Dumbuya (on the South Bank) in the so-called Soninke-Marabout wars. Both European colonisation and Islamic religious and cultural imperialism had long-lasting effects on West African societies. Together they weakened or eradicated indigenous forms of religion, knowledge, state structure and leadership and replaced them with new institutions of power. Thus, two new religions and concomitant education systems and scripts were introduced to replace the old ways of life and two new languages were added to the already existing linguistic diversity in Gambian society – English and Arabic. One of the effects of these two types of globalisation is precisely that we cannot now see very clearly what this old way of life was, or how education was organised in pre-Islamic and precolonial Gambia. It has also become hard to imagine what modern Gambian society would look like without English, without modern literacy, or without Islam. To speak with Mignolo (2012 [2000]), The Gambia’s local history is a crossroads of global designs. It

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is in that locality around which the world moved that local languaging shaped and reshaped. And every contemporary literacy event or verbal enunciation partially bears witness to that history. English was introduced in the Gambia in the early 19th century and was initially confined to Bathurst and Georgetown where the only colonial schools were built prior to the 1920s. Modern education, English and literacy were extremely exclusive throughout the colonial enterprise and still remain fairly exclusive today. In the 1840s there were only three elementary schools in the Colony (i.e. in Bathurst), offering education for a few hundred pupils only, and until the 1920s there was only one secondary school in the entire Colony. By 1918 there were only two elementary schools outside Bathurst (both in Georgetown) and still only six by 1938. By 1960 there were 37 village primary schools enrolling not more than 5% of the school-aged population of the Protectorate (Faal, 1997: 79ff; Hughes & Perfect, 2006: 27f). In the postcolonial period, a considerable effort has been made to build schools throughout the country, also in the rural areas, and the literacy rates have risen significantly since Independence in 1965. However, the country’s divide between a relatively developed and urbanised part concentrated in what used to be the Colony (which is now called Greater Banjul or the urban Kombos) and a less developed part in what used to be the Protectorate (which is now called the provinces or the rural areas) is still in place. When in 1966 some 600 Swedish tourists appeared on the scene for twoweek package tours (Farver, 1984) they, like the 15th century Portuguese explorers, came from the north (by air, this time) and based most of their activities in the west of the country on the Atlantic coast, more or less the same ‘contact zone’ (Pratt, 1997) as in colonial times. The Swedes were joined by British and Germans in the 1970s and later also by Dutch, Finnish, Spanish, and other European tourists, and small numbers of North Americans as well. Tourism is understood here as postcolonial mobility and a new type of globalisation, accompanied by new economic and social opportunities for various people. It has been estimated that with over 100,000 visitors per year, every Gambian family will in one way or another be connected to the tourism industry, either directly or indirectly. Note that in ‘my’ family (described in Chapters 1 and 5), both Lamin and his elder brother Yusupha are employed in the hotel industry, and that they have both direct and indirect earnings from tourism – directly through their salary and indirectly through tips and presents from relations with tourists. The lingua franca of Gambian tourism is English, but not the same English as that introduced in Bathurst in the early 19th century. English in Gambian tourism is first of all one language (be it the most important one)

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in a multilingual repertoire with Swedish, German, Dutch, Finnish, Spanish, etc. In and around every hotel there are several Gambians who speak one or more of these languages as part of tailor-made grassroots hospitality. In particular, ‘bumsters’ – informal guides and cultural brokers (elsewhere known as beach boys) – excel in their mastery of tourist languages (Nyanzi et al., 2005). Secondly, postcolonial English in The Gambia is an ensemble of native and non-native Englishes, of British English in its various social and regional dialects, and the various continental European Englishes in various individual levels of proficiency in contact with the old (but ever-changing) Gambian English. In this highly specific and highly complex polycentric English, varieties of all three types of English in Kachru’s (1985) concentric model are represented: British English as inner circle, Gambian English as outer circle and the European Englishes as expanding circle varieties. Postcolonial Gambian English is really all of that at the same time. Thirdly, English in the new contact zone of the ‘tourist bubble’ has become less exclusive and more accessible than it ever was in the Colony. At the same time as schooling has become more inclusive, access to English is no longer exclusively regulated through formal schooling as tourism, sports, films and various new media offer viable alternative informal routes into English (and into other foreign languages as well). Globalisation is thus a long process that has been going on for many centuries, each episode of which has introduced changes, some of which are still felt today. In this long process, however, a country such as The Gambia has always taken a peripheral place. Bathurst has always been more peripheral than places such as Timbuktu in the 15th and 16th centuries or Saint Louis and Gorée (Dakar) or Freetown and Lagos in colonial times. In the British empire, the Gambia was never the main colonial possession, nor the most central one. It was small enough for Great Britain to govern it in a larger administrative context with Sierra Leone on two occasions. Also at Independence in 1965 it was deemed too small to be viable as an independent state and considered an ‘improbable nation’ (Rice, 1968). Two decades after Independence, The Gambia was united for a seven-year period in the 1980s with neighbouring Senegal into the Senegambia Confederation (Hughes & Perfect, 2006). This peripheral position has its consequences for the ecology of literacy. The Gambia has never been as much of a stronghold for Arabic literacy and Qur’anic education as the Sahelian cities in Mali (e.g. Timbuktu, Djenné). And also in terms of English literacy production and Western education The Gambia has always been a peripheral place. The University of The Gambia, the only one, has only been in existence since 1999. Many branches of study (e.g. engineering, linguistics) have simply not been offered in The Gambia up to now. This stands in contrast with more semi-peripheral places such as

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Nigeria and South Africa that have dozens of professionally governed universities and polytechnics that have enough volume to satisfy internal as well as external educational needs (cf. Thesen & van Pletzen, 2006). Gambians go to Ghana and Nigeria, or to the UK and the US to study and not the other way around. Or they go to Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, India or Taiwan, and here too without reciprocating. In summary, my analysis of language and literacy in Gambian society shows evidence of a type of globalisation, resulting in a type of literacy regime.

Literacies Just as globalisation is not one wholesale recent process, so is literacy not a single, universal technique to visually represent language. Since the New Literacy Studies, literacy has been pluralised and reconceptualised from one autonomous Literacy with a big ‘L’ and a single ‘y’ (i.e. one universal, contextindependent technology, see Goody & Watt, 1963) to multiple ideological literacies in plural and with a small ‘l’ (i.e. culturally and context-specific events and practices, see Street, 1995). This study has given evidence of a range of different literacies in Gambian society. In Chapter 3 alone I distinguished between commercial and residential, urban and rural literacies, advertising and graffiti. I also distinguished between local language literacy and literacy in English and Arabic, and further referred to elite and everyday literacies, adult literacy, grassroots literacy, public and private literacies. This pluralisation of literacy has been made possible by authors such as Street (1995) and Barton and Hamilton (1998), but as it is acknowledged, for example, by Street (2003) in response to Brandt and Clinton (2002), this pluralisation has its limitations as well. It is simplistic to claim that in every event involving reading and/or writing, we are dealing with a different literacy (for critical reviews of (new) literacy studies, see Collins, 1995; Jahandarie, 1999; Reder & Davila, 2005). Just as every Citroën is a unique car (of a particular year and colour, with particular options and particular scratches, etc. – which is why I can distinguish mine from someone else’s) so too are literacy events unique and distinguishable from one another. Yet, we still meaningfully discern different brands of cars and different types within a brand. A Xantia is not a Xsara, is not an Xm, is not a C5 and is not a BX, but they are all Citroëns and therefore different from Peugeots and Renaults, and even more so from Porsches and Ferraris. By comparison, we are dealing with a uniquely situated and different literacy each time we observe literacy or practise it ourselves, but all these literacies are still recognisable as a type of literacy. Thus, we can identify

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different genres of literacy for different functionalities and social contexts. Literacy in The Gambia in the beginning of the third millennium is organised differently from in any other place and time. Literacy events and products as we encounter them may be seen as tokens of a type of event or a type of product. But this somewhat problematically assumes that there are pre-existing types into which every token should fit, or that everything is a token of a particular type, and that we can draw up taxonomies of types of literacy (cf. Basso, 1974). Better still, perhaps, is to conceptualise literacy as a verb (like language and culture). As Bartlett (2008) writes in an article entitled ‘literacy’s verb’: literacy does not have a verb; it is misleading to conceptualise literacy as a single phenomenon that has a predictable economic or political ‘effect.’ Instead, literacy is the verb: that is, diverse social actors, who are variably situated in social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, read and write disparate texts for different purposes and with unpredictable outcomes. (Bartlett, 2008: 751) Bartlett’s paper is further largely a reiteration of Street’s (1995) argument against autonomous notions of literacy that persist in literacy programmes. Her paper rejects the notion that literacy ‘enliterates’ individuals and societies in a predictable way and suggests conceptualising literacy not in the singular but in the plural as types of literacy and types of literacy programmes. However, in its title and in the above citation, Bartlett invites us to think of literacy as a verb, not as a transitive verb that has a subject and an object as in ‘they enliterate us’, but as an intransitive verb without an object. In such a verb, which does not actually exist unless we invent one (‘to literacy’ and ‘to letter’ are poor suggestions), we would simply call attention to the performativity of literacy as something that comes into being only when it is practised by someone in a particular context. Literacy (like language and culture) is not manufactured to be used by people or communities. Literacy is the manufacturing itself. People do not make use of literacy like they make use of a car. Literacy is acquired through practice (in a long and painful process, usually in schools). Literacy is not taught by telling children (or adults) how it is done, but is learned in the practice of doing it. Thus, literacy is not the car, but is driving. In this book, I have worked with everyday texts or ‘literacy products’ in order to describe and understand literacy and multilingualism in Gambian society. These texts offered different insights into the local ecology of linguistic diversity in a more vigorous way than can be done when focusing on observed and reported practices alone. In addition to studying literacy events

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and practices, attention to finished text products in literacy studies can help gain a more sophisticated understanding of the distribution of linguistic resources in society. Inspecting L’s telephone booklet shows us traces of the long and complex history of literacy in Gambian society and of his personal learning history that is situated against that history. This is where sociolinguistics becomes ethnographic – when it sheds light on the economy of semiotic resources in people’s lives against larger developments and macro-events. L’s limited exposure to formal education in Arabic, his informal exposure to English, and the absence of local language literacy in his personal life are all related to the different episodes of globalisation described in the previous section. The descriptive and analytical details we can arrive at by inspecting such everyday texts exceed what we could find out by interviewing or observing their producers. It is well known that people’s reported practices (what they say they do) often differ from their actual practices (what they actually do). Studies of literacy that combine talk about texts with observations of literacy events (i.e. people practising literacy) and actual products (i.e. what people make when practising literacy) capture the complexity of literacy as a situated practice much better than approaches that incorporate only one of these methods. Thus, using Lillis’ (2008) distinction between ethnography as method, methodology and theory, the scope of the ethnography of literacy adopted here is a fully fledged methodology and theory, making use of every method and data source that comes to hand. The product perspective introduced in this ethnography led me to refocus on real-world material and material realities, and prevented me from making too-easy generalisations. Working with language ‘products’ forced me to be selective in what I could analyse (key fragments only), to be specific in my analysis and rigorous because of its verifiability (Fabian, 2001). Throughout this book, I have been a convinced ‘data fetishist’, organising each chapter around a set of visible data: photographed signs from the linguistic landscape in Chapter 3, scanned school essays and transcribed audio fragments in Chapter 4, an observed and photographed event and a document in Chapter 5, and a series of texts on paper and on the wall in Chapter 6. Due to the clearly visible multimodal nature of the data, I had to embrace a broader semiotic perspective for this study of literacy (cf. Prinsloo & Baynham, 2008). This semiotic perspective was pursued in Chapter 3 by incorporating images in the analysis of the linguistic landscape, and by regarding signs as fundamentally multimodal (de)signs, with visuality as a fundamental feature of their design. I showed that texts are not composed of script only, but occur in the vicinity of images and have a particular size,

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colour, typography, layout, etc. These different modalities all contribute to the meaning of a text and can be deployed as communicative strategies. I therefore chose to reproduce the signs and texts discussed not in transcription only, but with a photograph. Ideally, the interview fragments in Chapter 4 should not only be readable but audible as well, something that is not really possible in the low-tech modality of a printed book. Writers such as L and Burama and their texts exist in a literacy regime that regulates in formal and more informal ways how writing is done, when texts are good texts, who writes well, etc. The ‘how to write’ here does not only involve technical decoding and encoding skills (cf. Papen, 2005), but also a set of social rules on what (not) to decode and encode, when, where and how. If one is constantly exposed to literacy in English rather than in any other language, then that results in a double identification of English-asliteracy and literacy-as-English. We witnessed the effects of this local languaging regime in the respelling of and the misrecognising commentaries on Burama’s writing in Chapter 6. Literacy in Gambian society appears to be organised in systems or regimes of literacy that need to be understood as global systems that are locally arranged. Whereas literacy can indeed be defined in the broadest possible terms as visual language, the particular ways in which language is visible or visualised depend on the concrete material and cultural context, the infrastructure of local languaging. Literacy, thus, is an eminently ethnographic object. And the context of literacy is a multi-layered context that reflects large overlapping historical processes.

Sociolinguistics The various chapters of this book have shown different kinds of sociolinguistics that were deployed to offer a comprehensive ethnographic account of language and literacy in Gambian society. Certain types of sociolinguistics were judged particularly useful while others were treated more critically and judged to be unfit to describe the complexity of local languaging products and practices in this West African society. Chapter 2, the background chapter, was largely a macro-sociolinguistic approach that made use of available census material, official sources, informants’ information and general observations. Chapter 3 inscribed itself in the field of linguistic landscape studies and focused on creative multilingual and multimodal signage in the public space. Chapter 4 was a more typical applied or sociolinguistic study in the sense that it situated itself in and around school and studied language ideologies through school essays and a

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focus group interview. Chapter 5 was an ethnography (an ‘ethnography of speaking’ and an ‘ethnography of text’) of writing practised in one village. Chapter 6 was a comparative linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis of spelling practices in Mandinka. Thus, I have made use of a variety of methods and presented a variety of different types of sociolinguistic data. What all these data have in common, besides the fact that they are all ‘Gambian data’ and shed light on literacy and multilingualism, is that these data are all descriptive. The data describe rather than illustrate language and literacy in Gambian society. It is the description and analysis of the data that led to understanding literacy and multilingualism in Gambian society, rather than an acquired understanding that led to the data. Thus, the start of the title of this book, Local Languaging, reflects an understanding of literacy and multilingualism in Gambian society that developed and matured over the course of my fieldwork and in interaction with the data that emerged in it. Through fieldwork, I gradually learned to let go of my own pre-ethnographic dispositions and received ideas about what language and multilingualism is (albeit only partially so, cf. Clifford, 1986). By unlearning old understandings, new understandings emerged. This work, as announced in the opening chapter, was in part an exercise to unpluralise language, to describe language and literacy practices without assuming the existence of languages – a categorisation that every piece of data defies, and most explicitly in the focus group discussion in Chapter 4. However, it was never was an unpluralising exercise in the first place, but only in hindsight when all the key pieces of data were brought together and grouped into a single text. As my research unfolded, it proved fruitful to let go of languages as starting points of analysis and handle a more dynamic notion of language and multilingualism. I gradually became less interested in multilingualism in either/or terms (as the medium of instruction debate in Africa tends to have been framed), and more in what people and institutions accomplished in their language practices. Empirically, I found it problematic to determine in what ‘language’ Ba-Abdoulie’s letter was written, in what ‘language’ L’s telephone booklet was composed, what ‘language’ the district chief and the parents preferred for use in their school, in what ‘language’ Gamcel’s campaign is conducted or in what ‘language’ Burama’s story was respelled. In short, I became interested less in languages and more in how people languaged locally, and so the focus from entire languages as units of analysis in a sociology of language shifted towards a sociolinguistics of repertoires of lapidary bits and pieces of different languages. Such a sociolinguistics automatically becomes an ethnographic sociolinguistics, but one that involves a scalar ethnography, i.e. an ethnography that grapples with various levels of

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social structure in single events, persons and communities. The ethnographic imperative being to describe social life in its complexity and totality, the ‘sociolinguistic fact’ (like Silversteins’ ‘linguistic fact’, see Wortham, 2008) needs to be seen as total fact, distributed at various levels of generality within the same sociolinguistic system. At the highest scale-level, the entire world is one sociolinguistic system (or ecology) in which various languages are variously valued (see de Swaan, 2001), but this ecology is made up of smaller subsystems that are partly overlapping and further subdivided in complex ways. Gambian society is one such ecology in itself, but is partly coterminous with the Senegalese system, with the Manding and Fula systems, the ECOWAS, Commonwealth or African Union systems, etc., in sometimes more and sometimes less relevant ways. Within Gambian society, too, there are several ecologies that operate within the larger system. Ba-Abdoulie’s village is one such ecology (one might also call it a ‘community’), which comprises in its turn a number of compounds with extended families. Contemporary ethnography needs to manoeuvre in all these spaces (the compound, the village, the street, the neighbourhood, the city, the country, the world) and cannot afford to be an ethnography of one such scale-level only. We cannot meaningfully understand the world without some amount of deep hanging out in small places such as Ba-Abdoulie’s village. We also cannot meaningfully understand what happens in this village if we do not look beyond the village and take national, international and global phenomena into account as well. This book described local languaging, literacy and multilingualism as social and ideological practice from the perspective of a small and peripheral place called Gambia. It has worked its way down from a relative macroperspective of mapping ethnic and linguistic diversity in the country as a whole to micro-ethnographic analyses of highly idiosyncratic spelling features in personal texts and text artefacts. And as I am writing these final words, new signs are being designed and placed in the streets of Serrekunda, most of the pupils of the writing contest will have concluded their education while others have taken their place, and writers like L and Burama, each in their own ways, continue to language locally.

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Index

Acquisition/acquire Knowledge, 14, 19, 152 Language, 5–7, 21–22, 37 Literacy, 2, 125, 149 Advertising; advertisement, 35, 50, 53, 56, 58, 60, 70, 72, 76, 124, 142, 148 Advocacy, 14 Africell, 45, 64, 68–69, 71, 76 Agency, 6, 57, 79–80, 88 Ajami, 35, 42, 118, 140 Aku, 32–34, 39, 40, 48, 51, 91 Alkalo (pl. alkalolu), 82, 90, 95, 99, 105 Animist, 37, 40 Arabic, 21, 25, 32, 35–36, 41–42, 45, 47–50, 53, 56, 63, 83, 105–108, 113, 118–121, 123–125, 140, 143, 145, 147–148, 150 Arnaut, Karel, 31, 54 Art; arts; artistic, 11–12, 51, 73–74, 77, 108 Attitude, 16, 56, 80–81, 85–90, 99, 101 Audience, 4, 50–51, 57–58, 65, 73–76, 110 Audience design, 74, 110 Autonomous Literacy, 2, 7, 148–149 Languages, 7 (and creative) practice, 9, 113 Awareness, 6, 14–15, 20, 80, 90, 120, 140

Banjul-Serrekunda Highway, 60–63, 70 Bartlett, Leslie, 149 Barton, David, 2, 148 Bathurst, 40–41, 144, 146–147 Becker, A.L. 5 Belgium, 20, 97, 101 Bell, Alan, 74, 76 Bilingualism Billboards, 41, 56, 60, 68–70, 73, 75–76 Blackledge, Adrian, 7, 9 Blommaert, Jan, 4–5, 9, 21, 36, 57, 66–67, 74, 80, 98, 104, 114, 121, 142 Bollywood, 29, 31, 51 Bricolage, 10–12 Briggs, Charles, 14, 81, 90 Brikama, 23, 28, 53, 61, 72, 126 British, 26, 39, 41, 45, 52, 144, 146–147 Brubaker, Rogers, 4, 94 Bumster, 147 Bundung, 60–61, 63, 126 Burama: see Janne, Burama Cameron, Deborah, 14–45, 101 Canagarajah, Suresh, 8, 31 Canut, Cécile, 7, 33, 39, 72, 94 Casamance, 22, 37, 40, 43, 82, 105, 127 Ceesay, Hassoum, 144 Census, 32, 34–35, 38, 40, 42–43, 47, 151 Chief (of district), 90–91, 94–95, 97, 99, 145, 152 Circumstances, 1, 15, 45, 74 City, 19, 28, 31, 61, 105, 129, 147, 153 China (People’s Republic of China), 9, 31, 45 China (Republic of China): see Taiwan Chomsky, Noam, 5 Christianity, 13, 37–41, 47–49, 133

Ba-Abdoulie (old man and the letter), 19–20, 107–114, 120–123, 125, 142, 152–153 Baddibu, 28, 144–145 Bainunka, 34, 40 Balanta, 34, 40, 82 Bambara, 32–34, 39–40, 44, 48, 51 Banjul, 17, 23, 28, 35, 39–41, 50, 53, 60–61, 71, 113, 144, 146 168

Inde x

Citizen; citizenship, 7, 42 Code, 6, 7, 57, 75 Codeswitching; code-mixing, 7, 36, 42, 54 Collaborative literacy Collins, James, 16, 80–81, 92, 148 Colony Colonial, 4–5, 7, 9, 26, 39–41, 49, 81, 122, 133, 144, 146–147 Colonisation, 143, 145 the Colony (Gambia) 41, 144, 146–147 (British) Crown Colony, 26, 41 Conditions, 1, 2, 8, 18, 59, 66, 74, 99, 103, 115, 139, 143 Comium, 45, 68–71, 75–76, 78 Communication Communication scheme, 104, 111–112 Intercultural communication, 81, 90, 98 Language of wider communication, 37, 95 (language as) means of communication, 87, 95 Medium/mode of communication, 22, 112–113 Miscommunication (communication difficulty/breakdown), 90, 98 Visual communication, 77, 124 Community, 4–5, 7, 9, 14, 24, 29, 45, 47–49, 51, 53, 72, 74, 76, 79–80, 83, 89–90, 97, 99, 101, 103–105, 118, 122–123, 139, 149, 153 Community of practice (Lave & Wenger), 7, 104 Community meeting, 90, 99 Community member, 99 Imagined community, 5 Speech community, 76 Comparative analysis, 125, 129, 133, 152 Complexity, 1, 3, 7, 29, 31, 46, 98, 122, 137, 140, 147, 150–151, 153 Composition (of repertoire), 107 (of society, of family), 72, 128 Composition (semiotic), 74 Composition fee, 46 Composition-writing, 80, 84–89, 99 Consonant, 134–135 Contact zone (M.L. Pratt), 146–147 Cosmopolitan, 13–14

169

Coup d’état, 26, 51 Creativity, 2, 6, 9–12, 67–68, 71, 74, 78, 133, 137, 142–143, 151 Creese, Angela, 7, 9 Creole, 32, 34, 39, 44, 48, 105, 108 Cuba, 29, 45, 52, 148 Cummins, Jim, 80, 100–101 Curriculum, 46–47, 81, 113, 124 Daara, 47 Deconstructing, 4, 24, 30, 72 Development, 7, 26, 29, 52, 65, 70–71, 103, 133, 139–140, 150 Dialectic Dialectics of surprise (Willis & Trondman), 14, 99 Dialectic relationship, 14, 142 Dictation, 86–87 Disinventing, 65–66, 78 Diversity (see also superdiversity), 4, 8, 24–25, 29–31, 33, 46, 50, 54, 57, 64, 72, 75, 78, 80–81, 83, 90, 95, 100, 123, 134, 141, 145, 149, 153 Dogon, 15 Donkey story, 129–133 Economy; economic, 16, 22, 28, 44–45, 66–67, 87–88, 101, 120–121, 127, 129, 139, 146, 149–150 Elite, 49, 66, 74, 115, 121, 148 Emergence; emergent; emerge, 6, 9, 16, 53, 59, 98–99, 124, 128, 141, 143, 152 Emic/etic, 80–81 Empowerment: see power Encounter, 16, 52, 80, 98–99, 149 Endangered language, 37, 39 English passim British English, 41, 147 English-only, 47, 77, 81, 89, 113, 142 Englishes, 8, 42, 52, 63–64, 66, 147 Englishing, 13, 56, 62, 66, 78, 142 Gambian English, 41–42, 50, 52, 67, 147 Global Englishes, 64 Grassroots English(ing), 62, 66, 142 Inner, outer and expanding circles of English (Kachru), 65, 147 Peripheral English, 67 World Englishes, 8, 42, 64

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Epistemic; epistemology, 5, 81 Epistemic violence, 94, 100 Error; mistake, 29, 67, 130 Ethics, 14, 58–60 Ethnic/Ethnicity Ethnic diversity; differences, 24–25, 29–30, 54, 78 Ethnic group, 4, 29–30, 32, 34–40, 44–45, 49, 51, 54, 71, 82, 105–106, 112 Ethnic identity; identification; affiliation; origin, 22, 30, 36, 40, 44, 54, 75, 96 Ethnic language, 21, 38 Ethnicity; ethnicities, 4, 24–25, 29, 32, 34–35, 37, 40–43, 48, 54, 71–72, 94, 107, 141 Mixed ethnicity, 37 Multi-ethnic, 8, 25, 35, 37, 51, 54, 82, 95, 105, 123 Ethnography Ethnographer, 3, 15–16, 81, 94, 96–98, 111, 114 Ethnographic analysis, 114, 125, 142, 153 Ethnographic data, 99, 111, 128 Ethnographic encounters, 80, 98 Ethnographic fieldwork, 10, 80 Ethnographic knowledge, 14–16, 80 Ethnographic sociolinguistics, 3, 46, 103, 141, 152 Ethnography as method, methodology and theory (T. Lillis), 150 Ethnography of speaking, 8, 103–104, 109, 152 Ethnography of text, 104, 114, 152 Ethnography of writing, 104 Micro-ethnography, 114, 153 Ethnolinguistic vitality, 56–57, 71–72, 78 Etymology, 38, 67 Eye-dialect, 67 Fabian, Johannes, 14, 16, 66–67, 81, 90, 137, 150 Family; familial, 1, 13, 16–19, 23, 29, 31, 33–34, 37–38, 50, 54, 61, 70, 72, 82–83, 88–89, 106–112, 114, 120, 122–123, 125, 128, 130, 139, 146, 153 Farato, 23, 125, 127

Fertile mimesis, 11, 142 Fieldwork, 3, 10, 14, 16–23, 30, 59–60, 67, 80, 84, 90, 102, 106, 108, 125–126, 130, 152 Finland, 7, 52 Focus group, 80, 90, 95, 98–99, 101, 141, 152 Foni, 17–19, 23, 25, 26, 28, 37, 80, 82, 95, 105–107, 112, 144 French (language), 36–38, 43–45, 50, 56, 105–106, 112, 114–115, 140 French (people), 7, 15, 26, 41, 44, 122, 144 Fula, 21, 28, 32, 34–37, 44–45, 48–50, 53–54, 63, 68–69, 72, 82–83, 90, 93–94, 101, 105–108, 112–113, 153 Gambia passim Gamble, David, 29, 52 Gamcel, 53, 64, 68–72, 76, 78 Gang; gangster; gangsta rap, 67–68 García, Ofelia, 5, 7 Gaze, 58, 73, 80, 111 Genetic classification (of Gambian languages), 33 Genre, 51, 67, 104, 113, 115, 121, 123, 149 Germany, 52, 146–147 Geography; geographic, 28, 31–32, 54, 57–58, 101 Geopolitics, 70 Ghana, 29, 38, 43–44, 148 Global North/Global South, 2, 31 Globalisation, 7–10, 14, 24–25, 31, 54, 64, 143–148, 150 Good/bad language, 65, 85, 129, 142, 151 Gorter, Durk, 56–59 Graffiti, 9, 11, 61, 63, 67, 126, 148 Grassroots Grassroots Englishing, 62, 66, 142 Grassroots lessons, 18 Grassroots literacy (J. Blommaert), 14, 66–67, 74, 121, 139–140, 148 Grassroots multilingualism, 8, 14 Grice, Paul, 100 Groupness (Brubaker), 94 Guest/stranger, 18, 99, 105 Guinea (Conakry), 29, 32, 35–36, 39–40, 43–44, 82, 107, 122 Guinea-Bissau, 32, 37–40, 44–45, 48, 82

Inde x

Haley, Alex (Roots), 52 Hamilton, Mary, 2, 148 Harlem Niggaz, 67 Headmaster, 83–84, 98–99, 101 Hegemony, 10, 88, 142–143 Heterography, 66, 120–121, 133, 139, 142–143 Hassaniya, 45 Heuristic, 79, 80, 98, 99, 101 Higgins, Christina, 7, 10, 11, 13, 22, 68 High Class Fashion Shop, 76–78 Hip-hop, 9, 13, 51, 68, 107 History; historical, 3, 5, 7, 13, 28, 30, 33–38, 40, 43, 51, 57, 59, 65–67, 88, 95, 97, 103, 105, 114, 118, 127, 138, 143–148, 150–151 Hospitality, 16, 147 Host, 16, 18, 90, 99, 106 Hymes, Dell H. 5, 8, 80, 103–104, 108, 112 Ideology, 2, 6, 9, 80–82, 87–88, 90, 92, 97–98, 102, 124–125, 131, 142, 148, 151 Language ideology, 80, 82, 98, 124, 131, 151 Our ideologies and theirs (J. Collins), 80–81 Igboanusi, Herbert, 81, 82, 89 Illiterate: see Non-literate Images, 6, 29, 53, 58, 60, 62, 68, 73–77, 115, 119–120, 137, 150 Independence (1965), 26, 41, 146–147 India, 11, 29, 45, 51, 148 Informant, 11, 16, 18, 36–38, 47, 49, 53, 96, 98, 129, 151 Infrastructure, 21, 25, 41, 129, 139, 151 Instrumentalities, 104, 112–113 Internet, 66, 131, 143 Interpreting; interpreter Islam; Islamic, 13, 36, 39–40, 42, 47–49, 84, 125, 145 Jahanka, 32–33, 40 Jamaica, 31 Jammeh, Yahya (president), 26, 37, 71 Janne, Burama, 19, 125–140, 142, 151–153 Jawara, Sir Dawda (former president), 26, 37, 41

171

Jaworski, Adam, 9, 16, 52, 57, 73 Joking relationship, 22 Jola, 19, 21, 30, 32, 34, 36–40, 46, 48–51, 54, 61, 63, 72, 75, 81, 82, 84, 90, 92, 93–95, 105–106, 108, 112–113 Jørgensen, Jens Normann, 6–9, 31 Joseph, John, 6, 66 Karoninka, 34, 40 Kenya, 10 Kombo, 17, 19–20, 23, 26, 28, 35, 37–39, 41, 44, 49–50, 53, 69, 107, 110, 114, 129–130, 144 Kress, Gunther, 69, 73–74, 76, 137–138 L (Lamin), 19–20, 106–108, 110, 114–115, 118–123, 125, 142, 151, 153 Language passim First/second language (L1/L2), 22, 35, 37–38, 49, 72, 83, 97, 100 Languager, 6, 143 Languaging, 3, 5–8, 13, 59, 66, 94, 103–104, 143 Learning to language locally, 19–22 Local languaging, 3, 8, 13, 20, 22, 55, 68, 72–73, 78, 94, 97, 113, 124, 141, 143, 146, 151–152 Lankiewicz, Hadrian, 6 Learning Language learning, 3, 5–6, 19–22, 39, 65, 83, 89–91 Literacy learning, 46, 82 Learning history, 103, 118, 127, 138, 150 Learning materials, 35, Learning environment, 89, 142 Learning moments, 98 Regime of learning, 89, 124 Lebanon, 29, 45, 70 Liberia, 43 Libya, 31 Lillis, Theresa, 150 Lingua franca, 21, 35, 39–40, 44, 49, 53, 72, 82, 94, 105, 113, 146 Linguistic landscape, 11, 17, 25, 53, 56–78 passim, 106, 113, 124, 137, 141–142, 150–151 Literacy passim Literacies, 2, 14, 63, 74, 78, 89, 120–121, 123–125, 140, 148

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Literacy passim (Continued) Literacy practice, 2, 8, 14, 25, 30, 42, 57, 60, 106, 131, 141, 143, 152 Literacy product, 25, 55, 59, 113, 149 Literacy production, 57, 74, 137, 147 Literate, 2, 66, 69, 89, 104, 106–107, 118, 122, 125 Enliterate, 149 Illiterate, 143 Low-literate, 25, 104, 108, 118, 121 Multiliterate, 124, 143 Non-literate, 2–3, 58, 75–77, 104, 122, 141 Local Local language, 2, 8, 10, 13, 21–22, 34, 44–45, 47–51, 63, 68, 80, 90–98, 101, 121, 123–127, 137, 142 Local language literacy / writing, 25, 125–127, 129, 142–143, 148, 150 Local language practices, 10, 55, 60, 66, 94, 96 Local languages, 20, 22, 26, 30, 32, 34–35, 42, 44–54, 58, 63, 68–73, 77–78, 79, 82, 84, 89–94, 96, 98, 101, 106, 120–121, 123, 124–125, 137, 140, 141–143 Local languaging, 3, 8, 13, 20, 22, 55, 68, 72–73, 78, 94, 97, 113, 124, 141, 143, 146, 151–152 Locality, 10, 12, 13, 20, 79, 94, 146 London, 31 Lüpke, Friederike, 21–22, 31, 36–37, 40, 72, 97, 134, 140 Luxury, 67, 74, 76, 77 Madrassa, 35, 47, 107, 119 Makoni, Sinfree, 7, 22, 53, 72, 79, 90, 94–95, 100 Mali, 15, 31–32, 38–40, 43–44, 51, 114, 147 Mali Empire, 34 Mandinka passim Manjago, 32, 34, 39–40, 48, 82–83, 105, 108 Marabout, 145 Margins, 14, 31, 125, 141 Market/marketplace, 9–10, 21, 44, 53, 68–70, 88, 114, 143 Marketing, 68 Marriage, 22, 29, 40, 50, 82, 104–105, 107, 111, 131, 145

Masquerade, 50–51 Materiality, 77, 104 Mauritania, 29, 36, 43, 45 Mbalax (music), 36, 51, 107 Mc Laughlin, Fiona, 36, 42, 71 McGlynn, Caroline, 30, 46–47, 54, 82–83, 124, 143 Media, 15, 41, 49, 71, 73, 76, 104 New media; social media, 15, 147 Medium of instruction/language of instruction, 17, 18, 25, 46–47, 79, 82–84, 89, 92, 96, 101, 143, 152 Memory, 5, 59, 71 Metalanguage, 30, 55, 81 Metrolingualism (Otsuji & Pennycook), 8, 13 Metropolis; metropolitan, 14, 29, 31 Mignolo, Walter, 5, 7, 13, 145 Migration, 9. 17, 22, 29, 31, 42–44, 54, 128 Misinterpretation, 29, 137 Missionary, 21, 29, 41, 134 Misunderstanding, 92, 98, 137 Miscommunication, 90, 98 Mobile phone, 31, 60, 75–76, 117, 123, 124, 142, 143 Mobile telephone provide, 45, 53, 58, 61, 76, 118 Mobility, 22, 89, 139, 146 Modern multi-ethnic village, 25, 95, 105 Moo fi kao (black people’s language), 90–97, 101, 124, 141 Mother tongue, 22, 46, 72, 80, 97 Mufwene, Salikoko, 142–143 Multilingualism, 1–25 passim, 30, 36–37, 39, 47, 50, 54, 56–57, 59, 64, 68, 72–73, 75, 78, 79, 82, 97, 101, 103, 105, 108, 113, 123–125, 140, 141–153 passim Multimodality, 57–58, 73–74 Muslim, 18, 35–40, 42, 47, 48, 106, 145 Nakam! (Comium), 68–69, 71, 75, 78 Nanz, Nancy, 51, 71 Nation, 7, 46, 71, 82, 122, 147 Nation-state, 75 National, 26, 36, 43–44, 49–50, 70–74, 82, 84, 113, 139, 153 Native/Non-native, 39, 147

Inde x

Native speaker, 38, 108 Native American, 80 N’Dour, Youssou, 36, 51 Necessity, 37, 67, 74,76 Netherlands/Dutch, 29, 52, 56, 144, 146–147 Network, 8, 16, 19, 23, 113, 120, 122, 130 New Literacy Studies, 2, 8, 148 Newspaper, 10, 41, 50, 74, 137 Ngom, Fallou, 36, 38–39, 42 Niger, 29 Niger-Congo languages, 33, 37 Nigeria, 29, 31, 43–44, 49, 51–52, 148 Niumi, 28, 52, 106, 144 N’ko (alphabet), 32, 35 Nollywood, 31, 51 Non-formal, 131, 138, 142 Norms; Normativity, 12, 65–67, 104, 113, 121, 137–139 North Bank, 23, 28, 38, 53, 144 Norton, Bonny, 9, 81, 88, 101 Official, 2, 21, 26, 30, 35, 40, 42–43, 49, 110, 143, 151 Official language, 2, 22, 41, 43–44, 83, 87, 91, 93, 101 Official language policy, 75, 80 Official medium of instruction, 46 Official orthography/spelling, 35–36, 131, 133 Orality, 66, 121 Orthography, 21, 35–36, 66, 121, 137–139, 142 Pakistan, 29 Parents, 35, 80, 82, 88, 90–91, 94, 99, 141, 152 Participants (research participants), 1, 14–16, 18, 50, 94–101, 104, 110–113 Pennycook, Alastair, 7–8, 10–13, 31, 64–65, 72, 88, 94, 142, 145 Performance, 13, 51, 66, 81 Periphery, 13, 67, 147, 153 Phillipson, Robert, 9 Philosophy, 11, 17, 65, 70–71 Photography, 58–59, 61, 68, 77, 86, 109–111, 115, 119, 129–130, 150–151 Pidgin English, 44

173

Place, 4, 10, 14, 22–23, 26, 30, 35, 40, 42, 53, 56–57, 60, 67, 69, 70, 83, 88, 120, 123, 127, 129, 144, 147, 149, 153 Emplacement, 57, 62 Marketplace, 10, 35, 53 Peripheral place, 147, 153 Small place, 4, 153 Workplace, 10 Replace, 70 Pluralisation; pluralise; pluralist; pluralism, 1, 4, 8, 64, 94, 148, 152 Police, 49, 70, 132 Policy Education policy, 46, 79, 81, 83, 89, 123, 142–143 Language-in-education policy, 79–80, 82, 99–100 Language policy, 6, 47, 81, 139 Policy documents; policy objective, 34, 46–47, 81–83, 92, 123–124 Policy makers, 93, 95, 97, 100 Politics, 15, 31, 49, 70 Polycentricity, 121, 142, 147 Polylingualism; polylanguaging (J.N. Jørgensen), 7–8, 13, 22, 31 Portuguese (language), 44, 105, 140 Portuguese (people), 144–146 Postcolonial, 4–5, 10, 41, 49, 68, 79, 88, 100, 133, 139–140, 143, 146–147 Poverty; poor, 17–18, 26, 66, 74–75, 81, 85, 88, 101, 137–138 Power; powerful, 15, 17, 26, 30, 37–38, 46, 67–68, 75–76, 82, 88, 98–99, 121, 122, 125, 137, 139–140, 145 Empowerment; empowering, 14, 17, 89, 101, 122, 140 Practice Collaborative practice, 143 Community of practice, 7, 104 Cultural practice, 4, 9, 11–12 Ideological practice, 125, 153 In practice, 13, 46, 104, 133, 140, 143 Language practice, 6, 9, 10–12 Local practice, 10, 11, 13 Local language practice, 55, 66, 94, 96, 152 Local literacy practice, 42 (Local) languaging practice, 66, 143

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Practice (Continued) Literacy practice, 2, 8, 14, 25, 30, 42, 57, 60, 106, 131, 141, 143, 152 Policy and practice, 80, 83, 142 Situated practice, 104, 150 Social practice, 2, 4, 66, 153 Spatial and semiotic practice, 78 President, 26, 37, 71 Private, 3, 25, 42, 44, 46, 50, 52–53, 59–60, 113, 122–123, 125, 137, 141–143, 148, 153 School, 46 Spaces, 42, 59–60, 142–143 Texts/literacies, 113, 148, 153 the Protectorate (Gambia), 41, 145–146 Public Literacy, 113 School, 46, 90, 107 Space, 25, 51, 56, 59, 68, 71–72, 77, 124–125, 141–142, 151 QCell, 68, 71 Quadrilingual sign (Africell), 71 Qur’an; Qur’anic, 42, 47–48, 81, 83, 121, 147 Radio, 35–36, 49–50, 69–72, 74, 76, 107 Rampton, Ben, 4, 8–9, 58 Reception; receptive, 59, 68, 112 Recognise; Recognised; Recognition, 13–14, 18, 21, 36–37, 87, 98, 103, 108, 119, 131–133, 139, 144, 148 Misrecognising, 148 Regime, 83, 89, 113, 120, 121, 124, 137, 139, 141–142, 148, 151 Religion, 24, 35, 47–48, 107, 145 Relocalisation (A. Pennycook), 12, 145 Repertoire, 1, 5, 7–8, 20–22, 30, 31, 47, 72, 76, 103, 107, 112–113, 115, 142–143, 147, 152 Resources, 1–2, 5, 7–8, 10, 21–22, 26, 29, 65, 72, 88, 101, 103, 105–108, 112–113, 117–118, 122, 125, 139–140, 142–143, 150 Respelling, 125, 129–139, 151 Rich point (Agar), 131 Rural, 2, 17–19, 23, 28–29, 31, 35–37, 44, 50, 52–53, 58, 63, 75, 79–80, 82, 105, 107, 122–123, 128–129, 146, 148

Russia, 20, 148 Rymes, Betsie, 30 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 5 Sayerr Jobe Avenue, 60–61, 63, 67, 76, 126 Scandinavia, 52 Scollon, Ron & Suzie Wong Scollon, 57, 73 Sebba, Mark, 125 Semiotic, 6, 57, 62, 73, 75, 77–78, 107, 112, 139, 141, 150 Semiotic landscape, 73 Geosemiotics (R. Scollon & S.W. Scollon), 57 Social semiotics, 12, 57 Senegal, 26, 29, 31–32, 35–36, 38, 40, 43–45, 51, 82, 105, 114, 121, 145, 147, 153 Senegambia Confederation, 147 Serahule, 32–34, 37–38, 48–49, 54, 75 Serer, 28, 32, 34–36, 38–39, 48, 75 Serrekunda, 19, 23, 28, 38, 60–61, 76, 107, 130, 153 Shoes Docta, 67 Shohamy, Elana, 6, 57 Shopkeepers, 44, 59–60, 141 Sierra Leone, 29, 31, 39, 41, 43–44, 49, 144, 147 Signage, 23, 25, 56, 74, 76, 141, 151 Signboards, 53, 60, 67, 69, 73, 76–77, 126 Silverstein, Michael, 4, 121, 153 Slavery; slaves; slave trade, 26, 39, 41, 52, 144–145 Soninke-Marabout wars, 145 Sonko-Godwin, Patience, 28, 34–38, 144 South Africa, 148 South Bank, 23, 26, 28, 39, 53, 82, 105, 144–145 Space, 3, 8, 12, 23, 25, 31, 42, 51, 56–57, 59–60, 68, 71–73, 76–78, 100, 117, 119, 124–25, 141–143, 151, 153 time and space, 8, 12, 78 public/private space, 25, 42, 51, 56, 59–60, 68, 71–72, 77, 124–125, 141–143, 151 Spain; Spanish (people), 52, 56, 146–147 Spanish (language), 45, 52, 56, Spelling, 32–33, 46, 67–68, 81, 86, 89, 121, 125–126, 129–140, 142, 151–153 Stakeholders, 80, 100, 125 Standard/non-standard

Inde x

Standard, 35, 41, 66–68, 83, 121, 133, 137, 139 Standardise; standardization, 35–36, 98, 137, 139–140 Non-standard, 66–67, 121, 137, 139 Stranger/guest: see guest/stranger Street, Brian V. 2, 4, 148 Stroud, Christopher, 7, 9, 13, 67, 74, 76, 94, 100, 129, 140 Struggle, 26, 88, 97 Students, 17–19, 47, 82–85, 88–89, 99, 110, 143 Sunu Buss (QCell), 71 Superdiversity, 29, 31 Swain, Merrill, 6 Sweden, 52, 146–147 Swigart, Leigh, 36 Taiwan (Republic of China), 29, 45, 148 Tanzania, 10 Teacher, 20–21, 41, 47, 80–84, 87, 91, 98–99, 101, 125, 143, 145 Television, 31, 35, 36, 41, 49, 70–72, 76, 137 Telephone/Nescafé booklet, 25, 104, 114–123, 150, 152 Third World, 66 Thurlow, Crispin, 9, 57, 73 Tourism; tourists, 6, 9, 11, 16–17, 28–29, 32, 51–52, 61, 69, 107, 146–147 Trajectory, 52, 82, 89, 114, 118 Transcript; transcription, 86, 90, 92, 120, 127, 129, 132–133, 151 Translanguaging, 7, 13, 22, 31 Translation, 5, 48–49, 127, 129–133, 141 Tribe; tribal, 32, 72, 78, 93–94 Tribalism, 93–94 Post-tribal, 75, 94 Typography, 69, 73–74, 151 UK (United Kingdom) 50, 52, 107, 148 England, 39

175

US (United States of America), 31, 50, 70, 148 Urban, 2, 8, 19–20, 23, 25, 28–29, 31, 35–39, 41, 44, 49–51, 53–54, 56, 58, 60, 63, 68–69, 71, 73, 75, 78, 107, 110, 113–115, 122–123, 129–130, 140–141, 146, 148 Van Leeuwen, Theo, 69, 73–74 Venezuela, 148 Vertovec, Steven, 29 Vigouroux, Cécile, 143 Village, 18–20, 22–23, 25, 29, 39, 41, 50, 52, 63, 82, 90, 92, 95, 104–110, 113, 115, 120, 122–123, 125–126, 128, 142, 146, 152–153 Visual; Visuality, 53, 58–59, 64, 66, 69–70, 72–73, 75–77, 112, 124, 137, 139, 148, 150–151 Voice, 6, 11, 16, 25, 50, 73, 79–102 passim, 122, 141 Vološinov, Valentin, 103 Vowel, 21, 35, 119, 133–136, 138 West Africa, 1, 4, 7, 13, 18, 20, 22–23, 26, 29, 31, 36, 38, 42–45, 48, 79, 97, 101, 114, 144–145, 151 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 4 Wolof, 2, 20–21, 28, 30, 32–38, 40, 45, 48–51, 53–54, 63, 68–72, 75, 82–83, 94, 101, 105–108, 113 Word boundaries, 133, 135 Wright, Donald, 4, 41, 52, 72, 143 Writing, 2–3, 5–6, 12, 15, 20, 25, 35, 41, 66–67, 80, 84–85, 88–90, 98–101, 103–123 passim, 124–140 passim, 141–142, 148, 151–153 Handwriting, 113, 118–119 Writing contest, 84, 90, 98–99, 101, 141–142, 153 Yaay Borom (Gamcel), 53, 70–72, 78 Youth, 8, 17, 31, 67, 115, 125