Repertoires and Choices in African Languages 9781614511946, 9781614512516

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Friederike Lüpke & Anne Storch Repertoires and Choices in African Languages

Language Contact and Bilingualism

Editor Yaron Matras

Volume 5

Friederike Lüpke & Anne Storch

Repertoires and Choices in African Languages

ISBN 978-1-61451-251-6 e-ISBN 978-1-61451-194-6 ISSN 2190-698x Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Boston/ Berlin Typesetting: PTP-Berlin Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

To Max, for preferring potatoes over Kartoffeln. To Doris, for relentlessly questioning received wisdom. To Hermann and Sophie, for the potatoes and the wisdom.

Preface The journey towards this book started at a language documentation workshop. It was through the conversations and intellectual exchange during this and subsequent meetings that both of us realized the common ground and shared interests we had in exploring African linguistics and its sociocultural contexts. We took off by asking ourselves where to situate African languages and Africanistic research practices – including our own – in relation to language documentation and language endangerment research. Soon we realized that our journey would take us much further than this, leading us from a colonial past into a yet to be created coevalness. This adventure led us down different, winding paths into the realities of African multilingualisms, linguistic creativity, ideologies, epistemes, and dynamics expressed in and on languages. That it culminated in a monograph was enormously facilitated by the series editor, Yaron Matras, who encouraged the first author to submit a proposal on the multilingual settings of West Africa, and whose positive reaction to the somewhat different book idea sped up our journey. We had inspiring travel companions in Felix Ameka, Amadou Kane Beye, Roger Blench, Tucker Childs, Alexander Cobbinah, Jules Jacques Coly, Cheikh Daouda Diatta, Gerrit Dimmendaal, Mathieu Geye, Havenol Douglas, Heinz Felber, Angelika Jakobi, Doris Richter genannt Kemmermann, Rudolf Leger, Meikal Mumin, Nico Nassenstein, Helma Pasch, Moustapha Sall, Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Rachel Watson and Andrea Wolvers. We are particularly grateful to Jeff Good and Johannes Harnischfeger, who commented on virtually every page of our manuscript and whose valuable comments helped us to obtain new perspectives and avoid a garden path or two. We are also deeply indebted to Angelika Mietzner, Klaus Beyer, Maarten Mous and Anne Schumann for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this book, and for sharing their ideas with us, and to Yaron Matras again for his feedback on the final manuscript. The discussions with all of them shaped our understanding of the central question of the book: the perspectives on creating knowledge on African languages, and how they relate to the repertoires and choices of their speakers. They – the speakers – who at the same time are our teachers, receive our deeply felt gratitude for their tremendous tolerance, generosity and sociability. We want to thank in particular Alpha Mané, Ansou Diendiame, Hortense Diandy, feu Dominic Mané, Benjamin Mané, Tèye Suko alias Hélène Coly, Pierrot Mané, Jules Mané, Odette Biai and Jaqueline Diandy in Senegal. In Nigeria, we acknowledge the late Mohammed Hamma Dada, Aya Amina, Tanko Danjuma Noma, the late John Shumen, Jibril Jatau Bara and the late Galadima Barunde Pindiga. We apologize for not mentioning all the many people who have assisted us in various ways, not only in Nigeria and Senegal, but also in Guinea, Mali, Uganda, Sudan

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   Preface

and Cameroon. Besides all this, we want to express how grateful we are to Vera Szöllösi who created an open space for fruitful encounters, and who knows the importance of bringing people together. We owe huge thanks to Monika Feinen for drawing the maps and graphics for our book, to Teresa Poeta for managing our reference management programme, and to Mary Chambers for all the proofreading and formatting. After all, this book is the result of many years of fieldwork experience, teaching and research. It aims at creating a perspective on the study of languages and cultures in Africa that involves both a look at ourselves and those other ways of speaking and living. By bringing together our ideas and views, we simply hope to have raised some challenging questions, first and foremost to ourselves, and encouraged a stimulating discussion that needs to be as multifaceted as the situation we have been depicting. London and Cologne, September 2012

Friederike Lüpke and Anne Storch

Contents  vii Preface   xv List of Tables, Maps and Figures   xix List of Languages  List of figures with cited and archived web pages   xxi Copyrights for reproduced photographs   xxvii Abbreviations 

1 2

1 1.1 1.2 1.2.1 1.2.2 1.2.3 1.2.4 1.2.5 1.2.6 1.3 1.3.1 1.3.2 1.3.3 1.3.4 1.3.5 1.4 1.4.1 1.4.2 1.4.3 1.4.3.1 1.4.3.2 1.4.3.3 1.4.3.4 1.4.3.5

 xxi

Friederike Lüpke & Anne Storch  1 Introduction   1 What this book is about   10 Structure of the book  Friederike Lüpke  13 Multilingualism on the ground    14 Societal multilingualism in Senegal     22 Individual repertoires: six case studies     Localist identities for moving targets 22  24 Purposeful alienation: the ethnolinguistic chameleon   28 The rhetorical return to lost roots   29 A return to what roots?      I am what I speak? 31  32 Well, I’m not what I speak   33 Societal practices nurturing multilingualism   34 Exogynous marriage patterns and movement of daughters      Language acquisition in peer groups and age classes 36  39 Fostering   41 Professional, ritual and crisis mobility and migration      Joking relationships 45 Written languages and the interaction of written and  48 spoken repertoires   49 The ecology of writing in Senegal      The making of guilty illiterates 54  61 African writing: what scope, which languages and scripts?   61 Grapho- and eurocentric ideologies and “restricted literacies”   63 Some literacies are more visible than others   65 Ajami literacies     70 The Ge’ez script  71 The Bamun syllabary 

x   

   Contents

1.4.3.6 1.4.3.7 1.4.3.8 1.5

2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.2 2.3.3 2.3.4 2.3.5 2.3.6 2.3.7 2.4

3 3.1 3.1.1 3.1.2 3.1.3 3.2 3.3 3.3.1 3.3.2 3.4 3.4.1 3.4.2 3.4.3 3.5 3.5.1 3.5.2 3.5.3

 72 N’ko   73 The Tifinagh script      The Vai syllabary 75 For an integrated view of spoken and written multilingual and  75 multiscriptal practices  Anne Storch  77 Doing things with words    79 Some symbolic dimensions of language      A complete language 86  89 Speech registers   91 Play languages   94 Youth languages  Respect languages and other examples of paralexification   104 Special purpose languages   106 Avoidance languages   109 Ritual languages   116 Spirit languages   120 What we can learn from users of speech registers  Anne Storch  123 Language and ideology      Language and power 125 Missionary activities and literacy development efforts   133 Power relationships   134 Conflicting language ideologies   136 Reducing diversity and creating standards  Constructing linguistic deficits and reacting to  141 language obsolescence   142 Lack of words, abundance of sounds      The visible and the invisible 151 Remaining who we are: local theories and  155 concepts of translation   156 Socio-historical background     158 Foreign text in women’s tales  160 Translating silence   162 Ways of making history       Eastern origins 164  167 Hone interpretations of Kisra traditions   172 Spirits of the past 

 128

 97

Contents   

3.5.4 3.6

4 4.1 4.1.1 4.1.2 4.1.3 4.2 4.2.1 4.2.2 4.2.3 4.2.4 4.3 4.3.1 4.3.2 4.3.3 4.4 4.4.1 4.4.2 4.5

5 5.1 5.2 5.2.1 5.2.2 5.2.3 5.3 5.3.1 5.3.2 5.4 5.4.1 5.4.2 5.4.3 5.4.4

Where people think (and don’t think) they come from   175 Ideologies, semiotics and multilingualism 

   xi

 174

Friederike Lüpke & Anne Storch  181 Language and knowledge      Creation of knowledge 181  181 The invention of tradition    196 The view from within   206 Essentialization vs. inclusion   208 Invention of evolution: colonial encounters   210 Why collect, count and classify African languages?   211 Linguistics as science, and language as evolution   214 The origin of data   219 Borders based on typology: noun class ideologies       Epistemes and the expression of knowledge 223  224 Terminologies   229 Categories and the power of tradition   233 Emic and etic perspectives: Baïnounk noun classes      The language of knowledge 244  245 Evidentials and perception   When knowledge systems converge:  253 Atlantic noun classes again      Endangered knowledge 257 Friederike Lüpke & Anne Storch  267 Language dynamics    267 A glance at linguistic diversity   268 Africa in the context of global endangerment discourses   268 African languages as the marginalized among the marginalized       Inapplicable global endangerment criteria 270  275 Ignoring multilingualism and real language dynamics   279 Linguistic rhetoric surrounding endangered languages   279 The misleading equation of rare with small or endangered  Sociohistorical versus biologistic reasoning surrounding endangered  283 languages   291 Where and why African languages are vital or “dying”   291 Language death in the literal sense   293 Languages and climate change      Languages and civil unrest 298  301 Urbanization 

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5.5 5.5.1

 307 Africa-specific vitality and endangerment criteria  The existence of communities of practice and social networks for  308 language socialization in a given language ecology  A “home base” providing the opportunities for maintaining and creating communities of practice and social networks  309 in a given language ecology  Socioeconomic and political stability in the language ecology in  309 question  Attitudes by speakers and non-speakers to the  310 language ecology  The reification of languages in the ecology as “named languages” and  311 their authentication as fully-fledged languages  Responses to language endangerment and  312 marginalization in Africa   312 Overcoming colonial language policies?     313 Continuing imbalanced power relationships  315 The mimesis of mimesis: mimetic excess   322 Outsiders as the “owners” of African languages   323 Linguists as failing to inform discourses of endangerment   327 Language as a thing versus language as flexible social practice  Consequences for the relationships of documentation with  332 “maintenance” and “revitalization”      Revitalization in the future 339

5.5.2

5.5.3 5.5.4 5.5.5 5.6 5.6.1 5.6.2 5.6.3 5.6.4 5.6.5 5.7 5.8 5.9

6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.4.1 6.4.2 6.4.3 6.5 6.5.1 6.5.2 6.5.3

Friederike Lüpke & Anne Storch  345 Not languages: repertoires as lived and living experience      Lessons from Africa 345  347 Changing our metaphors   349 The promise of a different approach      On the way, obstacles 351  351 Hegemonic northern discourses  The canon of descriptive linguistics:  351 power relations in a small field  Researchers and communities as generic pawns on a competitive  352 playing field   353 Finally, a vision   354 First of all: more time and freedom      Then: the notion of quality 354  355 The result: open-ended collaborative projects 

Contents   

6.6 6.6.1 6.6.2

 356 Paradigms as they shift and shuffle  African languages as agency – awake or sleeping   358 The tangible realm of language 

 360 References   391 Language Index      Subject Index 394  399 Author Index 

 356

   xiii

List of Tables, Maps and Figures Table 1 Table 2

p. 37 p. 62

Table 3 Table 4 Table 5 Table 6 Table 7 Table 8

p. 87 p. 88 p. 127 p. 147 p. 148 p. 178

Table 9 Table 10

p. 205 p. 235

Table 11

p. 239

Table 12 Table 13 Table 14

p. 239 p. 241 p. 243

Table 15 Table 16

p. 255 p. 276

Table 17 Table 18 Table 19 Table 20 Table 21

p. 281 p. 317 p. 317 p. 318 p. 319

Map 1 Map 2 Map 3 Map 4 Map 5

p. 15 p. 21 p. 43 p. 64 p. 66

Map 6 Map 7 Map 8 Map 9

p. 80 p. 112 p. 113 p. 131

Age grades in Wolof society Adult literacy and primary enrolment rates in five West African countries Some multimodal features of registers and speech styles Methods of exploring language and context Diglossia in Egypt Translation of political terms Religious terms Multiplicity of language ideologies among Northern Jukun speakers Days of the week as documented in three Baïnounk languages Some intra- and inter-speaker variation regarding class assignment Paradigmatic network for the root moot ‘related to cotton’ in Baïnounk Gubëeher Paradigmatic network for the root lód ‘related to building’ The circular class in Baïnounk Gujaher Different strategies for integrating loanwords in Baïnounk Gubëeher Verbal nouns in Baïnounk and Joola languages Fishman’s (2001) Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) Languages with the highest overall rarity index Languages spoken in different domains in percent Languages written in percent Attitude statements and responses in percent Perceived linguistic repertoires Important named languages of Senegal Languages of Casamance Migration flows in Africa Non-Latin scripts in Africa A selection of West African languages for which Ajami use is attested The Plateau area in central Nigeria Nubian and Meroitic Kordofan Nubian The Jukun-speaking area

xvi   

   List of Tables, Maps and Figures

Map 10 Map 11 Map 12 Map 13 Map 14

p. 246 p. 259 p. 296 p. 297 p. 300

The Maaka area Distribution of Fula and location of Fulɓe states A model of the Lwoo expansion Languages with split-ergative case systems The Baïnounk area

Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3

p. 9 p. 26 p. 27

Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13

p. 30 p. 38 p. 52 p. 56 p. 59 p. 61 p. 69 p. 71 p. 72 p. 73

No swimming, but lots of thriving languages Hélène Coly alias Tèye Suko Calabash worn by Kanyaleen from the Museum of Joola culture in Mlomp Marcelino Diandy and a neighbour Children in Niamone playing by themselves Shop sign in Touba Man in Niamone wearing a BOREPAB T-shirt Certificate for a graduate of the NTM literacy training Text message in Baïnounk Gujaher Mandinka text written in Arabic letters Ge’ez script on an alphabet chart The rulers of the Bamun dynasty in Roman and Bamun script Pages from Vydrine’s Manding-English dictionary in Roman and N’ko script Amazigh word written in Tifinagh The ànákù nóyì with his assistant A day’s harvest of sugar cane Diedrich Hermann Westermann Rural youth language in its context The ákù of Awe Blacksmith in Mavo village Ritual object The Magi in a fresco from the cathedral of Faras Karl Kumm and a view of old/new Ibi Monuments of missionary work in Kona Speakers of three Jukun languages Barunde Galadiman Pindiga Writing lessons in a Qur’anic school Storytellers Jummai and neighbour Barunde visiting the ruins of ancient Pindiga Information given on the website of the New Tribes Mission Alliance missionaries report on the Bible translation into “Dogon”

Figure 14 p. 74 Figure 15 p. 82 Figure 16 p. 85 Figure 17 p. 90 Figure 18 p. 97 Figure 19 p. 101 Figure 20a p. 105 Figure 20b p. 105 Figure 21 p. 111 Figure 22 p. 130 Figure 23 p. 132 Figure 24 p. 145 Figure 25 p. 146 Figure 26 p. 153 Figure 27 p. 158 Figure 28 p. 168 Figure 29 p. 187 Figure 30 p. 190

List of Tables, Maps and Figures   

Figure 31 Figure 32 Figure 33 Figure 34 Figure 35 Figure 36 Figure 37 Figure 38 Figure 39 Figure 40 Figure 41

p. 191 p. 192 p. 193 p. 195 p. 202 p. 203 p. 203 p. 204 p. 216 p. 222 p. 237

Figure 42 Figure 43 Figure 44 Figure 45 Figure 46 Figure 47 Figure 48 Figure 49 Figure 50 Figure 51a Figure 51b Figure 52 Figure 53

p. 253 p. 263 p. 263 p. 264 p. 293 p. 294 p. 316 p. 323 p. 334 p. 341 p. 342 p. 348 p. 355

   xvii

Information on the Dogon country The “Maasai” seen by maasaimissions.org A view on the “Maasai” by responsibletravel.com SIM on the Mursi A report on “Bainouk believers” Report on the first “Bainouk” literacy workshop Information on the “Bainouk-Gunyaamolo” language “Baïnounk” days of the week S.W. Koelle Classification of Jukun The occurrence of suffixed plural forms and animate plural agreement as a function of social network ties Bara, a place that offers many ways to wisdom and truth Semantic network of the “cow class” Semantic network of the –nge class in Proto-Fulfulde Na’i ‘cattle’ A bleak house, speakers gone The Nilometer on Roda Island BOREPAB flyers explaining language death Maslov’s (1954) pyramid of needs Winning the global game: a Monopoly board in Mwaghavul Men’s traditional pastimes: hunting Men’s traditional pastimes: gathering A more fluid picture of Africa An African reward

List of figures with cited and archived web pages Figure 29: http://usa.ntm.org/about/ archived as http://www.webcitation.org/66KVHYpNo Figure 30: http://www.cmalliance.org/news/2012/02/16/dogon-bible-translation-dedicationdraws-5000/ archived as http://www.webcitation.org/66SCwRRs8 Figure 31: http://www.dogoncountry.com/ archived as http://www.webcitation.org/6CdSnoHTM Figure 32: http://www.maasaimissions.org/ archived as http://www.webcitation.org/66SJJjcoI Figure 33: http://www.responsibletravel.com/copy/walking-with-the-maasai archived as http://www.webcitation.org/66SJTluwq Figure 34: http://www.sim.co.uk/people_groups/mursi archived as http://www.webcitation.org/66TW9EhX7 Figure 35: http://www.ntm.org/canada/senegal/news_details.php?news_id=2529 archived at http://www.webcitation.org/6CdkFRRzr Figure 36: http://singapore.ntm.org/news_details.php?news_id=2913 archived as  http://www.webcitation.org/669vmikLr Figure 37: http://www.worldmap.org/getprofile.php?ROG3=GA&QryFld=CP_Peoplegroup archived as http://www.webcitation.org/6Cf1UZH7u

Copyrights for repoduced photographs  Figure 1, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20a/b, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 45, 46, 51a/b, 52, 53: Anne Storch Figure 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 38: Friederike Lüpke Figure 6: Sokhna Bao Diop Figure 42: Alessandro Suzzi Valli Figure 11, 17, 39: photographs kept at Institut für Afrikanistik, Universität zu Köln.

List of Languages Note: Languages are listed with language name first, followed by (sub)-family, (super)-family, phylum, country (if relevant). A language name in this list is tantamount to languoid as the concept used throughout this book.

|Xam: extinct (South Africa) Acholi (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan, Uganda Adhola (also Dhopadhola; Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Uganda Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo): Ghana Alur (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Uganda Amharic (Semitic, Afroasiatic): Ethiopia Anywa (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan, Ethiopia Arabic (Semitic, Afroasiatic) Aramaic (Semitic, Afroasiatic): Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Israel Ashanti see Akan Baale (Surmic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Ethiopia Bafut (Bantoid, Benue-Congo-Niger-Congo): Cameroon Bagirmi (Central Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Nigeria, Chad Baïnounk (also Baïnouk, Baïnounck, Nyun, Banyun; cluster; Atlantic area): Senegal, Gambia and Guinea Bissau Balanta (Atlantic area): Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau Bambara see Mandenkan Bamun (see Mum) Basari (Atlantic area): Senegal Bayot (Atlantic area): Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau Bedik (also Menik; Atlantic area): Senegal Beezen (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Cameroon Belanda Bor (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan Berber (cluster; Berber, Afroasiatic): North Africa, Sahara Bete (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Beti (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Cameroon Birgid (Nubian, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Sudan Boghom (Chadic, Afroasiatic): Nigeria Bole (Chadic, Afroasiatic): Nigeria Boloki (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): DR Congo Bura (Chadic, Afroasiatic): Nigeria Casamance Creole see Creoles Chai (Surmic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Ethiopia Chichewa (also Chinyanja; Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe Chinese (Sino-Tibetan) Chopi (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Uganda Chufie’ (Bantoid, Benue-Congo-Niger-Congo): Cameroon Cicipu (Kainji, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria

xxii   

   List of Languages

Coptic (Egyptian, Afroasiatic): Egypt Creoles (also Casamace Creole, Creole of Guinea Bissau, Kriyol; Portuguese-based creole languages of West Africa): Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau Croatian see Serbian Dagbani (Gur, Niger-Congo): Ghana Damin: initiation language, also see Lardil Dholuo (Nilotic, Eastern-Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Kenya, Tanzania Dinka (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan Diyi (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Dogon (independent family): Mali Dongolawi (Nubian, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Sudan Duala (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Cameroon Eegiima see Joola Egyptian (Egyptian, Afroasiatic) English (Germanic, Indo-European) Ewe (Kwa, Niger-Congo): Ghana, Togo Fang (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Equatorial Guinea, Gabun, Cameroon, Congo Farsi (Indo-Aryan, Indo-European) Fon (Kwa, Niger-Congo): Togo, Benin French (Italic, Indo-European) Frisian (Germanic, Indo-European): Germany, Netherlands Fula see Fulfulde, Fulfulde (also Fula, Peul, Pular, Pulaar, Tokulor; Atlantic area): Sudan Belt from Senegal to Sudan, here: Nigeria, Cameroon Gã (Kwa, Niger-Congo): Ghana, Togo, Benin Gaam (Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Sudan Gbanyito (Kwa, Niger-Congo): Ghana Gbaya (Ubangi): Congo, DR Congo, Central African Republic, Cameroon Gәʔәz (Semitic, Afroasiatic): Ethiopia Gikuyu (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Kenya Giriama (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Kenya Greek (Greek, Indo-European) Gubëeher see Baïnounk Gugëcer (also Kassanga; Atlantic area): Guinea-Bissau Gujaher see Baïnounk Gumuz (isolate): Ethiopia Guñaamolo see Baïnounk Hausa (Chadic, Afroasiatic): Nigeria, Niger, West African Sahel and Sudan Belt Hebrew (Semitic, Afroasiatic) Hindi (Indo-Aryan, Indo-European) Hlonipha, see Isihlonipho Hone (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Ichibemba (Bantu, Benue-Congo-Niger-Congo): Zambia Igala (Volta-Niger, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Igbo (Volta-Niger, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Isihlonipho, also Hlonipha; (avoidance language, gender register): South Africa

List of Languages   

   xxiii

IsiZulu (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi, Mozambique Italian (Italic, Indo-European) Jalaa (isolate): Nigeria Jalonke (Mande): Guinea Jamaican (also Patwa): Jamaica Jamul (Yuman): Mexico, USA Japanese (isolate) Jibe (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Jibu (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Joola (cluster; Atlantic area): Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau Jula (Mande): Mali, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, West Africa Jukun (subgroup of Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria, Cameroon Kadu (also Kadugli; isolate or Nilo-Saharan): Sudan Kambaata (Cushitic, Afroasiatic): Ethiopia Kana (Kegboid, Volta-Niger, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Kanembu (Saharan, Nilo-Saharan): Chad Kanuri (Saharan, Nilo-Saharan): Nigeria, Niger, Chad Kapya (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Karó (Tupi): Brazil Kenzi (Nubian, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Egypt Khoe (Khoe-Sandawe): South Africa, Botswana Kikongo (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Congo Kimbundu (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Angola Kindubile (youth language, register, sociolect): Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo Kisi (Atlantic area): Sierra Leone, Guinea Kobiana (Atlantic area): Senegal, Guinea Bissau Koman (isolate or Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan, Ethiopia Korean (isolate) Kriyol see Creoles Kumam (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Uganda Kupto (Chadic, Afroasiatic): Nigeria Kutep (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Kwami (Chadic, Afroasiatic): Nigeria Labwor (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Uganda Langila (youth language, register, sociolect): Congo Lango (Nilotic, Eastern-Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Uganda Lardil (Australian area or Pama-Nyungan): extinct? (Australia) Limba (Atlantic area): Sierra Leone Limbum (Bantoid, Benue-Congo-Niger-Congo): Cameroon Lingala (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Congo, DR Congo, Republic of Central Africa Lufu (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Luganda (Bantu, Benue-Congo-Niger-Congo): Uganda Luwo (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan Lwoo (subgroup of Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania Ma’a (mixed; Bantu-Cushitic): Tanzania

xxiv   

   List of Languages

Maa (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Kenya, Tanzania Maasai see Maa Maha (also Maaka; Chadic, Afroasiatic): Nigeria Majang (Surmic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Ethiopia Malagasy (Austronesian): Madagaskar Maliseet (Algonquian): USA, Canada Mamprusi (Gur, Niger-Congo): Ghana Mandenkan (also Manding, Bambara, Bamanan; Mande): Mali Mandinka (Mande): Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Gambia Mangbetu (Central Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): DR Congo Maninka (Mande): Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Guinea Manjaku (Atlantic area): Guinea-Bissau, Senegal Mankanya (also Mancagne; Atlantic area): Guinea-Bissau, Senegal Mbembe (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria, Cameroon Mbugu (mixed; Bantu-Cushitic): Tanzania Menik see Bedik Meroitic (Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan) Mina (Chadic, Afroasiatic): Cameroon Mina (Kwa, Niger-Congo): Togo, Benin Mogofin (also Mixifore; Mande): Guinea Mopen (Atlantic Area): extinct? (Senegal) Mum (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Cameroon Mursi (Surmic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Ethiopia Mwaghavul (Chadic, Afroasiatic): Nigeria Ngiti (Central Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Democratic Republic of the Congo Nguni (cluster; Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): South Africa, Lesotho Ninkyop (Platoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Nobiin (Nubian, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Sudan Nubian see Old Nubian, Kenzi, Dingolawi, Birgid, Nobiin Nuer (also Naath; Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan, Ethiopia Nupe (Volta-Niger, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Nyakyusa (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Tanzania Nyimang (also Ama; Nubian, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Sudan Old Irish (Celtic, Indo-European) Old Nubian (Nubian, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): extinct (Sudan, Egypt) Oniyan (also Tenda, Tanda; Atlantic area): Senegal Päri (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan Patwa see Jamaican Creole Pepel (also Papel; Atlantic area): Senegal, Guinea-Bissau Pero (Chadic, Afroasiatic): Nigeria Ptolemaic (Egyptian, Afroasiatic) Pulaar see Fulfulde Pular see Fulfulde Rasta Talk see Jamaican Runyoro (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Uganda Sarwa (Chadic, Afroasiatic): Chad Seereer-Siin (Atlantic area): Senegal

List of Languages   

   xxv

Serbian (Slavonic, Indo-European) Setswana (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Botswana, South Africa Sheng (youth language, register, sociolect): Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda Shibong (also Akum; Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Cameroon Shilluk (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan Sidamo (Cushitic, Afroasiatic): Ethiopia Siwi (Berber, Afroasiatic): Egypt Siwu (Kwa, Niger-Congo): Ghana Somali (Cushitic, Afroasiatic): Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya Songhay (independent family): Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger Soninke (Mande): Senegal, Mali Soso (also Susu; Mande): Guinea Swahili (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Kenya, Tanzania, East Africa Tamasheq (Berber, Afroasiatic): Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso Tangale (Chadic, Afroasiatic): Nigeria Tennet (Surmic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan Thuri (Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): South Sudan Tigre (Semitic, Afroasiatic): Eritrea Tigrinya (Semitic, Afroasiatic): Ethiopia, Eritrea Tima (Kordofanian or separate family, Niger-Congo): Sudan Tirma (Surmic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Ethiopia Tirma-Chai (Surmic, Eastern Sudanic, Nilo-Saharan): Ethiopia, South Sudan Tsonga (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe Tukulor see Fulfulde Twi see Akan Uduk (Koman): Ethiopia Urdu (Indo-Aryan, Indo-European) Vai (Mande): Sierra Leone, Liberia Waja (Adamawa, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Wannu (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Wapa (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Wapan (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Wapha (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Wari’ (Chapacura): Brazil Winnebago (Siouan): USA Wolof (Atlantic area): Senegal, Gambia Wurbo (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria Xhosa (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): South Africa Xitsonga (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe Yalunka (Mande): Senegal, Guinea, Mali Yebekolo (Bantu, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Cameroon Yemsa (Omotic, Afroasiatic): Ethiopia Yoruba (Volta-Niger, Niger-Congo): Nigeria, Benin Yukuben (Jukunoid, Benue-Congo, Niger-Congo): Nigeria, Cameroon Zarma see Songhay Zenaga (Berber, Afroasiatic): Mauritania

Abbreviations agr andativ aug c caus cl, cm compl cond conj cons, consec cont cop def der dem exist fem foc fut gen ideo immed imper imperf impers inan incl indef inf inter, interj intr loc masc mod narr neg neutr nom, nomz

class agreement andative augment, augmented consonant causative class marker, noun class completive, complementizer conditional conjunction consecutive continuous, continuative copula definite derivational affix demonstrative existential feminine focus future genitive ideophone immediate witness (evidential marker) imperative imperfective impersonal inanimate inclusive indefinite infinitive interjection intransitive locative masculine modified narrative negative neuter nominalizer

xxviii   

   List of Tables, Maps and Figures

o, obj 0 part pass past perf, perv pl, pl poss prep qm quot ref refl rel relat rep repet sg, sg, sing. sm subj svc tam tel top tr v vn

object zero participle passive past tense perfective plural possessive preposition question marker quotative referential reflexive relative relative marker repetitive repetition singular suppletive morpheme subjunctive subordinate verbal clause tense, aspect, mood telic topic transitive vowel verbal noun

Friederike Lüpke & Anne Storch

Introduction 1 What this book is about This book arises from our complementary and overlapping interests in African languages and the ways in which they are spoken, used and understood. We feel that established approaches to these languages and their contexts – approaches being based on still barely reflected upon academic pasts – no longer suffice as appropriate means of describing and documenting them. These approaches include our own research, which until recently has been very much influenced by a way of producing “data” described by Blommaert (2008): There is an idea which is central to much of modern professional linguistics: the idea that language needs to be seen primarily as a limited collection of ordered forms – grammar – and of words – lexis. The assumption is, then, that modern linguistics has to find, identify and codify these things in ‘grammars’, ‘dictionaries’ and similar textual artefacts of scholarship. […] There are two deeper assumptions at play here. The first one is that speech – language in its actually used form, characterised by variability, negotiability and contextboundedness  – can be reduced to ‘language’ by attending to and ‘extracting’ the core forms-and-combinations, and listing its words. In other words, the fantastic variation that characterises actual language in use can (and should be) reduced to an invariable, codified set of rules, features and elements in order to be the ‘true’ language that can qualify as an object of linguistic study. […] The second assumption is that such reduction efforts can and need to be done in specific, regimented forms of textuality. In other words, it is not enough to just know these rules of grammar and lists for words, they must actually exist in specific genres of textual artefacts of limited size and specific shape. (Blommaert 2008: 291-292)

Like many fieldworkers, we feel that such an approach to African linguistic settings remains incomplete. Hence, dissatisfied by the dominant scholarly perspective on speaking that separates it from the real life of speakers, and in the heritage of Boas and Saussure – aptly characterized by Blommaert – our book is motivated by the wish to find ways of scholarly engagement with the linguistic practices in Africa that better capture what we perceive as central to them. Where we question approaches, traditions and dogmata, this is not meant as dismissing important contributions to research in African linguistics. Rather, we see this endeavour as a necessary enterprise for ourselves and our discipline to interrogate dominant positivistic notions with which we were brought up in ways analogous to the postmodern revolution in anthroplogy, but with the wish to not only deconstruct, but reconstruct concepts. Two core observations stem from our research experiences

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   Friederike Lüpke & Anne Storch

in several African contexts in the research paradigm described by Blommaert, and from the clash we perceive between it and the view of speaking as a social practice. The first is that speakers’ profiles can be better described and understood in terms of registers and repertoires than in terms of discrete languages. The second observation is that just as there are no fixed languages or fixed linguistic identities, there is no fixed alignment of linguistic practice with ethnically or otherwise construed aspects of identity. Rather, choices depending on domains, contexts, addressees and many other factors have a large role to play in determining which register and repertoire will be used. While there is ample discussion of these issues in the vast literature on the ethnography of speaking, on sociolinguistics and variation, on languages in education and on language ideologies, it is our feeling that such a view of communication has not been taken up by mainstream descriptive and documentary linguists, in particular in the Africanist tradition, in which we ourselves have been trained. The importance of social behaviour, and a perspective on language as a socially embedded practice have of course been stressed already, but research on language as practice remains largely unconnected to research on language as a system till today. For our own research, we consider it a matter of urgency to integrate the insights from ethnographic and sociolinguistic research into the theory and practice of linguistic description and documentation, for instance by looking at and describing language use in social networks (Milroy 1980, 1987, among others) and communities of practice (Eckert 2000; Wenger 2000) instead of positing it in constructed, homogenous and often ill-defined “speech communities”. Our book, stemming from a questioning of our own research practice, intends to contribute some reflections towards this goal. This introduction serves to frame our endeavour, first by giving a flavour of the ideologies which we do not find helpful, but which dominate research practice and perceptions of speakers of African languages alike, and then by formulating some perspectives we consider better suited to appraise African communicative practices.

Against an artefactualization of languages Like most field linguists, we have produced research output in the form of abstractions, such as descriptive grammars, corpora and dictionaries of particular languages. Blommaert (2008) has coined the label “artefactual ideology” for this canonical triad of field linguists’ production of grammars, dictionaries and texts. Artefactualization goes beyond the insistence on specific formats to “catch language” (see also Ameka, Dench, & Evans 2006 on the challenges and ideologies surrounding this task). The term reminds us of the dangerously under-appre-

Introduction   

   3

ciated fact that linguistic research creates its very own objects of studies: as Blommaert puts it, grammars and other scholarly products are the birth certificates of languages. In the African context, there is no clear notion of language that is independent of the activities of linguists or missionaries (who are often linguists themselves), and in addition to questioning the canon, in our own work we have come to question the notion of languages as the central units of linguistic description. In this book, we cannot avoid the use of the term language, and because of its omnipresence, we do not put it between scare quotes, as we do with many contentious concepts. Still, we cannot emphasize enough that “language” is only meaningful in geopolitical terms, lending a discrete identity, status, and power to otherwise fluctuating, hybrid, and changing linguistic practices and creating the illusion of an undifferentiated and homogeneous associated “community”. We follow Good & Hendryx-Parker (2006), who coin a term that is meant to remind us of the basically arbitrary nature of “language” – that of languoid: a cover term for any type of lingual entity: language, dialect, family, language area, etc. It is roughly similar to the term  taxon  from biological taxonomy, except it is agnostic as to whether the relevant linguistic grouping is considered to be genealogical or areal (or based on some other possible criteria for grouping languages). (Good & Hendryx-Parker 2006: 5)

Languoids can be recursively composed of other languoids. The smallest languoids are doculects (Good & Hendryx-Parker 2006) – those languoids that have been described and documented (and hence turned into languoids). The terminology reflects both the status and the process of creating entities (as opposed to merely discovering or describing them) that underlies much of linguistic practice. A documentation or description is not of a language; it creates a language. The term doculect captures what linguists do much better: they describe a  – more or less explicit and motivated  – selection of the communicative practices they encounter in their field sites. Only once this process has taken place does a “named language” (Blommaert & Rampton 2011) come into existence.

Against the irresistible power of numbers An important task for contemporary linguists, in Africa and beyond, is to remind ourselves of the dynamics of language as a social practice, and of its hybridity. An enumeration that suggests the exact opposite, namely stable and permanent language boundaries, fixed identities, and the importance of absolute numbers, is what we want to challenge in this book. Linguists are for the most part aware of the problems with defining languages and counting their speakers, but often feel

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   Friederike Lüpke & Anne Storch

that they need to invoke these numbers because of the dominant ideology that perceives languages in these terms, as we have been doing ourselves in our work. Consider the following statements: It is generally agreed by linguists that today there are about 7,000 languages across the world; and that at least half of these may no longer continue to exist after a few more generations. (Austin & Sallabank 2011: 1) The enumeration of languages objectifies them and implies that they are discrete, independent units, a notion which goes against ample linguistic research in language/dialect continua and linguistic variation. […] Moreover, this kind of rhetoric brings about a commodification of the speakers as well (see Dobrin at al. 2009, Errington 2003, J. Hill 2002, for compelling arguments). (Austin & Sallabank 2011: 18)

These two citations from the introduction to the Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages point to the geopolitical nature of the term language, and to a conundrum faced by linguists that is perfectly captured by the contradiction in the essence of the two statements by the same authors in one and the same article. The authors, well aware and critical of the objectification and commodification of languages – their treatment as measurable entities to which definite values can be attached – and of the essentialist discourses – looking at languages as uniquely embodying their speakers’ identity and culture – often employed in language endangerment discourse (Dobrin, Austin & Nathan 2007), start off their introduction to the handbook with a first sentence that does exactly what they criticize elsewhere: objectify languages. To be fair, as evidenced by the second quote, they relativize the value of those numbers later in the chapter, but the fact that they felt compelled to invoke weight of numbers in the first place (and on page 1 of the handbook) deserves consideration.¹ The power of numbers seems to be irresistible, especially when advocating for minority and endangered languages, and we do not exempt ourselves from the tendency to underpin our arguments with numbers of languages and speakers that are doubtful for a variety

1 In the same vein, Harrison (2007: 3) states that “In the year 2001, as the second millennium came to a close, at least 6,912 distinct human languages were spoken worldwide. Many linguists now predict that by the end of our current twenty-first century – the year 2101 – only about half of these languages may still be spoken.” In a footnote, he concedes: “It is in fact impossible to arrive at any valid and verifiable count of the world’s languages. Many languages exist in a continuum of tongues. Dividing these up into discrete entities remains a purely sociopolitical, not scientific, enterprise. It is also one often deeply biased by the power dynamics of colonialism and outside influence (Mühlhäusler 1996; Hill 2002).” (Harrison 2007: 237). Romaine (2007) offers another example of the same tendency.

Introduction   

   5

of reasons, all of them listed in Austin & Sallabank’s introduction: their shaky empirical basis, the lack of clear and applicable criteria to identify languages and distinguish them from dialects and idiolects, the problematic notion of what it means to be a (native) speaker of these not clearly definable languages, etc. The overuse of such statistics in the transmission of institutionalized expertise and knowledge currently results in still more omnipresent and fast travelling accounts of languages and numbers, namely digital maps that contain not only figures on endangered languages, but also non-existing ones  – languages that are mere fantasies, never were spoken, but are now placed “on the map”, and on the web, so as to fill empty spaces. Such fantasy languages, numbers and names that can be found on Google and UNESCO maps, for example, in a way resemble the geographical fantasies of medieval travellers and cartographers, who placed monsters and cephalopods in those spaces that remained unknown. It seems as though the names of all these mysterious endangered languages, which will disappear before scientists can grasp all the wisdom enshrined in them, are the cephalopods of our age – without extensive research their very existence must remain elusive.

Against unconsidered ideologies on languages and their ecology In as much as our ways of framing and exhibiting knowledge on Africa’s ways of speaking, linguistics and cultural studies are linked to our own epistemic ideologies and conceptualizations of language, so are the targets of our research and thinking part and parcel of the same ideologies. Linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have for some time now investigated the vested interests and powerful ideas that surround language and its use. Within descriptive and documentary linguistics and in the public perception, language ideologies  – “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (Irvine 1989: 255), in particular those that presuppose discrete languages that need to be standardized in order to serve modern communicative functions, are rarely questioned. Our book aims to invite reflection within our own field upon the ideologies that underlie our activities and to create a greater awareness of them in the many stakeholders connected with African languages. We recognize, of course, that there are scenarios where the notion of distinct languages and the discrete identities tied to them is more valid than in the contexts we are going to treat in this book: the American and Australian contexts of colonial confrontation and the creation of a dichotomy between “indig-

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enous” and “colonial” languages. In these situations, labelling languages as discrete entities is not only easier from a sociopolitical, historical and linguistic point of view than in the scenarios we want to examine, but speaking a recognized “named language” with a specified number of speakers can empower the oppressed minorities speaking them, at least in situations where at least some minority language rights have been implemented. In the majority of African situations of multilingualism, the inverse holds. As commonly observed by Africanists (Good 2012; Lüpke 2009; Mous 2003a), these maximally contrastive situations both in terms of hierarchical relationships between languages and their speakers and in terms of linguistic distinctiveness of the languages present in a given multilingual context are rare. They do exist, for instance, in Southern Africa, where Khoisan-speaking² peoples experience a (quasi) colonial situation, be it through the invasion of Dutch and British settlers or through a forced resettlement and assimilation induced by their Bantu-speaking neighbours (Dimmendaal 2008; Dimmendaal & Voeltz 2007). Not coincidentally, Khoisan languages are better represented in endangered language documentation programmes than any other (genetic or areal) group of African languages – but the very different settings encountered in other situations on the African continent do not fit these ideologies.

Against induced objectification and commodification For all African situations that we are familiar with, objectification and commodification are not empowering, but have fatal consequences for the languages and their speakers. The language ideologies that are imported leave very little room for agency by the speakers of the externally determined languages to acquire any linguistic and sociopolitical benefits through this process. Sailors, traders, missionaries and colonial administrators were the first to label languages³, provide word lists to prove their existence, catalogue speakers according to a language they spoke, map these languages and try to standardize them. Linguists joined in, often closely collaborating with missionaries (who, it should be remembered,

2 The term Khoisan is, as now commonly accepted among Africanists, used as a term of convenience that does not entail any genetic relatedness of these languages. 3 Of course, the labels they used may be read as evidence that “named languages” existed prior to the arrival of Europeans. Yet, the reference of the collected terms is often unclear – it might name a language, an occupational or political group, a group of traders or a linguistic group, to name but a few possibilities.

Introduction   

   7

have their own agenda in identifying languages and standardizing them in order to translate scripture into these languages). For most of the twentieth century, the notion of languages as homogenous and discrete entities was not challenged by the prevailing models of linguistic descriptions, with many grammars distilling a language from the idiolect of one (in most cases formally educated male) speaker. These languages were not only created by outsiders, but they were also owned by them, and in many cases continue to be so (an issue we explore in depth in chapter 4).

Against simplistic views of power dynamics in multilingual societies Another central topic of our book is an investigation of the power dynamics present in African multilingual societies. Our research experiences in settings where more than one language is used on a daily basis is another reason to question “language” as the best descriptive perspective in these situations. Multilingual societies have other consequences: most Africanists agree that language is only one, and in many cases not the most important, marker of one’s identity in the majority of African multilingual situations. Dominant metaphors of language shift (for instance invoking Wolof and Hausa as “killer languages”, cf. Batibo 2005) are directly fed by endangerment situations outside Africa, and depict traumatic scenarios of forced language loss where, in fact, languages survive even in small-scale communities as long as their ecological functions are not taken away, and are given up without a great sense of identity loss when this ecological niche ceases to exist (see also Mc Laughlin 2008b, 2001; Mufwene 2010, 2002, 2001). Leading sociolinguists have adopted differentiated and nonessentialist models of multilingualism (Djité 2009; Mufwene 2001; Romaine 2006, 2002), and many (Duchêne & Heller 2007a; Makoni & Meinhof 2004) have criticized the conflictual, essentialist model of multilingualism adopted by many advocates of endangered languages within and outside of academia. Yet, the imagery employed (and justifiably so) for many examples of language shift and language death in Australian and American contexts, is often uncritically exported to Africa, where it results in dramatic misconceptions of the interaction of African languages, often in the absence of any sociolinguistic research that would allow us to arrive at a differentiated analysis. (We dedicate chapter 5 to the dynamics of language use in Africa and include a detailed discussion of language endangerment and death.) The issues evoked in the preceding paragraphs sum up our main motivation to write this book. But we do not just want to react against dominant and, as

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we argue, misplaced, ideas and ideologies on African languages. Through our research in multilingual African communities, we have learned about the many creative and playful ways in which complex facets of identity are accommodated, negotiated, confirmed or (temporarily or permanently) altered, and we feel that it is important to share this “African experience” 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. It is to these positive aspects of African multilingualism that we want to draw attention, as an inspiring example of the tolerance, social cohesion strategies and creative accommodation efforts needed to create successful multilingual societies that are the – under-reported – normality in present-day Africa, in stark contrast to the equally existing “ethnic conflict” scenarios that dominate the media and public perception.

For a differentiated look at agency in language use and shift and at ownership of “languages” For this endeavour, it is crucial to have a critical look at the concepts of agency and ownership, taking into account the many external agents – NGOs, UNESCO, missionary organizations, western linguists – as well as the stakeholders on the ground, and to understand their competing and/or related motives regarding the creation of ideologies on African languages as well as in language policy and planning (or the absence thereof).

For an appraisal of language(s) as powerful forms of socially active knowledge Throughout the book, we also examine how the different languages used in a number of multilingual settings described in our case studies serve to express socially relevant knowledge, how multilingual repertoires complement or mirror each other, what local concepts and theories of language and translation are at work, and of course we also contrast these with the “imported” views mentioned above (this issue is central to the entire book, but is especially important in chapter 2).

Introduction   

   9

For a better understanding of language survival and language death in Africa Although our focus is on those manifold aspects of multilingualism that guarantee its maintenance, we cannot ignore the fact that African languages are “dying”, even if they generally have been classified as more vital than languages outside the continent (Mous 2003a; Dimmendaal & Voeltz 2007). We will attempt in this book to understand the reasons that make African languages vital or endangered, and to suggest a catalogue of criteria that allow us to assess them better than the existing endangerment scales, which have a monolingual bias and are not really suitable in an African context. We will also discuss the contentious issue of language revitalization – eminent Africanists are among the few linguists openly opposed to the concept of language revitalization (Ladefoged 1992; Newman 2003) – and contextualize it in our discussion of language survival and language death (see chapter 5).

Figure 1: No swimming, but lots of thriving languages

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For an acceptance and respect of choices In this context, we emphasize our view that it is up to us as Westerners to accept the linguistic choices made by the communities we work with, after carefully assessing them (for a similar view, see also Dimmendaal 2008). It is a dangerous pitfall (and a mirror image to the colonial linguistic coercion that resulted in, for instance, forbidding the use of African languages in school in French colonies) to want to oblige communities to fix their linguistic and social identities, and a dangerous ideology to regard their failure to have the wish to maintain a language as a deficit caused by poverty, lack of education, or oppression per se. Rather, we argue, we need to arrive at a deep understanding of different and always complex situations, have an awareness of our own biases (for instance regarding the existence of a clearly identifiable “mother tongue” and its potential scope in contexts of complex multilingualism) and take our interlocutors seriously. We do feel that simplistic notions of linguistic human rights (as proposed by Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson 1995) or the literal application of metaphors like “cultural capital” (reducing a language to the access it allows to economical advantages) fail to grasp the realities of many African situations. There is a great danger of the preconceptions formed by them overriding an accurate empirical assessment of multilingual situations, and tending to downplay speakers’ agency and choices – a tendency that may well stem from looking at Africa from an American/Australian colonization-and-settlement perspective. With this book, we want to redress this perspective and, without idealizing and homogenizing a continent with varied and different social, political, religious and ecological parameters, draw attention to some general characteristics of African multilingual societies that are of particular relevance not just for an understanding of Africa’s linguistic landscape, but also for an understanding of multilingualism and language survival in general.

2 Structure of the book We set out to introduce readers to the complex linguistic landscapes of Africa by looking at multilingualism and the social mechanisms that nurture its maintenance in chapter 1, written by Friederike Lüpke. A number of case studies from her current research area in Senegal provide a detailed introduction to some of those practices – exogynous marriage patterns, child fostering, joking relationships, and ritual, educational and economic mobility  – that contribute to the coexistence of several languages in many African societies, before these practices are discussed more generally.

Introduction   

   11

Chapter 2, written by Anne Storch, looks at “multilingualism” within and beyond a “language”: she describes the various registers, sociolects and varying repertoires that characterize linguistic behaviour in what is customarily seen as one language, and across languages in a multilingual society. She shows that, just as in patterns of multilingualism, speakers create and change parts of their identities through choices of register and lect, making polylectality analogous with multilingualism and reminding us that even within what is construed as homogeneous, there is heterogeneity and variation. In chapter 3, Anne Storch presents us with the conflicting language ideologies that are at work in the polylectal and multilingual environments described so far. She provides examples for the ideologies that speakers construct for themselves, and looks at how outsiders capture and characterize the linguistic practices they encounter against the backdrop of their own language ideologies. Language ideologies are a topic carried over into chapter 4 on language and epistemes, written jointly by Friederike Lüpke and Anne Storch. Here, the consequences of powerful language ideologies for the perception of African languages, for the creation of knowledge about them, and for capturing what knowledge they contain, are in focus. The hegemony of ideologies stemming from the “First World” brings us to chapter 5, again co-written by Friederike Lüpke and Anne Storch, that has at its core the power dynamics between ideologies, resources, and stakeholders – and, last but not least, between languages. In chapter 6, finally, both authors develop a sketch of how better approaches and perspectives can be created and achieved.

Friederike Lüpke

1 Multilingualism on the ground Scholars studying western Africa are challenged by conundrums involving relationships between languages, social groupings, and cultures. People in western Africa define themselves principally according to kinship and occupational affiliations and only secondarily in linguistic terms. Indeed individuals and families change their languages and modify their social and cultural patterns in ways that are often perplexing to outsiders. Individuals may change their family names to assert their affiliation with elite families, to express client relationships, apprenticeships, or religious affiliation, and for other reasons. (Brooks 1993: 27)

Many readers from a Western background will easily be capable of stating their mother tongue or first language, and listing a second and maybe more additional or “foreign” languages they speak. Unless they come from a bi- or multilingual background, they will have learnt these languages at school and often do not get to use them in everyday communication. While essentially monolingual individuals exist in Africa, they are far from being the norm. In the following sections, I look at the often strikingly complex language repertoires of individuals in a number of settings. I then take the observations on patterns of multilingual language use to the level of society by presenting some typical configurations both in cities and in rural contexts. I end the chapter by presenting the main mechanisms that facilitate multilingual practices and keep them alive in changing societies. In section 1.1, societal multilingualism is exemplified based on the sociolinguistic situation in Senegal, although occasionally, research from other areas in Africa is drawn on. The motivation for this focus on a particular West African country lies in my longstanding first-hand research experience in this country and in the possibility of presenting not only facets of multilingual language use but also introducing the relevant historical and geopolitical facts underlying it in preparation of the discussion of individual pathways and practices of individuals that follows in section 1.2. In light of the great diversity of situations, no pan-African generalizations are attempted. However, some recurrent and important social factors that, either alone or in interplay with other factors, may be of relevance throughout the continent, will be introduced in section 1.3. Section 1.4 looks at the interaction of spoken and written registers in multilingual African situations. The necessary background on Senegalese writing practices is provided in section 1.4.1 together with a case study. These particular situations are embedded in a wider context in section 1.5.

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1.1 Societal multilingualism in Senegal This West African country owes its name to the Senegal River that borders it to the north and east. Senegal has a population of ca. 14 million, most of who speak the major language Wolof as one language of their repertoire, although it is the “ethnic”, “vernacular” or identity language of only 40 % of the population. The official language is French, the ex-colonial idiom, but (standard) French is only used in a small number of contexts and by ca. 10 % of the population (for all percentages, see Mc Laughlin 2008b). The northern part of the country, located in the Sahel and Islamized a long time ago, occupies one overarching cultural space, due to its common religion and its location in the sphere of influence of a number of kingdoms and empires, and is dominated by three large languages – Wolof, Pulaar¹, and Seereer-Siin, all belonging to the Atlantic areal grouping of languages discussed in detail below. In the east of the country, bordering Mali, the Mande languages, Maninka, belonging to the Manding language cluster, and Soninke, are spoken alongside minority languages belonging to the Mande and Atlantic groupings, such as Yalunka, Menik and Basari. The south of the country belongs to a very different cultural and linguistic sphere. South of the River Gambia, in an area that until recently was outside the reach of Christianity and Islam, a high number of languages is spoken by small communities in various multilingual settings. Among them figure the Joola and Baïnounk languages from the Atlantic group, which occupy a prominent place in this book. Mandinka, a Mande language, is an important language of the region and serves as a language of wider communiction, alongside Wolof and French.

1 Also known as Fula, Ful, Fulfulde, Peulh, Pulaar and Pular. Peul, Fula and Ful are the French, English and German versions of the language name respectively. The differences in the initial vowel illustrate consonant mutation of stems in this language: Peul is derived from the singular pull-o ‘Fula person’, with a class suffix. Fula and Ful are based on the corresponding plural stem ful-ɓe, with a different class suffix. Number and other categories are additionally indicated through different initial consonants of the base. Throughout this book, we use Pulaar to refer to the Fula variety spoken in Senegal, Pular to indicate the Fula variety spoken in Guinea, Maasina Fulfulde for the Malian variety of this language, and Adamawa Fulfulde for the Cameroonian variety. Where we refer to the language without making allusion to a particular variety, we will use the terms Fula and Fulfulde.

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Map 1: Important named languages of Senegal

A word on the significance of the groupings Atlantic and Mande is in order. Regarding Atlantic, what was a geographically and typologically motivated grouping in Koelle’s Polyglotta Africana (Koelle 1963 [1854]), followed by attempts to integrate the languages into the Niger-Congo family tree as a genetic group of languages, is now again seen as a conglomerate of very diverse languages. It is mainly their location on the Atlantic coast of West Africa that motivates grouping them together as Atlantic languages (Childs 2010; Dalby 1971; Lüpke forthcoming; Sapir 1971; Wilson 1989 inter alia). Yet it remains remarkable that many of the languages share large portions of non-basic vocabulary (not usually taken into account when measuring genetic relatedness, i.e. descent from a common ancestor language) and exhibit a great degree of convergence in many areas of structure. In addition, the features of noun classes, initial consonant mutation, ATR vowel harmony, labio-velar consonants, and verb extensions, or a subset of them, are widespread across languages of this group; the status of these features as inherited, typological or acquired through language contact is uncertain. The genetic unity of Mande languages, on the other hand, has been less questioned, although their exact position in the Niger-Congo family tree is contentious (see Dimmendaal 2008 for a recent summary). Since Mande and Atlantic languages

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are so very different from each other in structure, the labels remain useful to categorize languages of Senegal into (genetically related) Mande languages and (differently related) Atlantic languages. In the light of the high extent of multilingualism, it is very likely that transfer of lexical and grammatical material through language contact was and is one of the major factors creating the convergences that make “Atlantic” a meaningful grouping. Despite its great role in shaping the lexicon and structures of languages throughout West Africa, language contact has not been a topic of major concern in African linguistics until very recently (see also Childs 2010, 2003), not just because of a preoccupation with genealogical relatedness, as also noted by Pozdniakov (2007), but also because of a lack of data on languages in contact, unless this contact involves a European and a major African language. However, only a systematic investigation of societal and individual patterns and motivations of language contact and multilingualism and their linguistic consequences will allow a conclusive answer to the question of whether Atlantic is justified as a linguistic grouping. There are some recent contributions raising awareness of contact phenomena and calling for more and concerted research in the Mande-Atlantic sphere and beyond (Cobbinah 2010; Lüpke 2010a, 2010b; Lüpke & Chambers 2010 and the papers therein), and this book also intends to make a contribution towards a greater awareness of multilingualism and language contact.

Language in the city Language contact is likely to have played and to continue to play an eminent role in language change in the entire geographical area, because multilingualism is so deeply anchored in the societies in question. The existence of several languages in an individual’s brain, just like their coexistence in diverse communicative contexts in a society, are likely to have an important impact on the lexica and grammars in such contact. In Senegal, patterns of multilingualism have been studied extensively by Caroline Juillard and Martine Dreyfus, among others, and have received a detailed treatment in two monographs by Juillard (1995) and Dreyfus & Juillard (2007) and numerous essays by both researchers, notably Juillard (2010). In analogy to the case studies presented further below, which introduce individuals from the southern area of Casamance (with the administrative centre Ziguinchor) and from the capital Dakar, the authors focus on the southern city of Ziguinchor (Juillard) and on the capital Dakar (Dreyfus) respectively, and are able to draw important conclusions based on the similarities and differences between these two different settings. While both cities present a mix of lan-

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guages, this heterogeneity is newer in Dakar. Due to its status as the administrative and economic centre of the country only since 1902, when it succeeded Saint Louis as the capital of the French areas in West Africa, Dakar has become a centre of urbanization that attracts immigrants in a situation of constant reconfiguration of multilingualism. Whereas Ziguinchor as a city is also representative of the trend for rapid urbanization, its population movements remodel patterns of multilingualism that have been present in Casamance for a long time. While multilingualism in Dakar is organized around three poles – Wolof, French and “ethnic” (or group/ “vernacular”– languages), it is much more diversified in Ziguinchor, and even the role of Wolof, the most widespread language of Senegal, is different in the two cities: Dreyfus and Juillard state that Wolof is being vernacularized – turned into the group language of people of proclaimed different “ethnic” identities – in Dakar, whereas it is being vehicularized – used as an inter-group language – in Ziguinchor. As we shall see through the example of Moustapha Sall in section 1.2.5, it is quite common for people who have grown up in Dakar, especially if they are married to speakers of other languages, to shift to Wolof as their main language. This process can be observed in Ziguinchor as well, but there is a much stronger tendency for maintaining linguistic diversity there. The scope of Wolof is growing in Ziguinchor, as in Dakar, but its role is more that of a vehicular language (and in that function it replaces other languages such as a Portuguese-based Creole that had assumed this role before) and of a youth register rather than the language of a new urban identity, as in Dakar. At the same time, and paradoxically at first sight, Juillard and Dreyfus state that “Dakar se dewolofise” [Dakar is dewolofising] (2004: 55). How can this observation be reconciled with their claim that Wolof is becoming the main language of a growing number of individuals in Dakar? Because of its particular role as a language of wider communication, Wolof, which is not much dialectally differentiated (Robert 2011), has developed two different varieties, at least in its symbolic representation; in reality, a continuum, rather than a neat dichotomy between its two assumed varieties, is the norm. On the one hand, there is “pure” or “deep” Wolof – the “ethnic” language of people who base their ethnic and linguistic identity on being Wolof, and which in turn is composed of different speech styles (Irvine 1978). This idealized Wolof variety is closely associated with the rural home bases of Wolof in the Cayor and Baol regions of Senegal, where the old Wolof empires were located, but it is not the Wolof variety that is most in use in present-day Senegal. Opposed to the variety perceived as ethnic is “urban” or “Dakar Wolof” (Mc Laughlin 2008b, 2001) – a de-ethnicized language of urban origin with a high percentage of French lexical borrowings. Urban Wolof is often regarded as a conventionalized instance of Wolof-French code switching (Poplack & Meechan 1995), unmarked codeswitching (Myers-

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Scotton 1993), code-mixing (Swigart 1994) or a product of “cultural creolization” (Swigart 1994) that owes its existence to postcolonial bilingual situations. However, many speakers of urban Wolof have no, or very limited, knowledge of French, and this is likely to have been the case since its inception in eighteenth century Saint Louis (Mc Laughlin 2008a). Many stigmatize this Wolof variety for the drastic influence of French, but also for its simplified grammatical structure when compared to rural or “pure” Wolof. So, for instance, urban Wolof is said to exhibit less noun classes than rural varieties – but see Irvine (1978) on a simplification of the noun class inventory in a rural Wolof-speaking community for the sake of social differentiation. It is often viewed as a somewhat deficient Wolof, employing French where full expressivity in “pure” Wolof cannot be reached, a deplorable state of language for which the alienating influences of colonization, urban life and globalization is to be blamed. However, Mc Laughlin shows that urban Wolof is much older and more conventionalized than generally assumed, going back to “a prestigious urban code, modelled after the speech of a small group of bilingual elites” (2008a: 714) in the city of Saint Louis, the earliest French settlement in Africa. There and in Gorée, an offshore island and former trading post and slave depot, “linguistic brokers” – members of the métis elite communities descended mainly from French traders and African women, the signares, and whose main language was Wolof – “helped fashion the unique variety of urban Wolof” (2008a: 719). Despite many negative attitudes towards it, urban Wolof or “l’alternance wolof français”, as Dreyfus and Juillard call it, is the city way of speaking Wolof, and is adopted by a fast growing immigrant population to Dakar and other cities as their main language, who thus contribute to turning it into a language everyone can speak. At the same time, there is no fixed and distinct code to which the appellation “urban Wolof” corresponds; rather urban Wolof unites a number of different and highly variable registers whose exact mix of Wolof and French depends on the speech act participants and their demographic characteristics, on the setting, and on the topic. Researchers argue that Wolof (in particular, urban Wolof) is being de-ethnicized, de-vernacularized or creolized (Dreyfus & Juillard 2004; Mc Laughlin 2008b; Swigart 1994). This process is seen as related to the course of urbanization: the phenomenon of speaking not a group language but a language that is partly independent of a particular group identity, means a neutralization of parts of language-associated identity (as opposed to constituting a switch in linguistic or ethnic identity). But the question that arises in the light of the case studies we have seen so far is whether the uncertainty, hybridity or cancellation of parts of the repertoire which are present in all the identities we will see in the case studies is a new fact, and is linked to urbanization, or whether it is a common factor of multilingualism that is as old as the coexistence of several languages in individu-

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als and their surroundings. As is often the case in Senegal, an essentialist mindset of both practitioners and observers in assuming past and present states of purity and homogeneity as precursors to complex contemporary situations, contrasts with fluid identities on the ground. For urban Wolof, Mc Laughlin (2008a) convincingly demonstrates that counter to common analyses of urban Wolof as a typical postcolonial phenomenon (Swigart 1994; Cruise O’Brien 1998), it emerged much earlier, not through diglossia with French in a colonial setting, but as a prestigious urban variety of Wolof in the eighteenth century in the trading posts of Saint Louis (and possibly Gorée) in what was to become French West Africa in 1904. We treat questions associated with urbanization and concomitant changes in linguistic practices in detail in chapter 5. Here, it may suffice to highlight the need to carefully assess all situations, present and past, if possible, before claiming new dynamics in situations where multilingualism is likely to predate the colonial period by centuries, if not millennia. In contrast to the tendency to embrace Wolof as the first language in most communicative contexts in Dakar, inhabitants of Ziguinchor give it a more nuanced and limited role. The existence of Ziguinchor as an urban settlement, like that of Dakar, goes back to a trade post that has exponentially grown in the twentieth century, whereby its topography represents and so preserves the linguistic diversity characteristic for the entire region. Established neighbourhoods have their particular linguistic profiles, without being homogenous. What is important, in Ziguinchor as in Casamance as a whole, is not so much sharing a language as sharing a pattern of multilingualism. Knowing which languages to expect in which place or context helps to keep multilingual repertoires alive by creating routines, occasions for playful interactions in several languages and conventionalized contexts for their use. This predictability facilitates the use of a high number of languages instead of adopting one exclusive vehicular language. According to Dreyfus & Juillard (2004), it is in the old, established, neighbourhoods of Ziguinchor (and, to a limited extent, Dakar), that there is the least need to revert to Wolof. In contrast, whenever an unknown communicative situation is present, Wolof – and French – are imposing themselves as the automatic choice, although in some situations, for instance in the market, it is possible to negotiate the language of the transaction. Yet French in Senegal is far from assuming the dominant role that some sociolinguists, e.g. Chaudenson (1989) predict for it. French, as already mentioned in passing, is nevertheless inescapable in both cities, being the official language of the country. French is not only attested in those contexts that by law demand it – administration, media, education – but has a growing importance in the home context. For many city dwellers it is used on a par with Wolof. Yet the use of standard French is limited to the urban middle classes, and the use of French alongside Wolof, often analyzed as code-switching

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or alternance in French (Dreyfus & Juillard 2004) is questionable as an instance of code-switching, because in many cases, the speakers using French material have no or only limited knowledge of the code French. The main channel of transmission of French is not through the school system  – formal schooling is stagnating in Senegal as in many West African countries and only successfully reaches a small elite – but through urban Wolof. Through the high percentage of words and phrases of French origin, French vocabulary trickles down to those who are excluded from learning it. Wolof and French thus have a very intimate relationship, but their existence as separate codes in many speakers’ minds is doubtful, since most of them have not acquired French as a discrete language.² There is an interesting gender complementarity regarding their use: women, and especially girls, tend to be discouraged from speaking French, because that would make them look assimilated and acculturated. For men and boys, such a stigma does not hold. In consequence, men’s repertoires contain much more French, whereas girls are the main propagators of Wolof in their age groups, and in turn are also responsible for the growing role of Wolof in general, since they tend to speak to their children in Wolof (depending on the setting and also on their group language). This gendered difference in language use may, alongside the preponderance of Wolof in spoken media and popular music, also contribute to the importance of Wolof for the younger generation. As soon as adolescents start to socialize in peer groups, Wolof enters the picture, and one reason for this may well be the fact that girls are discouraged from speaking French even if they have acquired it at school, hence forcing the choice of Wolof for inter-group communication whenever the two sexes want to talk to each other. However, this scenario is somewhat skewed in Casamance, where among speakers of Joola languages (who are among the most Christianized groups in this area), French is often preferred over Wolof, given that Wolof is associated with a distinct religious and cultural sphere. Group languages, languages of origin and identity or “ethnic” or “vernacular” languages constitute the third category of languages in use. As a general rule, it can be observed that the less vehicular, the more restricted the scope of these languages. In analogy, the more specific the  – local, linguistic and cultural  – identity they offer, the more restricted this identity is in scope. Thus, even in Ziguinchor, a confirmed hotspot of linguistic diversity, not all group languages are used on a par, and not all “ethnicities” are equally visible. Even

2 This has been observed for the African context in general by Makoni & Meinhof (2004), and led them to question the analytical decision of many Africanists to assume the mixing of or switching between two languages in these cases.

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among those languages that, unlike Wolof, Joola Fogny, Mandinka or Pulaar, do not have any vehicular functions, some are learned by members of other groups while others are not. So, for instance, Juillard’s study reveals that inhabitants of Ziguinchor may amuse themselves learning a little bit of Balanta or Mandjak, and Baïnounk speakers systematically speak the languages of those who surround them (Cobbinah 2012, 2010; Lüpke 2010a), but the inverse does not hold. Many inhabitants have no knowledge of the existence of Baïnounk, or at best see Baïnounk speakers as an amorphous group, without distinguishing the different languages, and the same holds for the smaller Joola languages. Crucial for the linguistic ecosystem is, however, that multilingualism is valued in the host society, and that mechanisms are in place to nurture it, since monolingualism is not an option for the many small languages present. The following sections address the strategies that facilitate and maintain multilingualism, both at the individual and at the societal level.

Map 2: Languages of Casamance

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1.2 Individual repertoires: six case studies 1.2.1 Localist identities for moving targets Let me introduce you to Georges Sagna. In 2011, he was 26 years old. He divides his time between the villages of Djibonker and Essyl in Casamance, in southern Senegal. I met him through an ongoing documentation project on three Baïnounk languages,³ and he was presented to me as a speaker of one of these closely related endangered languages, Baïnounk Gubëeher. Unless the presence of a linguist interested in Baïnounk languages prompts this level of detail, he would identify himself as a (speaker of) Baïnounk under some circumstances, but most likely without making allusion to the particular language variety he speaks. With maximally 500 speakers, Gubëeher is all but invisible from the outside, and most inhabitants of the Casamance region are unaware of its existence (and that of the other Baïnounk languages). In total, Georges speaks six languages, but in contrast to a sedentary Western multilingual, to rank them according to first language/mother tongue and other languages in order of descending fluency turns out to be quite impossible. His personal history preempts such an attempt, and this history in turn is embedded into wider practices in Casamance and beyond. Among these practices are widespread exogamous marriage patterns resulting in parents coming from two different villages. In the patri- and virilocal Baïnounk societies it is always the wives who move into another family. In the case of Gubëeher this often entails that they also speak different languages, since this smallest of the Baïnounk languages is confined to one single village. This and the small size of the Gubëeher and other minority communities therefore dictates that all communicative exchanges going beyond the village involve at least one other language. Georges’ parents come from two different villages and speak two different languages as their identity or “ethnic” languages. In Djibonker, where his father lives, Georges passes for a speaker of Gubëeher and uses it in most of his everyday interactions. Whenever he visits the village of his mother, Essyl, he is transformed into a speaker of Joola Eegimaa, another of the many minority languages of Casamance. Since he mainly grew up there, he is actually more fluent in Eegimaa than

3 The documentation project “Pots, plants and people – a documentation of Baïnounk knowledge systems” that I lead is funded by the DoBeS programme of the Volkswagen Foundation and runs from 2010 to 2013. Within the project, Alexander Cobbinah is responsible for the documentation of Baïnounk Gubëeher, and I owe the information on this Baïnounk variety mainly and gratefully to him.

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in Gubëeher, and only patrilinear and patrilocal attitudes to identity make him a Baïnounk. It is tempting to think that Georges’ changing linguistic identity presents a borderline case, and that there must be more homogeneous family circumstances, and indeed there are cases in the Baïnounk language area, such as that of one of his half-sisters, whose parents do not speak different languages, where there is no divergence between the aspects of linguistic identity conveyed by the mother and the father. In the largest Baïnounk language area, the Gujaher area to the east of Ziguinchor, children often have Gujaher-speaking parents, even though the women almost always come from a different village and bring with them a different variety of Gujaher or (a) different language(s) altogether. But we will see in section 1.3.3 that the languages spoken by parents are not sufficient in order to explain language repertoires: the majority of children do not grow up with their biological parents and often live in a different language area, so having parents speaking the same language is not a guarantee for acquiring this language as the first language. Exogamy is very widespread in all Baïnounk and Joola communities (for the Joola, see Linares 1992), and it is always the women who marry into a community often dominated by a different language, while the fathers stay in their agnatic families and pass on clan names and most commonly the ethnic label that dominates. So, while nominally a Baïnounk Gubëeher, in each of his two villages, George’s identity aligns itself with one of the languages of his repertoire. But what happens when he leaves these spheres of parental influence and goes to Ziguinchor, the capital of the region? I do not know for sure at this time and cannot really observe his practices, since working on Baïnounk languages does not make me an impartial observer and is likely to skew the situation towards a stronger affirmation of his Baïnounk identity than in my absence. Nevertheless it is very likely that both his Baïnounk and his Eegimaa identity are invisible in Ziguinchor, since Gubëeher is an “insider language” (Cobbinah 2012) that disappears when an insider context with fellow speakers is not invoked. Like many African towns and cities, Ziguinchor (with ca. 200,000 inhabitants from all ethnolinguistic groups of the area) is a point of language contact, in which rural and local identities are reconfigured to an important extent. It is most likely that Georges would answer, when asked about his ethnolinguistic identity, that he is Joola, unless he was visiting Eegimaa or Gubëeher-speaking family members. The label “Joola” hides even more internal diversity than the label “Baïnounk” and regroups speakers of a number of languages and varieties. The languages Georges is most likely to speak while in town are urban Wolof and French. Urban Wolof, as also described in detail in section 1.1 above, has become a marker of urban identity throughout the entire country. Originally the language of the area around Dakar, the capital of Senegal, this language is now not only the de facto

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national language due to the presence of northern elites in administration, salaried professions, government institutions and the media, but has also become very hip and trendy due to its use in the media and its association with popular music  – most notably Rap and Hip Hop, but also Mbalax, the most influential Senegalese dance music style. In addition to being fashionable, Wolof is often the preferred language when people want to avoid speaking one of their interlocutors’ other languages, even if they have mastered it. Finally, Georges is very likely to speak French in many formal contexts. If this repertoire already sounds impressive it should be noted that there are still two languages missing: Bayot, a language geographically and genetically close to the cluster of Joola languages, and Joola Kaasa, the Joola language which is dominat in George’s part of Casamance. These languages are spoken in some compounds in Djibonker and in neighbouring areas. If one wants to chart Georges’ languages per domain, there would be both overlapping and complementary uses of languages. In the home context, at least two different domains – father’s and mother’s village – need to be differentiated to determine the use of Baïnounk Gubëeher and Joola Eegimaa respectively. Relations with siblings and other kin imply the use of at least these two languages. In a wider local context, Joola Kaasa and Bayot appear, depending on the linguistic profile of Georges’ interlocutors. Independently of this, he would speak Wolof to claim a contemporary identity in his peer group, and urban Wolof, alongside French, would also be used outside his closer local context.

1.2.2 Purposeful alienation: the ethnolinguistic chameleon Alpha “Naby” Mané is one of my main consultants in the village of Agnack in the Baïnounk Gujaher language area. When he presented his mother to me as Tèye Suko, I was very surprised, since her name sounded Mandinka but I doubted that she was, in fact, Mandinka really be one.⁴ There is a strong Mandinka presence in Agnack Petit, a part of Agnack, whose population mainly consists of inhabitants whose nominal identity is Gujaher and/or Mandinka, though speakers of all other main contact languages in Casamance and of the major languages of Senegal are present as well. Speakers of Gujaher all speak Mandinka; speakers of Mandinka generally do not speak Gujaher; and some former Gujaher who have shifted to Mandinka as their main language have accompanied this shift with a change in “ethnic”

4 Note that women always keep their clan names, but that children bear their fathers’ clan names according to patrilinear descendance.

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and often also religious affiliation: they have acquired Muslim first names, and in many cases Mandinka clan names (the Mandinka brought Islam to Casamance, and for many Baïnounk, therefore, Mandinka and Muslim are equivalent). For Alpha’s mother, it was implausible to assume that she was a Mandinka, since she spoke fluent Gujaher, and her son often asked her for words he had forgotten. I asked another consultant (not wanting to intrude directly into her personal life during my first field stay), and he said that she had changed names in the wake of her conversion to Islam, and that her original name was Hélène Coly. After a number of days of me working with her son, she changed her surname back to Coly – surnames figure prominently in all greetings, so doing this was a public affirmation of a renewed Gujaher identity when interacting with certain people (mostly myself). It was only during my second field stay that I got to understand the true reason for Tèye-Hélène’s identity shift: her son revealed to me that she had been a kanyaleen, or ubos, an infertile woman who underwent a ritual that is known best in Casamance under its Joola name kanyaleen, and whose name in Gujaher is gubos.⁵ In a society where it is of paramount importance for a woman to be fertile, and where infant mortality is extremely high (Journet 1991), many women still undergo the painful process of becoming a kanyaleen in the hope of having children, and children that survive their early childhood. In order to assure this, the women concerned must submit to a number of rituals. Despite varying details in different communities, some parts of the ritual are invariant: the kanyaleen must leave the matrimonial home; she has to move to a different village or “quartier” where she will stay until her child (if she has a baby) is at least 3 years old. Furthermore she will be treated like a servant and will have to suffer extremely hard manual work and humiliation. She will wear special clothes  – a short wrap, shorts, etc., and often half of a calabash decorated with cowries (the iconic accessory of a kanyaleen), and necklaces crossed at the chest. She will also receive a new name that will stay with her for the rest of her life. It seems that alienation and humiliation form psychologically salient parts of the ritual, and so it is not surprising that le travestissement identitaire peut être parfois d’un changement formel d’appartenance ethnique et de filiation, telle Joola du Buluf devenant par exemple, Mandingue ou Balante. (Journet 1991: 27–28) [The travesty of identity can sometimes be of a formal change in ethnic membership and affiliation, such that a Joola from Buluf may become Manding or Balante.]

5 U-bos, plural ñan-bos, with noun class prefixes of the human paradigm u-/ñan- designate the persons undergoing the gu-bos, with the noun class prefix gu-.

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Figure 2: Hélène Coly alias Tèye Suko

This is what had happened to Hélène Coly: she could not get pregnant, and so she turned to a Marabout – an Islamic healer – who received her in his family and changed her name to the female equivalent (Suko) of his clan name Keita. Once she had given birth to two sons who survived (and are still alive), she left the kanyaleen status, but crucially not her new identity, behind. Compounded by the growing importance of Mandinka in Agnack and her status of being a fluent

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Figure 3: Calabash worn by kanyaleen from the Museum of Joola Culture in Mlomp

bilingual, it became easy for outsiders not familiar with her full linguistic profile and her personal history to take her for a Mandinka. Had I not learned her very private life story, I would have regarded her as a case of a completed shift in both linguistic and ethnic affiliation from Baïnounk Gujaher to Mandinka, and I would have explained it in connection with the attractiveness of Mandinka identity, given that Mandinka is one of the most important languages in Casamance, of conversion to Islam, and taking into account that Islam and Mande and Mandinka identity are strongly correlated in Casamance. There, most groups were first exposed to Islam in the wake of Mande immigrations (Brooks 1993; Bühnen 1994). Islam soon became a very appealing alternative to traditional religions and Christianity, as argued compellingly by Mark (1997, 1978) and Linares (2005, 1992) for the Northern Joola. Among them, the main incentive for a massive conversion to Islam of the young men lay in the attractiveness of a different hierarchical and economic model. Rather than being constrained to obey the gerocontratic elders who controlled the shrines of traditional Joola religion, in the first decades of the twentieth century young men were free to climb up the religious hierarchy based on individual achievements in Islamic scholarship, and in addition, Mandinka religious power went hand in hand with the introduction of groundnut cul-

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tivation in a drastic change from subsistence economy to cash crops (which was also favoured by the French, who accelerated this change by forcing taxes upon people). As a consequence, a dramatic change in life style and religion took place at once. Mandinka is and remains a strong target of language shift in Casamance, especially in Ziguinchor, where Juillard notes that whole neighbourhoods may switch to Mandinka as their main language of external communication as soon as one Mandinka household is present. At the same time, “Mandingization” can happen without massive immigration of Manding and without language shift, as remarked by Linares, building up on Wright (1985): He [Wright] suggests that the so-called western movements of Manding peoples may have actually represented a slow process of “cultural transferral” rather than massive migrations. Wright does not rule out the possibility that some ancestors of the present-day Senegambian Manding may have been actual traders who came directly from Mali to set up stations in far away lands. But he puts the emphasis where it should be, namely on the problem of distinguishing between subtle shifts in ethnic identities and the actual movements of people. For it is a fact of Senegambian history that ethnic labels and identities have continually shifted. This is what has happened to the “Mandingized” Jola groups […] (Linares 1992: 150)

Cases like that of Hélène Coly alias Tèye Suko testify to the need to understand personal stories and trajectories in order to reveal the larger patterns into which individual fates can be grouped. Kanyaleen are not a homogenous and easily visible group, and there is no easily discernible change from language/identity A to language/identity B entailed by kanyaleenhood; yet, a change in ethnolinguistic group membership is often central to creating the alienation necessary for this ritual.

1.2.3 The rhetorical return to lost roots Before I started research on Baïnounk languages in 2008, I had experience in working with a community speaking the minority language Jalonke in the neighbouring country Guinea (Lüpke 2008, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2005a, 2005b; Lüpke, Voeltz, & Camara 2000; Bohnemeyer et al. 2007). While I familiarized myself with the Baïnounk Gujaher community in Agnack Grand, a village of ca. 500 inhabitants and about 500km away from the Futa Jalon where the Jalonke live, I stumbled across an entirely unexpected connection between these two small and dispersed groups. While doing one of my greeting rounds sometime after I had arrived in the village, I found out that one of the families living there was descended from a Jalonke immigrant. This was quite a surprising finding, even in a multifaceted

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community like that of Agnack, where the languages Gujaher, Mandinka, Balanta, Pepel (a language of the Manjaku cluster) and Joola Susaana coexist, in addition to the larger languages of Casamance and Senegal. Ansoumana Keita, the last “Jalonke” of Agnack Grand, had initially been introduced to me as Baïnounk, and having been born and raised in Agnack he had been brought up with Baïnounk Gujaher as his first language and all the other languages in the environment as additional languages. Ansoumana has Pepel-speaking wives, so his children, although nominally Jalonke, speak Pepel and Creole as their dominant languages and talk to their father in Creole. Ansoumana has only rudimentary knowledge of Jalonke, as his father, originally from the Futa Jalon, had settled in Agnack Grand and married into the Baïnounk community. So, how does Ansoumana identify himself? To begin with, he classified himself as Baïnounk. But since I was, of course, interested in his family’s Jalonke past, and since he still knew the greetings in Jalonke, we soon started exchanging greetings in Jalonke. In the spotlight of my interest he suddenly became “the Jalonke of Agnack Grand” – so what does that make him? To what extent could he qualify as a (speaker of) Jalonke according to linguistic and identity criteria? How much Jalonke would he remember if exposed to it over some time? Evans (2001) has shown how futile any attempt at unequivocally classifying speakers must remain, since being “a speaker” means so many different things, and the lost and refound Jalonke of Agnack definitely confirms this. While his tapping into a Jalonke identity is not surprising in a patrilinear society where clan names and ethnolinguistic identity labels are passed on through fathers, it is surprising that he also sees himself as a Baïnounk. Strictly speaking, his mother is not a Baïnounk but comes from a community where Kassanga (or Gugëcer, as speakers of Baïnounk call this language) is spoken in nearby Guinea Bissau. Although Gugëcer, a language closely related to Gujaher, is often annexed to Baïnounk by speakers of Baïnounk languages, Ansoumana is not really regarded as a Baïnounk, by most inhabitants of Agnack Grand although given the elusive character of the notion Baïnounk it is difficult to nail down the reasons for this.

1.2.4 A return to what roots? Ansoumana Keita, the ‘Jalonke of Agnack Grand’ has a half-brother, Marcelino Diandy. Both have the same mother, but a different father. While Ansoumana’s father called himself a Jalonke and passed this identity, at least in part, on to his son, Marcelino’s father was Alkantari Diandy, a tax inspector in Guinea Bissau and a speaker of Gugëcer. Marcelino’s mother is also a speaker of Gugëcer. Originating from the same village as Marcelino’s father, she was first married to Ansou-

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mana’s father. She then returned to her native village in Guinea Bissau, Kanjandy, leaving her son behind in Agnack. In Kadjandy, she married Marcelino’s father, and Marcelino grew up there, exposed to Gugëcer, Creole, Mankanya and Manjaku. After Guinea Bissau’s liberation war in 1974, he came to live in Agnack Grand with his half-brother Ansoumana. He only learned Gujaher then, as an adolescent, and according to several Gujaher speakers I interviewed, he speaks it like a second language speaker, and with strong Gugëcer influence (with which inhabitants of Agnack are well familiar, since in this exogamous community, the majority of wives come from Gugëcer communities in Guinea Bissau, which is a mere 8 kilometres away). Ironically, Marcelino has become a Gujaher activist who is keen on being involved in documentation activities; his half-brother Ansoumana, in contrast, whose Gujaher is not distinguishable from that of other “native” speakers, oscillates in his self-classification between calling himself Gujaher and Jalonke; and by others, he is seen as a Jalonke. The issue of multiple and changing repertoires and identities is often seen as much more relevant for speakers of minority languages than for speakers of bigger languages, since allegedly, they tend to be bi- or even monolingual. So, to

Figure 4: Marcelino Diandy (right) and a neighbour

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what extent can the situations and repertoires described so far be representative for them?

1.2.5 I am what I speak? In Senegal, in situations involving majority languages there is a tendency to speak fewer languages  – in most cases one major African language and/or the official language French. However, even in these instances, the category of mother tongue is often inapplicable, and in terms of identity, even being a monolingual speaker of a majority language does not mean that one falls under the umbrella of a clearly recognized label that corresponds to a robust and fixed ethnolinguistic identity that is provided by a “named language”. Again, two cases of individuals from Senegal may serve to illustrate this point. They concern speakers of a large and recognized language that corresponds to two well-established ethnic group labels – Pulaar and Tukulor. Moustapha Sall is a colleague of mine at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar. He is bilingual in Wolof and French, and his children are being brought up in these two languages as well. His patronym reveals him as a Tukulor, however, and he is seen as such, although he has not lived in the Tukulor village in which he was born for more than 25 years and does not speak Pulaar, the identity language for Tukulor. When in a provocative mood, he will declare himself Wolof, as this label corresponds much better to the linguistic and cultural identity he has lived for most of his life. When tapping into his Tukulor identity, he feels the need to explain that he is not a “proper” Tukulor. The term Tukulor or Toucouleur, of uncertain origin, refers to a population of Fula speakers (they also call themselves haalpulaaren ‘speakers of Fula’ who have been assimilated to the Fula group. The Fula scholar Hampaté Bâ, a speaker of Maasina Fulfulde, identifies them as follows: Toucouleurs: peuple d’Afrique occidentale, vivant surtout au Sénégal et en Guinée (ancien royaume du Fouta Toro). Il ne s’agit pas d’une ethnie, mais d’un ensemble culturel assez homogène (islamisé et foulaphone, c’est-à-dire parlant peul). [Toucouleurs: people of West Africa, mostly living in Senegal and Guinea (former kingdom of Futa Toro). They don’t constitute an ethnic group but a rather homogenous Islamized and fulaphone, that is, Fula-speaking cultural group.] (Hampaté Bâ 1957: 16)

Central to being a Tukulor, according to this definition, is sharing faith and language with the Fula. Moustapha Sall is only right to question his Tukulor identity, then, given that he doesn’t fulfil the second criterion. But is he a proper Wolof? He

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seems reluctant to assert this, although linguistically, he undeniably is. Interestingly, language seems to have been less decisive historically in creating a Wolof identity than for the Tukulor: the legendary founder of the first Wolof empire of Djolof, Njaajaan Djaay (Ndiadiane Ndiaye in French spelling), was, according to some oral sources, the son of the Tukulor princess Fatoumata Sall and of Abou Bakr Ben Omar, an Almoravid war lord, and he is said to have spoken Pulaar and Seereer, but not Wolof (Dreyfus & Juillard 2004). A common saying in Senegal states that Wolof du xeet, jakk rekk la [Wolof is not a lineage, it’s just a language] (Smith 2006: 934). I have described above how Wolof is the least “ethnic” language of Senegal. Yet Moustapha hesitates to call himself a Wolof, thus lingering behind his linguistic practice when it comes to determining his identity. Although there is less choice in expressing different identities through different languages for him, given his smaller repertoire, this does not entail a stronger link between language and “ethnic” identity then. And what happens if a speaker of a major language with a readily available ethnic label moves not into a language area dominated by another major language, as in the case of Moustapha, but into a minority community? This is the situation that I will look at in the next and last case study.

1.2.6 Well, I’m not what I speak Similarly to Moustapha Sall, Babacar Baldé is nominally a Peul or Fula. He is around 16 years old and lives in Agnack Grand. Without the custom of evoking people’s clan names in greetings, I actually might never have found out – all my interactions with him were in Gujaher, and I never overheard him speaking a language other than Gujaher, Wolof or French. It was only when I set out to investigate the genealogies of every family in Agnack Grand and also enquired about non-family members living in a household and about absent family members that I found out his “true” identity. By asking about non-family members present and family members absent I had actually opened Pandora’s box, since in many compounds, all biological children and grandchildren of the head of family and his wives were living not in Agnack Grand, but elsewhere – with uncles, aunts, cousins, friends or remote relatives who were fostering them. Inversely, many of the children I had taken to be linked consanguinously to the adults inhabiting the house they shared were not related to them at all, or only very distantly. The former is the case of Babacar Baldé. He lives in Diassikunda, a compound named after the now deceased head of the family Pierre Diassy. Babacar is not closely related to anybody in Diassikunda. Rather, he ended up there because of his now deceased grandmother, Belanty Diassy who married Falaye Baldé, an “ethnic”

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Fula, in Dakar. Babacar is the son of their son, Jules Baldé and a woman called Ndéba Cissé. Although his parents had never lived in Agnack Grand and don’t speak Baïnounk at all, he was fostered out to live with his grandparents’ relatives there. Since he grew up in Agnack Grand from an early age, he does not speak any Fula. Rather, his linguistic repertoire resembles that of the other children he grew up with and comprises Baïnounk Gujaher, Wolof, French, a little bit of Mandinka, and a little bit of Joola Fogny. As in the other case studies, no questionnaire study asking about “mother tongue”, languages of parents and relatives or “ethnic identity” would have revealed the true complexity of his linguistic practices; and even less so captured how he would identify himself, and to what extent language would be a part of it. Therefore, it seems important to identify those patterns of social life that have a strong impact on linguistic practices, and to chart these practices without omitting the sometimes dauntingly large and changeable linguistic repertoires, before one even starts to investigate their link to the vague and likewise complex concept of identity.

1.3 Societal practices nurturing multilingualism It has already become apparent that it must remain futile to look at languages as static entities that can be located on a map, a problem already described by Dalby (1964). Without grappling with the mechanisms governing mobility and exchange and their relationship to linguistic repertoires, one must fail to create an accurate account of the past and present dynamics underlying language use in African societies. Throughout Africa, a number of social practices contribute to maintaining the existence of linguistic diversity where it is attested. In this section, I introduce a number of them, providing examples from Senegal where possible to remain faithful to the regional flavour of this chapter. Crucial for the coexistence of several languages in individuals and communities are the following strategies for exchange, mobility and cohesion: – Exogynous marriage patterns, where women come from an outside group and marry into a community – Language acquisition in peer groups and age classes – Fostering – Joking relationships and patronymic equivalences beyond ethnolinguistic boundaries – Mobility and migration for ritual, religious, economic and educational purposes

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1.3.1 Exogynous marriage patterns and movement of daughters In Senegal, as often attested in Africa, many communities practice exogynous marriage  – women come from an outside group and upon marrying a man become integrated into a different community. Often, they have to learn a new language in the course of events as well. Linares (1992: 108) describes the matrimonial space for one Joola community, the Kujaamat (or Fogny) of Jipalom: The men of Jipalom give sisters and daughters, and receive wives and mothers, from 17 different villages. Numerous individuals, belonging to several fank or courtyard groups, are involved in these marriage exchanges. This, then, is Jipalom’s matrimonial area, broadly defined. Narrowly defined, however, the effective matrimonial unit consists of 6 communities, including Jipalom, whose members regularly intermarry. These communities are 7 kilometers from each other, well within walking distance. Females married into Jipalom are known by the Foñi term kuseek, meaning ‘women’; 128 out of 154 kuseek, or 83 percent of the total number of wives in 1981 came from the 6 villages, including Jipalom. Together, the 6 villages form a marrying community within which women move around, though not in any pre-determined or unidirectional manner.

Married women retain ties with their family of origin, and Linares describes the conflicting roles that result from their position in two different kinship networks: Women live out their lives in two largely contradictory contexts: their own agnatic environment and their place of marriage. A woman’s first loyalties are those to her parents and brothers. The collectivity of outmarried females is known by the term kuríimen (pl.; aríimen sing.); the collectivity of in-married women by the term kuseek (pl.; aseek sing.), which means ‘woman’ and can be glossed as ‘wife’. Every married woman is both an aríimen in her natal House and an aseek in her husband’s House. In the role of female agnate, a woman exercises a great deal of influence. Female agnates care for, and, when necessary, bury their male kin. They protect their ‘brothers’ from witchcraft. They play an important role in agnatic rituals like initiation. And they also have some say in their brothers’ domestic lives and productive practices. But the kuríimen are scattered; their ‘political’ influence can only be exerted by activating agnatic ties. In her other capacity as wife (aseek), a woman is, nominally at least, quite powerless. She can only rally her ‘sisters’  – women agnates married with her into the same context – to her support. But these women, also, are mostly in-married affines, not locally born agnates. (Linares 1992: 109)

In the case of the Joola Kujamaat community of Jipalom, the circulation of women does not introduce additional languages into the villages involved, since all the villages of the marrying community are located in the Joola Kujamaatay (Fogny) language area  – this Joola language is one of the largest languages of Casamance. In the case of the nearby Baïnounk communities of Djibonker

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and Agnack, exogamous marriage often entails that out-married women bring their Baïnounk language into a different community, and in-married women introduce another language into an area where clans define themselves as Baïnounk. Thus, in the course of matrimonial exchange between the Baïnounk Gubëeher community of Djibonker and the neighbouring Joola Eegimaa-speaking kingdom Mov Avvi, the two languages become implanted in the two communities. Similarly, the Baïnounk Gujaher community of Agnack entertains a matrimonial exchange with Gugëcer-speaking communities in the neighbouring country Guinea Bissau. Gugëcer-speaking women learn Baïnounk Gujaher only once they are married into the Agnack community. Just like the women of Jipalom described by Linares, these in-married women, their children and husbands retain close bonds with the women’s villages of origin – women and their husbands returning there for rituals surrounding funerals and anniversaries of death, marriages and baptisms, and children spending lengthy periods of time with relatives. Even if Gugëcer is invisible when looking at how inhabitants of Agnack Grand define themselves linguistically, it has an undeniable presence, adding a hidden layer of multilingualism to an already complex community. In the same vein, all languages spoken in the area will assume an invisible presence in many households outside of their recognized language areas, due to the movement of women that is not reflected in “ethnolinguistic” identities, even when it has an impact on linguistic practice. Children born to parents in exogynous marriages often grow up speaking two languages in their home context(s). Depending on where they grow up, and which parent they most interact with, there can be an alignment with the “mother tongue” or the “father tongue”, here used in the literal sense, as the more dominant language. Yet, we have seen in the case of Georges Sagna that if both parents end up living in their respective agnatic families in different language communities, which is very common, hybrid and changing linguistic practices are to be expected. Women do not only move because of exogamous, typically exogynous, marriage patterns. Depending on lineage type and the functions of marriage in a given society, women (and, to a much lesser extent, men) may retain close ties with their agnatic family and return there when they divorce, are widowed or “retire” from marriage once they have reached a certain age. Goody (1982) describes the high incidence of divorce and retirement of women from marriage once their fertile years are over in the ethnolinguistically complex Gonja state in northern Ghana and notes that it is “rare to find a woman of fifty-five or over living with a husband” (1982: 98). For the Joola of Senegal, Linares (1992) draws the following picture, shedding light on the different interpretations of the institution of marriage in different Joola societies:

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[…] elderly women in one Jola region may re-marry even if they are past reproductive age because they still have an important conjugal role to play in the rice-growing system. In another Jola region, however, a widow who has reached the menopause never remarries even if she is capable of producing rice. For the concepts surrounding gender, age, and the meaning of marital relations have shifted, from being focused on women’s reproductive abilities in one area to being focused on women’s reproductive abilities in another area. (1992: 9–10)

Retiring from marriage may easily mean retiring from the language of the matrimonial home, depending on the origin of marriage partners, since the creation as well as the dissolution of marital unions may result in movement in space, and again, between language areas.

1.3.2 Language acquisition in peer groups and age classes Age is of enormous significance in most African societies. This is mirrored in many kinship systems, which have different terms for relatives according to whether they are older or younger than the ego, but not according to their sex, as for instance in Manding. In the Manding language Bamanan, spoken in Mali, the term for elder sibling is kɔ̀rɔ ‘old’ and for younger siblings is dɔgɔ ‘small’, genderdifferentiated through the addition of mùso ‘woman, female’ or kɛ ‘man, male’. Likewise, in Wolof, the term for elder sibling is mag, the one for younger sibling rakh.⁶ Sensitivity to age, a veneration of people of greater age, and gerontocratic societies are common throughout the entire continent. It is not surprising, then, that in many African societies, there are formal reflexes of this age-consciousness beyond kinship terminology, politeness vocabulary and honorific pronouns to address elders, in the organization of social activities according to age and the creation of categories regrouped by age. For our topic, age classes and peer groups are most important, since they take on many of the functions that in Western societies are assumed by the nuclear family or institutions like nurseries and schools, and they create affinities between individuals of the same age group beyond ethnolinguistic borders. In his seminal account of age class systems, Bernardi (1985: 2) describes Africa as “the part of the world richest in age class systems”, although he deplores the lack of a systematic survey. Age class systems in his definition are formal systems in which

6 Rabain-Jamain uses the spelling rakh, but rakk is also attested (for instance in Diouf 2003).

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Members of society come to be classified into special groupings by being assigned a common age and, thus, by forming a collective body of age mates with special prerogatives and specific tasks (Bernardi 1985: 2).

In formalized age class systems, age grades are typically used to differentiate within age classes. For the Wolof age class system, for instance, the following age grades for non-adult members can be distinguished (Rabain-Jamin 2003; RabainJamin, Maynard & Greenfield 2003; Rabain‐Jamin 1998; Diop 1985):

Wolof term

Meaning

liir baby

bu rel.clb

tooy fragile

‘new born, fragile, delicate baby’

liir baby

bu rel.clb

dëgër robust

‘resistant, robust baby’

cëpp-ent-al jump-nom-der

‘toddler’

per-ant-al / per-l-it be_weaned-nom-der / be_weaned-der-nom

weaned child (typically around 3 years of age)

gone / xale

child in the phase following weaning, from 3–4 years old

Table 1: Age grades in Wolof society (Rabain-Jamin 2003, Diop 1985)

Although in contemporary Wolof society, there are only reflexes of a former age class system, age-based categories are still of great importance. Rabain-Jamin describes the age of gone – roughly translatable as ‘child’ as follows: Dès 3–4 ans, les enfants se rassemblent en petits groupes dans des lieux qui leur sont propres, que ces lieux soient proches, à la lisière de la concession, ou plus eloignés à l’abri des regards. Ils organisent des activités entre paires d’âge (maas), expérimentent des notions d’ainé (mag), d’égal (morom) et de cadet (rakh) ainsi que l’ordre de succession dans la fratrie. (2003: 57) [From 3–4 years onwards, the children assemble in small groups in places reserved for them, be they near, at the edge of the compound, or further away, out of sight. They organize activities between pairs of age classes (maas), experience the notions of elder (mag), equal (morom) and younger (rakh), and the order of succession in the peer group.]

Dupire (1991) describes the formal age class systems of two Seereer societies, Ndut and Siin, which start at a later age  – around 15–18 years  – and regulate

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social relations, marriage and succession patterns etc. She also briefly discusses how strangers are integrated into the class system based on equivalence of the Seereer classes with a class in his or her system of origin. Throughout Senegal, formal or informal age class mates (promotionnaires in French), generally within one sex, are of great importance and create ties that last a life time, be they with peers from one village community or class mates from school, university friends, etc. These ties work independently of language and allow the integration of newcomers quite flexibly. The existence of childhood peer groups or age classes and grades goes hand in hand with a great autonomy of children from their parents, starting at the decisive period when they are weaned, typically at around three years of age. Figure 5 below shows a group of 3–6 year old children in the village of Niamone, where Baïnounk Guñaamolo is spoken, who have just finished a game; one of the boys is looking after his younger brother. There is no adult in charge of supervising the children.

Figure 5: Children in Niamone playing by themselves

It is in age groups, regardless of their formal implementation in the structure of society, that the overwhelming part of language socialization of African children takes place when they are older than three years. In the case of linguistically homogenous communities, language socialization may centre on only one language; in the case of heterogeneity, children will experience the same diversity as adult community members, and additionally contribute to the language socialization of fostered children and children from migrant families, to whose languages they will be equally exposed. Children in this society are typically breastfed until

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about the age of three, and births are ideally spaced (partly through the contraceptive effects of breastfeeding) by the same interval. At the age of three, most children lose the privileged position they occupied as babies to a newborn and enter a new and radically different phase in their life. The consequences of the different pattern of language socialization entailed by this model of upbringing has not been studied, and in general, studies of multilingual language acquisition in Africa are lacking, the existing research focussing on monolingual contexts or studying bilingual acquisition in an African and an official language (not a very representative pattern in Africa, as also remarked by Makoni & Meinhof 2004).⁷ But even in the absence of detailed analyses, it can be hypothesized that language socialization in peer and age groups means that: – The language(s) of the home context and agnatic family play a much lesser role than in Western contexts, which means that the “mother tongue” as a literal and as a metaphorical concept is absent or unimportant in many contexts; – Innovations happen and spread much quicker than in contexts with corrective conservative input from older generations; – Special codes and sociolects like urban and youth languages are likewise created and diffused through this channel, and this may well contribute, alongside the demographic importance of younger generations, to the remarkable fact that they have a much more prominent and discrete status in Africa than in other parts of the world (Kiessling & Mous 2004; Mous 2009); – An emphasis on age equivalence at least partly overriding other characteristics (language, social status) entails exposure to multilingualism and makes age groups important places of language contact.

1.3.3 Fostering The fostering of children (confiage in French), not just in situations of crisis as in Western societies, but as a systematic strategy for social cohesion and exchange as well as training is as ubiquitous throughout Africa as are age classes. In her comprehensive account of fostering in West Africa and beyond, Goody (1982)

7 The lack of studies of this kind is not surprising, given the insurmountable difficulties posed by most multilingual settings (see also Makoni & Meinhof 2004 and Lüpke 2010b: the languages or varieties involved therein will be in most cases at best scarcely described, and often be unrelated or only distantly related). Therefore, limitations to the rare monolingual contexts or to settings involving a European language remain the only realistic option in many contexts.

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describes how different African societies employ the delegation of parental roles to others than the parents for a multitude of purposes, closely linked to their type of social organization, and how this process is changing in the face of modernity. Up to 30 % of children are brought up by relatives or others in many African societies (Isiugo-Abanihe 1984; Goody 1982; Häberlein, Martin & Alber 2010; Lallemand 1993), and where the practice is known, there are few families that do not foster a child. Crucially for the purpose of this book is that, depending on the profile of the society in question, children may be fostered across language borders, child fostering thus fostering multilingualism. Placing children with relatives or non-relatives can be differentiated according to the following types, summarized by Isiugo-Abanihe (1984): – Kinship fostering, where the child is raised by family members – Crisis fostering, in cases of parental divorce or death – Wardship and alliance fostering, “to establish and strengthen social, economic, or political alliances” (1984: 11) – Domestic fostering, where mainly girls are fostered to help with household tasks in their foster family – Educational fostering, where children are sent to relatives or non-relatives in order to have access to formal education Dupire (1988) and Vandermeersch (2002) have studied fostering in two different societies in Senegal. Dupire, studying this custom in the Seereer Siin culture again, emphasizes how it benefits women more than men, and the receiving families more than the sending ones, because they obtain free household help. Vandermeesch, whose study focuses on the entire country, using census data, finds that fostering is of great importance in contexts of migration, where it serves to maintain ties between rural and urban participants in fostering, with rural areas of Senegal receiving more foster children than sending them (fostering is the least practised in the Dakar region, the most urbanized area of the country). She also notes, however, that fostering is beneficial to the sending family, in particular the birth mother, in cases of divorce, single motherhood, and migration. Since, in Casamance in particular, there is a longstanding tradition of women migrating to cities to seek salaried domestic employment, migration may explain why the biggest proportion of fostered children is found in the region of Ziguinchor, the administrative centre of this region giving it its official name. Joola women who live in Dakar, representing the ethnolinguistic majority of migrants there, send their children to be brought up in their agnatic families in Casamance. Since Joola societies can be characterized as acephalous (Linares 1992: 5), the fact that they practice fostering refutes Goody’s (1982) thesis that fostering is absent in this society type. However, Goody herself emphasizes the dynamic and changing

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nature of delegating parental roles in West African societies, drawing attention to the example of the Igbo, who took up this practice recently, probably in response to the challenge of providing formal education for their children by sending them to well-off relatives or acquaintances in urban areas and in Europe in order to facilitate access to education. Similarly, Joola fostering in contexts of migration constitutes an adaptation to economic realities necessitating migration. Fostering, as mentioned in passing in section 1.2 above, is extremely widespread at least in two Baïnounk societies: Gujaher and Gubëeher. In Agnack Grand, there is only one household where the majority of children (four out of five) live with their biological parents. The fifth child, a five-year old girl, was given to one of the in-married women to help her with her youngest child. In the remaining five households, all or the majority of children and some adult household members are placed. In many cases, the placement results in the children growing up outside their language area of origin. The – often combined – motivations given for receiving or sending children comprise many of those described for different African situations: – Helping a woman look after her children and with domestic chores – Finding a place for illegitimate children of both women and men – Providing company for an older woman without children or grandchildren of her own that live with her – Placing children in the proximity of a (good) school – Reinforcing kinship and friendship ties The continuing importance of fosterage in Africa, often over long distances and across linguistic communities, is of great significance for the maintenance of multilingualism. In the case of migration, it consolidates the links between rural and urban communities and individuals. The ties created through fostering do not only entail that individuals who live in cities and (some of) their children keep their language of origin alive; they also serve as vehicles for the other languages present in these environments – urban and rural languages of wider communication – to have their place, at least as languages in the repertoire of fostered children. The high percentage of fostered children, in accordance with other types of mobility discussed above and below, also means that it is an illusion to chart language areas on maps or to identify “mother tongues” or “first languages” of communities without excluding important proportions of their members.

1.3.4 Professional, ritual and crisis mobility and migration In addition to the more or less institutionalized (although constantly adapting to new socio-economic circumstances) movement of children and wives in African

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societies, old and new forms of mobility and migration for a wide range of purposes are also attested. Economically motivated mobility and urbanization have been the main concern of anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, historians and development researchers and agencies. Other forms of mobility, for religious and ritual purposes, among others, have been mainly studied by anthropologists. Dominant discourses in all these fields have for a long time assumed a “sedentary bias” (Bakewell 2008: 1342) that continues to influence the “master narratives” (Mc Laughlin 2008a) and ideologies of ethnolinguistic identity. Therefore, the importance of mobility for many different purposes in African societies and its impact on multilingualism cannot be stressed enough. I have introduced a number of mechanisms that involve mobility and – temporary or permanent – migration above: the circulation of women, children, and, to a lesser extent, men, in marriage and child rearing. This section investigates the role of mobility – motivated by economic, educational, religious and ritual reasons – in African multilingualism. Africa as a continent is – like other parts of the world – characterized by a long history of migration and population movements, and we look closer at migration and one of its consequences, urbanization, in section 5.4.4. Economically motivated migration within Africa exists in old and modern forms. These comprise the mobility of hunter-gatherers and pastoralists as well as the mobility of salaried professionals like teachers, nurses, doctors, government officials, the military, etc., of workers in the burgeoning informal sector and mobility for the purposes of training and education. These forms of migration are overlapping or complementary with socially motivated forms of migration driven by the size of marriage communities, fostering networks and the like. Finally, unrest and war often provoke important population flows out of the areas befallen by conflict or hunger. Out of the 215 million people not living in their country of origin, ca. 31 million are from Africa, which corresponds to ca. 2.5 % of the population, at least according to the available data (World Bank 2010). Not differentiating between motives for migration across African countries, Shimeles (2010: 8) notes: Generally, the intra-African migration is driven by the complexities of the history of state formation where colonial borders overlooked often linguistic and ethnic commonalities, as well as waves of internal and cross-border conflicts. It also reflects migration in search of job opportunities across neighboring countries.

These observations also hold for migration within countries. Africa – and West Africa in particular, which is the destination for about 90 % of intra-African migration (Shimeles 2010: 9) – is characterized by important movements of populations. Contrary to dominant perception in the West, however, most migrants do

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not leave the continent. Shimeles (2010: 8) finds that 65 % percent of cross-border migrants move within the confines of Sub-Saharan Africa.⁸ Map 3 highlights the magnets of migration flows in Africa as captured in the 1980s: Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania. The map does not only testify to the importance of migration, it also illustrates how dynamically the flows of migration adapt to changing sociopolitical situations: in contrast to then, migration to Nigeria and Sudan, for example, has largely ceased.

Map 3: Migration flows in Africa (Shimeles 2010: 10)

8 This is in strong contrast to North Africa, where 90 % of migrants have Europe and the US as their destination (Shimeles 2010: 8).

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The directions of movement are not only dictated by industrialization, as in the Zambian copper belt, in mines, or work in the cotton, cocoa, or groundnut commercial agricultural zones. They are, as emphasized also by Shimeles, facilitated and kept alive by cultural and linguistic affinities often predating the colonial period (concomitant with industrialization and the development of commercial agriculture) by a great deal. Multi-ethnic state formations, trade routes and religious networks throughout the African continent have paved routes for movements along established paths that persist despite the colonial carving up of African space in 1884–1885, which completely ignored them. Among the consequences of these conventionalized migratory flows that are important for this book are the existence of a number of vehicular languages or language clusters – among them Manding, Hausa, Fula and Swahili  – with a long history of being used as languages of wider communication in states and empires, along trade and pilgrim routes (until the advent of the charter flight, the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mekka could take years to accomplish and often required temporary settlement along the way to replenish the travel budget) or as languages of Islam. The ongoing important role of these languages is testified by 41 of them obtaining official status as vehicular cross-border languages from the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN), the language institution of the African Union founded in 2006. Twelve of these languages – Standard Modern Arabic and Berber for North Africa; Hausa, Mandenkan (Manding) and Fulfulde (Fula) for West Africa; Kiswahili (Swahili), Somali and Malagasy for East Africa; Chichewa / Chinyanja and Setswana for Southern Africa; and Beti-Fang and Lingala for Central Africa  – have been equipped with cross-border language commissions to work on their harmonization and use in language areas, rather than in arbitrarily established modern states. Longstanding multilingualism means that several languages are in contact with each other, either in an individual’s brain, or by existing alongside each other in an entire society. Both situations can leave traces in the languages in contact. Loanwords, calques or code-switching or mixing occur with a frequency often correlated with the intensity and nature of language contact (Thomason 2001). In Africa, as elsewhere in the world, language contact has led to a number of language features being areally distributed, in particular in, but not limited to, an area of West Africa known as the Sudanic fragmentation belt (Heine & Nurse 2008; Dimmendaal 2001a). It may seem that a situation of immense mobility, as described above, yields chaos and a “tower of Babel” situation. Yet, as also argued by Djité (2008) and Mazrui & Mazrui (1998), multilingualism, rather than presenting a problem, can also provide an important resource. Mazrui & Mazrui’s book has the telling title The power of Babel. Mastering several languages is certainly not only a conse-

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quence of mobility, it also facilitates it, thus enabling societies and individuals to tap into resources (social, economic, educational, etc.) not just at a local level but in a wider sphere. As has been shown for fostering, patterns of mobility are highly adaptive to changing necessities. Growing up with several languages not only enables individuals to change place without the alienating experience of not being able to communicate but also allows them to adopt new languages much more quickly. There are cases, however, where mobility is meant to be alienating, as part of a ritual process. Such a ritual is the Joola kanyaleen and Gujaher gubos, which has the goal of healing infertile women or women who have lost a number of children to an early death. Other instances of ritual multilingualism and ritualized linguistic exchange are described in chapter 2; for more examples see Storch (2011a). Whatever its cause or motivation, mobility goes together with multilingualism. Both need channels that facilitate them, and which create cohesion and a sense of belonging in a world not built on sedentarism and fixed ethnic and linguistic identities. Two of the most cited mechanisms for creating a dynamic sense of unity in the face of considerable diversity are introduced in the following section: joking relationships and patronymic equivalences across ethnic boundaries.

1.3.5 Joking relationships Joking relationships (relations à plaisanterie / cousinages in the French literature) are regularly evoked as part of the folkloric canon of African culture. A famous – but not the earliest – definition of this well-described practice first coined by Lowie (1912) for a North American context and then taken up by Canut & Smith (2006) and the contributions in this volume, Labouret (1929), Launay (1977), Mauss (1928), Paulme (1939), Radcliffe-Brown (1940, 1949) to describe similar practices in African societies, characterizes them as an institutionalized exchange of a teasing nature: What is meant by the term ‘joking relationship’ is a relation between two persons in which one is by custom permitted, and in some instances required, to tease or make fun of the other, who in turn is required to take no offence. It is important to distinguish two main varieties. In one the relation is symmetrical; each of the two persons teases or makes fun of the other. In the other variety the relation is asymmetrical; A jokes at the expense of B and B accepts the teasing good humouredly but without retaliating; or A teases B as much as he pleases and B in return teases A only a little. (Radcliffe-Brown 1940: 195)

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The joking relationship is a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility and a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relation is one of permitted disrespect. (Radcliffe-Brown 1940: 196)

The practice of acceptable – and expected – rudeness in order to create bonds between kin, clans or ethnic groups is widespread throughout Africa, and has acquired almost mythical status in the public imagination. Canut & Smith (2006) paint a vivid picture of how the complex and changing relationships that characterize the practice are elevated in folklore and public perception to a fixed and permanent institution creating peaceful cohesion among African peoples and serving as the African instrument for conflict resolution. It is certainly true that joking relationships help to overcome social, ethnic or linguistic distance by creating a playful and mischievous interaction between individuals otherwise separated by status. Yet the practice is by no means to be understood as consisting of automatic and immutable rules of the kind of “I am Joola, you are Seereer, hence we are partners in a joking relationship”, as strongly emphasized by all recent publications on the subject. As Launay (2006: 804–806) points out: Joking relationships, I wish to insist, exist largely in their instantiation. In important aspects, the exchange of jokes is not entirely unlike the exchange of gifts as analysed by Bourdieu. […] relationships themselves are not simply the product of the mechanical application of logical rules, but rather the product of strategies about whether, when and how those supposed rules can be invoked.

At the same time, and paradoxically, joking relationships are often used as political instruments aiming at appeasing conflicts by creating “ethnic bonds” through taking ethnically defined entities – like Joola and Seereer – and ascribing fixed joking relationships to them, for instance through evoking and reinterpreting myths. In the case of Joola and Seereer, the myth in question narrates the fate of Ageen and Jamboñ, the mythical ancestors of both groups. They were two sisters separated when their canoe capsized, and consequently the image invoked to plead for national unity overcoming secessionist tendencies is to reunite the two sisters in their canoe (the canoe in itself is a powerful emblem of Senegalese national identity, through a persistent folksonomy that analyzes the name of the country as stemming from sunugal ‘our canoe’). The process of creating fictional fixed ethnic entities and instrumentalizing them for various purposes has been described in detail in the context of the Casamance conflict whose background is described in detail in section 5.4.3 (and which was and is not ethnically motivated in the first place) by attempting to link the rebellious Joola to the Seereer (and

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through them, to the northern part of the country from which the rebels seek to break away), as succinctly described by de Jong (2005) and Smith (2006). For heterogeneous and multilingual societies, joking relationships constitute a powerful instrument for creating instantaneous relationships of closeness, trust and informality. They achieve this by tapping into aspects of identity that are shared – for instance, by appealing to established connections between categories of which speaker and addressee are members – particular kin categories, clans, patronyms, “castes” or professions, age groups, “ethnic” groups or shared identity languages. Most of these categories are not defined in linguistic terms and allow for alliances beyond linguistic affinities and shared identities based on multiple factors in multilingual societies. Not surprisingly, one of the most famous systems of joking relationship, the West African senankuya, allegedly goes back to Sundjata Keita, the founder of the Mali empire, who, according to the legend, created it in order to overcome ethnic, linguistic and hierarchical divisions in his stratified and diverse empire. However, the potential for a particular aspect of identity to be alluded to is not fixed, but is as flexible as identity as a whole. We have seen above that an individual has a considerable degree of freedom in defining him- or herself linguistically depending on the situation and the repertoire. The parameters involved in joking relations likewise offer a repertoire of possibilities for identification and creation of a bond that is negotiated according to the circumstances and requirements of the moment. In his account of the role of joking in conflict resolution in Gambia, Davidheiser (2006: 844) states: Mediators have a wealth of potential socially accepted relationships to choose from, such as karamu–talibe (Islamic teacher–student), talibeeya or ties between individuals who study the Quran together, seynyoyaa or neighborliness, Muslimeyaa, the common bond between Muslims, adamaeyaa, fictive kinship based on common descent from Adam and Eve, or baadiyaa, another broad fictive kinship […] (2006: 844)

European-style nationalism based on the construction of one monolithic overarching identity based on a shared  – and standardized  – language is only one option in order to manage coexistence in a shared space. It is far removed from many African situations, which are built on the instrumentalization of diversity for the sake of negotiating difference and belonging in mobile societies. It is noteworthy in this respect that many factors that enable the creation of a joking relationship are portable. Patronyms, for example, which often partly coincide with clans, have regular correspondences in other ethnic groups, and this is common knowledge (and are often invoked to the extent of becoming folklore).

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1.4 Written languages and the interaction of written and spoken repertoires Multilingualism is not only at work in spoken language. In societies where several languages coexist and have overlapping or complementary distribution over registers and genres, there are also several possibilities regarding language use in writing. These possibilities do not only concern the choice of written language(s), but also the choice of script(s). Therefore, the remainder of this chapter is dedicated to an investigation of how spoken and written repertoires interact in a multilingual and multimodal ecology of language use, and what the consequences of this complex interrelation is for an appraisal of multilingualism and its applied aspects.⁹ Often, mono- and multilingualism are topics addressed from the perspective of language rather than from the perspective of modality and register, because tacitly, there is an assumption of a one-to-one link between spoken and written language. As already argued, it is rarely the case in multilingual speech communities, even those of major languages, that their members have repertoires that contain corresponding structures and practices in all languages. This observation holds at the level of the oral modality, and even more so for the written modality. In contrast with spoken language, writing is not acquired by the same mechanisms – sufficient exposure over a long period of time at a young age – but by more regulated apprenticeship, generally associated with some form of schooling. Writing also requires a specialized technology ranging from stylus, pen, paper, parchment and slate to word processors, mobile phones and tablet computers. Writing can therefore be seen as being more “costly” than speaking, and therefore, it is a safe assumption that there will be even less overlap in written repertoires than in spoken ones (see Lüpke 2011 for examples). Very often, written languages enter di- or multigraphic relationships evident in the repertoires attested. I use the term digraphia for those written codes that are hierarchical, and the more neutral term bi- or multigraphia (henceforth used interchangeably), coined following the example of bi- and multilingualism, for the simple coexistence of two or more written codes for a language or variety with or without digraphia (see Fishman 1967 for an analogous analysis of multilingualism; see Lüpke 2011 for a detailed discussion of digraphia and its different uses). Both di- and multigraphia

9 Of course, a comprehensive typology of multilingualism would have to include all three modalities of language – spoken, signed, and written. Since there is very little information on sign languages in Africa (but see Lule & Wallin 2010; Nyst 2010), a discussion of sign languages and their interaction with other modalities has not been attempted.

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are common for languages which for a variety of reasons have come into contact with more than one written code, and there are many textbook examples available for larger world languages (cf. Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian, Chinese characters vs. Pinyin¹⁰, etc.). In multilingual societies, exographia (Lüpke 2011, 2004)  – the use of a different language in writing than in speaking by a community – also occurs widely. Finally, Blommaert (2011) reminds us that there is a huge difference between the “grassroots” literacies widespread in the “Third World”, and institutionally supported multimodal and multimedia “First World” literacies, that necessitates taking the structural inequalities of these literacies into account. The concepts surrounding reading and writing will be discussed in the context of writing in Senegal in general in section 1.4.1, and in a case study in section 1.4.2, before a generalization is attempted on those aspects of reading and writing that are important in many African situations (section 1.4.3).

1.4.1 The ecology of writing in Senegal It has already been mentioned that French is the official language of Senegal. French and Arabic (in the official Écoles Franco-Arabes) are the only languages used as medium of instruction in the formal education system of the country. National languages have no acknowledged place in schools, although they are widely used, especially in primary schools. Since children start school without speaking a word of French in the overwhelming majority of cases, teachers often use a national language of wider communication as the actual medium of instruction through which they teach French. Literacy in French is of very limited scope. Households often do not own any books, with the Bible being an exception for Christian households, and the Qur’an for Muslim ones. In public, these two holy books are virtually the only two books that people are seen reading. Newspapers and magazines are produced, but consumed mainly by a small urban elite. The main type of document created and read is letters to and from government bodies, decrees, tax lists, and the like.

10 As the different language names in two of the cited cases demonstrate, it is a delicate and controversial issue whether varieties with different multigraphic, national, and/or religious affiliations are to be regarded as one language or two. This issue is not independent of the graphic traditions associated with them, since writing systems are markers of identity and languages are not purely linguistic entities but constructs relying on shared identity according to a number of social, political, historical, religious and other factors.

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National languages of Senegal have an even more limited use. The only official niche accorded to them is in the university curriculum: students need to attend a course on a national language. If a language has been codified, that is, given an official status as a national language of Senegal with the right to be used in public, and equipped with a standardized Latin orthography (which in theory is based on a phonological analysis of that language), students can in theory request to attend a course on that language. All Latin-based orthographies in African languages originate in missionary efforts (Pasch 2008). Today, standardized orthographies are being created by government bodies, as in the case of Senegal, and not only by religious institution. Nevertheless, the Latin script remains closely associated with the Christian faith, and in Senegal, Latin-based orthographies are only sucessfully adopted by groups in which Christianity is an important religion. As of 2007, seventeen national languages, including the major languages Wolof, Pulaar, Seereer and Mandinka, had been codified with Latin alphabets (Ministère des Télécommunications 2007). In practice, however, only the largest national languages are taught in these initiation courses at university. Since French dominates writing in the Latin script, it has become the lead language (Lüpke & Bao-Diop forthcoming) whose spelling norms are transferred to the writing of national languages, despite them having their own – IPA-inspired – spelling norms in Roman characters. Writing in these languages occurs mainly outside the areas controlled by the government, mainly on billboards, shop signs, and in text messages, cartoons and graffiti, and never in the standardized orthographies. Despite the limited scope for writing overall, the Latin script is not the only one in use in the country. Several national languages – most notably Wolof and Fulfulde – have longstanding writing traditions in Arabic-based or Ajami scripts (see Lüpke 2011, 2004; Mumin 2009; Souag 2010; Vydrine 1998 for recent overviews of these scripts and discussions of their roles). For Wolof, the Ajami script is known under the name Wolofal and linked to the Islamic brotherhood of the Mourides. Lüpke & Bao-Diop (forthcoming) provide a detailed account of Wolofal writing. This script has no official status and is not counted in literacy statistics, although the government has recently announced that it will include literacy in Wolofal in future statistics (Mbacké Diagne, p.c.). It is expected that this action will boost the percentage of literates enormously, especially in those regions of the country where Mouridism is strong and where up to 50 % of the population master reading and writing in Wolofal. Wolofal is also in the course of being standardized: ISESCO, the UNESCO equivalent of the Arab world, has created a set of harmonized Qur’anic characters which are now decreed in Senegal to be used for the writing of Wolofal. But the caractères coraniques harmonisés (CHC), as they are called in Senegal, share the fate of standardized orthographies in the Latin script: they are simply not taken up. The main reason for this lies in

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the ecology of writing of Wolofal: it is acquired and used in a religious context that has its own, regional conventions for writing and reading Arabic. Its uses are mainly religious, but also comprise letter-writing and poetry, and alongside French and Wolof in Latin script, Wolofal appears in the linguascape of Senegal on billboards, inscriptions on bush taxis and minibuses, etc. For those languages of the country that can be written in two scripts, there are three orthographic choices present: while Ajami writing takes the Warsh tradition¹¹ of Arabic writing as the lead language (see Souag 2010 for a detailed discussion), for Latin-based writing either the standardized orthographies or French-based spelling can be used. This situation is aptly described by Mc Laughlin for Wolof as follows: Although a standard Wolof orthography exists in the Roman alphabet, it is not widely used, being almost uniquely the domain of linguists or educators working in literacy programs, as well as a handful of Senegalese authors who write in Wolof. Wolof written in the Roman alphabet, whether in the official orthography or in a French orthography, presupposes knowledge of French, however basic, on the part of the writer, and for most people who know French, that is the language they will write, thus relegating Wolof or other indigenous languages to the oral domain. To summarize the general situation, those Wolof speakers who are literate in French normally write in that language; those who are not write in Wolofal. The writing of Wolof in the Roman script is thus by far the least used of all written possibilities […] (Mc Laughlin 2001: 165)

The nature of Arabic as the lead language for Wolofal follows from the acquisition of this literacy as a side-effect of Qur’anic education with the main goal of reading and writing Arabic characters in order to read and copy suras of the Qur’an. Souag (2010) argues convincingly that this subordinate role of Ajami can be demonstrated through many of its characteristics, and in particular through the existence of a character described by him as the “Ajami diacritic” (2010: 6). The Ajami diacritic consists of three small dots above the letter (including diacritics of an ordinary size), and it simply signals that the character should not be read as an Arabic one, its exact value being dependent on phonological similarity and contextual interpretation. Thus, for instance “‫< ﺏ‬b> + 3 small dots = = /p, mb/; e.g. = /bopp-am/ ‘his head’; = /mbir/ ‘problem’” in Wolof. The solution of employing a diacritic that has no defined sound value is ideal for the context in which Ajami is acquired and transmitted. Since

11 Warsh and the more widespread Hafs are two reading traditions for the Qur’an, whose main difference resides in the level of phonetic detail provided. Warsh is attested throughout the Maghreb and West Africa. Among other features, Warsh uses a dot placed underneath a letter to indicate the sound [eː], which is attested in most West African Ajami systems with the exception of Mandinka Ajami. The CHC exclude specifics of Warsh.

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conventions for writing non-Arabic sounds are considered as mere sidelines to the primary goal of learning to write Arabic, then the simpler a convention is relative to Arabic, the more likely it is to be successfully acquired. The ‘non-Arab sound’ diacritic is a single element, thus maximally easily learned, and in principle doubles the script’s expressive capacity without requiring any further conventions. A language planner setting a goal of native language literacy would most likely design a system where each sound was separately represented; but this method represents a pragmatic compromise, recognising the religiously defined primacy of the goal of being able to read the Qur’ān and yet making the desirable side effect of native language mass literacy more easily attainable even with few or no printed works. It serves as an important reminder that the nature of an orthography depends not just on the structure of the language, but on the educational infrastructure supporting it and on its perceived purpose. (Souag 2010: 9)

Dominant language and script choice in the written domain become evident in the shop sign in figure 6. The demand to worship a religious leader, which would be Sopp sëriñ Fadiilu Mbake in Wolof in the standardized orthography, is present twice on the sign, once in a Latin script following French spelling norms (i.e. for /p/, for /u/), and once in Wolofal in the Warsh tradition. The standard orthographies for Wolof, in the Latin and Arabic scripts, are nowhere to be seen.

Figure 6: Shop sign in Touba: Sopp sëriñ Fadiilu Mbake – Worship Seriñ Fadiluu Mbake! (Lüpke & Bao Diop forthcoming)

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It becomes clear through a look at Senegal’s written landscape that languages and scripts are not equal, but coexist in nested digraphic relations, and that these are linked to the status of the languages in general. French is the principal language with official recognition and a designated education system serving its teaching. Although its scope, both in spoken and written contexts, is quite limited, these contexts are characterized by high prestige and backed up by legislation demanding the use of French in them. French is the only or most important exographic language for many communities in the country, who do not use any other language in writing. Therefore, French has gained importance as a lead language even for national languages written with Latin characters and so has increased its realm to contexts where it is not even present as a language. The use of the Roman alphabet, regardless for which language of Senegal, entails the symbolic presence of French. Arabic, in particular in the Warsh tradition, has a similar profile. It has a formal place in the education system and an enormous religious significance for the mainly Muslim population of the country. Like French, it is a language written and understood by few. Yet, and in this role predating French and Latin characters by at least three centuries, it has served as the lead language for the writing of Senegalese languages in Arabic characters, thereby allowing the expression of very different symbolic affinities. Minority languages, the least used group in the triglossic environment, have a small and local niche to occupy in oral domains, and no place at all in written domains. Members of minority communities have almost without exception exographic literacy practices. This means that other languages, depending on their respective lead in Latin or Arabic script, are the only ones occupying the written domain. Most language planning activities, for languages that have no written form and literacy development, rely on graphization (Ferguson 1968), which is seen by many as the most important instrument for strengthening the status of minority and endangered languages. Yet, as current literacy research warns us: Seen from the top, so to speak, language policy always looks simple and clear: language(s) X, Y etc. are ‘official’ languages, language(s) A, B are ‘national’ languages, language(s) C, D are ‘media of instruction’ in education, and so forth. There are people who believe that such clear and simple policies must have an immediate, profound and totalizing effect on practices on the ground (and that, consequently, a change in language policy would suffice to revitalize endangered languages, for instance). Ethnographers are quick to dismiss such views: when seen from below, language policies emerge as a complex and layered, stratified field in which language practices and language ideologies interact and intersect at a variety of scale-levels, some of which are dominated by the policy doxa while others respond to entirely different sets of norms and patterns of conduct (Blommaert 2011: 294–295)

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By way of illustrating the complex and clashing practices and ideologies surrounding grassroots literacy, the following case study focuses on my own research experience on Baïnounk Guñaamolo and aims at assessing what scope there is for writing in its context.

1.4.2 The making of guilty illiterates This case study tells the sad tale of a failed literacy campaign for Baïnounk Guñaamolo, the only Baïnounk language not yet discussed in detail. Guñaamolo is spoken in the rural community of Niamone, which comprises a number of hamlets, to the north of the Casamance River in the vicinity of Bignona. By the time missionaries of the evangelical American New Tribes Mission (NTM) started their activities in the Baïnounk Guñaamolo village Niamone, in the 1970s, this community, as is very typical for the north bank of the Casamance river, already consisted almost entirely of Muslims. Creating literacy is extremely important for NTM, as its explicit aim is to plant churches that teach the gospel in local languages (we will return to the role of missionaries in the creation of knowledge on African languages, and of NTM in particular, in chapter 4). A first generation of missionaries lived in Niamone for over 20 years. They devised an alphabet based on the same principles as the alphabet for the neighbouring language, Joola Fogny, created a number of syllabaries and other teaching materials, and started translating the Bible. A school for adult literacy lessons was built, and for a number of years, mainly previously illiterate speakers of Baïnounk Guñaamolo attended literacy classes in this language. Guñaamolo speakers with formal education (and hence literate in French) were not targeted by the campaign. In the 1980s, a second stakeholder in Baïnounk standardization and literacy emerged: The BOREPAB (Bureau d’Organisation, d’Etudes, et de Recherche sur le Patrimoine Baïnounck). This association was founded in Dakar by the charismatic Diaspora community member Augustin Coly. He was prompted by the failure to include any representation of Baïnounk culture in the first official carnival procession organized in Ziguinchor in 1980 to assemble eminent personalities from different Baïnounk language areas in an association that aimed at creating a better visibility and recognition of this important group of Casamance. Initially, BOREPAB organized study days focusing on Baïnounk history, which contributed considerably to a homogenization of the different oral traditions present in the area in favour of the creation of an overarching Baïnounk historical identity (a trend also described by Bühnen 1994). Later, BOREPAB lobbied for recognition of Baïnounk as an endangered language, picking up on essentializing statements on language endangerment that

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were quite unusual to find in West Africa at that time, and that reflect a position that might have been brought in by NTM missionaries informed of the endangerment discourse then emerging in the US (see also Smith 2006 on the emergence of this and similar “ethnic” discourses in Casamance and their spread through community associations, festivals of folklore, etc.). One major problem for BOREPAB’s homogenization attempts was and continues to be the linguistic diversity within the cluster of Baïnounk languages – the main varieties that are still spoken today are not in contact, nor are they mutually intelligible, and each of them has been shaped considerably by a different contact language. Therefore, the linguistic activities of BOREPAB were very limited initially, and all communication and publicity still takes place in French (see figure  7 below). This situation has not changed much, despite prolonged exposure of BOREPAB members to the different Baïnounk languages (in contrast to “ordinary” speakers of the languages)  – interactions, if meetings are organized across speech communities at all, still happen in French. Speakers have strong preconceptions about the different languages, generally claiming their own variety to be the purest, and the others to be corrupted by language contact, as poignantly illustrated by the following statement by a speaker of Baïnounk Gubëeher collected by Alexander Cobbinah (DJI121109AC [extract]): (1)

imɛŋ a-n-kɔlɔnise-a pa: le 3pl 3-pl-colonize-pass by def.pl ‘we have been colonized by the Mandinka.’

mandɛŋgə. Mandinka

d-ə-n-lob bə-lob b-a-n-jɛn ŋko. neg.fut-3-pl-speak cl.ba-speak neg.imperf-3-pl-say Nko ‘they won’t say a word without saying “Nko”’ minɔ gu-bəːher pyr g-i-n-lob-ɛ 1pl.incl cl.gu-Baïnounk pur foc.obj-1-pl-speak-1pl.incl.perf ‘it is us who speak a pure Baïnounk’ As is often the case, practice fails to be as pure as the ideology demands: material set in bold in the example above is either code-switched or borrowed from French (with the distinction between code-switching and borrowing impossible to make given the phonological distance of many features of Senegalese French from metropolitan French) and ironically includes the very word pure itself. The word ŋko corresponds to ‘I say’ in Mandinka, but is a direct quote. But there are also three instances of the root lob ‘speak’, doubly underlined in the example, which also occurs in Joola languages, and whose origin is not clear.

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Across the different Baïnounk varieties, speakers know a number of emblematic words in the other languages and can find their way around basic vocabulary that is cognate. The grammatical systems are too different, however, to allow for easy accommodation.

Figure 7: Man in Niamone wearing a BOREPAB T-shirt evoking the community – in French (Niamone, 2008)

Two factors converged to change the focus of BOREPAB activities towards Baïnounk literacy. In Senegal, a movement in favour of the codification of national languages had begun in the new millennium. Codification reads as official recognition going hand in hand with standardization and the publication of an official orthography, and the granting of certain linguistic human rights – use in education and the media among them, at least by declaration. BOREPAB was part of this movement, and joined forces with the NTM missionaries. Building mainly on the missionaries’ work on Baïnounk Guñaamolo, a language committee with representatives from the different language areas prepared the necessary documents for the codification of “Baïnounk”. It consisted of an inventory of letters, an illustration of their sound values with words from the different Baïnounk languages, and a short text in the main varieties, with a translation into French. In

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2006, Baïnounk was, at least on paper, one of the officially recognized national languages. In Niamone, in the meantime, a major change was occurring. When the first generation of missionaries left in the late 1990s, their language activities came to a standstill, since the newly arrived missionaries had to learn and master the language first – not an easy task, especially in the light of the absence of any comprehensive grammatical description, let alone a teaching grammar. At the same time, it became clear that proselytizing in the village was not very successful: NTM news highlights report only two converted villagers, and in 2008, there was no overtly Christian inhabitant in the village. This led to the odd situation that at the very point when NTM missionaries and BOREPAB activists had achieved the official recognition of the Baïnounk cluster as a national language of Senegal, the missionaries were on the point of leaving and had no more energies to invest in a literacy programme, not even for Guñaamolo. At the same time, the official alphabet for Baïnounk used the inventory of characters determined in the official alphabet for Senegalese languages decreed by the state, and the NTM alphabet diverged from this alphabet in a number of cases.¹² While most BOREPAB officials have mastered the new alphabet, they are and remain the only ones to do so, and the Guñaamolo literates of the NTM tradition are left behind without support of any kind – a costly misinvestment for a community with ca. 5,000 members and about 100 potential (trained) readers and writers. What are the main consequences of this development? The literacy activities so far have not created a single actual writer of a Baïnounk language; rather, they have succeeded in creating entire communities of guilty analphabets. Speakers of all Baïnounk languages, who have never written in their languages, have been instilled with the inferiority complex so commonly induced by powerful graphocentric ideologies (Blommaert 2004), that a language is only a fully-fledged medium of communication when it is used in writing, and that successful language policies for minority and endangered languages need to focus on the introduction of literacy. This myth has been criticized elsewhere (e.g. in Blommaert 2004; Lüpke 2011 and the references therein), and I will not take it up in detail here. It is, however, worth taking a brief look at language ecology in the different Baïnounk communities and looking for potential scope for written language use. In the small Baïnounk Gubëeher community, written communication (with an already limited scope) takes place almost entirely in French, the language of formal education. Reading, outside of the contexts of school and religion, is

12 See Lüpke (2011: 317) for the inventory of graphemes for both alphabets and their correspondences.

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almost entirely absent – there is no tradition of reading for leisure, and no money to buy books. With whom would a speaker of Gubëeher, almost exclusively present in Djibonker and in small Diasporas in Ziguinchor and Dakar, communicate in writing in Gubëeher, and in which contexts? The absence of a reliable mail system rules out letters as an effective medium, and internet access exists only in the cities, and only when there is electricity (Senegal has been in an acute energy crisis for the past years, with power cuts occuring more reliably than running electricity). This leaves text messages, which have been shown throughout Africa to be the medium favourizing the use of African languages most (Lexander 2010), as the only possible context, and indeed, Alexander Cobbinah’s main consultant and trained transcriber of linguistic data has started sending texts to relatives in Dakar (Alexander Cobbinah, p.c.). For the seemingly privileged Guñaamolo community of Niamone, the assessment of the situation is not much different: the school remains empty, the NTM materials have become obsolete overnight, and the beneficiaries of the literacy campaigns of the 1990s have lost the status of holding highly regarded knowledge. Of course, it should be added that this status was doubtful from the very beginning, given that the literacy campaigns were always aimed at adult illiterates. This means people without formal schooling, who in this community are illiterate, which underlines the campaign’s actual focus on the importance of literacy per se, rather than literacy in the Baïnounk language. If literacy in Baïnounk was the goal, one would have expected a literacy campaign including community members who are literate in French. De facto, the achievement of Baïnounk literacy is thus relegated to second place, relevant only for those who are unfortunate enough not to have mastered French and hence are not able to access this more prestigious literacy. This focus is typical for many attempts at introducing literacy in African languages (Skattum 2010; Dumestre 1997, 1994; Brock-Utne & Skattum 2009). Skattum succinctly exposes the mismatch between overtly stated goals (learning to write and read one’s language) and implicit value judgments and ideologies contradicting it (writing as a cultural technique is important, and writing in national languages is in reality only of value as a stepping stone towards literacy in the official language).¹³ Figure 8, a certificate for a graduate of the NTM literacy campaign, illustrates this clash between explicit aims and implicit ideologies counteracting these very aims. The certificate that qualifies

13 Mühlhäusler (1990) describes a similar clash between explicit and implicit goals and results of literacy for minority languages in the Pacific: in many cases, literacy development, despite strong rhetorics to the contrary, is seen and serves as a mere stepping stone towards literacy in the official language.

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its bearer to teach literacy in Baïnounk Guñaamolo is written not in the language whose literacy it is supposed to promote, but in very defective French (for which most certainly the American missionaries are to blame).

Figure 8: Certificate for a graduate of the NTM literacy training – in French

In the partly or wholly Muslim communities of Baïnounk Gujaher such as Agnack, some children attend Qur’anic schools in which they learn to read and write in Arabic; but unlike in other communities in Senegal, no writing practice using a national language in an Ajami script is attested in Baïnounk communities. One community member started a grassroots literacy class in the 1990s. It was shortlived, allegedly because the teacher was very short-tempered with his flock of students. More likely, similar factors as in the other villages impeded a sustainable move towards Baïnounk literacy: the lack of an ecological niche for writing in Baïnounk, the lack of an audience for writing, and finally the impossibility of creating a durable written environment providing access to engaging materials for reading, and genuine occasions for writing. In these circumstances, it is rather sad to see that members of the communities have been so much influenced by religious and Western graphocentric

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ideologies that they believe that their language cannot be “saved” unless it is written  – and unless they read and write it. For the ongoing documentation project on Baïnounk languages, this situation creates a caveat: on the one hand, a sociolinguistic study in the Baïnounk Guñaamolo area (Lüpke 2010a; see also section 5.6.3) has already revealed the discrepancy between attitudes strongly in favour of Guñaamolo literacy and actual practices: while 92 % of the 36 participants in the study were in favour of teaching literacy in Guñaamolo and none of them in favour of teaching literacy in contact languages apart from French, only 22 % had actually attended the literacy classes while they were offered, and 22 % had attended literacy classes offered by an NGO in Mandinka instead – for the simple reason that there was a reward (in the form of a sack of rice and a can of cooking oil) for signing up. At the beginning of the documentation project in October 2010, a workshop uniting 36 participants from the different Baïnounk language areas took place, and in this workshop, it emerged as central for the participants to be able to read and write “their language” – an identity concept not matched by the internal diversity of the Baïnounk language cluster. The majority of participants were BOREPAB members, and some of them had been involved in the codification committee. It turned out that they had mastered the standardized orthography and were at ease in teaching it – but had not written or read a single line in it since 2005. Compliant with the representatives’ wishes, the project organized an orthography workshop in March 2011, in which two to three members from each community were trained to use the orthography. Since then, two of them – both main consultants and trained in transcription, it should be noted – have been using it to write text messages, as illustrated in figure 9. Text messages are probably the only context where it is realistic to hope for a use of Baïnounk languages in writing. Unfortunately, this is not very ergonomic, since the orthography, conforming to the national norm, contains characters not easy to find ( and ) or absent () from the special character inventory of most mobile phones. Within the project, alternative digraphs (, and ) were suggested to replace them, but this creates a lot of confusion at certain morpheme boundaries, and renders the orthography more complex than desirable in a context where there are almost no resources for regular training in its use. Through the exposure to powerful essentialist and graphocentric discourses, Baïnounk communities have developed a deficit where there was none. While they remain illiterate in Baïnounk languages in practice, they have become apologetic about this perceived failure to do their language justice. I will now look at some other “restricted literacies” in the terms of Goody (1986), and at the consequences of literacy practices for a detailed ethnographic understanding of multilingual and often multigraphic literacy in a multimodal perspective.

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Figure 9: Text message in Baïnounk Gujaher14

1.4.3 African writing: what scope, which languages and scripts? 1.4.3.1 Grapho- and eurocentric ideologies and “restricted literacies” Situations like those described for Senegal and for the Baïnounk communities hold in many African situations. Is it the case, then, that (sub-Saharan) Africa is an oral continent, if official languages, whose scope is often very limited, are not taken into account? There is an overwhelming tendency to describe African societies south of the Sahara as “oral” or “lacking written traditions” in pre-colonial times, often in the form of global statements such as the following, taken from a volume with the telling title The making of literate societies:

14 The message, addressed to me under my Gujaher first name, says: ‘Aminata, greetings. I’m in Dakar and things are fine, but there is no electricity, I can’t work now.’ No interlinearization is provided, given that the analysis of Baïnounk Gujaher is still under way.

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In other regions such as Subsaharan Africa there was no previous literate tradition and the colonial language […] tended to be propagated. (Olson & Torrance 2001: 6)

Undoubtedly, a central place is to be accorded to orality in many African societies, and the roles of oral registers have been aptly described (Finnegan 1992, 2007; Barber 2007). But is it true that the importance of the spoken word is linked to the absence of literacies? A look at official literacy statistics seems to confirm this view. UNICEF literacy statistics for West Africa, although improved during the past decade, show that literacy rates remain very low, and the countries in this region fail to reach the UN Millenium Development Goals of providing universal primary education by 2015, as illustrated in table 2 below.

Country

Adult literacy rate 2005–2010 (%)

Primary enrolment rate 2007–2009 (%)

Guinea Mali Niger Nigeria Senegal

39 26 29 61 50

74 77 54 63 75

Table 2: Adult literacy and primary enrolment rates in five West African countries (source: UNICEF 2012; http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/centralafrica.html (not archivable in WebCite because site refuses access to web crawlers))

But is this picture of underdevelopment really accurate? Many specialists on African writing vehemently argue that it is far from portraying reality, and point out writing practices long predating the colonial period  – but most education planners would probably agree. Even writers coming from contexts of prestigious and old writing traditions can downplay or deny their role, as the following widely circulated quote attributed to Amadou Hampaté Bâ, the already introduced Fulfulde writer and philosopher, shows: Les peuples de race noire n’étant pas des peuples d’écriture ont développé l’art de la parole d’une manière toute spéciale. Pour n’être pas écrite, leur littérature n’en est pas moins belle. Combien de poèmes, d’épopées, de récits historiques et chevaleresques, de contes didactiques, de mythes et de légendes au verbe admirable se sont ainsi transmis à travers les siècles, fidèlement portés par la mémoire prodigieuse des hommes de l’oralité, passionnément épris de beau langage et presque tous poètes! (Ascribed to Hamadou Hampaté Bâ 1985) [The people of black race not being people of the written word have developed verbal art in a very special manner. For not being written their literature is not less beautiful. How

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many poems, epics, historical and chivalrous narratives, didactic tales, myths and legends of admirable style have transmitted themselves throughout centuries, faithfully carried by the prodigious memory of the people of orality, passionately taken by beautiful speech and almost all poets!]

Where does the clash between these two perceptions of (West) African writing or its absence stem from? Blommaert’s (2011) analysis of writing in the global South as grassroots writing or “the small print of literacy” points to the alignment of literacy with Western literacy practices – only those literacy practices that resemble Western ones are officially measured and perceived. Although aiming to represent literacy, the official statistics in all West African countries in fact measure literacy in the official language – in the five countries of table 2, English and French. This may not be their official goal, but for all countries concerned, literacy statistics for other forms of literacy are simply not available, even when there is a rhetorical willingness to include them, as is the case in Senegal. To this is added the fact that there is a huge bias in perception that causes language planners, NGO activists, missionaries and other outsiders engaged in language planning and literacy activities to overlook major and deeply rooted African literary traditions. In most instances, they have been reduced to the status of grassroots writing though the imposition of a colonial language in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their downgrading from prestigious expressions of religion and poetry to disregarded and discounted practices is not only due to a failure of external experts to understand the social context and the ecology of languages, spoken or written. The Eurocentric bias of Westerners who recognize as literacy what looks most like their own literacy tradition is matched by the ideologies of the African practitioners of unacknowledged or misrepresented literacy traditions (see also Tuchscherer 2007).

1.4.3.2 Some literacies are more visible than others Not all external observers are as extreme as to deny pre-colonial Africa a literacy tradition altogether. Yet, even for those who acknowledge their existence, grassroots literacy practices often come with the stigma of being a “restricted literacy” (Goody 1986), which stems from observations like the following on Ajami writing by Goody himself: the book [the Qur’an] was written in Arabic, and that was the language one had to learn to become a reader or a writer, so that advanced literacy skills were limited to a few Islamic scholars. Works were copied and even composed in West Africa but the uses of literacy for the purpose of government were few. While Hausa and Fulani were later written in Arabic

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script, even with the establishment of the Sokoto caliphate [according to Davidson (1998: 156) between 1804–1811] the language of state remained Arabic. The use of writing was restricted as a result of its origin in the word of God. (Goody 1986: 112)

I do not want to argue with Goody’s assessment of most cases of Ajami literacy (and of other forms of African grassroots literacies) as being restricted. But, as argued for Senegal in section  1.4.1 above, officially recognized literacy in most African settings is likewise “restricted”, especially if compared with the functions of literacy and the cognitive ability often associated with it (these have already been shown through a classic study by Goody, Cole, & Scribner (1977) on Vai

Map 4: Non-Latin scripts in Africa

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writing to be associated with Western schooling rather than with literacy per se). All existing literacy traditions, pre- or postcolonial, are rooted in the contexts of powerful and very different language ideologies and educational epistemes and associated with a powerful mixture of religious, historical, and political connotations. In addition, they are located in a complex multilingual space that determines and limits their scope. Map 4 above presents the most well-known of them. Below, a brief overview of important African writing practices outside the official context are given. They are included here in order to illustrate through concrete examples of literary practices that there is not a simple one-to-one relationship between spoken and written registers of language, and that widespread assumptions on literacy (or its absence) in Africa turn out not to be true as soon as one looks beyond literacy in the formal education sector dominated by the official languages. In addition, literacy practices and their role in a complex linguistic environment serve to demonstrate that, counter to common perception, language development cannot simply consist of creating a written standard for every single “named language” in an ecology. Just as for multilingualism within the spoken modality, the potential of particular scripts in their interrelation to the spoken repertoires needs to be understood.

1.4.3.3 Ajami literacies It is paradoxical that the countries with the highest official illiteracy rates in West Africa are among those with the most widespread “alternative” model of education and writing, Qur’anic education and Ajami writing. Throughout West Africa, there is a long tradition of Qur’anic education, continuing today at the formal and informal level. Some of the countries discussed here have integrated the so-called Franco-Arabic schools, teaching the curriculum of state schools in French and Arabic, into the formal education sector. All of the countries tolerate daaras, private Qur’anic establishments, as well as marabouts and imams teaching in their own courtyards. The criticisms of Qur’anic education are manifold (see Dumestre 1997 among others) – Qur’anic education generally does not lead to proficiency in Arabic, although Arabic is the object language of teaching. The goal of Qur’anic schooling (Franco-Arabic schools exempted) is the ability to read and recite the Qur’an, which is generally taught through rote learning, not the ability to understand what is written there or the knowledge of how to speak, read, or write Arabic. But even in the case of Franco-Arabic schools with a full curriculum and more Western educational goals, such a religiously inspired model of education cannot serve as a national model in West African countries, where several religions coexist. Nevertheless, the ongoing popularity of Qur’anic

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education shows that it fulfils important cultural and educational needs, aptly described by Brenner (2001) for Mali, or by Moore (2008) for northern Cameroon. In addition, a side effect of the exposure to the Qur’an leads to mastery of the Arabic-based scripts in use for several African languages of the region, which will be looked at more closely in the following section. No statistical data on the importance of Qur’anic education in the concerned countries are available, but impressions such as the following reveal the importance of this type of education. According to Mbacké Diagne of the primary education division of the Senegalese ministry of education (p.c.), the district in Senegal with the densest network of Qur’anic schools and the highest literacy rate in Arabic letters, Diourbel, does not feature as the nationwide leader in literacy statistics. On the contrary, Diourbel appears at the bottom of the list, since only formal schooling and resulting literacy in Latin characters is counted. The unsatisfying position of having to rely on quasi-anecdotal findings like this, instead of being able to access verifiable data collected at national and international levels, illustrates the vicious circle resulting from ignoring or minimizing this writing culture: what is not officially recognized does not inform any policies; what does not inform educational policies is not taken into consideration. Given the great importance of Arabic-based scripts among African literacy traditions, their discussion receives more room than those practices whose regional scope is more limited. Ajami writing practices are used throughout the sphere of influence of Islam in Africa; map 5 shows the distribution of West African uses that have been attested in the literature (see Mumin 2009 for a comprehenisve overview of Ajami writing throughout Africa).

Map 5: A selection of West African languages for which Ajami use is attested (based on Souag 2010: 1)

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Some well-described cases of Ajami literacies are introduced below. For the Chadic language Hausa, spoken in Nigeria and Niger, the use of Ajami is attested as early as the seventeenth century (Philips 2000: 19). As Philips remarks, however, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, and even earlier writings in Ajami cannot be ruled out, given the difficult climatic conditions for the preservation of manuscripts and the difficulties of dating them. Over 20,000 manuscripts in Ajami in the Nigerian National Archives are proof of this long and flourishing culture of writing in Hausa (Philips 2000: 27). Although Ajami was officially replaced with Romanized Hausa by the British colonial administrators, “[t]he informal use of Ajami in manuscript by scholars, merchants and others continues today wherever there are Hausa speakers” (Philips 2000: 27), and there are still books and newspapers produced in it. Similar observations as for Hausa hold for the Ajami used for Fula. Accounts on the historical importance of writing in Arabic letters are not available for all countries and language areas. Nevertheless, it can safely be stated that pre-colonial Fula literature in Ajami covered religious, political, administrative, poetic and personal texts and was most prolific wherever Fulbe states existed, as in Senegal, Guinea, and North Cameroon (Seydou 2000: 64–65). For some areas, such as the Futa Jalon in Guinea, a brief history, a catalogue of texts ranging from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and a partial evaluation of the contemporary role of the script are available (Salvaing 2004; Salvaing & Hunwick 2003). In contrast to Hausa, whose Arabic script was actively discouraged and replaced by Romanized Hausa by the British, the French colonizers of Guinea ignored Pular writing traditions, since their goal was to create a population literate in French. For the Futa Jalon region of Guinea, the facts point to a continuing popularity of Ajami: although a standardized Roman orthography was created for Pular in Guinea and used in adult literacy campaigns, the Ajami tradition persists until today, seeing the birth of new genres, and resulting in a flourishing written environment. Salvaing & Hunwick remark: Today, even slightly educated folk are capable of reading and writing Fulfulde in ajami script, at least for matters of everyday life and private correspondence. The great spread of written Fulfulde does not seem to have been hindered by the abandonment of teaching Fulfulde in public schools fifteen years ago, when the government, based on the work of the Military Committee for National Recovery, gave preference to French. (Salvaing & Hunwick 2003: 503–504.)

In Guinea, the use of Pular Ajami is also an established exographic writing tradition for minority groups in contact with Fula, such as the Jalonke of the Futa Jalon (Lüpke 2004, 2005b, 2011). For the use of Pulaar Ajami in Senegal, where this Fula variety is dominant in the Futa Tooro region in the north of the country, a contro-

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versy surrounds its scope. Some (Schmitz & Humery 2008; Humery 2010a, 2010b; Humery-Dieng 2001; and Fagerberg-Diallo 2001) describe it as marginal in contrast with a very successful Latin-based literacy. Others, like Cissé (2006) regard the Ajami literacy as the dominant, and the Latin-based literacy as the marginal one. It is possible that the observers’ paradox plays a role in these contradictory assessments, as described by Lüpke & Bao-Diop (forthcoming) for Cameroonian and Senegalese Ajami literacies. Another known case of the use of Arabic letters for a language other than Arabic is presented by Wolof, already mentioned in section 1.4 above. The creation and use of Wolofal, according to Camara & Mitsch (1997) dating back to the seventeenth century, is tightly linked to the Islamic brotherhood of Mourides. The Mourides are very influential in the Senegalese religious landscape, and the use of Wolofal for religious and poetic writings in their realm has resulted in an important body of literature, for the most part preserved in private libraries and copied by hand. Mc Laughlin, in accordance with Camara & Mitsch (1997), states for the present-day use of Wolofal: [W]olofal originated within a religious context, but it is also fairly widely used on the contemporary scene by those who are familiar with the Arabic alphabet but not the Roman, to keep records and notes and especially to write letters. The use of Wolofal for writing Wolof appears to be much more widespread than the use of the Roman alphabet for the same purpose, a fact that is due to almost universal attendance by Muslim children at Qu’ranic school, where they master the rudiments of the Arabic writing system. Public school education is conducted in French, and thus students who attend those schools learn to write in the Roman script – but attendance at such schools is not as high as attendance at Qu’ranic schools, and was even lower in the past. (Mc Laughlin 2001: 165)

Apart from the visible and formalized uses of Ajami and Wolofal, Arabic-based scripts are formally and informally used for letter writing in these and other languages. Even for languages lacking a formalized Ajami tradition, informal and even ad hoc writing in Arabic characters is attested, for instance in the Mande languages Soso (Guinea), Mogofin (Guinea) and several varieties of Manding spoken in Mali, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, and Senegal (Vydrine 1998). Figure 10 illustrates the use of Arabic for a story written in Mandinka, a Manding variety. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Ajami writing was placed in a context of competition with the Roman script, as missionary activities became concerted and culminated in the Church Missionary Society devising Rules for Reducing Unwritten Languages to Alphabetical Writing in Roman characters, with reference especially to the languages spoken in Africa, and Richard Lepsius creating a Standard Alphabet in the 1850s (Dalby 1986; Mumin 2009; Pasch 2008;

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Bendor-Samuel 1996). These activities served their goals of producing Bible translations in local languages and creating a literate population able to read them. In the propagation of the Latin script, they were joined by colonial administrators who, if aware of the existence of Ajami writing, rather than misperceiving it as writing in the Arabic language, were often deeply suspicious of this script that they could not read and that had such a close connotation with Islam (see also Cissé 2006 for similar observations regarding Ajami in Senegal).

Figure 10: Mandinka text written in Arabic letters by Keba Singateh (Vydrine 1998: 66 & 25; transliteration)

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1.4.3.4 The Ge’ez script The Ge’ez script has its origin in Ge’ez, the liturgical language and associated abjad¹⁵ of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox church. The modern script is an abugida¹⁶, written from left to right. The Ge’ez script is now used to write Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre and a number of other languages in Ethiopia and Eritrea. For a number of languages, the script competes with Latin-based and Arabic-based orthographies – see Asfaha (2009) and Asfaha & Kroon (2011) for an account of the di- and multigraphic linguistic landscape of Eritrea. They describe the interaction of scripts and languages based on classroom studies and observations of literacy in public life in Eritrea as follows: The choice of the Roman alphabet to write the less dominant languages in Eritrea has sociocultural advantages for the languages or language groups that have adopted it. The influences of the languages and scripts of wider use, however, can be detected in decisions regarding alphabetic-syllabic teaching of letters of the Roman alphabet adopted by the newly written languages. We also see that the newly coded languages are not immune from the influences of the teaching traditions of the two dominant traditions associated with the Ge’ez and Arabic scripts. Therefore, the progressive language and script policy of the EPLF, now the government of Eritrea, that promotes the equality of all languages is inevitably tempered by the pervasiveness of cultural practices such as the ubiquitous recitation of texts, chanting after the teacher, and the prominence of syllabic treatment of alphabetic and consonantal alphabetic letters and syllabaries. Finally we would like to stress that the results of our classroom study do not allow conclusions on day-to-day language and literacy practices outside school. Literacy instruction in Eritrean schools follows the mother tongue approach as proclaimed by the Eritrean language-in-education policy. This does not mean, however, that in all cases the real mother tongues of the students are taught (as e.g. in the case of the Arabic classroom observed, where most students were speakers of other languages than Arabic). It also does not mean, as has been clearly shown already by Hailemariam (2002: 271), and more recently by Asfaha, Kurvers, and Kroon (2008: 226) that all parents, especially those belonging to the smaller language communities, are in favor of this mother tongue approach because of a perceived socio-economic disadvantage that might arise from learning in one’s minority language in a globalizing world. And finally it does not mean that all languages are languages of literacy in the public sphere where most of the written communication is done in the Tigrinya language and the Ge’ez script, where written Arabic is mainly limited to Eritrea’s political, business and religious elite, and where, except for English, the Roman script, as the script of most of the minority languages, is hardly used at all (see also Asfaha 2009b). (Asfaha & Kroon 2011: 243–244)

15 Abjads are scripts whose graphemes encode only consonants. 16 Abugidas are scripts whose symbols encode consonant + vowel combinations. Both abjads and abugidas differ from alphabets, where consonants and vowels are encoded on a par as separate graphemes.

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Figure 11: Ge’ez script on an alphabet chart

1.4.3.5 The Bamun syllabary The Bamun (or Bamum) syllabary¹⁷ was allegedly created by the Sultan Ibrahim Njoya in the nineteenth century in the Sultanate of Foumban, in the Western Province of Cameroon (see Tuchscherer 2007 for detailed accounts). It is still symbolically present and is taught in a palace school there. Its scope of use is very limited, since formal literacy is dominated by French in the Roman script, and grassroots literacy takes place in Arabic and a number of Ajami scripts in Qur’anic schools. Nevertheless, the Bamun script has great prestige. In the past decade or so, the syllabary has gained new meaning and importance in the politi-

17 Syllabaries are scripts where each grapheme in principle stands for a syllable of the language, resulting in large numbers of characters.

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cal domain. Opposition leadership against the Cameroonian head of state has been associated with a descendant of Sultan Njoya, and the use of the Bamun script has become a symbolic act of expressing critique and diverging political opinions. Figure 12 shows the rulers of the Bamun dynasty in Roman and Bamun script at the Sultan’s palace.

Figure 12: The rulers of the Bamun dynasty in Roman and Bamun script

1.4.3.6 N’ko N’ko is an alphabet designed by the pan-Manding visionary Solomana Kante 1949 in Guinea (see figure 13). It is tailored for the writing of Manding languages, and, under the influence of Arabic, written from right to left. N’ko has a great popularity and is most certainly used more often than the different standardized Latinbased orthographies for Manding languages. It now has official and growing

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status in Guinea – where a N’ko academy exists, attempts to replace the official Maninka alphabet by the N’ko one have been made, and official documents in Maninka are published in N’ko (reports on Mandelang mailing list in 2011) – and in Mali, where a newspaper in the Manding language Bamanan appears in this script. The main attraction of the N’ko script seems to lie in the possibility of tapping into a shared Manding identity through its use, a factor that once more bears witness of the importance of seeing literacy as a social practice embedded in a complex cultural context, rather than just a technology needed to participate in information transfer through reading and writing.

Figure 13: Pages from Vydrine’s (1999) Manding-English dictionary in Roman and N’ko script

1.4.3.7 The Tifinagh script Tifinagh is one of the scripts used to write the Amazigh (or Berber) languages, alongside the Arabic and Roman scripts. Tifinagh is an alphabetic script written from left to right that is a descendant of the ancient Berber script, and is now used to write Amazigh in North Africa. Figure 14 shows an example of its globalized use.

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Figure 14: Amazigh word written in Tifinagh, on a CD cover in a record shop

The script has been modernized and standardized, and is now taught to Amazigh and Arabic speaking primary school children in Morocco. Despite a strong political will, and many resources invested in its implementation, literacy in Tifinagh suffers from problems typical for Third World literacies, which often create a new standardized language alongside a new – written – register. The hurdles are aptly summarized by Blommaert, who describes the steps of the incursion of Tifinagh literacy for the three Moroccan Berber languages into a domain previously dominated by Arabic: First, a standard variety of Amazigh had to be created. This was done by combining the three Berber languages of Morocco into a new standard, in which especially Tashelit lexical features appear to play an important role. This decision turned all three Berber varieties into ‘substandard’ Berber. Second, a script needed to be constructed and implemented. The choice of the centuries old (non Roman) alphabetical Tifinagh script was no doubt inspired by similar motives as the promotion of Tetum in Timor-Leste: the desire to articulate the newly won sociolinguistic independence through a rejection of the former symbols of oppression – Arabic and Roman scripts in this case. As El Aissati et al. note, the different stages of language planning coincided here, resulting in a rather chaotic sociolinguistic situation in which most of the speakers of the language were suddenly declared illiterate (their skills in the Arabic script were devalued) and teachers and students of the new language suddenly found themselves in an equal ‘deficit’ situation, one in which all three groups became learners of the new standard language and standard script. The teaching of the standard language and writing system is, consequently, very much an unfinished project. (Blommaert 2011: 296)

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1.4.3.8 The Vai syllabary The Vai syllabary was created in the 1830s by Momolu Duwalu Bukele in presentday Liberia, and described early in the history of African linguistics. It is very plausible that the syllabary was inspired by the Cherokee syllabary, as missionaries working with the Cherokee were working with the Vai community at that time (Tuchscherer & Hair 2002). The Vai syllabary is still in use, and the cognitive skills acquired in the context of its acquisition (as opposed to formal schooling following a Western model) were investigated in a famous study (Scribner & Cole 1981; Goody, Cole & Scribner 1977). Other African graphic systems that have a comparable relevance are mentioned by Battestini (2007), who emphasizes that the interrelation of art, knowledge, and cognition with the use of graphic (writing) systems in Africa has been largely ignored by Western scholars.

1.5 For an integrated view of spoken and written multilingual and multiscriptal practices Far from being the “oral” continent, Africa allows herself the luxury of having quite a number of old and recent, Latin- and non-Latin-based writing cultures. The diversity of writing cultures and their embeddedness in the societies in which they occur is reminiscent of the strong diversity present at the level of spoken languages. This diversity and multitude of repertoires, motivations, and ideologies surrounding writing in Africa means that its societies are not a blank slate on which any Latin-based literacy can be imposed. This finding must have consequences for any appraisal of African literacies, and for any attempt at introducing any kind of literacy in language management activities: – Despite persisting characterizations of Africa as “oral” (Olson & Torrance 2001) or as having “restricted literacy” (Jack Goody 1986) traditions only, all literacy practices present in African multilingual situations need to be researched and their scope determined. Since all literacy practices, including those in official languages, in Africa have limited scope, they all need to be assessed in order to understand their role in the interacting written and spoken language ecologies. The grassroots literacies may be the “small print” of global literacy, but, as Blommaert (2011) powerfully reminds us, small print needs to be read carefully. – All the major scripts used, and in particular the Latin and the Arabic script, have strong connotations with religion, Arabic script through its association with Islam and Qur’anic schooling, the Latin script through representing

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Christianity and through the many and increasing evangelical missionary activities on the continent, which use literacy campaigns as a central tool. These connotations need to be taken into account in language management, as there is no “neutral” script available. They also create a strong potential for the observer’s paradox depending on the cultural and religious identity of researchers and other external stakeholders. Literacy campaigns and script planning are not technical tasks but complex endeavours touching at the core of the language ideologies of all stakeholders. Often, the introduction of writing creates a new language without any native writers. Therefore, a true political will is required in order to embed learning into an existing cultural and social environment, rather than exporting Western constructions of learning to a population viewed as deficient because they lack it. This requires more and connected ethnographic, sociolinguistic and linguistic research in advance of language management activities, better communication between scholars (literacy researchers, linguists, anthropologists), language planners and government bodies, and communities of practice regarding the conflicting habits and ideologies surrounding this domain. Just as multilingual speakers do not have several complete language inventories, but tend to associate different languages (and registers therein) with different contexts and functions, multilingual and or multiscriptal writers do not write in all the registers and languages of their repertoires. This means that paying attention to registers and their functions in a holistically and multimodally viewed language ecology is of prime importance for a realistic understanding of the scope and roles of reading and writing.

Our next chapter investigates registers as powerful and creative ways to convey socially embedded meanings that go far beyond Jakobson’s (1971) referential functions of language.

Anne Storch

2 Doing things with words As human beings we are able to change our behavior. The idea that we act as free agents is fundamental to our self-conception. Every word we say reinforces this conviction, for whenever we speak we make choices. (Coulmas 2005: 1)

Language in every society across the world is diverse and manifold, in the sense that it continuously offers a large numbers of possibilities from which a selection can be made. There are different languages that can be selected from in multilingual societies, and there are various registers, sociolects, and so on within every single language, which provide even more possibilities and options to speakers. These repertoires have to be learned, some in early childhood, others later in life. We have seen in the previous chapter that not only the repertoires but also their socio-cultural contexts need to be learned, as in multilingual societies certain languages can be used in certain contexts, such as the market or the home, while other languages are used in other contexts. Repertoires also include registers, which are specialized in a similar way. In this chapter, we will see that learning and knowing the contexts of the different ways of speaking can be an ability as critical as the ability to speak a certain language or register. Multilingualism – the use of several languages within a given group – and polylectality – the use of several varieties and registers of a language – are part of social practice in general, but also, and more specifically, part of a set of cultural techniques among many community-oriented societies across the world, and in many parts of the African continent. In other words, speakers make choices all the time about the way they speak (as Coulmas suggests at the beginning of the present chapter), and at the same time are socially and culturally encouraged and trained to make such choices. This perspective on multilingualism, register variation and polylectality permits us to see speakers not as patients or victims of a loss of importance of their language, but as versatile and competent users of repertoires rather than of discrete, hierarchically distributed languages. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the idea of “mother tongue” and someone’s “first language” therefore has little relevance in many West African communities. There, and in many other parts of Africa, speakers use a number of different languages in different contexts, and live in multilingual families and multilingual neighbourhoods. Their multilingual skills are part of their cultural lives and social integrity. This is not only the prevailing situation in Africa, but also in many other parts of the world; it was once also a common praxis in most of Europe, and in

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urban environments still continues to be so. With the creation of the ideology of the nation state, implementation of uniform school systems, standardization of languages, etc., this has changed, however, in many people’s minds. In the same vein, the power relations that had emerged in the nineteenth century (and before) made the European ideas about national language and societal monolingualism a dominant paradigm, which still continues to shape debates about underdevelopment and poverty (Djité 2008). But the actual process in Europe (and many parts of the world where this paradigm had been successful) has also been one of impoverishment of diversity and cultural skills (Burke 2004a; Wright 2011). As we shall see in the following sections of this volume, multilingualism and register variation open to an individual the opportunity to make use of and express different concepts of wisdom and knowledge, act competently in a variety of social contexts, adequately express a variety of cultural concepts, and so on. The ideology of turning a single linguistic variety – standard language, written language, and so on – into an emblematic feature of ethnic and national identity, has to some extent reduced the potentials of speakers and their repertoires within a social setting. This has been the case, for example, in the context of centralistic national states, where this “way of organizing the world has had a profound effect on the language practices of most human groups” (Wright 2011: 775). Minority languages have been marginalized in this context in Europe (Darquennes 2011), but also in the contexts of language in education and religion in parts of Africa (e.g. Mugaddam 2006). We can learn how rich in possibilities and options linguistically diverse speaker communities actually are and how multilingualism and variation are part of meaningful daily linguistic praxis in taking a closer look at the ways of speaking among individual speaker communities in Africa. What have been called “Pidgins and Creoles” in this sense are rather localized and creatively changed codes that are to a certain extent only based on the colonial languages English, French, Portuguese, and so on, than “mixed” and “reduced” languages. The New Englishes of Africa (often called “Pidgins”), as well as various Frenchs (and “Creoles”), are spoken together with local languages, vernaculars and registers as parts of the repertoires of people who live in urban centres as much as in the rural areas of the continent. Speakers handle these registers in a context-bound, but flexible way, and change parts of it by purposeful manipulations as well as through contact-induced or other, less conscious happening changes. In this context, which highlights the creativity and agency of speakers, it is not productive to dwell upon the question whether Pidgins and Creoles represent a unique type of language or not. Instead, they are seen as part of a repertoire which in all its components is affected at all times by various kinds

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of linguistic change, depending on the social history and language attitudes of the speakers: […] the term creole is not structurally motivated, as creoles vary among themselves regarding almost any structural feature that is claimed to be typical of them. Pidginisation and creolisation comes in degrees, and languages can be placed along a continuum in terms of this parameter of language contact […]. (Dimmendaal 2011: 230–231)

This section  presents some insights and ideas about how speakers are “doing things with words”. This phrase was recently employed by the eminent scholar Ruth Finnegan in her study on oral literature and verbal art in Limba (Finnegan 2007: 1963). It illustrates how closely creativity and normalization strategies are related, the norm always only making sense in the context of the aberration and vice versa. Here, we will look at language as an artful game, but also at language being used as magic, an instrument of power and a symbolic means of creating social hierarchies and group boundaries. These functions and effects of linguistic practice concern the opposite of cohesion (as achieved by a unifying “mother tongue” or “ethnic language”), because they help to subdivide the members of a community of practice into social class, interest groups, and so on.

2.1 Some symbolic dimensions of language In the context explored here, multilingualism as a strategy can be seen as being meaningful by itself. Besides being a practised skill, it also has symbolic dimensions, for example in the context of marriage customs and the relationships between members of the maternal and paternal parts of one’s family. These play a role in many languages of the Nigerian Jos Plateau and adjacent Benue Valley, one of the world’s linguistically most complex and diverse regions. Here, the question about one’s linguistic identity actually is important, even though most people are profoundly multilingual. In the Tarok and Wapha communities, for example, it is important to get married to a person with whom one is not blood-related. The main idea of the exogamous marriage system, which seems to have been formerly practiced by many other groups in this area, is a rather strict one, and with regards to the many very small communities in the area meant that one originally needed to get married to someone who comes from a different village and, perhaps therefore, speaks a different language. This practice, linguistic exogamy, has contributed to the creation of an area of linguistic convergence with many linguistic features spreading across languages of the region, knitting close ties between neighbour-

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ing and competing groups, and therefore generating highly multilingual families.¹ At the same time, these languages maintain significant degrees of difference despite these convergences, for example because of language ideologies that encourage speakers to accentuate differences between languages, or because of prestige relations between languages that are relevant for how they are used in different contexts and domains.

Map 6: The Plateau area in central Nigeria

Because of the virilocal family structures dominating in the region, men normally claim to be first language speakers of their group’s dominating language, while women have a more ambiguous position. Among many Jukun-speaking groups, such as the Wapha, a married woman is publicly considered to be a foreigner or

1 A detailed study on the consequences of linguistic exogamy and language contact is Aikhenvald’s (2002) study of the Tariana in the Brazilian Amazonia. Stenzel (2005) also reports linguistic exogamy and consequent multilingualism and language contact in the Vaupés river basin of Brazil and Colombia.

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guest in her husband’s family, who may even betray and bewitch her husband. Especially in families where several wives share one husband, conflicts and competition between the women can result in witchcraft or theft accusations. Moreover, women, having this ambiguous status of being mothers of their husband’s children and at the same time potential enemies, are consequently excluded from religious and ritual practices. Hence, while the men are permitted to enter the shrines of the gods and ancestors, make donations, and perform rituals, the women must never see or hear anything that is inside such a shrine. They do make sacrifices at the entrance doors of the shrines though, especially when they are asked for compensation after having violated a taboo or law. But they are not supposed to take part in any of the important rituals, which often have to do with power and the creation of fear. During some of the more public rituals, which are performed by practitioners in the local religion as well as by those who are adherents of globalized religions, the men play music (mostly with drums) and can fall into a trance. Such rituals have much to do with agency-increasing strategies, in the sense that one does not just associate oneself with a mighty ancestor or spirit, but for some time becomes the embodiment of the spirit in question. What is interesting in terms of linguistic praxis here is that a person who is possessed by a spirit may speak in a completely different language than he would under different conditions, with a high-pitched voice, and saying things the spirit – but not the impersonator – would say. This is exactly what happens to the men: they speak spirit languages, or “speak in tongues” as speech acts in a trance state are sometimes referred to (e.g. in church contexts). Women who witness the drumming and public trances may fall into a trance as well, lie on the ground and experience the taking over of the spirit. But they will never utter a word: a symbolic act of keeping silent in a context where they have nothing to say. There are also other ways of speaking and other ritual contexts where women’s words are excluded. The village of Wase Tofa, where most Wapha speakers live, is surrounded by fertile land, having a constant and abundant supply of water. Three harvests per annum are the average, and it is therefore not surprising that the organization of work on the fields and the preparation of a harvest are important issues to most people in the village. The ànákù nóyì ‘chief of farming’ is one of the titleholders who are responsible for the continuing success of farming activities, as he has to make sure that work on the farms is safe. If an accident occurs while people are farming, or if somebody feels threatened, the ànákù nóyì can always be asked for medical and magical help. He also organizes communal field work, arranges for work breaks, provides medicine against snake bites and scorpion stings, and cleans cursed fields. The ànákù nóyì is only active during the rainy season, during which he is rewarded by the villagers with donations of beer.

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Figure 15: The ànákù nóyì with his assistant khã nóyì; he wears a special hat gótó, carries a medicine bag kù shãŋ and the kwai nyí, a calabash for medicine.

All of his insignia, namely drums, dances, dress and spears, have to be treated with particular respect by all members of the society. Moreover, the ànákù nóyì uses a derived language, which is characterized by the use of metaphors and secret vocabulary. This register is essential in healing and magic rituals, and it is

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forbidden to women and non-initiated men. Other titleholders of Wase Tofa use specialized registers as well, and all of them have in common that they are not used by women. Besides such secret registers, a common way of communicating in-group knowledge is the use of proverbs. These can in principle be used by all competent speakers of Wapha, but some are special. In these specific proverbs, oral composition employs formulae, whereby performance, position of the proverbs in the text or speech, and their interpretation are extremely conventionalized. As a form of indirect communication, they are strictly confined to members of certain cults, and they cannot be used in poetic oral texts. This makes these short pieces and revelations of secret information part of complex structures of “orality as multiform” (Finnegan 2007: 112), where educated speakers, audiences and storytellers are able to locate the magic formula in the text and to subsequently correlate meaning and emblematic form. The following proverbs are used in ancestral worship, where they are considered a special language of the deities, and have to be articulated with deep gurgling, hoarse and thrilling voices. They are sometimes interpreted to the listeners by elders who have been in the abode of the deities. (2)

n-gə̀ shau-ró n-gə̀ 1sg-exist iron-loc 1sg-exist ‘I am in iron, I am in stone’

(3)

n-nay 1sg-offend ‘I am the offence’

bã̀-ró stone-loc

The first of these two examples refers to the rigid and unshakable character of the deities, and the second expresses the opposite – in having a deity say ‘It’s me that is wrong or has gone wrong’. Interestingly, this is often asked in a question form, which has to be ritually turned down by the audience, because a god “cannot be said to be a liar or to go wrong” (Tanko D. Noma, personal communication, 2007). Unlike normal proverbs that usually have no author, these proverbs are claimed to be authored by specific deities or spirits. Moreover, they differ from other proverbs in that they use allegories (snake) besides metaphors (iron, stone), actually expressing something different than they first seem to, and they employ emblematic strategies, such as in the expressive combination of rhythmic language and the creation of imaginative pictures (e.g. in 2). Again, this register is not used by women, whose ancestors have probably come from outside the village.

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In Tarok society as well, women are considered to have come from the outside. Most of the shrines and religious societies therefore remain closed to women, unless they reach postmenstrual age and change their social position. Tarok women mark their ambiguous social situation by using gendered language. While the men’s way of speaking is considered to be the “real” and “correct” form of Tarok, women’s language is marked as being imperfect and sounding foreign (Blench & Longtau 2012a). The women who use this specific register may actually be speakers of Tarok, but they are often members of clans that originally rather spoke different languages, such as Ngas or other Chadic languages. Even though these clans have become part of Tarok society, and are no longer characterized by a different language, women are expected to express themselves in a specific variety of the Tarok language that indicates their foreign origin. The following examples help to illustrate the differences in Tarok gendered language (Blench & Longtau 2012a): (4)

Male ɓai izə̀yà tə́ ìpɪ̀ri ìzwà akwà ìgór ɗò ɗakwa kpáktɪ́kát datkulung

Female ɓa, ɓe ize yà tó ìpíri ìzùzwà akùkwà ìgùgór rò rakwa kpákták dat

Gloss ‘really?’ ‘what?’ ‘here’ ‘horse’ ‘snake’ ‘straw’ ‘bag’ qm qm ‘all’ ‘near’

Strategy monophtongization central vowel fronting -“-“reduplication -“-“rhotarization -“syllable/vowel deletion -“-

A language here is not a simple system that co-exists with other such systems, but has varieties and is used in specific contexts. Such ways of speaking – or keeping silent – are part of the meaningful choices that speakers make, and they are part of a more symbolic practice in communication. In families with several co-wives, gendered language also creates a sense of belonging among women who would otherwise be competitors and enemies. In the fertile and rich country of the Tarok, heads of households can afford to support rather large families, and these will only remain cohesive and prosperous if the wives and their children co-operate.

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Figure 16: A day’s harvest of sugar-cane

The family head in figure 16 has ten wives and, according to his own information, around 100 children. The entire family, apart from those children who attend boarding schools, lives in one compound, which looks rather like a small village, with children often freely moving from one co-wife’s household to another, which – like fostering – is another important aspect of sustaining multilingualism among children. Wealth is not only demonstrated by the beautifully adorned

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clothing, but also by the rich harvest of the day. The wives, who come from Tarok, Fulɓe and Wapha backgrounds, share a home and a linguistic identity which manifests itself in the register briefly desribed above. Both material wealth and social security are obtained through the creation of social institutions through language.

2.2 A complete language This little sketch about gendered language and gendered silence illustrates that a language is not just words and grammar, but something much more complicated. It varies, depending on who speaks to whom, and it consists of a variety of different lects. If we were to set out to write a grammar and dictionary of Tarok, which variety would we preferably describe? Probably the men’s variety as it seems to have more prestige in the society. But we would clearly miss much information about how speakers reflect phonological features, express social relations, and what ideas of correctness they have, thereby reflecting power relations. Of course, in a linguistic book there is only limited space for all the important information, maybe some 300 or even 500 pages. But that’s not enough to say everything about this language as a whole and will therefore not give an idea about all possibilities in the language. In the worst case, the description would be incomplete and prescriptive at the same time, creating a standard that doesn’t reflect the speakers’ reality. A complete language is much more than just words and grammar; it is multimodal, including face and head movements, gestures, changes in pitch and speed, various forms of performance, and a huge vocabulary of specialized entries, which are reserved for specific contexts. Sometimes, rarely used phonemes that are exclusive parts of registers or ritual language are also part of these phenomena, being part of a more complete phonology. Speech registers, the ways of speaking in specific contexts, are an important part of language, as the variety that is considered unmarked, or “average”, very often is the variety used by those who have more power than others. This variety is usually not a thing of linguistic pureness, but of power and control. Table 3 presents an overview of those functions of multimodal features that increase expressivity and can be used manipulatively.

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Feature

Context (example)

face/head movements gestures pitch speed performance specialized vocabulary special phonemes phonological manipulations morphological manipulations semantic manipulations

avoidance, ritual, expression of group identity ritual, possession and agency-increasing strategies social hierarchy, secrecy expression of group identity, secrecy ritual, possession, social hierarchy secrecy, power-increasing strategies secrecy, poetic language, expression of power relations play, avoidance, secrecy, power relations play, avoidance, secrecy secrecy, social hierarchy

Table 3: Some multimodal features of registers and speech styles (Storch 2011a)

Since the implementation of language documentation projects, which includes the creation of expandable digital archives, linguists have begun to systematically collect as many “snapshots” of linguistic practice as possible. Vanishing minority languages, especially, have gained interest, and they are now documented in the form of audiovisual corpora containing texts of as many genres as possible, annotations, audio and video material that illustrates how people speak, and furthermore including explanations on grammar, dictionaries, and so on. Such projects aim at documenting a language as a whole, as the sum of linguistic praxis of its speakers. Of course, funding and time are always limited, but in principle, the idea behind such initiatives can be quite resourceful in individual projects: linguists can decide to leave the choices about which variety of the language is recorded during a field session to the speakers, and step aside, trying not to impose their own ideas about standardization and completeness on the community. This has also led to an ongoing debate about the intrusive role of the researcher, or, more precisely, linguist. Of course, no scientist is free from the constraints of society and psychological conditions, so that objectivity remains a phantasm, but linguists are now increasingly aware of how they manipulate speakers and control situations. This awareness allows them to find new strategies that help them to stay out of the picture and instead to watch and listen more carefully to what the people actually have to say, even though power dynamics continue to play a role and researchers may always remain intruders in one way or the other. As these still new approaches to fieldwork and corpus creation involve a concept of documentation as a strategy that aims at presenting (or preserving) a glimpse at linguistic practice in a holistic way, languages are no longer considered discrete entities, but can be demonstrated to be fluid constructions, and

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the sum of a variety of linguistic practices. In terms of methodology as well as the analysis of linguistic materials, multimedia documentation has also begun to contribute to the evaluation of ideas about scientific objectivity. This is also felt in other research areas, such as anthropological linguistics, and in various empirical studies. In his work on ideophones in Siwu, Dingemanse (2011) was able to demonstrate that the application of four different methodological approaches results in different heuristic possibilities, which only in their combination provide an adequate picture of what ideophones are actually used for. This special word class is characteristic of narrative speech, but also helps to express sensory perception par excellence in many other contexts. Ideophones often need gestures to accompany the spoken word, but they add to such ways of expressing concepts in a salient way, thus providing a principle means of expressing oneself in a most creative and individual way. In cooperation with an entire village, Dingemanse applied the following methods and techniques over a couple of years:

Methodology

Finding

elicitation folk definitions/ethnoscience sorting tasks

ideophones express perception modalities ideophones express culture-specific forms of knowledge cognitive concepts that are expressed by ideophones are clustered and (hierarchically) structured ideophones are used in culture-specific contexts

social interactional approach

Table 4: Methods of exploring language and context in Dingemanse (2011)

Equally methodologically complex and open field research would be needed in order to adequately explore other aspects of language and ways of speaking it. Speech registers and speech genres cannot be documented alone by videotaping speakers using them, but one would rather have to ask speakers about their explanations for specific metaphors, manipulation strategies, or folk definitions for other formatives, create experimental field methods such as role plays, and so on. Some ways of speaking would not be available as objects of linguistic study, as these would be secret and only shared among initiated speakers. The following sections of this chapter illustrate the various ways in which speakers express their social and cultural identities through language as they have been studied and described by linguists for over a century. These ways of speaking may involve manipulation of phonology, morphology and the lexicon, the creation of a new language, or the artful play with metaphors and rhetoric tropes. By exploring the different registers used by speakers of a given language,

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one consequently learns something about their metalinguistic capacities, but also about language as such: about creativity, variety and almost unlimited possibilities of expressing oneself – nothing that could conveniently be stored between two book covers.

2.3 Speech registers That language use and choices made by speakers contribute to the shaping of societal structures has been frequently observed by linguists. Since Bauman & Sherzer’s seminal volume on the Ethnography of Speaking (1974, 1989), there have also been a number of significant contributions to our understanding of the relationship between society and language in Africa (e.g. Ameka 2009; Kleinewillinghöfer 1995; Mous 2003 among others). Many of these set out to explore how social structure influences linguistic praxis, and how speakers have agency that shapes societal structure through the manipulation and hence use of language (for a collection of studies see Senft & Basso 2009). The Ethnography of Speaking also – often indirectly – addresses a feature of language at large, namely variation. Languages always exhibit a certain degree of variation, making them adaptive in many ways, and they are always polylectal to some extent, which makes them useful tools in creating power relations and social hierarchies. In this context, deviation from a norm thus also creates a need for normalization, and this has much to do with the development and use of language ideologies (Agha 2005; Kroskrity 2007; Kuipers 1998, 1990). Studies on this problem suggest that speakers through their linguistic practice and use of certain deviant forms actually create registers, whereby such processes may only be properly understood on the basis of a sound knowledge of the relevant socio-historical and cultural contexts (Storch 2011a). For example, around 1912 the inhabitants of Kingdom of Bamun (now Cameroon) experienced intensive contact with members of the Basle Mission. One reaction – there could have been many more – was the invention of a secret language and a writing system by Sultan Njoya of Bamun. While the writing system is still used (see section 1.4.3), the secret language is now becoming obsolete. But it is interesting to look at, since it helps to understand how language ideology and awareness of differences between one’s own linguistic repertoire and that of others can be used to create a new code. The Sultan created words by deliberately violating phonological rules of Shupamum, the dominating language in the kingdom, and instead imitating some features that characterize German phonology. Consequently, the secret language has long words with lots of consonants instead of bisyllabic words with CV-CV syllable structures, so that kɔsɛ ‘and, with’ becomes

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muksuru-ruran, and ŋga-faʔ ‘servant’ is ispinklan-lasan (Dugast 1950: 234). This strategy appears as norm-breaking and ironic as Twain’s Awful German Language which has “Generalstaterepresentativesmeetings”. However modern and subversive Sultan Njoya’s secret language may seem today, it has not raised much interest among linguists. Whereas many important contributions to our knowledge of the ways of speaking and register variation come from Australian, South-East Asian and Amerindian linguistics, African languages remain poorly explored in this respect. One early example, however, is an essay on taboo and its significance for the design of language in Africa (1940) by Diedrich Westermann, one of the first eminent scholars of African linguistics. This essay is the first attempt to provide a somewhat comprehensive account of speech registers in Africa, drawing from Westermann’s own study on Ewe secret language as well as a number of previously published contributions on various avoidance and spirit languages, which were mostly written by contemporary missionaries.

Figure 17: Diedrich Hermann Westermann (1875–1956)

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Westermann’s contribution is remarkable insofar as he was one of the early scholars of African linguistics who produced the type of knowledge on African languages that would by contemporary standards form a solid base for a language documentation project. His oeuvre on Ewe includes, besides descriptive materials on grammar and vocabulary, data on pragmatics, media, sociolinguistics, multilingualism and register variation, standardization and ideology, cultural and historical context, and so on. This systematic study of Ewe registers and other African manipulated languages has, for a long time, remained an unparalleled source. Even though various important contributions have been made to individual phenomena of language manipulation throughout the last century, only recently have scholars again begun to study language as a whole in a systematic way, documenting registers and lects. In a tradition that goes back as far as Van Gennep (1908), speech registers and manipulated languages have been categorized according to their different functions rather than their linguistic structures. Such approaches most of the time underscore the representation of group boundaries and the construction of identity, sometimes also caste, through language. These readings of manipulated language have also been able to reveal the educative, creative role of speech registers.

2.3.1 Play languages After Westermann’s era, scholarly interest in created languages moved towards the reflection of phonological knowledge in word games and play languages. Studies on play languages allow for fascinating insights into the psychological reality of the syllable and word, demonstrating that speakers are obviously able to identify the types of units that can be changed (e.g. Henderson 2002; Sherzer 2002, 1970). These and earlier sources also provide information about the ways in which play languages are used. They help speakers to convey secret information or speak about delicate matters, and they have something to do with the ludic functions of languages as they are often employed just to play with words and syllables. Some studies of play languages also suggest that the manipulation of sounds helps young speakers to develop their linguistic competence. No matter what they are used for, play languages all have a number of features in common, such as the following: – Play languages are rule-governed systems. – Basic strategies are manipulations of the syllable, phonology and morphology. – Play languages exhibit variation and thus adapt to new contexts. – Speakers are able to articulate the basic rules. – Play languages are representations of ordinary language.

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According to Bagemihl’s comparative studies (1995, 1988), play languages can be typologically distinguished with respect to how syllable manipulations are performed. Very often, the type of phonological manipulation is quite foreseeable, as it depends on the phonological structure of the matrix language. Play languages may be derived from ordinary language by using the following strategies, illustrated by examples from various parts of Africa: (5)

Infixing: Boloki/Jimu secret language (Congo; Jeffreys 1956) mboka → mbo-sa-ka ‘village’

(6)

Templatic (CayCaəCa): Amharic/women’s secret language (Ethiopia; Demisse & Bender 1983) sɪm → sayməm ‘name’

(7)

Total reversing: Kisi/Kpelemeiye secret language (Sierra Leone; Childs 2003) kɔ̀láŋ → láŋkɔ̀ ‘go’

(8)

Transposing: Hausa language game (Nigeria, Niger; Alidou 1997) tààkálmíí → kálmììtáá ‘shoe’

(9)

Interchanging: Dholuo language game (Kenya; Borowsky & Avery 2007) apwɔyɔ → ayɔpwɔ ‘rabbit’

(10)

Exchanging: Mangbetu (Congo; Demolin 1991) ámázámbùlà → námálámbùzà

(11)

‘lion’

Replacing: Menik/Telexe initiation language (Senegal; Ferry 1981) gu-kany → o-pany ‘bottom’

A language such as Amharic, which has a templatic morphology (being based on a specific sequence of consonant phonemes to which vowels and affixes are added), obviously invites speakers to use templatic manipulation strategies (6). Other, typologically different, languages such as the Bantu language Boloki (5), in contrast do not. The example from the secret language of Kisi speakers in turn illustrates that words consisting of more than one phoneme, albeit of only a few syllables, can be manipulated by totally reversing the syllable order (7). Sometimes, syllable tone does not change, as in the Kisi example, but in the transposing language game used in Hausa (8), this has to change in order to match tonological constraints.

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Morphological constraints, in turn, are at work in (9), where the prefix vowel a- remains in situ. Example (10) exhibits a movement of grammatical morphemes, but the order in which these move varies among different word classes. Hence, Mangbetu have to identify different word classes and apply different rules of exchanging and moving syllables and morphemes. A similar degree of linguistic awareness and metalinguistic knowledge is needed by Menik speakers. The telexe initiation language is used in a context of liminality and inversion  – being and doing the opposite of what one normally is and does. Its principal manipulation strategy is the inversion of phonological features and the creation of semantic antagonisms. In (11), the original CV- noun class prefix is replaced by a semantically empty V- prefix. Then the stem-initial velar plosive /k/ – produced in the back of the vocal tract – is replaced by bilabial /p/, which is produced at the very front. The articulation quality of the consonant remains the same, namely unvoiced. This is essential because Menik noun classes are correlated with specific consonant mutation grades (plosive ~ unvoiced, fricative ~ voiced, prenasalized). A change from unvoiced to voiced – creating even more inversion – would suggest a change of noun class. Play languages can also be complex and difficult to learn for other reasons. In some speech communities, a huge variety of different, albeit related manipulation strategies is used. In Moroccan Arabic, there exist more than a dozen different strategies in the form of different syllables to be inserted that can be used to construct secret languages. The Moroccan linguist Nasser Berjaoui (2007) is among the few scholars who study this phenomenon in Africa. He emphasizes that Moroccan “secret languages” (Arabic ġuş) have a strong ludic component. They are often taught in Qur’anic school in order to enhance writing and grammar skills, but adults often enjoy using them in the public hammam or during leisurely tea breaks. Speakers of these secret or play languages may also use them to communicate delicate matters in a secret coded way, which is possible as these languages are extremely rich in variation. A plethora of manipulation strategies can be used, and not all of them are shared by an entire community. But the use of play languages may also simply imply that speakers want to avoid embarrassment, no matter whether they are understood by others or not. In Morocco, for example, guests of wedding ceremonies comment on the food offered there by using play languages – especially when the food is not sumptuous and not sufficient. Some other play languages, such as Ganoore, used among speakers of Fula in West and Central Africa, are considered to be part of linguistic skills and artful ways of speaking. Ganoore has some thirteen syllable manipulation strategies, which can also be used in combination. Consider the following examples (Noye 1975):

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Fulfulde laamiiɗo ndillen baaba maayo ʔAli Bello puccu deftere daada Jaaje nyiiwa paɗe baalte

Ganoore laapimiipiiɗo ndisillen baarabara maalfiro Laʔi Lebbo cupuc teredef daana Jaane wapyupinyii ɗegepaga tentenabaa

Gloss ‘Emir, chief’ ‘let’s go’ ‘father’ ‘river’ (name) (name) ‘horse’ ‘book’ ‘mother’ (name) ‘elephant’ ‘sandals’ ‘morning’

Manipulation -pi-si-rV-lfirmetathesis -“-“-“+ dissimilation -“+ -pyupi+ -gV+ -ntVna-

Interestingly, speakers also use their metalinguistic knowledge about differences between their own and other languages. Ful has no nasal vowels, for example, while French has. In Ganoore, nasal vowels are imitated and inserted in order to express otherness of (French-speaking) Europeans, for example: (13)

nasara

→

sãŋrãŋãŋ

‘white, European’

Ganoore is often used among young speakers in order to share secrecy, but it can also be employed by adults in order to protect their privacy from their younger children. Play languages such as Ganoore form part of people’s linguistic education, and they are a part of their quite indispensable repertoires. With increasing age, a speaker’s ability to use a play language competently may decrease in some societies, especially where using it is confined to young speakers. In other societies, however, speakers use play languages into old age when referring to delicate or secret matters.

2.3.2 Youth languages Languages spoken by Africa’s youths share some properties with play languages. They are very creative and are often used in a playful way as well. Syllable manipulation may play a role, but is usually not the only and nor main manipulation strategy. Their most common manipulation strategies are: – Intentional borrowing – Semantic shift (metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, hyperbole) – Code switching

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Very much like play languages, youth languages aim at creating a separate space for a group and at providing a means to communicate secretly. Among young people at the margins of society, such as drug dealers and petty criminals² in the big cities, creating their own distinct linguistic code is always a matter of staying undisturbed by citizens and the police. Students who articulate social critique, youngsters who seek distance from the dominant generation of their parents, as well as street children who establish their networks, all create their own ways of speaking, with fairly similar motivations. Of course, the young users of these languages will grow older and become established members of the society, which creates a need for younger generations to constantly modify and change the manipulation strategies of youth language. Nassenstein (2011) describes how the old-fashioned youth registers remain in use and become emblematic lects of different generations, merchants, of members of particular professions like taxi drivers, and so on. The same author describes a currently used youth language that is often spoken by street children in Kinshasa. The Lingala-based language Yanké differs from its matrix language in terms of phonology, morphology, the lexicon, and the syntax. An example of the creativity employed by its speakers is the following (Nassenstein 2011: 65):

(14)

(15) (16) (17)

Yanké linzáka kowét

Gloss Explanation ‘clothes with the brand name Nike’ ‘claw’ > brand sign ‘cheap shop’ French Koweit ‘Kuwait’, cheap, Arab groceries pinaresɛ́srv ‘extramarital affair’ French pneu de réserve ‘spare tyre’ rái ‘sunglasses’ > Ray Ban brand rolɛ́ks ‘expensive watch’ > Rolex brand (ya) kanɔ̃ ‘good-looking, hot, gorgeous (girls)’ > French canon ‘canon’ ʃetáni ‘child-witch, bewitched person’ > Arabic aš-šaiṭān ‘devil’ getó ‘small parcel, house’ > English ghetto palɛ́ ‘house, home’ > French palais ‘palace’

2 The link between youth language and young outlaws has been important for the definition of “anti language”. Tsotsitaal in South Africa, Nouchi in Côte d’Ivoire, and Yanké in Congo-DRC are all youth languages associated with young people engaged in different forms of illegal activities. Tsotsi, for example, is also used as a synonym for “gangster”.

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The examples suggest that Yanké exhibits some manipulation strategies that resemble those of play languages. However, the dominant strategy in the examples above is not phonological manipulation (which does play a role in Yanké), but the substitution of the common word by a metaphorical expression. Speakers  – in this case street children in Kinshasa  – use metaphors (14), metonymy (15), hyperbole (16), dysphemisms and euphemisms (17), among other strategies. Once the coded meaning becomes too transparent to others, or is understood by too many grown-up speakers, the form is replaced by another one. Over the past ten years scientific interest surrounding youth languages in Africa has increased rapidly, and different varieties, such as Sheng in Nairobi, Randuk from Khartoum, Godobé in Bangui, and Yarada K’wank’wa from Addis Ababa, have been investigated with respect to their origin and development, their strategies of linguistic manipulation and the role they play in identity constructions (Kiessling & Mous 2004; Landi 2012; Mugaddam 2009; Wolvers 2008). It seems to be generally accepted that youth languages in Africa are an urban and modern phenomenon that has arisen in recent decades. But a closer look at different African youth languages (e.g. Sheng and Lingala-based youth languages) and their emergence, as well as their relation to other socially interesting linguistic varieties, shows that these general assumptions about African youth languages have to be reconsidered. The most salient function probably attributed by linguists to youth languages, of marking group identity and distance from society as an “anti-language”, can also be observed in rural communities (Blench & Longtau 2012b). Young people there use special coded languages as well, expressing in-group membership and distance from those who have power and control over them. Linguists are just beginning to understand the structures, creativity, and social relevance of these manipulated languages. A related phenomenon in terms of the constant creation of repertoires concerns the expansion of former urban languages into rural spaces. Camfranglais, which started out as an urban youth language in Cameroon (Mous 2009) is increasingly conceptualized as a national youth language that symbolically unites anglophone and francophone Cameroonians and for many it stands for a less corrupt and more integrative society (Tiewa 2012). Today, many young people of rural Cameroon regularly use Camfranglais as part of their linguistic repertoire. The same holds true for those New Englishes that first emerged as urban jargons, such as Naija in Nigeria and Kamtok in Cameroon, and have now become languages in their own right that are equivalent in frequency of use to both urban and rural languages.

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Figure 18: Rural youth language in its context: courting with the help of Bob Marley songs played on the mouth-bow (Kona, Nigeria)

2.3.3 Respect languages and other examples of paralexification At the other end of the social hierarchy from youth languages, but not necessarily in a very different environment – often both cosmopolitan and glocalized³ as well – elders and chiefs need to be addressed in special ways in many societies. The honorific registers and respect languages used here, which are still today considered highly relevant in many African speaker communities, have received comparatively little attention from linguists, whereas they have been studied in considerable detail in Asian and Austronesian languages (Shibatani 2006). The traditional view has been to see African honorific languages as consisting of different levels of speech registers representing distinct social groups. These levels may vary, but there seems to be a limit of four to five levels (Cerulli 1938; Hunting-

3 This holds true in a considerable way for respect languages that are associated with Islamic polities and their elites. Here, honorific language correlates to local concepts as well as to global ideas about dignity and power in Islam.

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ford 1955; Lamberti 1993; Straube 1963; Wedekind 1986; Yilma 1992). Some salient manipulation strategies associated with respect languages are: – Intentional borrowing – Semantic shift (metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, hyperbole) – Institutionalized bilingualism – Morphological manipulations (number, noun class) – Phonological manipulations (pitch, stress, speech) Honorific language and the manipulation strategies its speakers employ are closely related to linguistic ideologies, which differ across cultures and societies. As Irvine (1998: 52) points out this, however, is not simply a matter of assigning honorific registers to the respective institution. Rather, […] the relationship between the distribution of social and linguistic forms is more productively sought in cultural ideologies of language  – those complex systems of ideas about social rank, respect, and appropriate conduct – including the native metapragmatic terminology and theories that articulate and rationalize perceptions of language structure and use […]. I draw on a concept of ideology, rather than merely a ‘culture of language’, because ‘ideology’, whatever else it may mean, suggests a connection with those power relations and interests that are central in a social order. Some such connection is surely relevant to honorific language.

Hence, honorific registers, like urban youth languages, are interesting because of the way they mirror and shape social hierarchies, but also because they tend to use a crucial manipulation process termed paralexification (Mous 1994). This is not so much a process of replacing semantically unambiguous vocabulary with metaphors and highly polysemous words, such as in youth languages, but rather one of deliberately creating parallel lexicons. We will see below that such processes may play a role in the creation of “mixed” languages, such as Ma’a. In Yemsa, an Omotic language of Ethiopia, there exist three parallel lexicons. Consider the following examples (Yilma 1992): (18)

Royal dugu mùtʃo ʃagto

Respectful nipu kèwu waʔo

Informal kito du maso

Gloss ‘to die’ ‘to sit’ ‘to wash’

Depending on whom one speaks with, one has to choose the relevant lexemes from the appropriate register. Some sources on Yemsa indicate that the failure to use the royal register correctly was once considered a capital offence.

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In other communities, this system is more simple and easier to learn. In Anywa, a Nilotic language of Sudan and Ethiopia, only one honorific register exists, which is spoken by and to the king (Reh 1996: 163). Paralexification and the use of metaphors are combined in such registers, which occur quite widely in Africa. Other examples come from the Cameroon Grassfields, from Bafut (Blench et al. 2010), Limbum (Zaccheus Fuh Ntumgia 2003), and Chufie’ (Nkweti 1987). Here, metaphoric language seems to dominate in the respect language, as the following example from Chufie’ (Blench et al. 2010: 5) illustrates: (19)

Royal ŋjɔ̃́ŋ̀gwò ŋ̀kíaè ŋ̀gwò líì, pl. mɛ̀̃ŋ

Commoner tùò pỗ pá̃j hõ ntʃỗ

Gloss ‘head’ ‘belly’ ‘eye’

Translation Of Royal Form ‘thing of the village’ ‘village drum’ ‘stars’

Such registers tend to occur in societies where kingship is associated with spiritual power. Among the Jukun-speaking societies of Nigeria, the sacred king (Wapan ákù) must be addressed in the royal register. But he is not the only member of the society who needs to addressed in a respectful manner; adults who have been initiated into the shrines of different gods and spirits need to be multilingual in order to maintain social life and contact with the ancestors. When Western-style missionary schools were installed two generations ago, Hausa was introduced as the medium of reading and writing as well as for communication outside the household. Today, some of the languages that are identified by Wapan speakers themselves and that are considered to play a salient role in Wapan-speaking Wukari social life can be summarized as follows: (20)

Languages of the gods, spoken in the shrines anéné kú ‘language of aku’ anéné gàshú ‘language of a spec. mask4’ anéné àgbàkéké ‘language of a spec. mask’

(21)

Languages used in passage rites anéné ácù̃kù ‘language of announcing s.b. death’ àkú ashɛ́ kí ‘idol cries out death of local authorities’

4 Masks are complex representations of Gods and ancestors, often with a long history (Berns, Fardon & Kasfir 2011).

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Royal language zà̃̀ kí jùwɛ́à

‘meet the chief’s body’

Honorific language shó̃ zo báwù

‘meet a person’s eye’

Language of daily communication5 anu wapan ‘mouth of the Jukun’

In other Jukun-speaking societies, too, this pattern of ritualized multilingualism persists, for example in the small town of Awe, which was once a centre of salt trade and production, but is now located away from routes of commerce. There are other types of honorific and respect languages, which are used in other contexts and employ other strategies of linguistic manipulation. A cross-linguistic comparison would enable us to get an idea about how many more manipulation strategies are employed in order to express social distance, ideas about a speaker’s own position in a group, or a person’s attitude towards an addressee or third-person referent, but this currently remains a task for the future. However, some examples for the diversity of manipulations used in register creation may be given. In Ichibemba, for example, respect is expressed by the use of plural noun forms and pronominals. Here, the manipulation of noun prefixes and class concord markers is a strategy of expressing respect, as the following example illustrates (Irvine 1998: 54): (25)

Singular (not respectful) u-mo u-mu-kalamba w-aandi a-lee-lya i-sabi cm.1-one aug.1-cm.1-sibling cm.1-1sg.poss 3sg-imperf-eat cm.9-fish ‘my one older sibling is eating fish’

(26)

Plural (respectful) ba-mo a-ba-kalamba b-aandi ba-lee-lya cm.2-one aug.2-cm.2-sibling cm.2-1sg.poss 3pl-imperf-eat ‘my one esteemed older sibling is eating fish’

5 Besides Hausa, English, and others.

i-sabi cm.9-fish

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Figure 19: The ákù of Awe

In its noun class system, Ichibemba provides for various disrespectful usages as well, which are achieved by shifting a noun into a different noun class. Irvine gives the following example (1998: 55): (27)

a-ba-kashi u-mu-kashi a-ba-kashi i-chi-kashi i-li-kashi

‘respectable wife’ ‘wife’ ‘insignificant wife’ ‘gross wife’ ‘shockingly bad wife’

→ → → → →

class 2, honorific meaning class 1, disrespectful meaning class 12, insult class 7, insult class 5, slightly derogatory meaning

Similar meanings and usages are found in other Bantu languages, such as Luganda. The expression of honorifics can also be based on other manipulations of the grammar, for example a manipulation of pronouns (e.g. Amharic, Kambaata; c.f. Treis (2008)). But honorifics may also be realized through phonological manipulation strategies. Irvine (1998) describes how such strategies are present in one rural Wolof community where two registers, namely noble speech (waxu

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géér) and Griot speech (waxu gewel) exist. Consider the following list of contrastive prosodic features, taken from Irvine (1998: 56): (28)

Feature pitch volume tempo voice contour dynamic range

Noble speech low soft slow breathy pitch nucleus last narrow

Griot speech high loud fast clear pitch nucleus first wide

These ways of speaking are related to the language ideology commonly shared among rural Wolof speakers. All speakers are permitted to employ either of both registers, depending on whether a more status-elevating or a more deferential speech is considered appropriate. Concerning the ideology behind linguistic praxis, Irvine remarks: The Wolof ideology includes some […] ideas about rank, affectivity, and engagement with the concrete: high rank implies self-control, flat affect, the protection of others, and (especially for the religious elite) disengagement from worldly involvements. Moreover, deferential conduct toward others requires a flow of flattering words. But […] in Wolof a flow of words does not easily display any rank or refinement on the part of their speaker. (Irvine 1998: 58)

Other-elevating expressions, achieved through a variety of manipulation strategies, may thus be based on self-elevation as well as self-degradation, whereby both strategies can be employed with great virtuosity by competent speakers. These may be respected elderly men on the one side who are using a self-elevating register, as well as married women on the other side, who are using a deferential code, such as gendered language and avoidance registers. We will see further below that deferential language has other symbolic meanings as well, for example foreignness and distance, which can also be conceptualized as being potentially dangerous and ambiguous. Another aspect of respect language, besides its diversity, is that one of the most recurrent manipulation strategies, namely paralexification, is also crucial for the creation of registers that are emblematic for a group’s identity. Paralexification has been crucial in understanding language intertwining, for example in Mbugu and Ma’a, two languages used by one ethnic group in Tanzania, whereby one language or register – with a Bantu lexicon – is used with outsiders, while the other – based on a Cushitic lexicon – is used among insiders (Mous 1994, 2003b).

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Examples for words from both varieties are found in the following set of motion verbs (Mous 2001: 296): (29)

Ma’a ku-ká ku-dáha ku-só ku-dóda

Mbugu ku-vúka ku-vata ku-tónga ku-anga

Gloss ‘get up’ ‘walk, step’ ‘leave, go to’ ‘go for a walk’

Ma’a, a language widely known as a mixture of Bantu grammar and a Cushitic lexicon, also has Bantu words, with shortened stems, or with affixes that make them look foreign and secret. This, and the occurrence of metaphorical expressions and other forms of manipulated languages, made Mous (2001) suggest that paralexification and intertwining may also be involved in the deliberate creation of ethnoregisters, and not only in the emergence of Pidgins and Creoles. Interestingly, in African diaspora communities of the Caribbean, where creolized languages, such as Jamaican (“Patwa”), are spoken, the strategy of paralexification is used in this same way, precisely in order to construct group identities. In Jamaican Maroon communities, this is part of ritual life: while in normal conversation, Jamaican, a language with English as main lexifier, is spoken, the Kromanti ritual, which aims at contact with the ancestors, asks for the use of an archaic “Creole” by those who are possessed by the ancestral spirits. Spirits of African ancestors, however, force upon the possessed person the use of a third register, which mostly consists of West African Twi-Akan vocabulary – symbolically referring to the ancestral place of origin. Kenneth Bilby’s (1983) fascinating description of the Kromanti language provides more insights into the complexity of register variation in Jamaican. Examples of the three registers of Maroon Patwa, which symbolically construct and express ethnic identity, are: (30)

‘cow’ cow lángteil (‘long tail’) abukani (< Akan)

Jamaican Maroon Deep Patwa Kromanti

In work such as Wirtz’ (2008) study on Cuban Santería, it is demonstrated that speakers actively search for West African linguistic material and deliberately include it in the relevant register in order to enhance its “Africanness”. This sheds some more light on the interesting phenomenon of purposeful borrowing: the languages that are the source of borrowing seem to have a particular prestige and meaning in exactly the context in which the borrowed words play a role.

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Even though the Kwa languages that were spoken by some of the Santería adherents’ actual ancestors would have had an extremely low prestige at the time of the formation of the Atlantic Creoles, they have much meaning and salience in the contemporary context of the Cuban religion and its performers. This prestige is partly obtained by continued research requests of external experts. Secrecy is not, as far as we can see, a primary feature of the languages from which speakers borrow words for their ritual languages, but is obtained through the process of using and safeguarding the ritual code. Speakers who purposefully borrow lexical or other material from other languages do of course not need to be multilinguals in the respective donor languages; here borrowed material can have an entirely emblematic function, in the sense of language identified as powerful and mimicked.

2.3.4 Special purpose languages In some fashion, all registers we have looked at so far are special purpose languages, as they are usually reserved for specific contexts and situations. However, there is a more specific group of special purpose registers that is exclusively used by craftspeople and other specialists, or by members of their castes or clans. Like the wives in Tarok and Wapha societies discussed above, blacksmiths and sometimes other craftspeople, such as tanners, may be members of other, neighbouring communities and therefore originally speak a different language. There is also the possibility of deliberate alienation, whereby a craft is associated with an imagined foreign people with whom the respective craftspeople identify themselves. In both contexts, the foreign, other language is a strong indication for their separation from the rest of the society. Registers of blacksmiths are the most common and best-known craftsmen registers in Africa. There are also registers for hunters, potters, people who dye fabric, who work leather and for woodcarvers, but these may not be as much related to the institutionalizing of a social class or caste, as blacksmith registers are. Very often the language used in these registers refers to the special knowledge possessed by the craftsmen, and to the complexity of their actions. In terms of their grammar, craft languages, like honorific registers, youth languages and so on, resemble the matrix language. They differ, however, in terms of their lexicon. This can be enriched by borrowed words, and can consist of words made from secret, metaphoric expressions, or of ancient terms for specific actions, materials and techniques.

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Figures 20a, b: Blacksmith in Mavo village and a ritual object produced by his ancestors

The village of Mavo was founded by Jukun people, who speak Wapa. The inhabitants also speak Hausa, Tarok, and Fulfulde. Before the village was destroyed and a large number of its inhabitants killed during the violent conflicts in Plateau state in 2003, most families peacefully shared different religious practices, namely the Jukun’s mam religion, Islam, and, occasionally, Christianity. Masks of the principle mam shrines and their languages, and the register used by blacksmiths, healers, and specific titleholders were all considered to be “deep language”, and their meaning was not disclosed to outsiders. In the craft language of Hausa in northern Nigeria, secrecy is not a salient feature of its praxis. Hausa craft registers exhibit an alternate vocabulary, metaphors and euphemisms (Bross 1996). The terms very often refer to similarities between tools and other objects, or to the routine of some of the performed actions. This way of manipulating language is not ludic or artful, but rather avoids addressing knowledge directly, in a sense of keeping the actual process of crafting hidden and special. This reflects the heightened and at the same time marginalized position of craftsmen, their mythological or real origin from another

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place and another people, and the power they have over material substances and spiritual phenomena alike. An example from Hausa craft registers is: (31)

kúlkíí ‘club’ for ‘wooden drying device of hat-makers’ ɓááwóó ‘bark’ for ‘shavings’ kúúrár ƙárfèè ‘hyena of iron’ for ‘magnet’ (the magnet pulls iron in the same way as the hyena pulls its prey)

Blacksmith registers more explicitly refer to the social role of their speakers, who very often are craftsmen, healers, and spiritual specialists at the same time. In some communities, such as among the Berber-speaking Tuareg, they are considered to be the descendants of former slaves. The elaborate blacksmithing registers that exist in many parts of West Africa are likely to have developed in the context of such a specific socio-political set-up. For example, several Mande languages have elaborated blacksmithing registers, and these speaker communities also have a social history in which nyamakala (“caste”) relations and the control by an elite over certain guilds and social groups play an important role. Blacksmiths often occupy a very low rank in these hierarchies, or none at all, as they are of foreign origin and thus not an integral part of the group. They sometimes speak completely different languages from the groups among whom they live, obviously as a consequence of migrations for feudal service. This specific pattern of special-purpose bilingualism is described by Kastenholz (1998). Other blacksmithing registers in turn, such as among the West African Songhay, appear to aim at a disguised representation of activities that may involve high risks or that have to be kept secret from possible competitors. Very often, transformation in its most literal sense is the blacksmiths’ special responsibility in every possible way, and this is what their registers symbolically express.

2.3.5 Avoidance languages The linguistic expression of social distance between sub-groups of a society is also achieved in avoidance languages. These do not usually aim at secrecy, however, like some of the registers discussed above, as they have to do with family relations that need to be known in order to be treated accordingly. But, in a similar way to special purpose languages, these registers are a means of implementing and sustaining social institutions. This is particularly true for in-law avoidance languages of married women, which are also part of gendered language in general. Avoiding relatives and relations may have many reasons, such as incest taboo, keeping control over one’s personal economic resources, expressing con-

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cepts of alterity – the construction of the cultural Other –, and so on. However, the expression of vagueness and difference in the relationship between a woman and her father-in-law seems to be crucial in many avoidance registers. In many of these, names are the centre of avoidance praxis, and their phonological composition is relevant for the manipulations that can be observed. Even though this exact type of name avoiding could have been rather common in Africa, only very few avoidance languages have been recorded or are still used (e.g. Herbert 1990; Kunene 1958; Raum 1973; Van Rooyen 1968). Hlonipa, an avoidance language used by married women of Nguni-speaking societies of southern Africa, Ballishsha of the Horn of Africa (for example practiced among speakers of Sidamo and Kambaata (Teferra 1987), and avoidance registers of female speakers of Nyakyusa have been studied in detail (Finlayson 1995, 1982; Kolbusa 2000; Treis 2005), but information on most other parts of the continent is largely lacking. Sociolinguists have repeatedly suggested that the otherwise improbable spread of phonemes and loan words from low prestige into high prestige languages can be explained by the widespread use of in-law avoidance languages (Herbert 1990). In order to create a larger repertoire of avoidance forms and substituting sounds in Hlonipha, loans from neighbouring languages, such as Khoe for example, would have made a lot of sense. In this respect, the praxis of avoidance registers would shed additional light on the possibilities and consequences of multilingualism, language contact and convergence. Consider the practice of the Hlonipha in Southern Africa: once a woman got married she was supposed to refrain from ever uttering the name of her husband’s father (and sometimes other senior members of his family). Moreover, any word that contained syllables that were part of this name had to be avoided as well. To borrow marked sounds – for example clicks – from neighbouring languages made a lot of sense if avoidance was tantamount to a major restriction in the combination of syllables and phonemes. Historical-comparative work suggests that it is very likely that Hlonipha speakers were aware of phonological differences between Bantu and Khoe, and that they made use of this knowledge (Herbert 1990; Irvine 1998; Irvine & Gal 2000). In present urban settings, and with increasing work migration in many parts of southern Africa, this praxis of Hlonipha is not often continued. But in rural settings the situation can be different, and here the avoidance languages are still in use. The praxis of an avoidance language clearly depends on a speaker’s environment, where help in getting forms (and names) right will be needed during the early days as a newly married wife. Most descriptions of avoidance languages emphasize that newly married women first have to learn the principles of the register before they are permitted

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to move around freely in their husbands’ homes. Either a sister of the husband or another person of similar social standing teaches the young wife about syllable replacement strategies, avoidance vocabulary and other strategies, such as ways of avoiding their in-laws physically. In Kambaata, the Ballishsha avoidance register employs a variety of strategies, besides asking for non-verbal practices as well, such as avoiding direct eye-contact between in-laws, communal meals, and so on (Treis 2005): (32)

saʔá haamúta amá-ta handarchúta

‘cow’ → laamuuwwá ‘chest’ → wozaní biríta ‘mother’ → il-aanchúta ‘dove’ → ciiʔichchúta

ancient East Gurage loan ‘the front of the heart’, periphrasis ‘the one who gives birth’, derivation ‘bird’, synonym

Living in the compound or house of her husband’s family most likely means to a married woman that encounters between in-laws occur frequently and that they refer to each other daily. This makes the use of avoidance language a practice quite similar to multilingual practices that exist in many of these societies, as we have seen in the previous chapter. This aspect of in-law avoidance registers is rather significant in the light of what we can observe in gendered language. Considering the example of Tarok above, the meaning of avoidance languages seems to become more complex. On the one hand, they refer to the marginalization of women in particular spheres of life, for example in religious contexts and in terms of economic strategies, whereby these women – as family late-comers  – are marked through linguistic practice as outsiders with limited access to resources. Since the name, for example as metonymy, is given such salience in all the in-law avoidance languages, there must be more to say about it. And there is much more about a name. In Evans-Pritchard’s famous study (1948) on Nuer modes of address, the author demonstrates how a person in the course of passage rites and throughout his or her life accumulates names. There is a name given after a child’s birth, usually selected by elder family members, then a toddler’s nickname, a bull name after initiation, names that have to do with adulthood, and today of course also Christian names. Accordingly, the lexeme for ‘name’ in Nuer and many other Western Nilotic languages is grammatically a plural (Storch 2005). Furthermore, names must be treated with care. For example, the name of a respect person, such as an adult male, must not be uttered with a loud voice, and thus calling a person by his name, shouting across a village’s central place, a market or a street is a gesture of humiliation and disrespect. Hence, besides expressing a variety of social information about a person (Bruck & Bodenhorn 2006), a name is in itself a symbol of a person’s wholeness and dignity. Avoiding

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it as a daughter-in-law is an expression of respect and distance. And this is also exactly the case in other avoidance strategies that must once have been more widespread than they are today: the avoidance of a deceased person’s name. Name taboos for deceased persons are briefly mentioned by Frazer (1989) for the names of kings and chiefs among Zulu speakers. For west-central African societies, we have more detailed information. A number of Adamawa-speaking groups in north-eastern Nigeria have practised name tabooing until the relatively recent arrival of missionaries. As Kleinewillinghöfer (1995) is able to demonstrate, this has contributed to the accomplished replacement of parts of the basic or core vocabulary. Names, as he rightly argues, are very often derived from nouns that denote basic concepts, such as body parts, location and motion, or natural phenomena, all referring to the circumstances of one’s birth. Sources for the replacement of these names and nouns came from neighbouring languages. Some of these are still spoken today, and therefore are relatively easy to identify as donors of a replacing avoidance vocabulary, but one language is now disappearing, with only very few old semi-speakers remaining. This language is Jalaa, and its lexicon and retrievable grammatical forms are not related to those of any other language of Africa. This illustrates the conservative aspect of avoidance and taboo: even though language changes continuously, in terms of its lexicon, grammar and sociolinguistic situation alike, there are some domains of linguistic practice that are more conservative. Because name taboos are such a crucial strategy in keeping institutions such as respect and power relations functional, they remain active even though the society, the languages its members speak, and so on, change. Turning to ritual language, we will see that ancient forms of language may indeed be remembered, but at the same time, there are examples that illustrate that innovation plays an important role too. These have to do with the invention of tradition, whereby language is intended by its speakers to sound as ancient and enigmatic as possible.

2.3.6 Ritual languages In the course of the history of African linguistics, scholars have repeatedly come up with the hypothesis that ritual languages used in masquerades, spirit cults, and so on reveal something about the “original language” or the general “origin” of the respective community. For example, the three registers spoken by the Gbaya (Tessmann 1931) were interpreted as evidence for historical language shift, whereby the old language still had to be used in cults so that the living could be understood by their deceased ancestors.

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This coupling of language and ancient history is an old narrative in African linguistics and anthropology. Fabian (2002) has demonstrated that locating the Other in a different time, such as linking Africa with Europe’s medieval, antique and pre-historical pasts – consider how Western scholars have thought about the cultures of the Sudan, the Great Lakes and the Kalahari⁶ – has always been a powerful strategy of alterity, creating the object of anthropology and its related disciplines. This framing of African multilingualism, more especially the complex and multivocal practice of register variation, has considerably obscured the meanings and functions of ritual language. At the same time, Africa does have these ancient languages that are used in ritual contexts. The Coptic language, for example, survives as a ritual medium in the liturgy of the Coptic Church, and Gə’əz, or “Ethiopian” in older sources (Ludolf 1661a; Ludolf 1661b) is the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but has been replaced by Amharic in all other contexts. However, these ritual languages have been correlated with non-African cultures.⁷ Egypt, for example, by the time of the advent of Christianity, had been a multilingual place with Greek as the dominating language. The Nile Valley therefore was associated in later times with Europe and the Mediterranean rather than with Africa, for example by many Egyptologists. Coptic consequently was not so much studied as an African liturgical language, but as one of the Middle East, together with Aramaic, Hebrew and so on (Woodard 2008). Recent research has demonstrated that Coptic liturgy and ritual linguistic practices, and perhaps even pre-Christian ritual communication, have a relevant and complex history in Africa. Obviously, ancient languages such as Egyptian, Coptic and Greek have left their imprints in other parts of Africa, where they once contributed to shaping the lives of people who are commonly not considered to have been part of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Byzantium. An example that illustrates the longue durée of registers used in ritual (and, presumably, administrative) contexts stems from Kordofan.

6  Examples for this quite colourful narrative are Lange’s (2004) account of the medieval character of the central Sudan and its ancient links to Minor Asia, ethnographies such as Nadel’s Black Byzantium (1942) and Meek’s Sudanese Kingdom (1931), but also models of how South Africa’s Khoisan languages and their speakers represent stone-age populations (Stopa 1986). Recently, this narrative has turned into one that emphasizes that Africa no longer represents Europe’s past, but its – most frightening – future, characterized by weak states, absence of social security and social market economy, and so on. Besides being contributions to social sciences, it seems as if all these representations of Arica have something to do with alterity and othering, where Africa serves as a kind of mirror for Western fears. 7 Very much like contemporarily used ritual languages such as Arabic in Muslim communities and speaking in tongues in Pentecostal churches.

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In late antiquity, Christian kingdoms emerged south of Egypt: Makuria (Dongola), Alwa (Allodia), and Nobatia (Faras). In this area, Meroitic had been spoken and also written until about 400 AD; other written sources of that time are in Greek, as well as Egyptian (until about the fourth century AD), and of course Coptic. But in the early medieval era, around 800 AD, Old Nubian texts emerged, mainly in the context of Christian literature such as Bible translations, theological comments, and letters. The script used for Old Nubian is based on the Coptic alphabet (which is derived from the Greek alphabet) which was enlarged by five Meroitic letters (derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs). Old Nubian was the dominant language in all three of the medieval Christian kingdoms and remained in use as a written language until 1485. The Old Nubian texts tell us something about religion, administration, political alliances and the daily life of the medieval Nubian societies or at least of the learned clerics and elites of the period (Bechhaus-Gerst 2011). The language used in these texts shows a few similarities with Greek, such as loanwords and the use of the subjunctive as a morphological device of subordination and complementation. But apart from such contact phenomena, Old Nubian has nothing to do with Greek or Egyptian, but is an Eastern Sudanic language and is closely related to Meroitic (Rilly 2010).

Figure 21: The Magi in a fresco from the cathedral of Faras (Nubia, northern Sudan; now in Sudan National Museum)

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Map 7: Nubian and Meroitic

After Old Nubian had disappeared and the medieval kingdoms with it – they were conquered by the Mamelukes and marginalized as trade networks changed  – Nubian was no longer written in the Coptic script and played no role in the religious life of the region; in this domain, it was replaced by Arabic. The modern Nubian languages that are spoken on the Nile today are Kenzi, Dongolawi and Nobiin, and their speakers are all bilingual in Arabic, which is used in the public domain. But the Nubian language family is actually much larger, with Midob west of the Nile, and some seven languages spoken in the Nuba Mountains in Kordofan, and until a few generations ago, Birgid in Darfur.

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Map 8: Kordofan Nubian

None of these languages have written records that date back as far as the medieval period or Ancient Egypt, and their speakers have always lived far away from the Nile, often in remote areas where they formed small independent groups (Dimmendaal 2007, 2011). However, Jaeger & Ibrahim emphasize that common motifs in folktales and linguistic similarities exist (Jaeger & Ibrahim 2010). One linguistic feature that quite strongly links them to the ancient kingdoms and rituals of the Nile Valley is the cultural vocabulary. In Nyimang, for example, the following names for the days of the week are used, which have nothing to do with recent missionary work, but seem to be old (Rilly 2011): (33)

Nyimang sàm’déé kìrà’géé

Old Nubian ϲαββτοη κγριακε

Greek Σάββατον κυριακη

Gloss ‘Saturday’ (Sabbath) ‘Sunday’ (‘Lord’s day’)

The etymology for most of the terms for days of the week might remain unknown, but for some of them, like those in (33), the historical context is clear: the lexemes for ‘Saturday’ and ‘Sunday’ are loans from Greek, and are also present in Old

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Nubian. There are a few other such borrowings, and they all suggest that there was a relatively strong influence of Coptic and Old Nubian as means of ritual communication. These ancient languages are also unlikely to have been used as linguae francae in daily communication as the borrowed vocabulary in Hill Nubian shows no traces of Old Nubian, Greek and Coptic outside the domains of religion and power. With the decline of the Christian kingdoms of the Nile and the fall of Byzantium in the fifteenth century, the practice of using ancient languages as ritual media stopped. Rilly (2011) provides another, quite striking example that suggests that before this major interruption of contact between Kordofan and the Nile Valley there had been continuing exchanges over centuries. Looking at the names for months, or seasons, one finds evidence for loans from Pharaonic Egyptian, which can only let us speculate about the continuity of rituals and contact alike (Rilly 2011): (34)

Nyimang tɔ̀tɔ̀ bìbìlá

Old Nubian θοθ /tot/ φαϖφι

Ptolemaic THOT PAOPHI

Gloss ‘June to July’ ‘July to August’

But are there many more ritual languages in Africa that are languages of the past? An answer will be difficult to provide, given the patchy documentation of such registers. But there are surely many of more recent origin that exhibit the creative and innovative capabilities of their users. A look at what ritual languages are used for and where and when they are spoken helps to illustrate this. Ritual communication includes daily routines as well as heightened events. It is characterized by Senft & Basso (2009: 1) as “artful, performed semiosis, predominantly but not only involving speech, that is formulaic and repetitive and therefore anticipated within particular contexts of social interaction”. Moreover, as the authors argue, ritual communication is always turned on itself, as it will only then be complete and whole once its ramifications become obvious: anticipation of the forms used in communication stimulates anticipation of its consequences, and the performative character of ritual communication involves its subsequent evaluation. One crucial function of ritual communication is thereby to provide constant opportunities for the negotiation of power relations among participants. As this involves social flexibility according to the possible changes in power relations, ritual communication is usually a way of speaking which can be manipulated and modified by speakers. This has been formidably shown by Irvine (1974) in her study of Wolof ways of greeting. And greeting formulae are an example of ritual communication par excellence: performative, with expectable addresses and replies, and involving

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several participants who will constantly evaluate the consequences of the ritual. In Wolof-speaking communities, greeting is an important daily ritual which needs much time. Participants are expected not to miss any greeting formulae, and not to overlook anybody who should be greeted, even if this would mean that – for example during a large gathering – greeting takes several hours. Irvine describes how the performance of the individual greeting ceremonies is flexible. Participants may use an expected set of questions and replies in order to strengthen their respective social positions, but they may also diverge from such patterns in order to greet themselves up or down in the social hierarchy. Ameka (2009) characterizes greetings as access rituals. They help speakers to enter into communication events, and to exit from interaction, and thereby they express ideologies about social cohesiveness, communality, inclusiveness, and so on. As interdiscursive speech acts they are based on performance, a common cultural grammar and a repertoire of conventionalized frames in which formulaic phrases are used. Again, there needs to be space for flexibility and improvization, as participants do not necessarily wish to meet social expectations about their culturally recognizable roles (Irvine 1974). The same flexibility is essential in reacting to social change, as Ameka (2009: 150) suggests, describing differences among greeting rituals: The use of salutation and identification address terms in opening routines has disappeared, especially in urban contexts, and not just among Ewe but also in other communities such as the Akan. The mode of inquiring about such identification terms has been replaced by questions asking other forms of identification, such as ‘Who are you?’, ‘Where are you coming from?’ and [sic] ‘Who is your father?’ Some aspects of access rituals are stable, but others are changing in the West African communities.

Language used in such rituals changes together with the society, and does not necessarily conserve old forms and meanings. However, while institutions disappear, the ideas about those institutions could be maintained. And this is indeed an aspect of culturally meaningful linguistic praxis where ritual language also can have a kind of preserving character. While the more structural dimensions of social life, such as technology and forms of political organisation, may change frequently, the more symbolic dimensions of social life, such as religion, magic and poetry, continue to exist. Hence, the use of formulaic phrases may refer to ancient times. A good example for such a situation seems to be the linguistic expression of joking relationships, introduced in section 1.3.5. These can refer to various relationships, for example to the fragile, ambiguous bonds between the distant yet highly responsible maternal uncle and his nephew in a virilocal community, or between grandparents and their grandchildren (who are conceptualized as their grandparent’s incarnation – small grandfathers and grandmothers):

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Adhola speakers of eastern Uganda are permitted to ritually insult their grandparents. Joking relationships and ritualized teasing can also refer to relations and ritualized interactions of the past, for example when they are practised between groups who share a historical relationship. Maha speakers in northeastern Nigeria ritually abuse members of specific groups from neighbouring villages, because these groups exchanged daughters in the past. Even though clan exogamy is no longer an important practice, the ritual abuses persist and refer to deeper relationships that cannot be easily interrupted. Some examples for ritual abuses from another Nigerian language, Wapha of Wase Tofa, are given in (35): (35)

jín makwà ǹnәŋ

‘Tarok people’, lit. ‘watermelons’ ‘Hausa people’, lit. ‘sth. foreign’ ‘Boghom people’, lit. ‘stinkers’

One feature that is salient in the expression of social relations here is inversion: speakers do not utter the terms of respect that would be expected in “normal” ritual communication, but the opposite. Such inverted ways of speaking and behaving are also characteristic of another register that is closely related to ritual communication, namely spirit languages.

2.3.7 Spirit languages Spirit possession, healing rituals and speaking in tongues are phenomena that have received much attention by anthropologists, who have convincingly argued for an explanation of spirit possession as a strategy that helps to gain agency and that can be employed on purpose as a body technique (Friedson 2009; Behrend & Luig 1999). Possession rituals have also been studied in terms of being manifestations of art (Kramer 1987). These perspectives have not been obtained by explicitly recording and studying spirit languages, but they have helped to achieve a more satisfying analysis of spirit languages and their meanings. People who are possessed by a spirit or experience states of trance are often claimed to speak in tongues, but are also observed using languages they never have learned – for example Chinese, Korean, and so on in the case of the leader of a Ugandan spiritual movement (Behrend 1993). Certeau (2000) argues, referring to the possessed nuns of seventeenth-century Loudun, that it is quite conceivable that possessed persons simply imitate languages that they have heard before. Though the theatrical, performative character of possession events creates a

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frame which adds some kind of credibility from the point of view of the audience, most of the sudden speakers of foreign language use a rather limited repertoire. But there is another context where spirit possession is extremely meaningful, namely ritual. And here we indeed find rather striking examples of meaningful, highly symbolic languages used during possession. These do not just “take over” during trance, and are also not uncontrollable means of communication, but are learned during initiation into a shrine or a religious society. One of the first systematic studies of a spirit language is Leiris’ (1948) study of the Sigi language used among Dogon-speaking groups. The Sigi language is normally used by those who have been initiated into a secret society and therefore remains obscure and enigmatic to outsiders. Other languages used in trance and possession rituals are acquired in a similar manner, for example the Yeve register used in Ewe spirit possession (Akuetey 1998), or the Kromanti language that forms part of ritual practice among the Jamaican Maroons (Bilby 1983). In his detailed and informed study on the Bori cult in Hausa-speaking Nigeria, (Krings 1999, 1998) demonstrates that the language used in a trance state is a representation of real language, but not of Hausa, the language normally used by the protagonists. Rather, they speak local varieties of French or English, which fit the spirits by whom they are possessed. Similarly to Rouch’s Maîtres fous (1953), the Bori spirits have to do with strategies of inversion: the labourer becomes a General, and the unassuming shopkeeper a heavy cigarette smoker and drinker. The possessed utter things they would never be permitted to say otherwise, and thereby create a state of inversion, where the possessed becomes the opposite of what he or she normally is considered to be. Hence, local speakers of Hausa become vernacular speakers of French, powerless people become mighty titleholders, and so on. Consider the following examples taken from Krings (1999): (36)

mai yaƙi ɔfәn zi maus a bæg a bæg Lord war open the mouth I beg I beg ‘Mai yaƙi, speak, please, please, mai yaƙi, okay’

(37)

bandʒu savai bonjour ça va ‘that’s it’

trɛ très

mai lord

yaƙi war

afɔ̃ ah bon

bjɛ̃ bien

While in these examples, language and the expression of inversion, of being the Other, are part of speakers’ repertoires, the following examples illustrate another representation of existing language, which however has to be learned during several years of immersion and practice in a shrine. In Yevegbe, the spirit lan-

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guage of the Ewe, othering strategies, mimetic interpretations of agency and of the replacement of the Self during possession play an important role. Otherness is often expressed by the use of Mina, Gã and Fon vocabulary, which in the cult language Yevegbe works as the most obvious mimetic interpretation of the Other. Examples of borrowed vocabulary in Yevegbe are as follows (Akuetey 1998): (38)

Ewe ɖeká ‘one’ → lolo ‘big’ → ŋutsú ‘man’ →

Yevegbe lokpo amiagbo esúi

Source Fon: ɖokpo Gã: mami agbo ‘fat woman’ Mina: asu ‘male’

Affixation of morphemes that are not present in the matrix language is used to enlarge words and thus to express the augmentation of their meaning and power. The morphemes are analyzed as expressing meaning since they seem to differ in the respective word classes, as far the available material suggests, where nouns, stative verbs and adverbs are marked by different morphemes in Yevegbe (Akuetey 1998: 85): (39)

Ewe ŋku nyɔnu yéyé xòxó egbe

‘eye’ ‘woman’ ‘new’ ‘old’ ‘today’

→ → → → →

Yevegbe ekui enyɔe niyé noxɔxɔé hɛgbi

Source affixes e-/-i affixes e-/-e, reduction of root affix ni-, no reduplication affixes no-/-é affixes hɛ-/-i

Compounding serves as another strategy of augmenting speech and expressing its agency (Akuetey 1998: 85): (40)

Ewe mɔlu ‘rice’

→

Yevegbe dayiwoagbató

Source ‘the whiteman’s corn’

Semantic disambiguation and ambiguation are other salient features (Akuetey 1998: 86). In example (41), the ambiguity of yaklɔni wɔ probably refers to learning by immersion, where teaching and learning may not be distinguishable: (41)

Ewe etsɔ fia nu srõ nu

‘yesterday/ → tomorrow’ ‘to teach’ → ‘to learn’ →

Yevegbe etre etremɔni yaklɔni wɔ yaklɔni wɔ

Source ‘yesterday’ ‘tomorrow’

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There are some significant typological changes in Yevegbe, such as a loss of plural formation, and depronominalization (Akuetey 1998: 87): (42)

Ewe me é

Yevegbe ‘I’ → ami ‘person’ ‘s/he’ → amiha ‘friend of a person’

The loss of personal pronouns presumably reflects the loss of control over what is uttered while being possessed by a spirit. During possession, the subject experiences a state of patienthood and does not speak but rather is made to speak by the spirit (Behrend 1993: 157–158). In this situation, the subject is replaced by a ‘person’, which exactly is what the spirit language seems to express. We can also conclude from our brief look at spirit languages that they are fundamentally different from play languages, youth jargons, honorific registers, avoidance registers, and so on, and share features that express alienability with blacksmith registers. Othering in language, as in spirit languages, involves the following principles and strategies: – Spirit languages differ from each other in the degree of othering. – They may represent ancestors, foreigners and animals, but never refer directly to the ways of speaking otherwise employed by the possessed person. – In contrast to other speech registers, this linguistic code is not necessarily created by derivation from ordinary language. Spirit languages are not icons of ordinary language. – Speakers and audiences refer to specialists for an explanation of the rules that govern spirit languages. Besides these spirit registers, initiation languages and non-urban youth registers, secret languages, and many other coded forms of communication can be used to express experiences of liminality or ambiguity in rituals, inversion, marginality, and so on. Hence the creation of registers such as cult and spirit languages also tells us something about how speakers refer to multilingual or polylectal practices in order to make statements about their social situations, personal life experiences and viewpoints. These are in principle not linguistic practices one arbitrarily chooses from, or states which simply overwhelm a person.

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2.4 What we can learn from users of speech registers In a variety of genres, for example in written poetry, but also in other forms of verbal art, the choice of registers and styles, besides supporting institutions and following norms, aims at the expression of socially delicate matters, agency and power. Hence, the rich cultural heritage of African poetry, as much as the registers and speech styles we have looked at here, also always refers to power relations and the positioning of the Self, in a way much like in Western art (Storch 2011a: 108–109). And, much like media and forms of social and political comment, these genres, styles and registers are not static but change with society. Hence, a stylistically conservative poetic genre like Qasida in the Islamic world has been localized in Fulfulde- and Hausa-speaking West Africa as a genre of agitation, for example in religious conflict (Boyd & Furniss 1996). In East African Swahili poetry, the same genre is used for the communication of otherwise delicate social critique (Mulokozi 1982). At the same time, linguistic practices such as respect languages and avoidance registers can lose their original meaning, for instance when those institutions they refer to cease to be meaningful or simply disappear. For example, with the migration of rural women into urban settings and the change of family life through work migration and urbanization in many parts of Southern Africa, the practice of Hlonipha lost its importance. Married women often do not meet their in-laws frequently and therefore have no chance to practise the appropriate avoidance register. They may know that it exists and is in general culturally important, but often are not able to actively speak it. Kiessling & Mous (2004) refer to a number of such increasingly obsolete registers when exploring highly vital and dynamic African youth languages. They observe that the manipulation strategies these latter registers are based on have very often been inspired by those used in the creation of avoidance registers, initiation languages, and so on. Linguistic change here is embedded in an experience of social, environmental and political change. The active and deliberate use of a rather large variety of manipulation strategies thereby reflects the speakers’ metalinguistic knowledge and competence. By making their choices, often naming and explicitly distinguishing between registers and lects, they demonstrate linguistic awareness and competence. Speakers are able to identify morphemes, phonological features and syntactic patterns; they know how to use this knowledge symbolically, and they have access to this knowledge regardless of whether or not they have access to grammar lessons, alphabetization groups and Bible translation courses. That spirit and cult lan-

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guages are actually taught in shrines, poetry is practiced in Qur’anic schools, language skills are enlarged through the practice of language games, is unmistakable evidence for the fact that there are alternatives to Western education, which have been kept meaningful throughout colonialism and the postcolonial era. These other means of transmitting linguistic knowledge suggest that multilingual societies are not just based on their ability to speak many languages, but rather on the speakers’ access to relatively abstract linguistic knowledge. There are a few conclusions that we can draw so far which will be of importance in the following chapters: – Language is deliberately manipulated and engineered regardless of the presence of modern, central institutions. – Local concepts of grammar and metalinguistic knowledge exist and shape, but also express speakers’ possibilities of manipulation and deliberate linguistic change. – Linguistic knowledge has several representations (e.g. practice, performance, symbolism). – Cultural change does not necessarily lead to a loss of this knowledge, but rather to its transformation. Being a fluent, complete speaker very often means being a competent speaker of various registers and speech styles. A language as the sum of its varieties, sociolects, registers, and styles, is, of course, something different from language as a simplistic standard. As we have seen in the present chapter, thinking about the Self and Other, making verbal statements about one’s position in society are a crucial part of speaking in general. In that respect, a competent speaker of any language will always be a multilingual, or polylectal, one. This is probably an area where Western scholars and audiences alike have often misunderstood speakers of African languages. Constructing institutions through language is reflected by the use of highly diversified linguistic forms, by the coexistence of different languages and ways of speaking, while the material – visible  – representations of such institutions are not always there. The preference of hearing over seeing in various African societies as an indication of truth (Aikhenvald & Storch 2013) reflects this reality. Words, or rather their registerspecific representations, have much to do with the creation and conservation of power and norms, and this, in the context of a common cultural grammar available to speakers of different languages. As we shall see in the following chapters, linguistic practice has often been misunderstood by outsiders (and hence many linguists) as a simple expression of “diversity”, either in the sense of otherness or contrast, which is often seen as being archaic and rudimentary. This has led to a

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number of problems in the explanation of multilingualism and language change by Western linguists. The epistemes underlying their explanations, perceptions and representations of African languages, and those in which speakers of African languages themselves construe their knowledge, will be looked at in detail in the next chapter.

Anne Storch

3 Language and ideology Máajìjìjì séy ǹdә́gu, séy ágàŋgàŋ, bәŕgbâ bәŕgbáp jàu, báwɔ́rùp kùkùyì – shíi kèe nâŋ. When they feast, there is playing and drumming, they beat and dance, and the women are jumping – that is all.’ Barunde Galadima, keeping silent about the secret language of the Hone, Pindiga 1995.

Speakers’ choices about whether they wish to use a specific language or register in a given situation, or whether they will continue to speak a language at all, or rather stop using it, depend on many factors. One profoundly important locus for making such choices is language ideologies that are shared by a speaker community, or a group within such a community. This is the case in the quote with which this chapter begins. Barunde Galadima was born in a village on top of a hill, well protected against enemies, and he grew up as a speaker of Hone, living in a Jukun society where he underwent initiation rituals in various shrines, and learned to fear and respect ancestral spirits and those godly rules that shaped his people’s way of life. As an adult, Barunde had become a Muslim, like most of the people of Pindiga, and moved down from the hill to where a more prosperous life would be possible. When asked about the relevance and use of a secret register in pre-Islamic ritual, he politely described the event as such and remained silent about anything relating to the power of the word, or the magic and agency of the old secret language. Silence itself is a very powerful way of communicating, and the absence of words here signals that there actually exists something more than dancing and jumping, a secret about which we actually know. We notice the silence and suspect that there is something secret, even threatening, up there in the old ruins of the houses and shrines, and in the old incantations and secret words. The relevance of this secrecy relates to language ideologies which still are meaningful to Barunde, even though he is now a Muslim and speaks Hausa most of the time, as no member of the younger generations in Pindiga would be able to communicate in Hone. To Barunde, the concept of language as a whole is one of words as magic, speaking as power, and disclosing secrets as having clear consequences. This concept, or rather ideology, of the Hone language has led him to the conviction that it would be better to die without transmission of knowledge that is potentially harmful to him than to share his memories and insights before the people of Pindiga finally forget who they formerly were. Hence, Barunde Galadima does not fall silent as a victim of bilingualism and language shift, but

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actively makes a choice, acting according to the constraints of a language ideology that was once shared by his entire community. The significance of differences between languages  – Hone as a potentially powerful language versus Hausa as a harmless one, languages with few vowels against those with many, and so on – is intercalated in the cultures, social structures and power politics of the area where these languages are spoken. The ideological framework in which these differences are conceptualized and made useful to speakers is the topic of the present chapter. Language ideologies express how speakers experience differences between languages, generate differences and map their ideas about linguistic variety and differentiation onto other speakers. To simply change the frame  – move from the researcher’s ideological concepts to the language ideologies of speakers – is not intended here, because linguistic research like other scientific work will always remain subjective. But by exploring the praxis and meaning of language ideology we will come to a closer understanding of how and why multilingual communities maintain or change their linguistic repertoires. This also helps us to understand linguistic change as something other than a passive repercussion of global forces, colonial powers and material changes. The case studies provided in the present chapter instead intend to demonstrate how attitudes towards language and culture, beliefs and ideas about prestige and power have shifted among speakers of Hone and other Jukun languages. The dynamic ideological processes we will explore in some detail include reactions to external efforts in literacy development, standardization, and homogenization. Reactions that are profoundly expressed in oral history and other accounts include the creation of translation strategies and the invention of traditions in order to legitimize the community itself. Language ideology as part of linguistic practice has been systematically studied in various ways and in various contexts. These rich contributions to the study of language ideology provide a solid base for the following studies of individual communities and speakers. One aspect of language ideologies that has been discussed intensively is their dynamics (Silverstein 1979, 1985) and multiplicity. They change and thereby reflect how speakers’ ways of thinking change, and they refer to different aspects and truths of linguistic differentiation and praxis. Among speakers, there consequently exist several ideologies, referring to various implications of a given linguistic phenomenon. Moreover, language ideologies have various levels (Kroskrity 2007: 501–502), as speakers may be more interested in the ideology of aberrant, marked ways of speaking than in that of “normal” speech. These help to construct identity through linguistic praxis, but can be regimented and exploited for political purposes (Kroskrity 2000). Language ideology shapes and reflects the organization

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of institutions and social structures (Irvine 1998), and expresses and supports power relations (Schieffelin, Woolard & Kroskrity 1998). The following case studies demonstrate how these features and functions of language ideologies are confronted with competing ones, are transformed and preserved. This will provide an idea of why speakers reject “development”, “progress” and revitalization of their “endangered” languages, or why they keep speaking them in multilingual settings, where they seem to be disadvantaged by power relations.

3.1 Language and power Linguists usually do not claim that one language is better than another, has richer semantics or provides deeper insights into thought, concepts of truth or beauty. But different languages might open different opportunities to their speakers, depending on prestige relationships, their use in education, and other sociolinguistic parameters. The social life of language has been studied widely by sociolinguists in Africa, paying considerable attention to language politics and to the ways languages are used by their multilingual speakers in the different domains of daily life. And of course, as societies change, the roles attributed to various languages and registers may change as well, contributing to the emergence of new prestige languages and to the marginalization or disappearance of others. A good example for this process is the current situation in North Africa. In the course of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and so on, it suddenly and quite disturbingly became obvious that Arabic – a language so much embedded in religion, sanctity and a thousand and four hundred years of written history – is used in a new and shockingly different way by youths, members of the opposition and revolutionists. No longer do the leaders of the revolution stand on a balcony of the Al-Azhar University, citing ancient poetic language and Qur’anic phrases, as Nasser did, nor do they clad their speeches in the puritan cloth of the Islamists. What they apparently do is to negate all expected, socially encouraged forms of language and use a code that lacks the finery of the poetic register and the grammar of the standard language. Their language expresses the channels through which the revolution emerged  – Facebook, Twitter and text messages. This anti-language in a very subtle way plays with inversion, antonymic identities and the fluidity of language, as opposed to the codified, written texts of green books and grey propaganda.

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