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Why I Believe Almost All African Languages are Endangered

Guest Post by Luis Morais

Languages as cultural and social institutions of their peoples can either flourish, evolve and thrive or stagnate, degrade and die. There are several causes and factors that contribute to the death of a language, we could simplify things by stating that languages either die by the force of oppression (from man or nature) or by assimilation: when speakers start using a foreign language more than their own, up to the point that the dominant language swallows the regional language.

UNESCO rates how far a language is to extinction by quantifying the number of new young speakers learning and using it actively both inside and outside their homes. It is a straight-to-the-point system but it exclusively evaluates language “health” from the perspective of its spoken use without a deep consideration of how actively the regional language is used as a tool for knowledge creation instead of the dominant foreign language and how motivated regional speakers feel to preserve the knowledge acquired from previous generations.

Most African languages nowadays are safe from violent repression and technically considered alive due to the numbers of their many speakers. Nevertheless, since the world trend is that we will grow more and more dependent on digital technologies, we must consider the growing pervasiveness of the digital and online world in Africa either as:

An opportunity for African languages to gain their space in the online world and thrive in the digital age;
Or, where languages fail to establish an online and digital presence, the speeding up of the assimilation process where the local language is pushed out of yet another environment by the dominant language with the side effect of further eroding local speakers’ opinion of the language as useful and relevant for the digital age.

Knowledge is much wider than gadgets, corporations and factory plants

This article expands the focus of language health and longevity from new speakers learning the language and number of oral speakers to how actively the local language is used to create and preserve knowledge in the digital age. So that we are clear, whilst some view knowledge as exclusively what corporations, academic institutions and factories churn out every year, we base our argument on the fact that knowledge is much wider than that.

Within every language a trove of knowledge is to be found in the form of myths, poetry and literature, gastronomy, spirituality, herbs and natural medicines, philosophy and untranslatable concepts, music and new sounds, art, child upbringing methods, moral concepts, ways to govern and live in society, forms to express feelings and everything else.

In the oral tradition of Africa, it potentially resides a) the basis of the advances we enjoy today, b) the leads to future breakthroughs, c) but most importantly the blueprints of a sustainable way of life in this broken planet. This knowledge, essential and valuable as it is, must be preserved for the sake of the hidden lessons we might still learn from them.

If one thing, and one thing only, Africa should learn from Europe is fostering one’s own local languages

Although Africa is the home of the oral tradition, the historical evidence also shows that Africans from all over the continent have also been writing and recording their knowledge for centuries. Nevertheless, be it in Arabic, Medieval Latin, French or English, Africans from the past and present seem to have produced more physically recorded knowledge in the crusader’s and colonist’s language than in their own local languages.

In Europe, local languages stand a better chance to co-exist (instead of competing) with dominant official languages. Although the pressures of assimilation from other majoritarian European languages are still present, local languages and minority national languages in Europe have possessed a localised digital infrastructure compatible with knowledge creation in the local language for some time now.

The results are clear:

Catalonia as an autonomous region in Spain with 7 million Catalan speakers, boasts a book catalogue of 56.000 titles. Despite having suffered government repression in the past, nowadays the Catalan language is digitally accessible and content can be easily found online.

As another notable example, Iceland, with a population of a bit more than 300,000 people publishes 1,500 books in Icelandic every year.

In the case of Yiddish, one can easily find online book repositories with more than 10.000 free titles.

In the UK, there is plenty of literature produced in Welsh (430.000 speakers), Irish (2.5 million speakers) and Gaelic (87.000 speakers).

Regional and linguistic identity has always been a European theme, backed by a lucrative regional cultural industry generating millions of Euros. In the African context, it is difficult to foresee how regional languages expect to thrive in the digital age unless regional speakers find the localised tools and motivation to use their local languages in the digital space.

Why aren’t we producing more digital content in African languages?

We contemplate a future where our descendants will learn more of their identity and culture from digital and online sources. These future generations will likely listen to their oral tradition in YouTube, dance to their drums in iTunes and read about their myths in Wikipedia. These future generations will be more and more engaged in living a digital life and used to accessing and sharing information from digital sources.

In order to create local knowledge for these future “digital & online” generations, we first must allow regional language speakers to use their languages whenever and wherever they want. This is hardly possible in Africa today simply because the basic tools such as local keyboards and local digital language features are hard to find if not nonexistent.

Most African languages have poor access to digital aides such as language glossaries, text-to-speech databases, auto-correction and auto-suggestion features amongst other incredibly simple digital advances such as OCR, the technology that allows words in a picture of a book page to be recognised as words.

In simple terms, one can’t create knowledge in their local language without fully accurate and functional language tools.

As a personal example, being a speaker and writer of Brazilian Portuguese, I battled with keyboards to write in my native language when I came to the UK. Portuguese characters such as “ç” and accented letters such as “ã”, “à”, “ê”, “ó”, “ü” were impossible to type in a UK keyboard and for months I didn’t create much in my own language, reluctant to write it in a way that was orthographically wrong and open for misunderstanding.

In order to write in my own language, I tried several workarounds in the first years. I spent time cutting and pasting the accented characters from Brazilian websites into my writings; I installed intrusive virtual on-screen keyboards; and at a time I imported a European Portuguese keyboard which took a lot of physical space since my family still needed the UK keyboard around.

Just when I started using customised keyboard layouts on my UK keyboards then I was able to write from my coração (heart). Just then, I felt intellectually liberated and started creating knowledge in my own language.

Conclusion

Whilst typing machines epitomised the colonist’s oblivion (if not plain hostility) to local language and culture by locking knowledge production to a keypad in the colonist’s language, soft keyboards, computer keyboard layouts and digital language aides give the local speaker the freedom to produce knowledge in as many languages as they want or need.

The technology is here and has been available for some time, nevertheless in order to give regional African languages a fighting chance in the digital age, more needs to be done in order to create easily accessible regional language tools that allow one to exercise their regional language and culture with full digital language support.

I link the low usage of local languages to produce digital and online knowledge to both technological and social reasons:

There are insufficient localised input tools that allow one to write in their local language correctly.
Attempts to write the language with an incompatible input tool generates imperfect language content without the right characters, accents and tonal marks.
Content created without the right orthography dilutes the language. For not being standard it is harder to find in search engines.
The lack of digital language tools such as glossaries, dictionaries, OCR, auto-correct and auto-suggest features amongst others demotivate less experienced speakers of the local African language.
By seeing their local language under- and misrepresented in the digital and online world, speakers don’t feel their regional language is relevant for the digital age.
By being forced to make more effort to write in their regional language correctly, speakers decide not to use it as often as the dominant language to avoid the extra work.

Once the barriers above are removed and local digital language tools are created, part of the mission to allow African languages to represent themselves in the digital world will start to be accomplished in the form of the unblocked production of regional language content. In other words, make the tools for localised knowledge production accessible and everything else will follow.

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Luis Morais writes from Brazil. This article was first published on LinkedIn here.

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Bibliography/Further reading

Google’s Vint Cerf warns of ‘digital Dark Age’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31450389

How do I address you? Forms of address in Oko – Uchenna Oyali
http://academicjournals.org/article/article1379410255_Oyali%20pdf.pdf

Is Yorùbá an Endangered Language? – Felix Abidemi Fabunmi & Akeem Segun Salawu
http://www.njas.helsinki.fi/pdf-files/vol14num3/fabunmi.pdf

An Endangered Nigerian Indigenous Language: The Case of Yorùbá Language – Temitope Abiodun Balogun
http://nobleworld.biz/images/6-Balogun_s_Paper.pdf

African Languages in a Digital Age, Challenges and Opportunities for Indigenous Language Computing. Don Osborn, HSRC Press.

Raising Money: The Dictionary Experience

There are many ways to fund a project, I’ve realized. One can work hard, save up for many months, and then put all that savings into the choice project, ignoring family and other more important commitments in the process; or one can ask friends and family for a raise, promising that the money will not all go down the drain of sometimes unrealistic dreams. This is usually a good idea if they are not, at the moment, committed to something else more important themselves. Usually very rare. Or one can apply for a number of grants in the world, promising to make one’s dreams come true.

Most grants however are specific. I got a MacArthur-sponsored grant in 2005, for instance. It came with a stipend of $600 for all of six weeks, with a paid trip to Moi University in Eldoret Kenya for a “Sociocultural Exchange”. The Fulbright of four years later came with a monthly stipend of about $1200 but one had to pay for lodging, and feeding in the United States (totaling usually up to around $800) such that by the end of the program, there was just enough to buy an iPod Classic, a hand-held camera, and a few gifts for hordes of friends and family back home.

Some grants require that the grantee do a couple of things (like write a book, for instance), or stay in a particular location for a period of time. Or do work in a certain area for a period of time. In most cases, except one is already established in that field, it’s hard to find a grant that fits conveniently. That was why when sometimes last year, while pondering a way to continue and expand a project I started as an undergraduate in the University of Ibadan “A Multimedia Dictionary of Yoruba Names”, I constantly ran into a wall of doubt as to the possibility of raising enough funds (and finding enough interested people) to get the project moving. The model I had submitted as an undergraduate project was of just a thousand names borne by Yoruba children, with their meanings and (for the first time) audio pronunciations done by Yoruba speakers. For 2005 Department of Linguistics at the University of Ibadan, it was an impressive work. For a 2015 adult with access to more efficient technology and crowd-sourcing, it was less than a tip of the iceberg.

I didn’t have enough savings to start the project on such a scale that I envisioned, and I couldn’t think of any grants that could fund it. Even the Fulbright Alumni Innovative Fund (for past Fulbrighters), as diverse as it is, was limited to a number of categories which doesn’t accommodate a project focused on lexicography and language documentation. There is the MacArthur Genius Grant, a suitable and appropriate grant that makes no demands on the grantee but rewards them (with $650,000 over five years) to be able to achieve their dreams without the drag of a 9-5 job in a busy city. Problem was, one needed to be nominated, and the folks who nominate are usually not known to anyone but the MacArthur folks. Finally out of options, the idea of crowd-funding struck me, just as quickly as the imperative to use 2015 as a year to proceed with the dictionary idea in the first place. I’ve had some contact with Indiegogo before now, but only through friends who had asked me to donate to their project. I’d also heard of Kickstarter, GoFundMe, GlobalGiving, and a couple of other crowd-funding sites. I did a little search on all of them and found Indiegogo most appropriate. Unlike Kickstarter, they don’t send all the pledged amount back to the owners if the goal is not reached. They do take 5%-9% on all the funds raised though, which makes sense when we realize that they’re also in business to make a profit.

So, on January 6 (a not-so-smart date to start a fundraising drive, when one considers the expense that usually goes into the Christmas holiday period), I launched the Indiegogo campaign, open for 60 days. Yet, in spite of the inauspicious beginning, the idea resonated with a lot of friends, family and colleagues with whom I shared it, and they gave, surpassing my expectations. It may also have had something to do with how obnoxiously I pestered a couple of them who promised to donate and then promptly went AWOL :). More importantly, word about the project got out and many people who had nurtured similar ideas about documenting the Yoruba experience but lacked the means or network to do so wrote to me to volunteer their time and services. It has been the best part of the whole experience. There have also been other not-so-encouraging ones: colleagues who matter-of-factly expressed their unwillingness to support either because I’d never supported their projects in the past (even without my knowing it) or because they had their own projects that also needed financial attention. In all, I learn a lesson in human relation, fundraising (I wonder how politicians do it. Explains why I’d never be one), drive, and persistence.

There are now about 15 days to go until the fundraising effort is over. But yesterday, I realized that this is only a start. Yes, I do want to create a Yoruba Dictionary of Names, and the dream is now more realer than ever, thanks to a number of known and unknown people. I however also want to create a Lexical Dictionary of Yoruba containing all the words in the language, also crowd-sourced, and also multimedia and internet based. There is no excuse for the absence of such a document online and such app in mobile phones of interested people all around the world. I want to translate more work from English into Yoruba (I’ve still not completed the one I’ve been working on for years), and render more work from Yoruba into English, and into audio. I want to work with as many people as are willing to make Yoruba relevant to the next century in information technology. The industry for mother tongue education, and documentation is one that is huge and waiting to be tapped. Yes, we are translating twitter into Yoruba, but that can’t be all. Where’s Facebook? Instagram? Google? Where are machine translations? Where is Siri Yoruba? And to do all of these will take more than the $5000 that we are now on the path to raising. We need more.

Yesterday, I applied for the TED Prize 2015, a prize worth a million dollars to support any dream from anywhere in the world. A total stranger had sent me a link to it via Facebook, believing that I have a shot. I scoffed for all of one second and then sobered up. If life has taught me anything, it’s that more than hard work and persistence (which usually pays), taking a chance on oneself is also usually a good idea. I have also begun to look for any other grants that can support a dream of creating a thriving ecosystem of mother tongue education and use in Nigeria. Not just limited to Yoruba, by the way, but the over 500 languages in the country. It might happen, or it might not, but it will not be for lack of trying. There is a future worth pursuing. From the kind of enthusiastic support I’ve seen from the Dictionary fundraising, one also within reach.

Goodluck, Gridlock, Gone!

We’ve been at this stage before, in Nigeria, a couple of times in fact: a government welcomed with wary but open arms gradually wastes all the goodwill it has once enjoyed on one distraction or the other until it eventually runs out of favour with the electorate. Then it begins to panic and seeks means to prevent itself from being thrown out. First the strategy looks benign, then gets desperate, and eventually destructive in a way that almost takes down the whole country with it.

Looking back to much of the crises of administration in Nigeria’s history, this has been the pattern: Akintola in the defunct Western Region, Yakubu Gowon in the seventies, Ibrahim Babangida during the June 12 crises, Sani Abacha afterwards, and Olusegun Obasanjo with the Third Term Agenda. In all these instances, the common denominator is an eventual disgracing of the principal, and the ushering in of a new administration. In a few cases, it comes with loss of lives, properties, and the well-being of the country. Babangida’s hubris ended with a transitional government and a coup d’etat. Sani Abacha’s, with the bite of an apple.

Yesterday, the administration of Mr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan joined the infamous list of Nigerian rulers incapable of looking away from the lure of interminable power. A man ushered into office on the huge enthusiasm and hope of all Nigerians in 2011, after two years as a substitute for a dead principal, has now finally come full circle as nothing but the same old power-hungry model we’ve known too well. Yesterday, 11 hours after major news outlets broke the news, the chairman of the electoral body INEC announced that he has been arm-twisted into postponing elections previously slated to hold on February 14 to a later date six weeks away. The excuse made no sense, and people saw through it immediately. But that didn’t stop the emperor with no clothes.

Yesterday, before the announcement was made, military men were seen patrolling Lagos and other major states around the country, ostensibly to keep the peace (that wasn’t threatened), but in reality to put the nation under an atmosphere of intimidation which usually helps to allow rigging when called for. A leaked audio tape from a previous state election in Ekiti state shows how the administration had used the Minister for State for Defense and other government officials to bully security operatives into allowing them a free hand to manipulate the outcome of the election. By pretending that a state of unease exists in ALL the parts of the country (and not just the NorthEast where Boko Haram has finally taken root after six years of half-hearted security response by the government), Mr. Goodluck gets a chance to again use the agencies of state for ends not beneficial to anyone but himself and his merry band of political opportunists.

We have been here before, and the situation always ends the same way: disgrace and dishonour. It is true that the coming election will be between a civilian and a dictator. More than ever before, Nigerians are committed to voting out the dictator as soon as possible. Six years is long enough.

A Review of Tendai Huchu’s “The Intervention”

“The Intervention”, a short story by Tendai Huchu, which can be read here, was recently shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African writing. Here’s my take on the work.

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“Intervention” could be read in many different ways: as a tale of distant compatriots grown impotent by time and distance; the futility of armchair activism or the inevitability of same in the face of real challenges; or as a common allegory on the state of the continent in tumult.

It could, however, be read simply as a story of love, lust, disappointment, and one man’s care-free interrogation of it all. That man was Simba in this case, a poet, along with his friends, Z and Tamu (and their girlfriends).

The texture of Huchu’s story goes from casual to mundane to judgmental observations of people made by the principal character, Simba, who lives in the United Kingdom, far away from the scene of electoral action in Zimbabwe, his hometown. The story climaxes at the end of a national election in Zimbabwe where the president who has ruled since the country’s independence in 1981 was “elected” into office for another term. Then it descends gently into the chaos of domestic dispute between lovers and friends: a not so subtle subplot that had followed the story from the start.

So, is this an allegory on the state of our impotence and confusion on the continent? I’m more inclined to that conclusion. Or, in trying to find other ways to appreciate a story so ordinary yet representative of a slice of some immigrant life from a failed African country, I might be forced to dismiss it as a neophyte attempt at storytelling (at worst) or an effort carefully riddled with levity, for particular effect (at best). The characters are naïve if not simple, and prosaic if not uninspired. An example:

“…I never cast a single stone in this entire charade. I was consumed with overwhelming fury, seeing what Tamu was doing to this little princess. How could he sit there, chatting nonsense about his privacy, as she trailed the list of names from his phone.”

Apart from the fact that the last sentence is missing a question mark, the expression itself is not that striking, especially in a work of fiction aspiring to Africa’s largest literary prize.

In an earlier scene, Simba says: “I gave him my wtf face”, written exactly as quoted, with small letters for “wtf” which one assumes does not mean “Welcome to Facebook”.

Maybe the pedestrian storyline of a bunch of immigrants in England watching and pontificating about their home elections does call for equally carefree characters speaking in insipid turns of phrase. Or maybe the primary character is an extension of a writerly experimentation that didn’t quite achieve its goals. Either way, one is left with a feeling of deep dissatisfaction when it all ends. This is 2014. A failed African state and the disappointment of its emigrated elites isn’t such a tantalizing storyline except something new is added in the form of great and captivating writing.

“The kids didn’t speak Shone, so we were introduced in English, and check this out; I was “Uncle Simba”… The kid just looked at me blankly like I was talking effing Zulu.”

Effing, really? Who is this character? A twenty-two year-old Zimbabwean visiting England for the first time and intent on convincing us of his acquisition of street and teen lingo?

So, maybe the writer didn’t care much for inspiring our imagination or challenging our capacity for linguistic fireworks. Or maybe he couldn’t. We may not know until we read his other offerings.

Or maybe the story is a deliberate simplistic portrayal of simplistic existence. Zimbabwe goes on in its charade of a government. AIDs continues to ravage the continent. Sudan is now two countries. Egypt has changed its government more than twice in three years. Boko Haram has turned the fragile Nigerian state into a colander of dust and dead bodies. Kenya is fighting Al-Qaeda on its streets. Somalia is a violent ghost of whatever was there before, and Libya after Gaddaffi hasn’t lived up to Western (and African) hopes of its survival. Yet here we are in a quotidian cycle of daily vanities: dating, cheating, smoking, etc, and goofing around in our new realities, too impotent to act in any meaningful way. On this level, I understand and appreciate the effort and direction of the work. Otherwise, I should also probably go for a smoke (and hopefully not “cry like a pussy.”)

In any case, if it is the writer’s first, it shouldn’t necessarily be his worst. Next, please.

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First published on Brittle Paper.

To My Wife

It has been a while since I’ve been mushy, but seeing my wife through the physical and emotional burden of being the primary caregiver for our little son has filled me with tremendous appreciation for the role of mothers in the life of children, and as pillars of families. Yes, I provide support in all the best ways I can, but nothing compares to being the sole source of food and care for a tiny being who also happened to have lived in your uterus for about 9 full months. There were the days of crazy cravings of pregnancy, and those involving spontaneous vomiting in uncomfortable places. There were the fevers, and the cramps, and the final days in the labour ward. And now, even after all that, a tiny thing latches onto your body for survival for about a couple of months more. Sleepless nights, nipple sores, worry, and days spent fretting about every new development in the stages of the newborn’s life.

For many, like her, driven and ambitious career-wise, giving up full-time work is just one of the sacrifices to make in pursuit of the having it all. And in today’s patriarchal societies with no paid maternity or paternity leave, it is often a costly trade-off. Maybe if everyone lived in Sweden, for instance (with a reported 13 weeks paid leave for parents of a new child), or Canada (with about 35 weeks of paid maternity/paternity leave, life might be a bit easier for everyone. A shame, in this case, that Nigeria, the 26th largest economy in the world, and the largest in Africa, can’t afford to give its citizens the comfort and peace of mind that comes from paid leave for child care.

This post is to appreciate all the mothers doing well by their families, sometimes at the expense of their own careers of individual pursuits. This post is to appreciate my wife for all her work and dedication to the building of a great, functional, and healthy family.

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