ktravula – a travelogue!

End of Classes, and More

My presentation in class on Wednesday was my last in this Master’s program (baring a thesis defense, of course). It focused on a hypothetical lesson plan for second language teaching in a foreign country. One of the advantages of such assignment that allows for creativity is the chance it gives the student to make conjectures on things that may actually become future research areas. I am a teacher of English language in a high school in Kigali, Rwanda. That country emerged just a few years ago from a brutal civil war that tore the country into many ethnic parts. It has now adopted a policy of English language (over French and Kinyarwanda) in order to forge a more united country free of a colonial past, and with a view to a more globalized future.

What problem does such a job pose for both the student and the teacher, even beyond the usual problems of language acquisition? Socio-cultural attitudes of parents still hung up on ethnic and cultural identities and resistant to change? Government bureaucracy and a typical political gamesmanship that might deny funding for much of the initial experimentation that could amount in success? A problem of communication between teacher and student? (It’s hard enough for students to be learning a new language. If the teacher offering guidance for such teaching does not even share the linguistic identity of the students, the baggage of his “otherness” might be a little hard to overcome). What else? There are actually far more positives to the experiment, one of which is the delight of sharing cultural similarities and differences while at the same time sharing the knowledge of a connecting international language. Cultural exchange is after all always an learning stimulant.

I have good memories of my first major teaching experiences in the Nigerian middlebelt as a Youth Corper. Students delighted in their ability to communicate in Hausa and Berom even in our English classes. It was a battle that I struggled with all through the year, frustrated that the purpose of English education is defeated when students choose instead to resort to local codes at every moment of convenience. Other linguists working in the area of Second Language Acquisition have argued that there are positives in this model of acquisition where the pressure to always be right is taken off the shoulder of students and they are allowed to subconsciously acquire the second language. The problem in the application was the reluctance of the students themselves to even try since their mother tongues provided an easy alternative. (But then, a prominent educational research in Nigeria, particularly the Ife Six-Year Primary Project of 1989, showed that students taught in their mother tongues performed better in learning other subjects).

I find Second Language Acquisition extremely fascinating, and the prospect of teaching English in another country equally enticing. Rwanda presents a fascinating example of such intervention because it combines education with social work. A country willing to ditch a dividing legacy of multilingualism for a second foreign language presents a fascinating study. One of the best rewards for teaching – as I have realized from my years of involvement – is not just in the knowledge that the teacher brings into the class, but the ones he takes out of his interactions with his students. I believe that in the next century, the language of the world will not be this English language as we know it, of course, but something richer, encompassing the form and world-view of all the peoples through which it has passed. There is something to enjoy in the process of bringing that to existence.

Vernacular vs David Starkey. 1:0

This part of what British historian David Starkey said in a moment of careless rage at the weekend caught my eye immediately after he had initially said that a ‘violent, destructive and nihilistic’ black culture had corrupted too many of Britain’s youngsters:

‘A substantial section of the chavs have become black. The whites have become black. Black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together . . . which is wholly false, which is a Jamaican patois that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.’ (Read more)

Some phrases immediately pop out here: “nihilistic black culture”, “this language… which is wholly false”, “Jamaican patois that’s been intruded in England…” It would take a very long essay to respond to the slight of “nihilistic” being used to refer to a culture which the British empire spent much of the last hundred years stealing from in form of artifacts that now decorate the British Museum and private collections over the country. No, the part that interested me the most was a claim that the Jamaican patois (1.) is a false language and (2.) has been intruded (sic) in England (3.) is the cause of the violent culture among today’s youths black and white in England as well as a carrier of “black” culture. (Video here)

Coming from a layman, the false claim that any form of vernacular itself derived from English is so strange as to make an English speaking country seem like a foreign country seems silly enough, especially if that layman lives in a country that has some of the most unintelligible dialects of the same language in the world. But when a historian says it on national television to an audience already looking for a scapegoat in a national crises, then it takes on a totally different meaning more than just a rambling of the uninformed. What is more likely is that he was addressing his remarks not to the smart section of the populace but to the angry ones. I imagine a scenario in which any citizen of the United States would feel like s/he is living in a foreign country because all young people now speak in African-American Vernacular English as a result of a cultural movement. Highly unlikely. But that could be because the United States has evolved far ahead of Britain in its racial identity.

Yet, if that were the case, not only would it be an at least totally understandable social and cultural phenomenon, it would also be justifiable under one of the best known phonological facts: that language tend towards simplification. Most young people in America today have gone from using “You are” and “You’re” to using “Your” as a perfectly normal pronoun i.e. “Your the man of my dreams.” Other pronouns “he”, “she”, “it” have not yet undergone the same transformation. I have already started planning for a day when I would see the expression simply written as “Yor” while the rest catch up with the various forms of simplification: “Hez” “Shez” “Their” etc for “He is”, “She is” and “They are”. The ONLY thing it tells us is that humans like to make speaking easy and fun for themselves more importantly than anything else. It has nothing to do with skin colour, race or culture. Patois evolved howeve – just like other world creoles – as a pidgin made from an unusual contact of two strange languages. It is not by any chance an “easy” or “false” language. If its appeal has now spread to the level of popular acceptance within youths in a country far from its birthplace, it is more of a validation of its language status rather than its “falseness”. The English language as we know it today also evolved from the fusion of languages, dialects, and vernaculars from the old Germanic and Romance languages.

And we have not even talked about the (albeit annoying) false causality between speaking patois (or any vernacular for that matter), and gang violence. But then, David Starkey is not a linguist. He’s just a flawed historian, and more, even a poor speaker of English.

Orwell on The English People

I am reading “As I Please”, a collection of essays written by George Orwell between 1943 and 1945 and edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. In the first essay titled The English People, the author explains some benefits and demerits of being an Englishman speaking English:

“But there are also great disadvantages, or at least great dangers, in speaking English as one’s native tongue. To begin with, as was pointed out earlier in this essay, the English are very poor linguists. Their own language is grammatically so simple that unless they have gone through the discipline of learning a foreign language in childhood, they are often quite unable to grasp what is meant by gender, person, and case. A completely illiterate Indian will pick up English far faster than a British soldier will pick up Hindustani. Nearly five million Indians are literate in English and millions more speak it in a debased form. There are some tens of thousands of Indians who speak English as nearly as possible perfectly; yet the number of Englishmen speaking any Indian language perfectly would not amount to more than a few scores. But the great weakness of English is its capacity for debasement. Just because it is so easy to use, it is easy to use badly.”

In the essay with parts that read like an epilogue to his earlier essay Politics and the English Language, Orwell complains about English being influenced by “American” pop culture words. Although written about six decades ago, it is fascinating how Orwell’s perception of the English life, language, and culture seems to remain as applicable now as it was then, even seeming applicable to other new post-colonial societies elsewhere.

Here is another quote:

“The temporary decadence of the English language is due, like so much else, to our anachronistic class system. “educated” English has grown anaemic because for long past it has not been reinvigorated from below. The people likeliest to use simple concrete language, and to think of metaphors that really call up a visual image, are those who are in contact with physical reality. a useful word like bottleneck, for instance, would e most likely to occur to someone used to dealing with conveyor belts: or again, the expressive military phrase to winkle out implies acquaintance both with winkles and with machine-gun nests. and the vitality of English depends on a steady supply of images of this kind. It follows that language, at any rate the english language, suffers when the educated classes lose touch with the manual workers. As things are at present, nearly every englishman, wheatever his origins, feels the working-class manner of speech, and even working-class idioms, to be inferior…”

An engaging read.

How to Become a Language Snob

Inspired by Clarissa’s list of “20 Ways to Become Known as a Male Chauvinist“, I am compiling my own top ten list of How to be Known As a Language Snob, along with extra points.

___________________________

1. Whenever you meet someone from a different country tell them “I like your accent. You don’t speak like other _____________ (fill in country name) that I have met.”

2. After meeting someone for the first time, let your idea of a compliment to them be “Oh you speak good English.” For extra points, ask them where they learnt to speak it so well.

3. Whenever someone says to you “I like your accent too”, look insulted and ask in a high voice, “I have an accent? What do you mean I have an accent?” For extra points, be actually insulted by that.

4. Be disgusted by people speaking their local language around you. For extra point, go to them (whether you know them or not) and ask them to speak English instead. After all, they are in America.

5. If you come from a multilingual society, pretend that English is the only language worthy of learning by your children. Punish them if they speak the mother tongue. Don’t speak it to them. For extra points, justify this by saying that “In today’s world, English is the only language worth learning.”

6. Wonder aloud many times why anyone speaks any other language at all no matter where they live. Ask “Why can’t they all learn English?”

7. Fail students who write “spelled” as spelt, learned as learnt, “labor” as labour and “neighbor” as “neighbour”. For extra points, tell them that they have spent enough time in the USA to know how those words should be spelt.

8. When someone tells you that their course of study is linguistics, ask them what the importance of that course of study is. When they tell you, ask them why they didn’t study business instead.

9. When someone tells you that their course of study is Teaching English as a Second Language, tell them without prompting that it is a good idea because they would finally be able to return to their home countries to teach the people there how to speak English.

10. Complain that the reason you did poorly in a class was because the accent of the teacher was too thick for you to understand/process. For extra points, wonder why the university didn’t employ a full-blooded American for the position instead of foreigners.

Of the Englishes

The Urban Dictionary defines “Just sayin'” as “a term coined to be used at the end of something insulting or offensive to take the heat off you when you say it.” Here is the example that comes with the definition:

”

Jordan: Anna you have really let yourself go.

Anna: What the hell! What is your freaking problem?!

Jordan: Just sayin’

Anna: Oh well in that case, I suppose its okay.

Jordan: Friends?

Anna: Fer Sure.

”

There is a phrase in Yoruba that translates to just that. It’s often just used as “I’m just saying my own”, or in plain English, “I’m just giving my own opinion. Don’t crucify me for it.” Now we have the Urban Dictionary for telling us what we already know. In other news, the expression “What is doing this one?” will be a perfectly correct Nigerian English expression of exasperation at someone/something that you don’t understand. What’s wrong with him/her?

Those of you not on twitter would have missed the trending topic of a few days back, titled “English Made in Nigeria.” Check out more of them here before they disappear from off the internet. If you can sort through the pidgin rubble, you’ll come away with some golden gems, like: “She’s my senior sister” meaning “older sister.”

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