The Gist: Indigenous Language Education
There has been a debate on the NG branch of twitter over the last few days and to the best of my knowledge, it was largely confined to a particular section — some call it intellectual twitter, others call it errconomist twitter — but I think it is fair to simply call it the part of NG twitter where arguments about who should cook in the house or how much is enough to start a family doesn’t really take hold.
The debate was about indigenous language education and changing (or not) the language of instruction in our schools from English to any (or some or all) of our “indigenous” languages - a fairly wide set of about 500 languages. First off, if you’re looking for a longform article supporting one side of the argument, you’re in the wrong place. This is only a summary of different sides of the debate; for my personal opinion, you can ask me in person later.
What started it all was this tweet by Kola Tubosun, a Nigerian linguist which was in itself a response to a tweet announcing that a Bayero University team had successfully translated Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics textbooks at the primary and secondary levels into Hausa. This was part of a broader push for Educational Inclusion; getting science knowledge to students who otherwise struggle with the English language. Kola’s response was that this will lead to better science and innovation outcomes in that part of the country compared to the rest. A lot of people disagreed and in the storm that ensued, there was a lot of gbas given and a corresponding amount of gbos returned. I’m here to streamline the main lines of reasoning for either side and help those of you guys too busy to check for it, and you know, for posterity.
In his line of argument, Kola put out this thread that includes links to some of his articles outlining his position, and the TLDR summary is:
- Nigeria is a mosaic of many languages, and this is not going away anytime soon.
- Over a hundred years after the British officially created Nigeria, only about 53% of Nigerians speak English with any level of competence.
- Exclusion of local languages from “officialdom” excludes people from lots of opportunities e.g. a farmer who isn’t literate in English will not understand the manual of a new tool so he is further impoverished by not being able to (potentially) improve his yield.
- The longer that languages stay out of the written space, the faster they tend towards irrelevance and more importantly, create a poverty of sorts for citizens who can communicate in only that language.
- Only the (federal?) government can begin this process of inclusion for languages through policy, and within said policy framework, lower levels of government and even volunteers can plug in to save languages from the irrelevance that awaits them in their current form.
A more radical support of this side took the form of “English came to us via colonialism, and we can’t shake colonialism away unless we elevate our language(s)”. What was not clear was how exactly this will be achieved.
The rebuttals were many and a good proportion of them disjointed, but for the most part they were centered around the following points:
The Nigerian education system is broken, and English language instruction is not the reason for it. It was said that the decline is due to an underinvestment in teacher training and pedagogy. An additional point thrown in was that a good proportion of those who had only primary education in the distant past (pre-70's?) speak better English than many public secondary and university graduates. An article here about how investment improves outcomes.
Nigeria is a patchwork of ethnicities and languages and politics is almost always along those lines. If the government decides to change languages of instruction at any educational level, which languages get the nod? Surely, not all 500 languages, most of which have never been written can be used. Since one language is not “better” than the other, how does it choose which to allocate the needed resources for curriculum development/translation to?
- It will only increase the number of groups who feel (rightly) marginalized, and for whom English is a leveler of sorts that put them on the same (linguistic) level as speakers of more widely spoken languages. Threads: 1 and 2.
- It will accelerate the oblivion of languages not chosen — the opposite of what was intended.
One last point raised: it creates the gatekeeper problem. If texts are to be translated into indigenous languages, there will be a lack of content diversity because the only knowledge available in that language will be what gatekeepers (those who have the resources and interest) decide to translate. So, they may translate Adam Smith and leave out Karl Marx, or translate only one memoir of the civil war.
If there’s anything to take away from these different valid angles, it’s that for any major policy decision, usually one person doesn’t have the answers no matter how noble their intention; so some gbas-gbos of ideas is required to arrive at a sensible conclusion. If you think I’m subbing the FG, you’re on your own.
PS: Someone mentioned how they look forward to translations of photosynthesis and thermodynamics into Yoruba. In her own words, “it will be lit”.
