A unified language for Africa????

This is a furtheration of my thoughts on this topic. Yeah, there is an irony that someone who quotes Julius Nyerere would critique the use of Swahili as a lingua franca for a continent, but...

As a person who speaks both English and French, I'm always happiest when the conversation is held in English. Not to mention being in a meeting with a group of people, who included the head of Benelux, who just happened to suggest that we speak English since it was easiest. But, that makes sense from someone who speaks Dutch, a language which is really close to English. 

Actually, Frisian is supposed to be closer to English. One rhyme which purports to demonstrate. the palpable similarity between Frisian and English: "Butter, bread and green cheese is good English and good Frisian," which is pronounced more or less the same in both languages (West Frisian: "Bûter, brea en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk."). 

I've heard in a few places that the medieval Frisian folk hero Grutte Pier asked people to pronounce this sentence. He fought against the Dutch and Saxons. Only real Frisians can pronounce the sentence correctly, so enemies posing as Frisians were bound to slip up and get caught. Grutte Pier’s gigantic sword is still on display at the Fries Museum. I think that Dutch/Flemish is basically a shibboleth: especially after one of my friends said I did my phone message in German twice...

Anyway, I come at this from a European viewpoint, where people happily kill each other over which alphabet they use along with how they pronounce things.

Africa is probably worse, although one could blame the Rwandan genocide on the evil Belgians. Hey, I was just a kid when Grégoire Kaybinda established the independent republic, but didn't that follow a genocide of Tutsi by the Hutus? As I've pointed out in a previous post:

The ethnic groups of Africa number in the thousands, with each population generally having its own language (or dialect of a language) and culture. The ethnolinguistic groups include various Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan population.

There are a few reasons for writing this. One being that Pascal Paradou is interviewing a lot of African Francophones on Radio France Internationale lately in preparation for the Francophone summit (https://www.rfi.fr/fr/direct-monde).  French would be second choice for me, but I do have to admit I love listening to Africans speaking French.  Not that my vote would be for French as the lingua franca, but it would be a second choice. 

It would be a definite hands down over Swahili.

The interesting thing is that the Swahili article comes from the BBC, which was one of Tanzania's colonial rulers (the other being Germany). The Brits were actually latecomers, taking over the territory after the 14-18 War. Of course, the French are going to promote Francophonie since that is one of their foreign policy goals.

Yes, I am a member of the Alliance Françiase...

"It's high time we move from the coloniser's language."

And these people want to speak Swahili...

OK, I have to laugh as someone who speaks the two most common languages spoken in Africa: English and French. Portugese is the third.

Swahili, which takes around 40% of its vocabulary directly from Arabic, was initially spread by Arab traders along East Africa's coast.

It was then formalised under the German and British colonial regimes in the region in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, as a language of administration and education.

And though it has been spoken about before as an alternative on the continent to English, French or Portuguese as a lingua franca, or as a commonly understood language, there is now a renewed impetus.

What is getting lost here is that Swahili is also a "coloniser's language". The Swahili helped inland Africans trade ivory, grain, and even slaves, for the foreign merchants' knives, farming tools, fabrics, and porcelain.

Slave Trade and Slavery on the Swahili Coast, 1500-1750: Arab traders captured Zanj to enslave them, but generally speaking, medieval geographers rarely mentioned the slave trade on the Swahili coast, although they often did so for other regions, particularly western Africa. 

In other words, Swahili, even though it is a Bantu language is also culpable if we are going to talk about the slave trade. But the common link between Swahili, English, French, and Portugese is that they allowed diverse linguistic groups to get along. 

Africa has something in common with Europe and some other places: that is multiple small cultures speaking mutually incomprehensible languages (there's a post about that coming up). So, having a standard common language helps make things run smoothly. It's fun listening to ignorant people talk about language since:

Various colonial powers that ruled on the coast of East Africa played a role in the growth and spread of Swahili. With the arrival of the Arabs in East Africa, they used Swahili as a language of trade as well as for teaching Islam to the local Bantu peoples. This resulted in Swahili first being written in the Arabic alphabet. The later contact with the Portuguese resulted in the increase of vocabulary of the Swahili language. The language was formalised in an institutional level when the Germans took over after the Berlin conference. After seeing there was already a widespread language, the Germans formalised it as the official language to be used in schools. Thus schools in Swahili are called Shule (from German Schule) in government, trade and the court system. With the Germans controlling the major Swahili-speaking region in East Africa, they changed the alphabet system from Arabic to Latin.

I think I've mentioned how many different native languages exist in Africa, but it is a major shitload. And let's add this in for good measure:

But Ms Lankai's classroom at the University of Ghana in the capital, Accra, is some 4,500km (2,800 miles) west of Swahili's birthplace - coastal Kenya and Tanzania.

Dig deeply enough and you will find the major languages owe a lot to colonisation and trade.

And that includes Swahili.

Sources: 

• BBC: Swahili's bid to become a language for all of Africa
• Wikipedia: Swahili language

Hey, Beth Nguyen, was it America that ruined your name, or was it the English language?

I just read a New Yorker article by Beth Nguyen called America Ruined my Name for Me. It seems her name is Bich Minh Nguyen. You can guess what Anglophones do with that. Or as Beth says:

I cannot detach the name Bich from people laughing at me, calling me a bitch, letting me know that I’m the punch line of my own joke.

Of course, like everyone else, the answer for why this happens is simple: racism!

I would suggest another reason: Linguistic.

"Bich" you see means "Jade" in Vietnamese and is pronounced "Bic". She could have changed it to "Vic"or "Vicki" since as she points out Asian children often have second names, which is helpful if your name is "Phuc" or "Phouc".

On the other hand, you can guess that Anglophones pronounce "Bich" as "Bitch" which Ms. Nguyen attributes not to linguistic differences, but to the fact that people in the US are anti-Asian. One the other hand, I would be pretty certain if she had landed in Australia or New Zealand, or any other anglophone nation, that the same problem would have occurred.

Maybe not so much in Canada, and definitely not in France. She probably wouldn't have written this article had her family emigrated to a Francophone nation, which was a definite option for them. That's because "Bich" would be associated with a different animal than what it is in English.

"Biche" in French means "doe": a sweet and gentile animal. Alas, Beth is the only "Bich" I have ever met. So, I really can't get into this. And for all I know she may have gone to France. Anyway, she should be happy she wasn't named "Phuc" or "Phouc" since that one is pretty universal.

On the other and, I can understand a desire to fit in which "Bich" doesn't in an anglophone country, but on the whole I'm not sure if that rises to the level of racism. After all, her family came to the United States and didn't try to move on to Quebec or France. France would have been another option since Indochina was once a French Colony. And obviously, the "racism" wasn't bad enough that the family decided to move back to Viet Nam. They remained in the US.

Anyway, Beth admits she has always given fake names in restaurants, which has moved on to writing the article I am responding to with the name "Beth Nguyen". So maybe the "racism" isn't that vicious that it can't be escaped from. I'm pretty sure her Western friends didn't mind if she was "Bich", "Beth", or whatever. 

Since I am bilingual, I see "Bich" and think of "Biche", a doe, a sweet animal. My pronunciation of her name would probably also be wrong since it would be more in line with the French. That's my problem with her article. It's dangerous to make blanket statements about people.

Prior to Brexit, I identified as British, but post-Brexit I am European. While I can pretty much pick and choose amongst a few of the European nationalities, it is the Frencophone nations which I identify with most these days. That means both my US and French "homelands" have been at war with Vietnam. France was probably the worst.

But, I didn't see "Bitch" when I read your name "Beth": I saw "Biche". That would have been the way I pronounced it.

American English: Racist?

One thing that makes a nation is a common heritage and culture, which is often shown by a common language. After all, communicating is what language is all about. And people can't communicate if they are speaking different languages. Quite a few countries require prospective immigrants to demonstrate proficiency with their language: Canada and France come to mind.

Map of US official language status by state before 2016. Blue: English declared the official language; light-blue: 2 official languages, including English; gray: no official language specified

While English is not an actual official language, there are some who consider it the de facto national language. It is the sole, but unofficial, language of the federal government. the United States federal government has recognized no official language, even though nearly all federal, state and local government business is conducted in English

There have been attempts to make English the official language of the US with the first major one being in 1923 with a bill drafted by Congressman Washington J. McCormick. The U.S. House of Representatives passed English as the official language in 1996, but the Senate did not act on the measure before the conclusion of the 104th Congress. English is the official language of 32 states as of 2019.

Proponents of this movement include US Senator S.I. Hayakawa and Mauro E. Mujica, who is a naturalized citizen, Mujica was born in Antofagasta, Chile, and moved to the United States in 1964. Is someone who speaks multiple languages who berates someone for speaking Spanish really racist or just pointing out that it's rude to speak another language (e.g, Aaron Schlossberg).  Could he have made his point in another way.

Contrary to what is often believed, most of the world's population is bilingual or multilingual. Monolingualism is characteristic only of a minority of the world's peoples. On the other hand, it makes more sense to speak the common language instead of another language (Disclosure: I speak English, French, and German)

Would it take the US making English the official language to end this debate, especially since currently it seems that people who are "Trump supporters" are being accused of the being the crowd who support speaking English.

On the other hand, having a common language would be a factor in a national identity.

The History of English in 10 Minutes