Author: Kwesi Kwaa Prah (ed.)
ISBN No: 1-919799-51-6
Cost: 246.24
The issue of language in Africa is fraught with complications. The advent of colonialism denied to most of the people of the continent the dignity of consideration for their mother tongue, imposing on them instead a dependency on colonial languages. Contributors to this important and timely collection argue that without respect for what Prah calls “the door into people’s culture”, without the use of indigenous languages – “the languages of the masses” – development in Africa cannot be realized. The “Myth of the African Tower of Babel” is challenged and the theory posited that most of what are regarded as autonomous languages are really dialects which can be put into wider clusters enjoying significant degrees of “mutual intelligibility”. Such “harmonization” on a Pan-African scale, it is argued, would facilitate the development of educational materials for African societies. Coming as they do from a wide range of countries in Africa and beyond, the contributors cover a great deal of ground and dissect in a variety of ways the plethora of issues which impinge on the question of harmonizing and standardizing African languages, and demonstrate the need to update existing classifications.
ISBN No: 1-919799-51-6
Cost: 246.24
The issue of language in Africa is fraught with complications. The advent of colonialism denied to most of the people of the continent the dignity of consideration for their mother tongue, imposing on them instead a dependency on colonial languages. Contributors to this important and timely collection argue that without respect for what Prah calls “the door into people’s culture”, without the use of indigenous languages – “the languages of the masses” – development in Africa cannot be realized. The “Myth of the African Tower of Babel” is challenged and the theory posited that most of what are regarded as autonomous languages are really dialects which can be put into wider clusters enjoying significant degrees of “mutual intelligibility”. Such “harmonization” on a Pan-African scale, it is argued, would facilitate the development of educational materials for African societies. Coming as they do from a wide range of countries in Africa and beyond, the contributors cover a great deal of ground and dissect in a variety of ways the plethora of issues which impinge on the question of harmonizing and standardizing African languages, and demonstrate the need to update existing classifications.
