Promote tri-lingualism

[Olùkọ́ Ọbádélé]

Promote tri-lingualism
Wednesday, 22nd February, 2006


UGANDANS go to the polls to elect a president tomorrow, having been wooed in a variety of ways including rallies, radio and television appeals, and in the written word. Campaign rallies have invariably had translators, and many electronic media programmes have been conducted in the relevant local language. But the most permanent form of campaign, the ubiquitous candidate’s poster, has been a letdown in the sense that it has been predominantly in one language, English.

As the sixth International Mother Tongue Day was marked yesterday with celebrations that coincided with the Year of African Languages, our vernaculars come into focus. There are 6,000 languages in the world, of which 3,000 are endangered. Uganda has 56, of which 33 (with 100,000 speakers or more) are deemed secure. The others, especially those with less than 50,000 speakers, are endangered.

With globalisation and its main medium, English (now spoken by nearly 2 billion people) in the ascendant, native languages and their attendant cultures tend to suffer. But this need not be so. While acknowledging that for our economy to be competitive we would need to retain a strong international language, we also realise that the foreign (official) language should exist alongside local tongues and regional lingua franca. We must be wary of the Tanzanian experience where Swahili has drowned out local dialects, and has also edged out English.
A halfway house can be reached by promoting bi- or tri-lingualism. Using the mother tongue as a medium of instruction in lower primary school, then switching to English, but while retaining the teaching of the local language as a subject right through secondary school to university would be a good policy. A supplementary language like Swahili would complete the cycle.

An economy can grow around local tongues in theatre, literature, newspapers, radio and television. Native languages can grow around translations of cultural, scientific and general knowledge literature from international to local tongues.