Rethinking Language Use in Digital Africa

Technology and Communication in Sub-Saharan Africa

Leketi Makalela, Goodith White, Leketi Makalela, Goodith White

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800412323
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism.The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms.

This book is open access under a CC BY NC ND licence.

Part 1

Multilingual Practices

1Multilingual Literacies and Technology in Africa: Towards Ubuntu Digital Translanguaging

Leketi Makalela

Introduction

‘Where [the] government has failed, technology is bringing hope to the people,’ says the Makalela. ‘African languages were probably going to die, were it not for technology, social media and popular culture. Technology is going to take African languages forward and these languages are going to evolve to fit into the digital age and any future world shift [s].’ (Physig.org, online)

The author had an intensive interview with a Communications Officer after she had received numerous reports about the negative effects of technology in the development and standardized use of indigenous African languages. In particular, concerns were raised around how the social media platforms produce non-standard versions of these languages and how they become vulnerable to the dominant former colonial languages such as English, French and Portuguese. Unlike these dominant languages with a high ICT coverage and use, African languages have very few online resources and their presence as the media of communication via ICT tools is still negligible (Jantjies & Joy, 2014; Mabweazara, 2016; Osborn, 2006). This conversation is reminiscent of what was an old-age linguistic dilemma on whether changes signify decay or progress. The sentiments expressed in the above quote go against the conventional view that predicts doom and extinction. Rather, it regards the ICT advances as a positive development to save indigenous African languages from extinction and move them through digital migration platforms.

Although there is a need for advances in technology for literacy in African languages in Southern Africa, the usefulness of technology and its impact on the development of African languages does not have a universal agreement (Shanglee, 2004; Tassé, 2003). As demonstrated in the report above, there are two contesting views: the most dominating one is that the use of technology will ‘decay’ the pristine models of African languages and that the strong international languages like English will dominate over the digital space in a manner that will eventually result in the extinction of the less dominant languages. The second view is that technology will fasten development trajectories of these languages as platforms such as social media will give them coverage and use by their speakers across a wider spectrum of nationalities and ethnic divides that were historically based on languages.

The result of the divergent views on the impact of digital technologies has been that the resources outside of classroom spaces cannot be leveraged to support the cultural competence of multilingual encounters and e-literacy opportunities. Where attempts are notable in selected areas, there has been scepticism on the full use of available resources both outside and inside of the classrooms. This scepticism ironically includes the view that technology will ‘corrupt’ the standards of the languages if technology encourages a linguistic cross-over or what is generally referred to as translanguaging (Makalela, 2018; Otheguy et al., 2018). Worth noting, however, is that there is very little research on the use of technology for African language development. In this chapter I report on the success of technology induction in a classroom project, which was tailor-made to have leverage outside of the classroom multilingual resources. In conclusion I discuss how technology can respond to ways of knowing peculiar to African cultural competence and literacy initiatives that cut across a number of languages. A model for multilingual e-education and literacy, referred to as digital translanguaging, will be highlighted and significant areas of good practice will be shared at the end of the chapter.

African Languages as Media for Technology Communication

It is axiomatic that many parts of the world have experienced a wave of technological developments as the world exponentially gravitated towards information economies. Concomitantly, digital learning and teaching have become a constant and normal feature in many classrooms as societies advance, among other things, through machine learning and the ‘internet of things’ (Hayward, 2018). A scant survey of the use of technology generally and among African languages in particular shows that Sub-Saharan Africa has been lagging behind since the dawn of the information society era (Janties & Joy, 2014; Osborn, 2006; Tassé, 2003). Notably, many African governments have developed policies and started several projects, which to date remain incomplete and under resourced for a meaningful fourth industrial revolution to take effect. Shanglee (2004), for example, argues that the developments of Human Language Technologies (HTL) have not sufficiently addressed African languages party due to lower level of awareness and lack of interest in HLT among African language scholars.

Research on the use of technology in African languages shows that Africa is lagging behind in a variety of ways. First, the developments in voice interfaces where searches can be carried out via voice have left nearly all African languages behind. Even Kiswahili, which has about 98 million speakers, does not have the options for voice interfaces as yet. One of the technological devices is mobile learning (Jantjies & Joy, 2014). Jantjies and Joy (2014) developed a framework for using mobile technology in low-income communities. However, the multilingual nature of Africans means that the developers are not producing multilingual models where more than one language is used at the same time. These technological advances and many others fail to take root as they were designed for ‘ideal’ monolingual speakers. There is therefore a research and development gap that is not being addressed to advance African languages as the media for communication in the digital platforms.

Multilingualism, Translanguaging and African Cultural Competence

One of the ways in which new technologies will take effect in Sub-Saharan Africa is the material effect of addressing multilingual nature and epistemological pathways that are authentic to speakers of African languages. It is conventionally accepted that multilingualism is a norm in many African states, but the ways of knowing that are often introduced through educational packages and technological advances reflect monolingual bias that disproportionately disadvantages speakers of African languages (Brock-Utne, 2015; Makalela, 2017). Even more poignantly, practices of multilingualism are also rejected in favour of foreign language monolingualism despite a plethora of research pointing to the need of these languages for sustainable development (Prah, 1998).

Research is replete with the recommendations for disrupting monolingual bias and allowing divergent voices to come into contact. One of these includes looking back at the sociolinguistic background of the African people prior to colonialism (Makalela, 2018; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). The history of Mapungubwe – a cultural heritage site at the border of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana – and its linguistic repertoire becomes the obvious point of reference for Southern Africa to reclaim its linguistic and cultural heritage. I have elsewhere (Makalela, 2018) shown that the African value system of Ubuntu is a heuristic for African multilingualism where the use of more than one language through porous interaction is a norm that can be cultivated strategically in contemporary platforms. To this end, the concept of Ubuntu translanguaging accounts for a communicative practice where input and output are exchanged in different languages to signal that one language is incomplete without the other. As will be discussed below. the main idea of Ubuntu translanguaging is its paradox found in the saying: I am because you are; you are because I am. The complex interface of ‘I’ and ‘we’ offers a window through which individuality and collectivism co-exist in a shared identity space.

To date, translanguaging as a social and cultural practice has been studied elsewhere in the world as a discourse where linguistic input and output are alternated in different languages (Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García, 2009, 2011; García & Li Wei, 2014; Li Wei, 2018). In the African context, the use of languages goes beyond alternation where complex interfaces within and between languages could involve more than two named languages in the same communicative event. In our research in complex multilingual settlements in South Africa, we found that there is both vertical and horizontal translanguaging discourse practices in classrooms (Nkadimeng & Makalela, 2015). For example, teachers who teach different subjects have a tendency of using languages of their preference with a similar group of learners who interact and respond in any of the named languages in the process of meaning making. In other words, we found situations where six teachers choose different named languages for input–output exchange to respond to questions from their learners. It is in this connection that these overlapping ways of meaning making mirror larger sociocultural practices that are, however, not reflected in the emergent technologies.

Viewing multilingualism from a complex array of translanguaging and meaning-making practices provides opportunities for an epistemological shift from what languages look like to what speakers do with languages. Research shows that the missionary linguists’ development of African languages orthographies often without a central coordination system form the basis of invented artificial languages (e.g. Makoni, 2003). For example, a language variety called Sesotho was written down by three different missionary groups who wrote the spelling systems differently according to their own languages. In the northern part of South Africa, the German missionary group founded and developed an orthography of the language they called Northern Sotho (which later became Sepedi); the London Missionary group worked in the western part of the country and named their language, Western Sotho (which later became Setswana); and then the Roman Catholic missionary group were in the south where they wrote down a language they called Southern Sotho (which is known today as Sesotho). Here, one language that should have one writing system and more readers has been divided into three different languages (see Makalela, 2009).

The translanguaging approach in the context of Ubuntu provides policy makers with measures to ques...