Battle for the tongues

 Battle for the tongues
It’s a world of diverse tongues. Which of the major powers will have their words rolling off our tongues? Image: Courtesy

Eric Wamanji

When French President Emanuel Macron came to Kenya recently, there is one wish that probably ran through his mind, though he didn’t utter it- French to be Kenya’s national language.You see, for ages, English has been a dominant language. In fact, the dominance of English is even unsettling folks in Brussels and more so the French. It has triggered some sort of race for the tongues.

Last year, the French president, Mr Macron, rolled out an ambitious strategy to make French the dominant language in Africa, online and displace English in Brussels.

While addressing students in Burkina Faso, he warned that “to refuse the French language in order to make English fashionable on the African continent is to be blind to the future…” a future he reckoned will be dominated by French in Africa and globally. He described French as the language of emancipation.

Since colonial times, France was obsessed with winning over the hearts and minds of Africans. It even crafted the assimilation policy a ridiculous ideological manipulation that suggested by adopting France’s culture and language Africans would become French. 

Therefore, it must have deflated the ego and prestige of France when Rwanda dropped French for English. The switch, observers noted, was a political move, in protest of what was considered France’s role in the 1994 genocide.

Bastion of French

Still, France is defiant. It is banking on Africa’s population windfall to be the bastion of French. Indeed, of all the 300 million French speakers, 34.8% are from sub-Sahara Africa, according to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. Macron is betting on education to achieve this ambitious crusade. That is why he even established a fund to boost education. It is like a race of sorts.

But the British Council waxes lyrical about English: “… it is the economically active, the thought leaders, the business decision-makers, the young, the movers and shakers present and future who are learning and speaking English. They are talking to each other more and more and English is the ‘operating system’ of that global conversation.”

The Confucius Institute can only dream of the day it can strut like British Council. Indeed, it will not be as easy as ABCD to make Mandarin the international lingua franca.  Most parents of the world still fancy Englsih for its prestige and influence. And according to the Defense Language Institute, Chinese is a difficult language to learn.  In that league are Japanese, Korean and Arabic. Mandarin is even a pain to Chinese pupils.

Interestingly, Kenya is interested to roll out Mandarin in schools. Will the Kenyan pupil, saddled by heavy curriculum and starved of competent Mandarin instructors, crack this new logogram? Time will tell. But more important, it will be interesting to see the kind of cultural products that learners will be exposed to.  

It is too early though to determine the influence and appeal of Mandarin. Beyond commerce, there may be no much robust incentives for its adoption after all.  English had a strategic advantage – was easily entwined in culture, religion, education, commerce and administration. These instruments, save for commerce, are not readily at the disposal of China.

But as history has shown, language rises and falls with empires from the Hellenistic period to the wonder of Latin under the Romans, the fate and fortunes of hegemonies also dictate the fate of their language in the Gramcian sense of the word. Twitter: @manjis

See my other argument that appeared in the Saturday Nation https://www.nation.co.ke/oped/opinion/Language–instrument-for-expansion-of-Chinese-empire/440808-4962436-t99m79/index.html

https://www.nation.co.ke/oped/opinion/Language–instrument-for-expansion-of-Chinese-empire/440808-4962436-t99m79/index.html

Erick Wamanji

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