African Perspectives on Decolonising Linguistics

Growing up in the late 1960s in a small town in Eastern Zambia bordering Mozambique and Malawi, where at least four languages were spoken at home and in the town, multilingualism is my mother tongue. I grew up interacting with people from different ethnolinguistic backgrounds who lived, and still live, side-by-side speaking each other's languages and living multilingually. Scholarship on the sociolinguistic situation in Africa shows that a typical African speaks at least three languages (Banda 2009; McLaughlin 2009). The literature also intimates that not only do they not hierarchise them additively as first, second, third, fourth languages and so forth, but the languages are typically acquired outside the formal school system, unlike in the Global North (Banda 2009; Brock-Utne 2009). Starting my primary school in the late 1960s, other Zambian children and I experienced a renaissance of some sort: the unusual and negative impact of forced monolingualism, not in an African language, but in a foreign language, English. The emergent African government after Zambia's independence from British colonial rule in October 1964, instituted a new language education policy that the medium of instruction was going to be English right from the first grade, replacing the missionary and colonial education policy, where the first four or five years were done using an African language medium of instruction. The English medium of instruction was based on what I came to know later as an undergraduate student, as the New Peak Curriculum, which the British Council had prepared for Kenya, and was now transported to Zambia, another former British colony. Whereas I could speak five languages, excluding mixed repertoires outside the classroom, I quickly learnt about the linguistic restrictions inside the classroom, as everything revolved around speaking and writing English ‘properly’. Out of the more than 72 languages spoken, only seven were chosen, with each of the nine (now 10) regions allowed to use one Zambian language for local administration, and as an optional subject in schools. This created a language matrix of power, and a hierarchy with English occupying the top, followed by the official Zambian language, and the rest of the non-official Zambian languages occupied the lower levels. In practice, the exuberant multilingualism and creativity of linguistic variation in the communities (Smith 2024) were and are still in sharp contrast with the push towards English monolingualism in the classroom. Nevertheless, other learners and I quickly learned how to resist and circumvent the colonial imposition of English monolingualism, as even as the teacher engaged in her/his English monologue, where something was not clear, we would consciously or unconsciously reconceptualise it in an African language and knowledge, and if prompted, translate it back into English in response to the teacher. In terms of group work and peer learning, immediately the teacher was out of earshot, we would sometimes translate the task into an indigenous language and discuss and generate complex arguments before translating them back to English. Scholarship has shown that if learners are able to translate complex arguments and ideas between languages, it means learning has taken place (Baker 2011). This counter-hegemonic practice, currently described as translanguaging (Banda and Mambwe 2024), continued throughout my high school and extended into higher education. In contexts characterised by linguistic diversity and the close interaction of different ethnolinguistic groups living side by side, translanguaging functions as an everyday social practice in Africa. It not only facilitates meaning-making but also enables the negotiation of complex identities and the navigation of daily interactions, including those in the classroom (Banda 2009). The examination of the theoretical and practical implications of the imposed linguistic regimes reveals that Western-derived language policies and prescribed classroom practices do not align with African sociolinguistic realities. While in the African sociolinguistic reality we lived in, multilingualism was my mother tongue; we were thrust into a new linguistic regime modelled on Global North societies, which privileged a singular African mother tongue over others. As I entered undergraduate studies, this shift was further reinforced by the bi/multilingual models of education and the supporting linguistic theories we read, which insisted on distinguishing between so-called major and minor languages and emphasised that each person should focus on their singular mother tongue as a way to promote multilingualism. Ironically, this would perpetuate structural marginalisation of so-called minority languages, as majority speakers who would otherwise speak the so-called minority language, or use translanguaged discourse combining linguistic features from both named languages, would only focus on their designated mother tongue. The problem is that African languages, which have coexisted for significant periods and complemented and supplemented each other in multilingual symbiosis, are cast as competing for space. Likewise, multilingual African communities are mistakenly characterised as collections of isolated monolingual enclaves. This distorted misrepresentation of language and community in Africa stems from the imposition of Global North frameworks, and the European Enlightenment ideology of ‘one nation—one language’. Banda (2009) argues that these foreign models have distorted African linguistic realities and prevent scholars from exploring the unique characteristics of language practices in African societies as products of their socio-historical contexts. The core issue is that language development strategies designed for monolingual populations in the Global North, dealing with immigrants, and where multilingualism is mostly attained through formal schooling, are applied to African contexts where multilingualism is the norm. For example, the concept of ‘additive bilingualism/multilingualism’ as currently theorised in the literature works for monolingual speakers acquiring an additional language, but is ill-suited for Africans who are multilingual. The additive bilingualism model, theorised from Jim Cummins’ North American bilingual education programmes, typically prescribes 4–7 years of mother-tongue instruction followed by English-medium education, which effectively means replacing African language monolingual education with English monolingual education. This reduces the African language to merely a preparatory tool for English monolingual education, However, contrary to these theoretical prescriptions, actual language practices in African informal, formal and collaborative settings often reflect fluid multilingualism, with speakers freely employing diverse African languages without hierarchical distinctions between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ tongues, or adhering to linguistic boundaries between African languages and English or other colonial languages. In language practices, Africans largely defy monolingual prescriptions and position multiple languages as a mother tongue within dynamic communicative repertoires (Banda 2009). There is a need for linguistic theories that arise from and explain African realities, and build and extend multilingual democratic spaces for speakers as a way of enhancing multilingualism as a voice for experience and knowledge production. This would enable material production of multilingualism through local agency that transcends imposed linguistic borders. In this way, multiple languages can serve as instruments for Africa's social, cultural, political and economic transformation, enabling broader participation across its populations. Montoya (2024) touches on how the European imperialists took it upon themselves to collect and amass indigenous linguistic data from which they synthesised to create grammars and writing systems in the image of European language systems. As a result, the grammars and writing systems, although purportedly meant to be for the benefit of indigenous people, in fact serve ‘the linguist and the agenda of the colonial institution’ (Montoya 2024,31) and missionary establishments. Thus, the languages are delinked from the everyday lives and language practices of their speakers. In some cases, as noted by Banda (2016), the gap between the African language people speak and the grammar and writing systems is so large as to make the African language prescribed for classroom practice unfamiliar. In South Africa, the Ministry of Education's National Education Evaluation and Development Unit (NEEDU 2012), in its report The State of Literacy Teaching and Learning in the Foundation Phase, highlighted notable discrepancies between African languages in their spoken and written forms. It specifically identified the disjunctive writing systems used in Sepedi (Northern Sotho) and Setswana as posing significant challenges for early literacy development. On the other hand, Msimang (1998) noted that it is easier for a child to learn the morphosyntactic rules of isiZulu conjunctive writing, as there are fewer rules to master, than a Sepedi child who has to learn a lot of rules. Whereas the French missionaries infused elements of French spelling anomalies, including the disjunctive system, the missionaries who developed isiZulu writing, which was further refined by a linguist, Michael Doke and an isiZulu speaking novelist and linguist, B. W. Vilakazi, adopted a conjunctive writing system in line with the Bantu language agglutinative morphophonological system. I have argued that, following the writing system mostly inherited from the missionary and colonial era, the written standard Nyanja/Chewa used in Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique, has introduced more than eight grammatical rules governing when to use R or L (Banda 2016). In contrast, speakers of Chewa/Nyanja use only L, otherwise they use L and R interchangeably, especially in borrowed words, in their everyday languaging practices. I speak several dialects of Nyanja/Chewa, including those spoken in Malawi and Mozambique. Thus, from a mother tongue speaker's perspective, the grammatical and writing rules in the language as used in education are difficult to understand and confusing. For example, one of the rules says people should use R after the vowels e or i, except in specific circumstances, such as, in cases where the i is part of a prefix or the root starts with L, as in: gwira (catch/hold), lere (hereabouts), mpira (ball) and mbendera (flag). At the same time, it is said that words such as lilipo (it is there), tilipo (we are here) and phili ili (this hill) should be written using L because the first two are part of the monosyllabic verb -li (to be), while the last is part of a demonstrative adjectival phrase. The last example is further obfuscated by the fact that a common surname, Phiri (hill), is written with an R. The argument is that in the written form, the African language has been reconfigured: A speaker uses L in all cases, but they now have to learn how to use eight or more grammatical rules and unfamiliar terminology. A child has to learn the different types of prefixes and the complex concordial systems, demonstratives and adjectival phrases, stems and verb-roots, monosyllabic and disyllabic verbs and so forth, to decipher the written Chewa/Nyanja. In addition to shaping African linguistic theories and grammars by missionaries or colonial agents, two issues also discussed in the volume are the limited publishing opportunities for scholars from the Global South, especially Black and other non-White researchers, and the continued dominance of predominantly White, male academics from the Global North in the field of linguistics. Focusing on non-Bantu sub-Saharan languages, although articles on Khoekhoegowab (Nama–Damara) and other Khoisan languages still appear, these descriptions are mainly based on work by missionaries, as well as North American and European academics. Although Khoisan speakers and occasionally research assistants are used to gather data on which theoretical analyses are built, to my knowledge, only one mother tongue speaker has studied the formal or theoretical properties (phonetics, morphology and syntax) of these languages at the doctoral level in recent years. Furthermore, very few instances exist where a mother tongue speaker of a Khoisan language has been listed as a co-author. While North American and German scholars have collected phonological, morphological and syntactic data from Khoisan language speakers—sometimes with the help of research assistants since colonial times—they have not trained indigenous people at the PhD level to independently conduct research in aspects of phonetics, morphology and syntax of Khoekhoegowab and other Khoisan languages, thus limiting their capacity for independent research in these specialised fields. This results in non–mother tongue speakers holding a monopoly over research and publications concerning the phonology, morphology and syntax of Khoisan languages. The situation within Bantu linguistics is better, but also shows authorial and scholarship imbalances, as will be discussed below. It can be argued that the imbalance in representation and asymmetrical power relations is not incidental; it entrenches colonial logics in academic research and related intellectual debates. The persistent under-representation of scholars from the Global Souths also signals structural inequities embedded in the very processes of knowledge production, as, despite their linguistic expertise and privileged access to primary data, these scholars rarely occupy positions of intellectual leadership in published works. Instead, they are frequently relegated to the role of data brokers, that is, facilitators rather than theorists within extractive research practices that reproduce colonial hierarchies. The result is that data is collected from Africa and is taken to the Global Norths, where it is processed into linguistic theories and other knowledges, which Africans are expected to consume. This can be said to exemplify the extraction of linguistic resources from the Global Souths to feed the theory–manufacturing linguistics departments in the Global Norths, and to be brought back in processed form and retaught as complex information to Africans, as Global Souths consumers. The idea of linguistic extraction is relevant as it is analogous to mining: the extraction of African intellectual resources to enrich institutions and academics in the Global Norths (Montoya 2024; Medina 2024; Arnold 2024). African minds are mined for linguistic data, which is then refined in Northern academic settings into complex theories. These theories are subsequently published and ‘sold’ back to Africans in forms that often mystify the very communities from which the data originated. This reframing adds a new dimension to the argument around the ‘logic of dispossession’ (Arnold 2024, 175), which targets communities in the Global Souths. Simultaneously, it is a paradox, since insider researchers, who hold critical cultural and linguistic knowledge, are systematically excluded from shaping the theoretical frameworks that govern interpretation. They are denied or have restricted intellectual ownership and authorship of scholarly knowledge. The prevailing assumption was that the structural principles identified in English applied universally to all languages. This imposed English structural norms on Bantu linguistics and other indigenous linguistic structures. There is also a need to decolonise methodologies and equalise power relations in collaborations. Funders from North America and Euro–Asia often require that researchers from the South get a partner from the funding country. This creates an unequal relationship with the partner from the funding country, taking the lead either by design or unequal circumstances (Chetty, Gibson and Reilly 2024). In terms of language or linguistics studies, the Global South is always the object of study. There is no study of an academic from an African institution going to London, embedding themselves in a total stranger's house for weeks to study their speech patterns. Notably, I have yet to encounter any ethnographic or extractive research methodology where a Global South academic travels to the Global North, say, London, to live with strangers and study their speech patterns in domestic and community settings. This asymmetry in research practices is telling. The asymmetry in research practices is equalled by the epistemic injustice engendered by unequal publishing and authorship practices and diminishing the scholarly contributions experienced by the Global Souths academics. This sustains an unbalanced global academic economy where authorship authority and linguistic theory production remain concentrated in the Global Norths. 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