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African-Language Study in the 21st Century: Expansion through Collaboration and Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2016

Sandra Sanneh  and
Alwiya S. Omar
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Extract

The formal study of African languages in U.S. universities began with the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958. Title VI of that act supported the establishment of “centers for the teaching of any modern foreign language [that is] needed by the federal government or by business, industry or education” and for which “adequate instruction is not readily available in the United States.” The act also authorized fellowships for those undergoing advanced training in these languages. Over the next two decades, a small number of universities successfully competed for the federal funding from NDEA and subsequent acts that established Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships and later Title VI National Resource Centers (NRCs) for African studies.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , 2002 , pp. 42 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2002 

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References

Notes

1. Rusher, Nancy, Barely There, Powerfully Present: 30 Years of U.S. Policy on International Higher Education (New York, US: Routledge/Falmer, 2002), 61 Google Scholar.

2. Bokamba, Eyamba Georges, African Language Program Development and Administration: A History and Guidelines for Future Programs (Madison, Wis.: NALRC, 2002)Google Scholar. See chapter 2 for a detailed discussion of this period.

3. Ibid., 23.

4. Ibid.

5. David Dwyer and David Wiley, “Language Priorities,” photocopy, 1980. Group A: Akan, Amharic, Chewa/Nyanja, Fulfulde, Hausa, Igbo, Kongo, Malagasy, Mandikan, Lingala, Oromo, Ruanda/Rundi, Sango, Shona, Somali, Sotho/Tswana, Swahili, Tigrinya, Umbundu, Wolof, Xhosa/Zulu/Swazi, Yoraba, Afrikaans. Discussions to revise this list were initiated at a meeting of the African Language Teachers’ Association held during the African Studies Association’s annual meeting in Houston, December 6, 2001.

6. In 1982, Will Leben (Stanford) directed the first Hausa GPA in Nigeria, and in 1983, Ann Biersteker (Yale) directed the first Swahili GPA in Kenya.

7. Since 1999, proficiency workshops have been revived by the National African Language Resource Center.

8. Four Title VI centers participated by pooling resources to pay instructors and to support students with tuition and stipends: Boston University, UCLA, Stanford-Berkeley, and Yale. Six languages were offered, and 16 students were enrolled.

9. Since 1983, Swahili GPA grants have been awarded to Yale, University of Illinois, UCLA, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Georgia. Hausa GPA grants were awarded to UCLA and University of Wisconsin-Madison. Zulu GPA grants were awarded to Yale.

10. Russ Schuh, UCLA.

11. Lioba Moshi, University of Georgia; Alwiya Omar, Indiana University; Magdalena Hauner, University of Wisconsin-Madison; John Mugane, Ohio University; and others.

12. Antonia Folarin-Schleicher, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

13. See http://www.yale.edu/swahili.

14. The grant was renewed for another three years in 2001.

15. NALRC Web site, http://african.lss.wisc.edu/nalrc/home.html.

16. See http://www.ndu.edu/nsep.

17. Africanists were uncomfortable about the location of the funds and asked whether they could be moved to the U.S. Department of Education. When this move proved impossible, a motion was tabled at the annual meeting of the AASP in 1993, and the large majority of members present voted not to apply for institutional grants, citing safety concerns for student researchers in Africa and a reluctance to administer funds emanating directly from the Department of Defense. The vote was reconfirmed at the AASP meeting of April 2002. Not all members of ALTA go along with this agreed-upon nonaction. For example, Antonia Folarin-Schleicher of the University of Wisconsin-Madison received an NSEP grant in 2001 for the development of a series of Learners Grammars through the NALRC.

18. Robert Slater, director, NSEP, address to AASP, Washington, D.C., April 19, 2002.

19. The NSEP Web site includes only Arabic and Lingala on its list of languages in “areas of emphasis” for 1999-2000.

20. This situation contrasts with Europe, where sociolinguis-tics is both popular and prestigious.

21. One counterincentive that leads some social-sciences students to study an African language is the emphasis that funding agencies such as Fulbright and the Social Science Research Council place on knowing the language of the community where research is to be carried out.

22. Bokamba, 2002, appendix A.

23. The follow-up was carried out by searching college and university Web sites. For a regularly updated list of colleges and universities offering African languages, see http://www.carla.acad.umn.edu/lctl/access.html.

24. See note 3 above.

25. Afrikaans is excluded from this appellation by authors David Dwyer and Lioba Moshi, “Academic African Language Programming in the United States,” unpublished paper, 1994,32.

26. Ethnologue 2000, Summer Institute of Linguistics, http://www.ethnologue.com.

27. The situation tends to be most serious in countries with no history of Christian missionary activity, because missionaries generally initiated the production of literature and newspapers in local languages by running literacy classes and building printing presses. In addition, British colonial policy in Africa tended to favor mother-tongue education in elementary schools, whereas French colonial policy did not. See Sanneh, Lamin, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1989)Google Scholar for a detailed discussion of this issue.

28. Zulu, Xhosa, Siswati, and Ndebele (Zimbabwe) are Nguni languages with a high degree of mutual intelligibility.

29. This is not always the case, however. The authors know of at least one unsuccessful summer program in Africa, after which returning students wanted nothing more to do with African-language study.

30. Swahili GPA, 1982-2001; Zulu GPA, 1999-2001.

31. This arrangement is in place at institutions such as UCLA, Michigan State University, University of Illinois, Indiana University, and Boston University, among others.

32. In their book, The Pedagogy of African Languages, Antonia Folarin-Schleicher and Lioba Moshi discuss the problems for African-language program directors of balancing heavy administrative responsibilities with teaching and research. Pathways to Advanced Skills, vol. 5 (Columbus: National East Asian Languages Resource Center, Ohio State University, 2000), 11.

33. By “advanced level,” the authors mean the third and fourth years of study.

34. A conference titled “Paths to Advanced Proficiency in the Less Commonly Taught Languages” was held at Yale in March 2003 with support from Title VI.

35. Michigan State University, for example, lists 29 languages on demand, and two (Arabic and Swahili) as regular courses on its 2003 Web site.

36. Two such are the University of Illinois and Ohio State University.

37. Bokamba, 2002.

38. An impressive exception to this generalization is the University of Georgia where, under Lioba Moshi’s leadership, the university developed a strong interest in African languages among undergraduates without federal funding.

39. One example of such networking is the North East Regional Center for Programs in African Languages (NERCPAL). Four institutions applying for Title VI funding—Boston University, University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, and Yale University—have formed this consortium to share expertise with one another and with area institutions.

40. Boston, Ohio State, and Yale have all experienced the frustration of seeing extensive African-language programming threatened or disrupted by the (temporary, in some cases) loss of Title VI funding.

41. For more information, see the U.S. Department of Education’s International Education and Graduate Programs Web site at http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/hst/ope/iegps/index.html.

42. Swahili is particularly well supplied with Web sites.

43. For example, see http://www.isp.msu.edu/AfricanStudies/ and http://www.yale.edu/ycias/african.

44. Demonstrations of some lessons from the Salama course can be viewed at http://www.aramati.com.

45. Elementary and intermediate levels are now available at http://www.africa.uga.edu/Kiswahili/doe.

46. See http://lang.nalrc.wisc.edu/yoruba/test for more information. Visitors to the site should enter the word testuser as both the username and password.

47. See http://www.yale.edu/ycias/african for details.

48. See http://willow.cats.cats.ohiou.edu/~mugane/critical/index.htm for more information.

49. South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania are among these.

50. See http://www.yale.edu/african for an updated hst of colleges and universities offering African languages.

51. When Title VI centers lose federal funding, teaching positions are lost and courses are dropped from the catalog.

52. A senior social scientist recently told Sandra Sanneh that he saw no purpose in students studying African languages. “Rather, they [Africans] should be studying English,” he said.