To Talk the Talk

Language has been an interesting concept here in South Africa. For one, South Africa has no less than eleven national languages recognized by the state. Prominent ones are English, Zulu, and Afrikaans, but that is not to say the others are not important or prominent as well, those are just ones I hear about a lot. The others are: Ndebele, Xhosa, Sepedi, Southern Sotho, Tswana, Swati, Venda, and Tsonga. Some of them involve clicks, which I think is really cool sounding and also seems impossible to recreate. Often the language you learn first as a South African is what impacts your own personal accent, which means that there is no one accent that is recognized as 'South African,' there are different types of accents that fall under this category. Of course this happens everywhere, but in somewhere like the the States, there is (in my opinion) a base American accent and then you might have a different accent if you live in a very specific region (Midwest, South, urban areas like NYC or Boston). However, you can also identify a 'classic American accent.' There isn't really that concept in South Africa.

We talked about language as a form of oppression in my psychosocial class last week and it raised some very interesting points. We read Nguagi's Decolonizing the Mind. In this reading he talks about language in regards to colonized cultures. He points out that when colonized people came into a state they brought with them the sense of their own superiority and instilled within the natives the sense that they were in turn inferior. This was emphasized by the fact that white European was held as the ideal, but Nguagi stresses the importance in this concept of the fact that the newly established European language, whether English, French, Portuguese, was then established as the language of knowledge and culture. School was taught in this language, and literature was presented in this language, and children got to this point where they were punished in school for speaking in their native tongue, emphasizing an idea that their language and their culture was inferior and ingraining a concept of self denial. Language in this sense is a bearer of culture and by accepting this foreign language you are in turn minimizing your own culture and putting emphasis on the imposed European culture.

Those are some of Nguagi's ideas in regards of language at least. We talked about the idea that a common language does not have to also imply a denial of your culture or a minimization of it. Of course it is easier to communicate across state lines when there is a common language, but what does it say of cultures where this language is not the first one children learn? For example, South Africa has eleven national languages, but English is what is found on every sign and on the television and is the language everyone is expected to speak. Wits is taught solely in English. Students do not necessarily have the same proficiency in this language though. Students in my class talked about the idea that people could speak three or four languages fluently, but not speak English very well and be considered stupid. In a modern context, those who grow up speaking English as their native language have a clear advantage internationally, especially since people will never be able to express themselves as well in a second language as they can in their native tongue and English is so common internationally. But why should one language be granted such importance. African literature, for example, has often been composed in these colonized languages (especially because they were (and are) the languages of the educated and the elite), but there have been arguments as to whether or not these pieces of literature should be considered African literature. And why, in the past, were these writings seen as more legitimate than those written in native tongues? It is this concept, where more legitimacy is given to a European, foreign language, that goes with the idea of self-denial, taking emphasis away from your own culture and putting it on that of another.

And on the idea of language I have a story I experienced recently to share. I went to a birthday party dinner on Wednesday night for a South African friend I met at Wits rural. We had been eating and taking pictures and having a good time when one of the waitresses approached her and asked if she could talk to her. They had a fairly intense conversation off to the side and when she came back Dudu said that the waitress had told her that the manager told the waitress that he wanted Dudu's number. She mentioned that she always seems to attract people of different races from herself saying that the manager was white. However, when we finally saw him near the end of the night he was black. I turned to her and said that I thought she said he was white. She said that actually she had gotten confused because in the language the waitress was talking in, trying to explain the guy to her, she used a word that means 'white person' but is also means 'boss.' I was shocked to find that connotations such as this were still commonly used in the language. I mean, what kind of implications does it have if you are constantly associating 'white' with 'authority figure' just in the common language? It was a disturbing idea. I know languages evolve, and I hope in the near future those two concepts become separate words, because at the moment I can't see as anything good coming out of it.

Anyways, those are just some things I was thinking about and I thought I'd share them with you.