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\nThe issue of mother tongue education has been fiercely but sporadically debated in South Africa since 1994. In the past two and a half years, student protests at universities across the country have breathed new life into the discussions.<\/p>\n
\nThe issue of mother tongue education has been fiercely but sporadically debated in South Africa since 1994. In the past two and a half years, student protests at universities across the country have breathed new life into the discussions.<\/p>\n
Proponents of mother tongue education tend to argue that children should be taught in the language they first learned and spoke at home. Those who oppose this approach argue that English is a \u2018global language\u2019 and should be the main language of instruction throughout the school system and into higher education spaces.<\/p>\n
But in a country steeped in colonialism and apartheid, it\u2019s not far-fetched to suspect that the common understanding of the idea of \u201cmother tongues\u201d is coloured by outside influences.<\/p>\n
A mother tongue is taken to be a language that has a name: Xhosa, Tswana or Sotho, for instance. It refers to the standard version of that language, transcribed in most cases by 19th century European missionaries based on how they understood and conceptualised the way people spoke in the immediate vicinity of the rural mission station.<\/p>\n
But what they were transcribing were actually regional dialects, not pure versions of pristine languages tied to an authentic and timeless cultural identity. Decades of schooling practices institutionalised and continuously reinforced the missionaries\u2019 notions.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the problem: those supposedly \u201cpure\u201d languages often bear only a loose family resemblance to the way that modern people in both rural and urban areas actually speak. But, as my own previous and ongoing\u00a0research<\/a>\u00a0shows, it\u2019s important to challenge the common assumption that \u201cmother-tongue education\u201d is necessarily helpful and empowering for African language speakers if it\u2019s based on an unquestioned, popular idea of what a \u201cmother tongue\u201d is.<\/p>\n I\u2019m currently lecturing Xhosa grammar at the University of Cape Town, mostly to second language speakers but also to some who speak it as a home language. Xhosa is the country\u2019s second biggest indigenous African language.<\/p>\n In class I am often confronted with mismatches between what the grammar books say and how people express themselves in speech. So I often ask my Xhosa speaking students about their preferred way of saying something in their \u201cmother tongue\u201d. The students frequently start their response with an apology like: \u201cWell, I can say it \u2013 but I know that\u2019s not the proper Xhosa.\u201d<\/p>\n This embarrassment seems to partly come from a perceived mismatch between identifying as a Xhosa person but feeling as if not fully commanding one\u2019s own \u201cmother tongue\u201d. This is reflected in other statements such as: \u201cEven we Xhosas don\u2019t know how to speak Xhosa properly\u201d, variations of which I frequently hear from students and also from my Xhosa speaking friends.<\/p>\n Their statements echo findings I made while\u00a0researching<\/a>\u00a0first my Master\u2019s and then my PhD. My work focused on language related issues at a primary school in Khayelitsha, which is the biggest of the poverty-stricken, largely informal settlements at the outskirts of Cape Town. Residents there mainly speak Xhosa.<\/p>\n At the school three years of \u201cmother-tongue education\u201d precede the switch to English as medium of instruction in grade 4, when most children are around 9 or 10 years old.<\/p>\n A grade 3 teacher told me that she had to teach her pupils Xhosa numbers before she can teach them maths. These are children whose \u201cmother tongue\u201d is Xhosa. She said:<\/p>\n They know these words in English sometimes. If you say\u00a0<\/em>inye<\/em>\u00a0(Xhosa for 1), they can say\u00a0one<\/em>, because that is the language at home. They don\u2019t say\u00a0inye<\/em>at home, they say\u00a0one<\/em>.<\/p>\n She also often had to teach children to say, for example, imifuno (vegetables – standard Xhosa<\/em>) instead of \u2018iveg\u2019, which is adapted from the English word \u201cvegetable\u201d and is widely used in contemporary Xhosa.<\/p>\n Such examples show that childrens\u2019 actual mother tongues are often translingual. That is, they\u2019re made up of linguistic resources that, according to dominant Western conventions, would be said to belong to different languages.<\/p>\n So does this mean there\u2019s something wrong with these children\u2019s mother tongue? No, I don\u2019t think so. Perhaps, instead, there are some problems with our own notions of \u201cmother tongue\u201d.<\/p>\n The frame of reference for European missionaries and colonisers when transcribing African language practices was an idea of\u00a0languages existing as autonomous structures<\/a>, each spoken by a distinct group of people.<\/p>\n Versatile and flexible African listeners and speakers communicating efficiently without necessarily agreeing on one distinct, correct way of speaking did not fit this 19th century European frame of reference.<\/p>\n But to translate Bibles and develop grammars for their \u201ceducational\u201d and Christian agenda, missionaries had to make African ways of speaking fit European ideas of language and grammaticality. Their Western concept of language forced them to be selective, to choose some ways of speaking for standardisation and writing purposes and\u00a0to ignore others<\/a>.<\/p>\nMismatches<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Mother tongue or missionary tongue?<\/strong><\/h4>\n