"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 conceptualized the way people spoke in the immediate vicinity of the rural mission station.
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 institutionalized and continuously reinforced the missionaries’ notions.
Here’s the problem: those supposedly “pure” languages often bear only a loose family resemblance to the way that modern people in both rural and urban areas actually speak."
FB: "The frame of reference for European missionaries and colonizers when transcribing African language practices was an idea of languages existing as autonomous structures, each spoken by a distinct group of people.
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."
No comments:
Post a Comment