This document discusses the impact of globalization and colonialism on languages in Africa. It notes that while over 2,500 languages are spoken in Africa, 48 of 57 African countries have adopted European languages like English, French, and Portuguese as official languages. However, the author argues this endangers local identities and cultures. The document examines factors that have led to the dominance of foreign languages, like colonialism and attitudes among some African parents who refuse to teach their children native languages. It warns that losing local languages could result in "the linguistic extermination" and complete loss of cultural identity for many Africans.
1. English and the African
Identity
Globalization or a lost identity?
Mr Baraka Abdellah
University of Mascara Algeria
dailynews02@yahoo.fr
2. English is the mother tongue
of about half a billion people
on the planet .
375 million second language
speakers
750 million foreign language
speakers
3. Official language in at least
75 countries
Most books, reports and
communications are often
published in English.
43. The child will never
acquire a language
without being exposed to
it.
44. Sooner or later the child
will learn the foreign
languages at school.
45. Communicating with a
child in his native language
would a not prevent the
parents to use English in
parallel.
46. The majority of the parents
have a very bad English.
The child will have all the
troubles of the world to
learn the correct school
English.
47. Why do people in Africa
refuse the Africanity of
their children?
Is it what we refer to as the
parental neo-colonialism.
48. Africans fear the darkness
of their past .
They wish to reach that
light of modernisation, but
surely at the expense of
many social and national
entities.
49. To kill a language is to kill an
identity.
This is what we may refer to
“The linguistic extermination”
50. The disappearance of a
language is not sudden.
The first indicator / people
start not to use their native
language or they give it up
for another one.
52. Social elite / completely bilingual
The mass / unilingual
The urban population / gradually bilingual
The rural population / unilingual
The urban areas/towards a growing bilingualism
The rural areas / welcoming bilingualism
The whole society shifts heavily towards unilingualism
54. The phonetic system of the dominated language
melts slowly in the dominant language.
Its sentences will reflect those of the other
language.
Its vocabulary is gradually absorbed
58. Thus, in the eighth century,
English has almost
disappeared in favor of the
Norse Vikings.
59. They had only a few
battles to fight for
complete elimination of
the Anglo-Saxons.
60. English remained weak
until the seventeenth
century and many experts,
at the time, had even
predicted its imminent
death.
61. So, it’s obvious that the
assimilation process, a
prelude to the death of a
language, may be stopped
evolving.
62. The non-use of the mother
tongue will provoke a loss of
both linguistic ability and
cultural identity.
63. The loss of the African
cultural identity is the
result of a power that
works in favor of a
dominant language
64. History shows us that only
people who have a cultural
weight based on strong and
stable institutions, a
network of schools and
writing traditions, manage
to survive, even after being
conquered by arms.