Search

Africa is highly ideologised in terms of two antagonistic positions. Facing two extreme ideological positions, namely what one might call ‘19th century European nation state-ideology’ vs ‘20th/21st century African Renaissance-ideology’, language planners and decision-makers in Africa are caught in a complex dilemma. The paper begins by sketching out salient differences between the two positions: (1) Ideologies based on European historical-cultural experience, which gave rise to a particular ‘Western’ mind-set; this mind-set is built on convictions regarding European exceptionalism and on notions linked to linguistically and culturally homogenous nations. (2) Ideologies informed by anti-colonialist struggle and anti-imperialist philosophy which, further, rest on the recognition of sociolinguistic realities in Africa that are different from ‘the West’, i.e. being characterised by extreme ethnolinguistic plurality and diversity. While the first position continues to have considerable impact on academic and political discourse in terms of prevailing Eurocentric perspective and attitudes infested by Orientalism, the second is rooted in idealistic romanticism relating to notions of Universal Human Linguistic Rights and of African Identity and Personality. Political strategies embedded in any of these apparently mutually exclusive ideological positions have been and still are widely discussed in academic and political circles across Africa. A third position and the one adhered to in this presentation, is that of bridging this ideological divide by advocating multilingual policies for Africa, which would combine indigenous languages of local and regional relevance with imported languages of global reach towards the strategic goal of mother tongue-based multilingualism (MTBML). Interestingly, the ongoing highly controversial debate in Africa tends to overlook the fact that MTBML is exactly the ‘language(s)-in-education policy’ that most so-called developed countries, including the former colonial powers of Europe, have long since installed to best serve their own political interests and economic progress. Therefore, it remains somewhat paradoxical that African postcolonial governments copy from European models those features that are incompatible with sociolinguistic facts on the ground, like monolingual policies in the face of extensive multilingualism, but do not copy features that would be beneficial in Africa as well, like operating professional foreign language teaching and learning through a familiar medium of instruction.

The sociolinguistics of the Northern African states is relatively obscure in terms of international research, since these regions do not feature significantly in the areas of Arabic studies/Orientalism,Romance studies or classical African studies. A similar problem holds for the scientific classification of studies on Berber. This article develops an africanist-sociolinguistic approach to central questions refering to multilingualism in the context of historically unfolding geo- and sociolinguistic profiles of Northern African nations. This will be discussed within the framework of a historical linguistic stratigraphy. The article broadens the concept of diglossia as used in the arabophonic context in order to include a multilingual dimension (polyglotism), and discusses models of conflict avoidance between native speakers of Arabic, Berber and French, respectively. The article focuses on situationally adequate language political arrangements, especially in the area of education, on the basis of L1-based additive bi- and trilingualism models.

The paper reports on generalisations drawn from the author's historical analysis of a sample of some five thousand words, which reflect more than two hundred lexical items from up to sixty-six Central Chadic languages and language varieties. The paper provides illustrative examples from present-day languages with explicit diachronic analyses of the evolution of their synchronic segmental and 'prosodic' suprasegmental structures. Four typologically characteristic prosodies (i.e., palatalisation, labialisation, nasalisation, glottalisation) operate across words, which are – in synchronic perspective – mostly monomorphemic, while in diachronic perspective they are mostly polymorphemic. The paper shows that, and how the four reconstructed prosodies lead to the diachronic emergence of innovative phonemes in the modern languages, which were not part of the segmental phonological inventories of the common proto-language. This empirical fact poses considerable challenges to the application of the well-established 'comparative method' as originally developed by the Neogrammarian school of historical linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]