# Why colonizing Southern Africa didn't break its linguistic diversity; did it just add to it? ## Метаданные - **Канал:** NativLang - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVHhjvegXJw ## Содержание ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVHhjvegXJw) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) The whole of Southern Africa, northwest from Angola southeast to Natal, was a site of intense European colonialism for centuries. And yet it went through that and came out a site of intense linguistic diversity, known not just for its number of languages but its high rate of multilingualism. Two books led me to wondering why, and down a road of research that has me reconsidering who speaks which languages where, what being multilingual means, and even a more ~ahem~ human approach to languages and languaging. Yeah, so, why didn't colonialism break Southern African multilingualism. In fact, did it only seem to add languages? At the moment I find myself reading two books side by side. One in Portuguese, one in English. One by an author I've met and chatted with, the other new to me. Neither one for work, so I get tucked in but it's tough to call it cozy reading time. Both are about life in a colony in the late 19th Century, in what today are Angola and South Africa. Both involve European imperial powers envisioning futures and drawing lines through the lives of people caught in colonial outcomes on the edges of Southern Africa. Fifty pages into both works, I lowered them, stared over the tops and willfully complicated things for myself. Wait, this brings up gaps in my understanding of the tapestry of Southern Africa's multilingualism. I mean, how is it that, even forced through such a powerful colonial strainer, the whole region remains so famously multilingual? Which sent me wandering down a path that, to my delight, ended in a two-word answer given that it's such a broad question. Here I'll reflect on the notes I took along the way. Geographically, guess it's no surprise I craved filling in some gaps. These two books contrast two extreme points in Southern Africa, northwest to southeast. The vast area between is home to so much including, linguistically and culturally speaking, multiple language families. Snapping fingers and gasping "wait", I thought, didn't I read something about this in another book before, one I had quoted, That was, it was by Salikoko Mufwene... well, let's bring his in as a third book and take a more careful look this time. He does presume we enter the book with prior linguistic geography, or "geolinguistics". I won't repeat the details, that was a video from before, one I already stretched to animate. I'll just gesture that way as we move along and take it for granted. Because book three today rolls all the local five-family, scores-of-languages complexity up into three categories: Indigenous African languages, Indigenized European languages and Creole languages. The metropole's colonial hopes and anti-Indigenous practices and policies generally pit speakers of these languages and their colonial goals against cultural practices. In the tug-of-war between is where creolistics has conventionally put pidgins and creoles. And that point is the spark igniting this book, which aims to recalibrate our understanding of creole tongues. Along the way, though, I recollect there being something of a deeper point about languages interacting in Southern Africa. Going back, I was not disappointed. What characterizes the region's "geolinguistics" is not only the three types of languages but how they interact in a web of contact and influence. Take the largest set of Indigenous languages. Bantu languages are numerous, are around 5000 years old, and cover a wide area, 23 countries today. They also retain evidence of a point of historical connection. Two, actually. Speakers in two areas borrowed click consonants from even older language families. More restrictedly, downstream along the Okavango or Cubango River before it heads into its delta. And more abundantly, all over the southeast. Click consonant spread is one audible sign of a rich linguistic "repertoire" held together by threads that all tie back to a fact stressed in another work I pulled off the shelf, this handbook of Bantu Languages. The introduction notes multilingualism is "the rule rather than the exception" for Bantu speakers, who often speak more than one Bantu language ### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVHhjvegXJw&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) let alone other languages. Acknowledging multilingual as the default here is our first key. It sets the terms for what's going on. Languages from Europe have indeed been learned, but they're taken in alongside other languages in a way that's additive, not replacive. This is possible because instead of competing in an "arena where some languages grow at the expense of others", colonial-era languages fulfilled "new communicative functions". And even when they play the same role they more often end up "sharing some functions" than being superimposed one atop the other. And so we're given our first words to put to an answer: Southern African additive, non-replacive multilingualism. But then, what are these communicative functions, and how do they enable an additive multilingual landscape? Additive multilingualism in the wake of colonialism brought to mind a contrast with this old map showing the so-called Scramble for Africa. Painted chunks separate out (the phrase I've often heard is "carve up") claims by competing colonial empires and so, we may think, the resulting European language of each colony. This I think of as the language-speaking lands approach to colonies and then nations, you know, Nigeria speaks English, Guatemala speaks Spanish, Brazil speaks Portuguese and so on. Underlying this is an assumed one-way flow of language under European colonization: from metropole to colony to monolingual-speaking nation. In the process, a once-multilingual place becomes monolingual. Well, notice how all video I've talked about "languages". They're all monolanguages that we box up and label. People can then pick them up and use them. And multilingualism is when you pick up and use more than one of them. As I follow the research yarn, I run into scholars who call the results of this process of sorting, boxing and labeling "named languages". Additive multilingualism opened us up to considering what's behind the names of named languages: their communicative functions. Taking the next step, books and papers put more thought into what humans do with languages. A discussion of languages, and multiple languages, rooted not in people in service of languages but in people doing the languaging. Across languages. Translanguaging. Do you speak because boxes or are boxes because you speak? Hmm. Well, while anyone else who's long leveraged translanguaging may feel a twinge of common sense in this, for monolinguals this could help shine light on otherwise paradoxical-seeming behaviors. Two people each speaking different languages understanding each other just fine? Translanguaging. Adding more languages to a discussion increasing rather than hampering everyone's understanding? Translanguaging. People not being counted as native speakers of languages they themselves grew up speaking? Translanguaging. Specifically, for our discussion of multilingual Southern Africa, translanguaging bends common wisdom. Take the way South Africa is presented as so multilingual: it's because it officially recognizes a dozen such named languages. But our trajectory from the 19th Century has me reconsidering. Maybe it's so multilingual because of a knack for translanguaging. Filling out government paperwork and talking food in the kitchen are often done in different languages but in the words of one and the same person, fluidly leveraging all of their capabilities. Importantly, this all does involve thought and intention, but from below. It's a kludgy process in response to specific needs. When those piecemeal workarounds become habits that become norms, a linguist may swoop in, late in the process, and name languages. I started from if-colonized-why-not-monolingual? And then why-so-multilingual? Then additive-multilingualism and now translanguaging. Some would go home but I went one more step. I learned a potent cultural reason that additive multilingualism through translanguaging is a particularly good fit for Southern Africa. Separateness. Reflecting back, the maps, the language types, and my starting monolingual assumptions relied on sorting and separating, and the implied conflicting allegiances. It's like, you can be on one monolingual side or another. Which turns polyglots into these weird oddities, exceptional for being multiply monolingual. But that's foreign to the versatile experience of ### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVHhjvegXJw&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 14:00) translanguaging. One author pictured it as pouring meaning into a conversation until we reach a saturation point, when everyone understands through someone else's understanding. Languaging because you were languaged... echoes of a famous aphorism there. I-language-because-we-language? Yeah, a non-replacive multilingualism that distributes and adds commmunicative functions is the answer I got to: ubuntu translanguaging. Coining a term for the shared speaking activities that knit together communities opens its expounder up to recognizing a remote but obvious commonality lost the colonial flow, and so erased from our discussion so far. Can you think of another region of the world, one I keep mentioning today, where people leverage all their resources to communicate in complex interactions? This is not a story of monolingual-Europe, translanguaging-Africa. Hardly. The term translanguaging was coined in Welsh (and translated from Welsh) for bilingual school lessons, and practices like "Lingua receptiva" (or however you prefer to pronounce your Latin) have a long history in Europe, where people make meaning without a single language in common by drawing on "constellations" of linguistic resources. Whence then the replacive monolingualism? Hhh, well this is where we wrap up and send me back to finish my books. Today, multilingualism seems at odds with the habit of tying a language to a name to colony to state to flag. Fumbling for a term, I called this the "colonial strainer"; one of my last sources prefers "top-down bordering": one language on top of others, separating out speakers. Different people speak different languages in different lands, right? Or perhaps they must be made to. Resisting this, people do "horizontal bordering": dynamic, along bonds, for making meaning. Instead of a power push to repaint language maps, this kind of bordering puts languages and people side by side. The author who called multilingualism here "additive" insists the risk to linguistic richness is not directly colonization, though that was the "trigger", both the extracting and the settling. Nor is the risk direct language replacement. It's people actively negotiating which languages fulfill which functions. Notably, creoles and new vernaculars now compete for traditional functions. (So then the answer to the last part of my opening question is really "no", at least, not "only". ) And if the variety of communicative functions gets whittled down or leveled out, so can the languaging that fills them with meanings. Dulling tools for meaning-making dulls community-forming, and additive becomes replacive. But people can pull the other way. Take my final source, who says a one-aphorism approach to ubuntu is too simple if it only considers the participation and not the character of the participants. That's especially relevant in times when "traditional communal bonds" are weakened. Adding that dimension back in makes translanguaging a personal quality worth fostering as well as a vibrant communal practice worth describing. Who knows, maybe one day we'll hear about click consonants developing in Southern Africa's English. That'd be one indication. And with that, for now I'm back to the books. I'll leave links to my sources document and the opportunity to support me as my patron. I'm working on a few projects that, if you enjoyed this one, will surely touch your languagey heart. I usually say stick around and subscribe, but how about this today ~ talk about this with someone, share something about our world full of languaging and culturing --- *Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/40647*