Multilingualism in Rural Africa

Abstract

The pervasiveness of multilingualism throughout the African continent has led it to be viewed as Africa’s “lingua franca.” Nevertheless, sociolinguistic research on this topic has concentrated mostly on urbanized areas, even though the majority of Africans still live in rural regions, and rural multilingualism is clearly of much older provenance than its urban counterpart. In urban domains, individual language repertoires are dominated by the interplay between European ex-colonial languages, African lingua francas, and local languages, and language ideologies emphasize the ordering of languages in a hierarchy that is tied to social status. The situation in rural areas is clearly distinct, though it has yet to be thoroughly investigated. Early work on language use in rural Africa tended to background the presence of multilingualism and was dominated by an approach that viewed each community (or “tribe”) as having its own language. Thanks to the progressive adoption of ethnographic methods of inquiry, facilitated by language documentation research especially since the beginning of the 21st century, it has been possible to more effectively study areas of high linguistic diversity in West and Central Africa which demonstrate that multilingualism plays an integral role in structuring social relations. Available case studies document the presence of individuals with linguistic repertoires that are primarily oriented around local languages, ideologies, and practices and that do not clearly fit with what is known from urban environments. The most important theme that emerges from this work is the extent to which rural multilingualism is linked to the specific dynamics holding among communities that are near to each other rather than being a reflection of a more general, externally imposed value system. While this result makes it difficult to characterize rural multilingualism as a single, coherent phenomenon, it does point to the utility of a shared toolkit of research strategies for exploring it in more detail. In particular, ethnographic methods are required in order to ascertain the major local social divisions which language choice both reflects and constructs in these areas, and it is additionally important to focus on how individual repertoires are tied to specific life histories rather than to assume that groupings that are salient to the outside researcher (e.g., “villages” or “compounds”) are the relevant units of analysis. Finally, investigation of multilingualism in rural Africa is not only valuable for what it reveals about social dynamics on the continent, but it also seems likely to yield important insights for the study of sociolinguistics more broadly.

African(ist) perspectives on vitality: Fluidity, small speaker numbers, and adaptive multilingualism make vibrant ecologies (Response to Mufwene)

“…Drawing on a large body of ethnographic and historical research, Lüpke and Storch (2013) challenged the Eurocentric expectation of a monolingual ethnolinguistic group sharing an ancestral language, crucially for rural as well as urban areas. Beginning systematic research on rural multilingualism in Africa is uncovering the complexity of these settings (Cobbinah et al 2016, Di Carlo 2016, Di Carlo & Good 2014, Di Carlo et al 2017, Lüpke 2016a, 2018, Ngué Um 2015, Storch et al 2014. The image of sedentary 'tribal' groups is turned on its head by the widespread existence of African sites of high linguistic diversity, particularly in the sub-Saharan fragmentation belt, reaching from the Atlantic coast of West Africa to the Ethiopian escarpment (Dimmendaal 2008, Güldemann 2008.…”

“…It is crucial to overcome this fallacious perception. Colonial and postcolonial classifications attempting to impose essentialist identities and strict boundaries on groups that were and are heterogeneous and in which identities are multiple and relational rather than categorical (Di Carlo et al 2017) are reductive. They mask the importance of multifaceted indices of identity, including clan membership, caste, religion, or profession, and overestimate the importance of recent concepts such as ethnicity and ethnolinguistic group, which have their origin in the colonial period, when colonial administrators took their romantic ideas of language to new territories.…”

Languages and ideologies at the Lower Yenisei (Siberia): Reconstructing past multilingualism

“…Identity is understood here as a category that allows people to group themselves with some other people as opposed to all the rest (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004; Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985). Categorical identities flag one’s belonging to a single group only, while relational identities index diverse components of one’s social self so that use of different languages may refer to membership in different groups (the distinction, as applied to studies of small-scale multilingualism, was actualized by Di Carlo and Good (2014) and developed by Lüpke (2016) and Di Carlo et al (2019)).…”

Language Endangerment and Language Documentation in Africa

“…But especially since Africa hosts a high proportion of the world's languages in settings that defy these ideologies, it is of prime importance to develop viewpoints that allow a better characterization of vitality and endangerment on this continent. An acknowledgement and better understanding of multilingualism must constitute a central component of this endeavour, since most Africans live in multilingual situations the diversity of which remains understudied in large parts (Di Carlo et al 2016;Juillard 2005;Lüpke 2010a).…”

“…It is also common to see multilingualism as a recent phenomenon linked to the introduction of colonial languages and to growing rates of migration. Yet, a growing body of research, summarized in Di Carlo et al (2016) for Africa, and in Lüpke (2016b) worldwide, points to the longstanding existence of multilingualism in places not commonly imagined as multilingual, and through motivations that are not polyglossic, i.e. not based on domain specializations for and hierarchical relationships between languages.…”