Who Cares What Language I Speak?

America has one official language, and many if not most people will say that if you come to America you should learn to speak English. Canada has two, with the politically strong Quebec province managing in 1969 to add French. In Britain, there is one official language, but increasingly there is pressure to treat Welsh, Gaelic and even Cornish as being of equal value to English.

In South Africa there are 11 – yes eleven – official languages. Afrikaans and English are probably the most widely spoken. But there are more native Zulu speakers than these two combined, and more native Xhosa speakers than either “white” language. Most South Africans functionally speak at least two languages.

Chapter 1 Section 6 of the Constitution of South Africa provides for these official languages. The don’t cover all the native languages of the country, but close to 98% speak one of them as their own. The Constitution was created after the end of apartheid, and signed into law by Nelson Mandela in 1996. It reflects his vision of a truly multi-cultural, equal society.

When Afrikaner leaders first spoke to Mandela, even during his 27-year imprisonment, they were shocked and disarmed to be spoken to in Afrikaans. He first learned it so that he could talk to his prison guards. He was a native Xhosa speaker from the Eastern Cape, but he learned to speak in several other languages. Why? This is what he said:

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. (Nelson Mandela)

For those of us who speak the world’s most universal language, I think it is difficult to understand why this is so important. We can make ourselves understand pretty much anywhere in the world. So why bother to learn French, or Hindi, or Portuguese when we visit France or India or Brazil? For Mandela, we forfeit the ability to speak to heart of others.

For those who grew up speaking a localized language, it is a different story. They are expected to learn a second language, in which they are less fluent, less comfortable and which hides an aspect of who they are. If the world had listened to Mandela, difficult though most of us find it to learn additional languages, how different would things be? If only white and colored South Africans had listened! Because while South Africa has 11 official languages, it does not have the unity the should have come from this recognition and appreciation.

A common widely-spoken language is admittedly useful for trade and cross-cultural communication. In 1945, when Indonesia became independent, Bahasa Indonesia became the country’s official language in opposition to the colonial Dutch language. The first president Sukarno, and his successor Suharto, both understood that by insisting that all trade, government, media, education and really all aspects of life be conducted in Bahasa Indonesia. This, despite the fact that almost nobody spoke it (a recently created simplified dialect of Malay), but instead one of at least 700 other languages. This is perhaps a consequence of Indonesia being a rather arbitrary collection of over 3,000 inhabited islands. While it was very convenient to have a common language, and created at least a form of national identity, I wonder whether this was more than superficial. Most Indonesians even today speak their native language in addition – they live two lives: an official Indonesian one, and the one in which they are identified with their own ancestral tribe.

South Africa is similar. In all the cities, most people speak at least some English, often in addition to Afrikaans, the de facto official language of apartheid (and the main language spoken by Western and Northern whites and coloreds). But when I visited the remote Xhosa village of Bulungula (more on that in a later post) very few people spoke more than a few words of either language. They may have identified as South African, but much more they are Xhosa, and proud of their traditions, their values and their language. I’m sure it is the same in rural Zulu villages in KwaZulu-Natal and in other cultural clusters. But it means they are largely isolated from the nation South Africa.

If South Africa is going to truly become a nation in which all its citizens take pride, then it will need to recognize the value of all its languages.

And what about us? Do we make a Mexican immigrant into a true American by insisting on the use of only English in the classroom or the marketplace? Is this the welcome promised by the US Constitution? Or are we creating little enclaves – communities – of different cultures that are like islands within the great sea of America. I would ask the same question of Britain, Australia, France and many other countries.

The apartheid Bantu Authorities Act, and several others after it, established ten “homelands” or bantustans to which members of particular racial groups were to be transported. They were to have partial “independence” (which meant they had a governor, usually white, who supposedly looked after their affairs on behalf of the National Party government).

The original goal was that each of the bantustans would become fully independent, and some actually did, including Namibia, Swaziland and Lesotho. But since they were given inferior and too little land, with most of the land being kept for the minority white and colored groups, these were bound to be suppressed and poor nations. What resulted was a series of underserved, undereducated and underprovided for groups of millions of people – second-class South Africans. While this has changed to a degree since the ANC came to power, it still has a very long way to go.

It could be argued that an unintended consequence of the ANC’s decision to adopt all the major languages as “official” resulted to some degree in consolidation of the bantustan mentality, rather than its dismantling. I’m not sure what the right balance is. Native languages have great value in preserving the beauty and values of the underlying culture. But they can also fragment the nation as a whole.

America isn’t quite so crass about it as the apartheid era National Party. But isn’t there at least a flavor of it here? Yes, power is growing in some of these communities (e.g. Chinatown in San Francisco) but generally levels of poverty are significantly worse in ethnic areas.

Could it be that a big contributor to world discord is the arrogance of us native English speakers (and to a lesser extent the other “global” languages like French, Spanish and Chinese), assuming the superiority and rightful universality of our language.