Exhibit, Slavery Museum, Juffureh, the Gambia | ©Greg Gross
A traveler’s random musings about words, culture and Alzheimer’s disease. And yes, they’re all connected.
Language is a lot on my mind these days.
Coming back from my recent journey to West Africa, my second-most cherished souvenir is a Wolof-English dictionary.
(The most cherished were my two Gambian names.)
While English is the official language of the Gambia, where we spent most of our time, Wolof is spoken by a good quarter of the population of Banjul, the Gambian capital, and is the most widely spoken indigenous language in neighboring Senegal.
Never heard of Wolof, you say? Well, you already know at least one Wolof word right now, especially if you’re familiar with the produce section of any grocery store.
“Banana” is a Wolof word.
Our slang use of the word “hip” — especially in its first use by American jazz musicians in the slang expression “hep cat” — may derive from the Wolof word “hepicat,” meaning “one who has his eyes open.”
THE CULTURE OF WORDS
The subject of language came up during my time in the Gambia during the International Roots Festival earlier this month, and for good reason. Language can tell you a lot about a culture, especially about who shapes it, who runs it.
A lot of Africans have taken note of the fact that their own traditional, indigenous languages are most often not taught in their own schools to their own children in their own countries. In the tongues of their own ancestors, many can neither read nor write.
What are they taught instead? English, French, Arabic, even Spanish…and increasingly, Mandarin Chinese. The languages of conquerors, colonists, explorers, missionaries, humanitarians and exploiters.
And you though we black Americans were the only ones cut off from our African heritage?
Apparently not…
These days, the African Union has added Swahili to its official list of languages — English, French and Arabic being the others. There’s even talk of making Swahili into the official lingua franca from all the nations of the Mother Continent.
Even there, however, you come across little cultural tripwires.
For instance, the very word “swahili” means “coast.”
In Arabic.
A lot of Americans would see all of this as a non-issue, since we tend to pay scant attention to any language that isn’t ours.
MONO-TONGUED
We native-born Americans are famously — or notoriously — monolingual. Not only do most of us tend to speak only English, but a lot of us seem to think the rest of the world should speak English, also.
This is how, when we travel, we find ourselves staring with more than a mild flash of envy at other travelers at the train station, in the airport or the hotel, in the restaurant. Being able to easily switch from one language to another when they need to, they often glide smoothly into and out of situations that leave us stumbling, stuttering and furiously gesturing in clumsy, improvised sign language.
The benefits of learning how to communicate in something other than your mother tongue have been well-known almost forever, and outside the the United States, much of the world grows up doing just that.
The advantages of being multilingual (and increasingly, multicultural) in a world in which business opportunity and competition are both increasingly global may at last be dawning on us, too.
Now, it looks as if medical science has given us all a third reason to learn a second language, and it’s a big one:
Neurology researchers in Canada, studying the function of the human brain, have found that learning a second language can protect the brain against Alzheimer’s disease.
BILINGUAL IS GOOD FOR YOU
There is no need to wipe your glasses or adjust your monitor. You read that right.
Read the entire story here at LiveScience.com.
if you’ve ever seen Alzheimer’s at work, you know firsthand the kind of devastation it can unleash in a person’s life, and the anguish it rains down on whole families. If learning another language can not only make your travels better and make you more competitive in the 21st century, but help shield you against Alzheimer’s too, that sounds like the mother of all fringe benefits to me.
And these days, the Web makes it easy for anyone to take up a new language on their own — at their own convenient and their own pace, cheaply, or even for free.
So now, you really have no excuse for staying monolingual!
Pirogues at the Banjul ferry crossing, the Gambia | ©Greg Gross
okay, this is a ridiculously long response. but then again, it’s not as cut and dried as people would like it to be.
heh. i have a wolof-french dictionary. i used to have a wolof-english dictionary. one of the funny things about having the two of them is that some words transliterate differently. wolof is written in both arabic and roman script, as well as words using french, english, and portuguese spelling rules.
[for example, the man's name Lamine is spelled with the "e" in senegal and mali, but often without in both gambia and guinea-bissau.]
another name that is common throughout west africa but is written differently is Cisse/Cissé/Sesay — same surname, three different spellings.
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spanish is pretty close to non-existent in africa; i think you meant to say portuguese. even in GQ, which is the only african country where the spanish language is official, french is also official, and is the working language of most of the migrants who work there. outside of GQ, morocco and western sahara, the only times you’ll see spanish offered in public schools is if the spanish or cuban governments are paying for it.
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but to answer your question about “non-native” [for lack of a better term] languages being used in various places — a big part of it is the disparate peoples within a country. because of the badly drawn borders, going local often involves picking one group’s language over someone else’s. choosing one over the other can put cause india-like problems, or you can end up doing what china did [both of which are discussed below].
whether or not you get an african language in school is largely dependent on where you live. your point of “people can’t read or write in their ancestral language” should be placed parallel to many [in some countries, most] people’s inability to read and write in *any* language. in senegal, you get wolof in school, but if you never go to school in the first place, it’s a moot point.
ideally, education planet-wide should be in any of the united nations six, followed by people who have “made it” financing enhancing of local languages. but in the first instance, get the people in the classroom first. if you think about it, that’s pretty much what happened — in the “western” world, education was latin and/or greek until it was deemed useful to a) expand education and b) do it in local languages. in the east, it was “chinese” script. between the two, it was arabic or sanskrit, depending on location.
belgium’s disastrous books are directly related to having three official languages. if you educate from k-university, and you do it right, it becomes too expensive to viably do it in more than one languages. so in order to do it *right*, what you need to do is to get rid of the arbitrary borders and make countries to roughly follow linguistic footprints. [you see the problem with this, right?] the most stable countries are monoethnic ones or ones with one particular ethnolinguistic group ridiculously dominant over all the others. anything else creates fissures and disorder.
in china, when the communists took over, mandarin was the main language for a bit more than half the people. these days there are more people who speak cantonese or shanghainese as a first language in thailand and vietnam than there are in china; the government pretty much shifted the spoken language of the people to mandarin, often at gunpoint.
in the case of india, english is an official language. the reason that this is the case is because there are millions of people in the south who feel that hindi is just as much of an oppressor language as many perceive european languages to be. there are parliamentarians in india who will refuse to speak hindi.
india has 14 official languages, but practically almost everything official is in hindi and english and then secondarily translated into one of the other 12. in addition, hindi, punjabi, and urdu are mutually intelligible, although there are many words that exist in the latter two that don’t exist in hindi. this is before you have to deal with the whole deal with merely writing them — hindi and punjabi use the same script, but hindi is written left to right, and punjabi is written right to left. urdu is written in arabic script, and right to left. fun!
keep in mind, also, that the only country with more regional languages and dialects than india is… papua new guinea.
btw, while there is “talk” that swahili be an african lingua franca, it is too associated with arabic — and thus islam — for this to be palatable in some parts of the continent. in some ways this is funny, since most swahili speakers these days aren’t muslim; one of the reasons that dar es salaam is no longer the capital of tanzania is because it’s a muslim city. [yes, the government wanted something a bit more central. but calls to prayer ringing through the city and being able to be heard in meetings was a major, major push factor.]
additionally, swahili is doing in the east exactly what people are accusing english and french of doing in the west — people are ditching their own languages to learn swahili to improve their job prospects. it’s a big, big problem in rural kenya, tanzania, and border areas of countries immediately adjacent to them. keep *that* piece of info in mind while mulling over the “these outside languages are muscling in on our local ones” — it’s okay if it’s a local one doing the muscling, then?
Language is indeed a flexible, fluid thing, one that both shapes cultures and is shaped by them, in turn.
re Cisse/Cissé/Sesay, ewhile in the Gambia, I also came across “Ceesay.” What I saw among the people there was a relative handful of surnames, each spelled multiple ways. The same is true for the Gambian name I was given, Yaya Colley. I’ve seen “Yaya” spelled with an “h,” as the president spells his, and without, as my family wrote it for me. I made a conscious decision to go with the spelling my adoptive family uses, but which one is “correct?” Who knows!
You can point to the same thing in almost any language anywhere. The English name George takes on an “s” in French culture, José becomes Joao in Portuguese, and so on.
And yes, I did mean to say Spanish. Its footprint on the Mother Continent may be extremely small, and much smaller than that of Portuguese, but it’s there.
The drawing of national boundaries in Africa based on colonial designs created a great many problems for people in Africa, language being only one. Ideally, you’d just erase all those borders and start from scratch, but I have a better chance of following Barack Obama into the White House.
The same could be said of Swahili’s chances of being universally adopted across the continent, due in no small part to its ties to Arabic.
Anyway, thanks for a deep and thoughtful comment. Keep ‘em coming!
btw, juan is joão. josé is josé. so few people speak spanish in africa — and i’ve lived in, been to, and/or partied in almost a dozen countries on the continent over the past couple of decades — that when i speak to my us-based bank, i often do it in spanish. with my thick caribbean accent [which is only there in spanish, not in english or french], even people who learned textbook spanish who try to overhear tend not to understand what i’m saying. but by that point i would know that people are trying to overhear… lol
btw, another surname whose spelling depends on where you are is…. jallow/jalloh/diallo
your name change reminds me of something that happened to me when i was in senegal. one of my then-boyfriend’s friends decreed that i must have an african name … which is fine and all, except said then-boyfriend had the exact same first name as i did and he was not amused.
i still need to make it to nigeria. i’ve been to every country bordering it, but haven’t been there. who goes to *niger* for a house party that he heard about from a friend of a friend in abidjan? well, me! lol and this was *before* the innertubes, no less. i think i would have been a hot mess had these countries been more connected in the late 80s.
Thanks for the fix on Joao. For some reason, been confusing it w/José! As for Jallow, that’s the other Gambian name I was given. More surname confusion! Same thing with N’diaye and Njie. Oh boy!
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