Languages, Part 0
Languages, Introduction
Each language is a work of art, as priceless as any work of
art that can be imagined.
All languages are part of the general human heritage.
Languages are kept alive by the speakers and the writers of
the language. Each language is a collaborative project of People’s Power. There
is no centre and no hierarchy. Language authority rests with the ordinary
speakers.
Each language is produced (and constantly reproduced) in a
form of organisation that is nowadays called a “distributed network” (See Ron Press, New tools for Marxists, 1994).
It can be imagined as a diagram:
And as a
progression, like this:
Creation of
language is a real-life, on-going example of the kind of mode of production
that can supersede the capitalist mode of production. The work is its own
reward. The artifact produced is beyond price, and it belongs to all. It at
once becomes a common patrimony.
Creation of language happens in real life. The creation of
the language and the use of the language are one and the same thing. Hence language is an example of the
kind of communistic mode of production that can supersede the capitalist mode
of production. The work is its own reward. The artefact that is produced
– language – belongs to all.
The many languages of the world are open gateways. They are
not barriers.
Learning
languages teaches the learner how to understand people, in more ways than just
understanding what they are saying when they talk to you. Far from being a
“confusion of tongues”, as in the Babel-myth (see illustration), the many
languages are all open ways to understanding.
Languages that are spoken by large numbers of Africans, in
different countries on our continent are: Kiswahili, French, English, Arabic
and Portuguese. Of these, only Kiswahili is a purely African language. Across
the continent, translation of an African language into another African language
is often done via a European language, and this is a problem.
Because there is no central authority, a dictionary is only
a collection and a record of words as they are used. But dictionaries –
single-language dictionaries – make a language stronger.
In South Africa there are eleven official languages. Most of
them are not well served with dictionaries, or with the publication of written
literature.
The upward mobility of people that has followed upon our South
African democratic breakthrough has resulted in a flight to English in
particular, as the most extensive language in the country, and as people think,
in the world. This is a problem.
But it remains the case that all of our official languages
are spoken languages, and all of them are the first, or home, language of
significant numbers of South Africans.
African children, like children everywhere, need to be taught,
in the first years of their schooling, in the language that they know from
home. Later, they need to be taught their own language as a subject, like other
subjects. South Africa has a programme to achieve these aims, gradually.
African languages, like all other languages, need writers to
write them, and readers to read them. In our South African circumstances, these
are revolutionary, nation-building tasks. We build our nation by giving life to
our heritage.
This CU Course on Languages
This ten-part
course will attempt something that hardly exists in South Africa, which is a
critique of language use, and language policy, in the country today.
This is a
political education course, and it is one of the sixteen CU ten-part courses.
The course
will interrogate, and critique, the 11-official-language policy. We will ask if
in practice this policy is working as a cover and a blanket under which the
nine official African languages are being allowed to fall into greater
disrepair. In this regard, we will look at PANSALB, Kha Ri Gude and any other institutions and
programmes of this kind that may come to our attention.
We will then
propose ways in which language – an institution without a state – can be
strengthened with the communist means that we have at our own disposal:
Education, Organisation and Mobilisation. Language, as we have seen, is
generated communistically. It should be possible to repair and regenerate the
same languages communistically.
Hence we
will look at the possibility of creating dictionaries by “crowd-sourcing”,
using wikis.
And we will
look at the possible application of Freirean pedagogical methods for the
co-operative learning of languages in study circles, because languages are
social, and we think they should be taught socially, as a community of
practice, and not as commodified, “qualified” products.
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