A world renowned linguist shared his vision for mother tongue-based academic multilingualism in Africa at the Language Indaba held at the Bellville Campus.
Prof Ekkehard Wolff, Professor emeritus: African Linguistics at Leipzig University in Germany argued that this type of academic multilingualism is the reason why Asia still performs better in academia than Africa, even 20 years after the collapse of apartheid in South Africa.
Wolff argued that despite university enrolments growing fast on the Africa the continent, graduation rate is the lowest in the world due to low academic literacy in the language of learning, English second language.
He says the pre-requisites of implementing an African Language as a medium of instruction in African universities should be addressed by interdisciplinary approaches which involve governments and administrators, the intellectualization of African Languages and the Understanding the distinction between first language, second language and third language pedagogy.
Wolff encouraged the use of African Languages in new and high prestige domains such as academia, science, philosophy and technology and argued that this should involve the development of terminology.
Prof Antia Bassey, Chair in the Department of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, responded to Wolff’s keynote address and commended the CPUT language policy which promotes multilingualism as a model worth following.
The Indaba was hosted jointly by the Language Working Group in conjunction with Fundani Centre for Higher Education Development’s Language Unit on “Language Factor in Higher Education in Africa “.
