Towards a Mother Tongue School

“Everything we learn, we learn through language. Children in Mozambique start school without knowing Portuguese, yet they have to learn everything in Portuguese. This makes the learning process very difficult,” says Professor Armindo Ngunga at Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM) in Maputo, Mozambique.

“Preliminary results from pilot projects on mother tongue education here in Mozambique show that children who are taught in their mother tongue do better in school than those who are taught everything in Portuguese when they start school,” he continues, adding that only 40 per cent of the population speak Portuguese and hardly anyone speaks it as their mother tongue.

From bottom up to top down

The research results by Ngunga and his colleagues are one of the reasons why things have started to change in Mozambique lately. Another reason is the emerging interest in bilingual education at grassroots level. More and more parents now want their children’s education to be conducted in their mother tongue in the first years of primary school. This increasing pressure from parents for bilingual education has resulted in governmental demands for the production of grammars, orthographies and dictionaries.

Professor Armindo Ngunga with an edition of an English–Northern Sotho dictionary. More dictionaries are in the pipeline as a result of the project.

“In the past, when we were a one-party state, the politicians in Mozambique thought that they could communicate with their people exclusively in Portuguese. But now that we are a democracy they feel that it is important to communicate with the people in the languages the people understand,” Professor Ngunga explains.

Ngunga is project coordinator for the research project “Standardization and Harmonization of Cross-border Languages”, supported by The Norwegian Programme for Development, Research and Education (NUFU), and head of the Center for African Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UEM.

Languages without borders

Historically Mozambique and Zimbabwe have shared several spoken languages. But as time, colonial powers and political changes have come and gone, the languages have drifted apart to such an extent that they now appear as different languages. However, they are in fact varieties of the same languages. Sena, Changana and Shona (all Bantu languages and thus linguistically related), which are the research objects in this project, are all spoken both in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Shona is spoken in Botswana as well. Changana and Sena are also spoken in South Africa and Malawi respectively.

The researchers want to re-establish the close relationship of the languages by harmonizing their orthographies, i.e. spelling and language norms. To do this they need, as a first step, to go out and record spoken languages. This work is done mostly by students. In addition they collect text samples.

The next step is to do a transcription of the oral materials and scan the written texts before transferring all the data into a huge database from which they are now producing grammars and dictionaries – a work of vital importance as such language tools have never existed before.

A page from one of the coming Changana dictionaries that is soon to become one of the dictionaries from the cross-border language project.

Mother tongue pioneers

Historically, local African languages have been written down by a wide range of people, missionaries for instance. Different people have documented different languages according to their own mother tongue’s orthography. In Mozambique this has resulted in the same language having developed three or four parallel writing systems, for example.

“What are the necessary steps forward to develop adequate language systems?”

“First of all, it is important to standardise the writing system so that it can be used in schools. Secondly, it is important to have some kind of standard terminology to be used in schools. That is why we have several dictionary projects, including the medical and musical dictionaries in Zimbabwe and the monolingual dictionary for the cross-border language Changana that we are working on in here in Mozambique, and which is going to be the first of its kind,” says Professor Ngunga.

The long-term aim of the language project is a transformation of the educational system from a Portuguese school to a mother tongue school. The teachers who are taking part in the pilot projects on mother tongue education did not learn their own mother tongue in school; they are in a sense learning it at the same time as they teach. In this perspective they are mother tongue pioneers.

“The grammar and the dictionaries are going to be instrumental to the success of this project,” Professor Ngunga emphasises.

Same but different

In Zimbabwe, a former British colony, the language situation is completely different from Mozambique. The native languages have been the educational languages for decades. The British colonial powers brought their strong academic traditions to Zimbabwe. In Mozambique the universities are still relatively young due to the Portuguese rulers’ lack of academic aspirations for their colony.

“The Portuguese colonial system discouraged the use of local languages in all their African colonies, whereas in Zimbabwe the African languages were taught even during colonial times,” Ngunga explains.

“We have a language policy for the language curriculum in Zimbabwe. The mother tongue is supposed to be taught in primary school for the first three grades. I also recently heard that this year it was set for an exam for another minority language called Tonga for the first time. I think it is a positive move from the government towards developing the languages,” Dr. Nomalanga Mpofu says.

She is Professor Ngunga’s Zimbabwean research fellow and project coordinator at the University of Zimbabwe. She recently spent eight months at UEM in Mozambique and has contributed with important research under the supervision of Professor Ngunga.

Professor Armindo Ngunga, project coordinator at Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique, Dr. Nomalanga Mpofu from University of Zimbabwe.

Benefits from African cooperation

“Cooperation between our two African institutions is very important if we want to proceed in our development together. The development and cooperation at grassroots level is done through the languages that people speak. We share the same border, the same language and people cooperate at this level. On a governmental level they speak English and Portuguese. It is important that we develop the languages that we use in order to make better use of common resources.” “Could you point to a result that has come out of your research so far that has had consequences for language policy in Mozambique?”

“When we talk about the grammar and the dictionary of Changana, we held a seminar on the standardisation of the orthography of mother tongue languages in 2008. One of the results of the seminar is that we are now producing a report where we set up a standard orthography of the Mozambican languages, which will be very important in education,” says professor Ngunga.

The researcher’s efforts are yielding positive results. The Minister of Culture in Mozambique wanted to see the orthography report before the Parliament passed a law on the official orthography of Mozambique. The new law is an indirect effect of the NUFU project so to speak.

“Do you think it ever will happen that mother tongues will become teaching languages in the higher education institutions in Mozambique?”

“At our university, Eduardo Mondlane University, I think it will happen, yes,” Professor Ngunga concludes optimistically.