早稲田国際教養AO入試 Languages in Africa

1.    Crummell would not be satisfied with the present language situation in Africa because he thinks it is good for the black to grow up using English as their mother tongue while this has not happened in Africa, where countless number of indigenous languages are still alive and learned as first languages before the colonial languages as the official languages.

2.    Advantages: People would be internationally active because there are less barriers against communication in English. Unlike Japan, where the larger percentage of the population are not required to use English on a daily basis, everyone has a basic command d of English and this would make it easy to communicate with people all over the world or to find a job in a company which uses English as its official language. On the other hand, deeper communication would be halted in such a country because people cannot use their mother tongue in communicating with those from regions other than their own. Also, life in such a country would be affected by lack of or delay of reaching consensuses and delay of introducing new ideas and systems because the country could technically stay as a collection of hundreds of small nations.

3.    On the surface, the language situation in Japan and that in Africa might look the same, the people communicating in a common language, but the actual circumstances are totally different, one providing a much more favorable environment for development and sophistication of a culture than the other. Japanese speak their mother tongue which is part of their tradition. This situation provides perfect matrix for well-rounded evolution of their tradition. On the other hand, Language situation in Africa would lead to the difficulty of realizing cohesiveness of disparate regions in one nation. Given that their common languages are not directly rooted in their cultures and merely play the role of a communication tool that barely helps convey common denominators of each concept, building a mature culture common to all ethnic groups in a county might be almost impossible, especially when many areas still suffer from civil wars, which are a legacy of colonial period whose policy was to separate Africans and make them hate each other.