Comments on: ‘If you do not speak Siwu to me in my home, I will not pay your school fees!’ http://ideophone.org/speak-siwu/ Sounding out ideas on African languages, vivid sensory words, and iconicity Sat, 12 May 2012 10:14:20 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 By: Men of Letters | A reference for good literature. » ‘If you do not speak Siwu to me in my home, I will not pay your school fees!’ http://ideophone.org/speak-siwu/comment-page-1/#comment-1536 Men of Letters | A reference for good literature. » ‘If you do not speak Siwu to me in my home, I will not pay your school fees!’ Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:34:21 +0000 http://ideophone.org/?p=882#comment-1536 [...] part of their heritage. Mark Dingemanse writes of the protection of the Siwu language in Ghana at The Ideophone, a blog on African languages. This post was filed under Language   —   Read [...] [...] part of their heritage. Mark Dingemanse writes of the protection of the Siwu language in Ghana at The Ideophone, a blog on African languages. This post was filed under Language   —   Read [...]

]]> By: Don http://ideophone.org/speak-siwu/comment-page-1/#comment-1531 Don Mon, 03 Aug 2009 04:03:35 +0000 http://ideophone.org/?p=882#comment-1531 Thanks for posting this, Mark. It is a real shame when educators (and even some parents) subscribe to the zero-sum notion of language, which ends up in attempts to "subtract" languages of lower status from educational, social and even family life (!). Glad that the parents are standing up for the maternal / community language. Teachers like the one in the story should be taught not to instruct students to ignore their linguistic heritage - in fact, there are some basics of learning in multilingual contexts that are probably not even touched on in most teacher education in Africa (and most of the world too?). Thanks for posting this, Mark. It is a real shame when educators (and even some parents) subscribe to the zero-sum notion of language, which ends up in attempts to “subtract” languages of lower status from educational, social and even family life (!). Glad that the parents are standing up for the maternal / community language.

Teachers like the one in the story should be taught not to instruct students to ignore their linguistic heritage – in fact, there are some basics of learning in multilingual contexts that are probably not even touched on in most teacher education in Africa (and most of the world too?).

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