<div dir="ltr"><br clear="all">
<span style="padding-bottom:66.6667%" class="gmail-image-attachment gmail--ratioscale gmail-horizontal-orientation">
</span>
<div class="gmail-caption">
Boys in their senior year at the Protection of Civilians
Camp 3 study after class in Juba, South Sudan, on March 23. (Alex Potter
for Foreign Policy) <span class="gmail-attribution"></span>
</div>
<div class="gmail-feature-header-text">
<a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/category/dispatch/" class="gmail-department-name">
<h3 class="gmail-department">Dispatch</h3></a>
<span class="gmail-hed-heading" href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/14/for-south-sudan-declaring-independence-from-arabic-is-not-so-easy-language-politics-juba-khartoum-english/">
<h1 class="gmail-hed">For South Sudan, It’s Not So Easy to Declare Independence From Arabic</h1>
</span>
<h2 class="gmail-dek-heading">When the world’s newest country broke away from
Khartoum, it discarded Sudan’s main official language, too. But casting
aside the oppressor’s tongue did not heal the country’s divisions.</h2>
<div class="gmail-meta-data">
<address class="gmail-author-list">
<span class="gmail-pre">By</span>
<a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/author/laura-kasinof/" rel="author" class="gmail-author">
Laura Kasinof</a></address>
November 14, 2018, 8:49 AM
</div>
</div>
<div class="gmail-post-content-main gmail-shares-position">
<p>JUBA, South Sudan—When South Sudan declared independence in
2011, breaking away from Republic of Sudan to become the world’s newest
country, all facets of state-building had to be finalized: ratifying a
new constitution, printing money, and distributing passports.</p>
<p>There was also the issue of language. South Sudan is a diverse
country, with some 60 languages spoken by dozens of ethnic groups in a
population of around 13 million. The <a href="https://www.unicef.org/esaro/UNICEF(2016)LanguageandLearning-SouthSudan.pdf">majority</a>
of South Sudanese also speak what is known as Juba Arabic, a dialect
far removed from standardized Arabic and named for the South Sudanese
capital. But Arabic was also the language of the Sudanese government in
Khartoum, which the South Sudanese viewed as their longtime colonizer.</p>
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</div><p>“People developed hatred toward Arabic partly because it was
imposed on us by the regime in Khartoum before our independence,”
explained Rajab Mohandis, the executive director of a local group called
the Organization for Responsive Governance. As with Afrikaans in South
Africa, a language that has declined in status due to its image as the
medium of apartheid policies and its history of being forced upon black
students, Arabic was seen as the language of the oppressor.</p>
<p>Consequently, in July 2011, South Sudan embedded in its new
constitution a declaration that English, not Arabic, would henceforth be
the country’s official language, while “all indigenous languages of
South Sudan are national languages and shall be respected, developed and
promoted.”</p>
<p>English, of course, was also a “colonizer” language, brought by the
British empire, but that colonization was not as recent a memory. And
because English wasn’t the language of the most recent oppressor, it
seemed a positive step to use English for official purposes.</p>
<p>Moreover, South Sudan’s government envisioned a future in which the
country would position itself closer to Anglophone East African nations
such as Kenya and Uganda. Leaders of the liberation struggle, who
subsequently became politicians in the new state, had lived in exile in
English-speaking parts of East Africa. <span class="gmail-pull-quote gmail-has-quote">The
government thought it could avoid the sort of conflict that comes with
making one indigenous language dominant over all the rest by designating
English as the language of state affairs</span></p><blockquote class="gmail-pullquote-left">The
government thought it could avoid the sort of conflict that comes with
making one indigenous language dominant over all the rest by designating
English as the language of state affairs</blockquote> instead.
In theory, the plan seemed viable. But in reality, the government lacked
the capacity to provide proper education so that English could become
more widely spoken, rather than just a lingua franca of the upper
echelons of society and government.
<p>Seven years later, the hope of a new nation—one that was initially
cheered by the United States and Europe—is hanging on by a thread. South
Sudan has been engaged in a brutal civil war that displaced a third of
the country’s population and killed tens of thousands. A September peace
deal between President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar offers a
hint of optimism, but whether peace will hold is another more
troublesome issue altogether. South Sudan’s conflict often breaks down
along ethnic lines, as infighting among elites has polarized South
Sudan’s diverse population. And despite all of the government’s
ambitious linguistic plans, English remains the language of a minority,
and indigenous languages have become more politicized than ever.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_952857" class="gmail-wp-caption gmail-alignnone gmail-none gmail-section_break"><a href="https://foreignpolicymag.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/2_potter_sudan.jpg"> <span style="padding-bottom:33.3008%" class="gmail-image-attachment gmail--ratioscale">
<img alt="" class="gmail-image gmail-alignnone gmail-size-section_break gmail-wp-image-952857 gmail--fit gmail--loaded" src="https://foreignpolicymag.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/2_potter_sudan.jpg?w=1024&h=341">
</span>
</a><p class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Left: Nuer students in the
Protection of Civilians Camp 3 write in their native language, which is
not taught in schools outside the camps, in Juba, South Sudan, on March
23. Right: Students sit in class at a school where teachers struggle to
teach in English, rather than in Arabic or their local languages, in
Juba on March 21. (Alex Potter for Foreign Policy) </p></div>
<div class="gmail-bolded-first-line">
<p>Language is inextricably tied to the modern nation-state. Around the
world, official language policy has been used to create coherent
national identity. It has shored up governments and unified diverse
peoples within borders. Leaders, especially those who rule over
multiethnic territories, have known this and exploited it. Through
language, politicians can brandish their anti-colonial credentials and
avoid favoritism toward particular tribes or ethnic subgroups. Language
policies can also serve to marginalize peripheral minorities within a
population or bring them into the fold of the centralized state.</p>
</div>
<p>In the post-colonial world, many countries have pushed back against
designating languages imposed by former colonizers. Yet in multiethnic
nations—with borders drawn by former colonial powers—sometimes the
language of the outsider has turned out to be the best compromise for
state institutions. If a country functions in the language of a
particular group of people, tribe, or ethnic group—even if that group is
the majority—it marginalizes the rest of the population, leading to
protests. Linguistic hegemony, after all, can lead to other forms of
cultural imperialism as well.</p>
<p>India is a prime example. When the country adopted its first
constitution after independence from Britain in 1950, Hindi became
India’s official language, while English was permitted for official
purposes, with the goal of phasing it out over the course of the next 15
years. But Dravidian language-speaking regions in the south pushed
back. There were deadly protests in Tamil Nadu (then Madras State) over
the issue, and the constitution was amended so that both Hindi and
English would continue as the country’s official languages. The issue
remains heated today, especially under Prime Minister Narendra Modi,
whom critics accuse of trying to make Hindi more dominant in politics,
going so far as to put in a bid for Hindi to become an official language
of the United Nations.</p>
<p>In other countries, language planning took root, proliferated, and
accomplished its goal largely as a result of more aggressive education
policies and timing. Periods of intense nationalist fervor seem to make
people more willing to learn new languages for the sake of the homeland,
especially if a new language does not come with the threat of one
group’s hegemony over others.</p>
<p>Following its independence in 1945, Indonesia, another multiethnic
country where some 700 languages are spoken, was faced with the problem
of designating an official language. Javanese was spoken by nearly half
of its citizens and the elites of the country, but, as in India, the
same conundrum existed as to whether Javanese should be promoted over
all other languages. Ultimately, the government decided to make what is
known as Bahasa Indonesia the state’s official language, even though it
was spoken as a mother tongue by only a small portion of the population
at the time. Bahasa Indonesia is derived from Malay and was a trade
language that for centuries was the lingua franca of much of coastal
Southeast Asia. Its successful propagation came as a result of an
aggressive education campaign by the government and advantageous timing,
because the initial adoption of the language was during a period when
post-colonial nationalism was running high.</p>
<p><span class="gmail-pull-quote gmail-has-quote">In
Tanzania, the country’s first post-independence president, Julius
Nyerere, pushed his countrymen to learn and speak Swahili while
downplaying tribal affiliations, a move that is credited with unifying
the nation</span></p><blockquote class="gmail-pullquote-left">In Tanzania, the country’s
first post-independence president, Julius Nyerere, pushed his countrymen
to learn and speak Swahili while downplaying tribal affiliations, a
move that is credited with unifying the nation</blockquote> and
helping pacify the sorts of tribal tensions that continue to exist in
neighboring East African nations. Like Bahasa Indonesia, Swahili was a
trade language used in the region prior to European colonialism, though
it was certainly not spoken by everyone, especially inland tribes, at
the time of independence. Also, as in Indonesia, Nyerere’s government
invested in linguistic education. Today, Tanzanians’ mastery of the
so-called purest form of Swahili, which comes from the island of
Zanzibar, is endowed with a sense of national pride.
<p>Turkey also manufactured major changes to its language at a time of
sweeping nationalism under the republic’s first president, Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk. Ataturk shifted modern Turkish from Arabic to Latin script in
its written form and purged the language of many words that were of
Persian or Arabic origin and replaced them with Turkish equivalents. The
move was part of his larger reform agenda of pivoting Turkey toward
Europe and constructing a modern secular nation-state following the
founding of the republic in 1923.</p>
<p>A more repressive version of language imposition is the history of
much of Western Europe and the Americas. Native Americans were forced to
enroll in English-language schools in the United States, and
post-revolutionary France sought to stamp out minority languages like
Breton and Occitan through standardized schooling in French. In more
recent times, Chinese authorities have slowly eroded minority languages
within their borders such as Tibetan and Uighur—and they have tried to
do so with Cantonese—by promoting Mandarin through education and the
media, ostensibly for the sake of national unity, though also as part of
an effort to curtail the political power of ethnic groups that are
viewed as a threat to the state.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_952858" class="gmail-wp-caption gmail-alignnone gmail-none gmail-section_break"><a href="https://foreignpolicymag.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/akp_3-21-2018_southsudan_languageportrait36.jpg"> <span style="padding-bottom:55.5664%" class="gmail-image-attachment gmail--ratioscale">
<img alt="" class="gmail-image gmail-alignnone gmail-size-section_break gmail-wp-image-952858 gmail--fit gmail--loaded" src="https://foreignpolicymag.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/akp_3-21-2018_southsudan_languageportrait36.jpg?w=1024&h=569">
</span>
</a><p class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Girls write on the blackboard
during English class in their high school in Juba, South Sudan, on March
21. The school’s mandate is to primarily teach in English, but teachers
admit to struggling to stick to the curriculum without any Arabic.
(Alex Potter for Foreign Policy) </p></div>
<div class="gmail-bolded-first-line">
<p>South Sudan’s efforts never made it as far as those of Indonesia,
Tanzania, or Turkey. Public schools today in South Sudan use a variety
of curriculums. The closer a school is to the border of Sudan, the more
likely it is to still rely on the Sudanese curriculum. <span class="gmail-pull-quote gmail-has-quote">University
of Juba professors have found that students who had gone to
Arabic-speaking schools that switched to English following independence,
particularly those just entering high school at the time, are now
struggling to keep up</span></p><blockquote class="gmail-pullquote-left">University of
Juba professors have found that students who had gone to Arabic-speaking
schools that switched to English following independence, particularly
those just entering high school at the time, are now struggling to keep
up</blockquote> at university because they essentially lost their high school education due to poor English comprehension and instruction.
</div>
<p>“The current generation has a problem. When we were a country before,
it was all in Arabic, and they thought that they would study in
Arabic,” said Venansio Muludiang, a professor of statistics and
demographics at the University of Juba.</p>
<p>Bakhita Ireneo is an education student on the same campus and, after
graduation, she will be expected to teach in English. She had attended
school her whole life in Arabic in the Bahr el Ghazal region, so her
English is quite weak. “It’s difficult for me when I am taking the
exams. It’s really hard for me to understand the questions,” she said.</p>
<p>When hostilities broke out in Juba in December 2013, marking the
start of South Sudan’s civil war, government soldiers reportedly spoke
to civilians in the Dinka language to distinguish those who belonged to
the pro-government Dinka ethnic group from those who belong to the Nuer,
that of opposition leader Riek Machar, whom the army targeted during
the fighting. (Dinka and Nuer people tend to share a similar physical
appearance, but Nuer living in the capital often cannot speak Dinka.)</p>
<p>Approximately <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/south-sudan/unmiss-poc-update-22-may-2018">40,000 people</a>
who fled violence in Juba, most of whom are Nuer, now live in
ramshackle camps for internally displaced persons inside a U.N. compound
on the outskirts of the capital. Nuer students who study at the
University of Juba while living in the camps make sure to conceal their
ethnic affiliation when commuting to classes and even on campus grounds.</p>
<div id="gmail-attachment_952859" class="gmail-wp-caption gmail-alignnone gmail-none gmail-text_width"><a href="https://foreignpolicymag.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/akp_3-21-2018_southsudan_languageportrait24.jpg"> <span style="padding-bottom:66.625%" class="gmail-image-attachment gmail--ratioscale">
<img alt="" class="gmail-image gmail-alignnone gmail-size-text_width gmail-wp-image-952859 gmail--fit gmail--loaded" src="https://foreignpolicymag.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/akp_3-21-2018_southsudan_languageportrait24.jpg?w=800&h=533">
</span>
</a><p class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Bakhita Ireneo, an education
student at Juba University, struggles with the English curriculum after
studying in Arabic her whole life. (Alex Potter for Foreign Policy) </p></div>
<p>“We speak Nuer, but not in front of people. We have to hide our
identities,” a law student told me when we spoke inside a tent that
served as a tea shop for the displaced. He asked to remain anonymous due
to political sensitivities.</p>
<p>On the other side of the camp, inside a school for displaced
children, a teacher taught Nuer language to an overfilled classroom.
Children of various ages dutifully wrote Nuer sentences in an adapted
Latin script into their notebooks. The head of Nuer language education
at the school, Lam Deng, insisted that teaching Nuer wasn’t a political
act. “This has nothing to do with the conflict,” he said, but that
surely is not how it is seen from the outside.</p>
<p>Periods of political tension tend to cement an us-versus-them mentality, and South Sudan is no exception. <span class="gmail-pull-quote gmail-has-quote">In such fraught times, language and the way one speaks it becomes a loaded act, signifying a specific identity.</span></p><blockquote class="gmail-pullquote-left">In such fraught times, language and the way one speaks it becomes a loaded act, signifying a specific identity.</blockquote>
In recent years, the emphasis on Nuer language among Nuer people has
coincided with the prevalence of Dinka on Juba’s streets as the civil
war has ground on. Both groups are retreating into linguistic cocoons,
with little to unite them under the umbrella of a common national
identity.
<p>There was a brief moment in South Sudan’s short history when an
inclusive nationalism devoid of ethnic divisions was running high, as in
post-independence Indonesia, Ataturk’s Turkey, and Tanzania—but the
country struggled, and ultimately failed, to create a coherent identity
before that window began to close. The failure to turn English into a
unifying force did not destroy the country, but it is one among many
failures. The new deal between Kiir and Machar could renew a sense of
common national identity in the coming months, or old divisions could
spark a return to civil war.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, South Sudan’s foreign policy has since switched course, a
symptom of having isolated itself from regional allies. Rather than
courting Anglophone leaders in East Africa as it once hoped, South
Sudan’s government has made a U-turn and, according to <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/south-sudan-requests-join-arab-league-180312141145631.html">reports</a>, requested to join the Arab League, a group of 22 mostly Arabic-speaking nations, including its old nemesis: Sudan.</p>
<p>The country, once hailed by world leaders such as U.S. President
Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, has fallen into
an identity crisis, flip-flopping on the foundational question of where
and to whom it belongs. In the end, its failure as a modern-day
state-building project has shown that while selecting and adopting the
right official language may not be able to make or break a new nation,
it can certainly hasten its success or collapse.</p>
<p><span class="gmail-red-box-end"></span></p>
</div>
<div class="gmail-last-author">
<p><strong>Laura Kasinof</strong> is a journalist and author of <em><a href="http://arcadepub.com/arcadepub?catid=0&id=1204">Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets: An Accidental War Correspondent in Yemen</a></em>. She was the <em>New York Times</em>
correspondent in Yemen during the Arab Spring. Reporting for this story
was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation, as part of
its African Great Lakes Reporting Initiative. <a href="http://www.twitter.com/kasinof" target="_blank">@kasinof</a></p> </div>
<br>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div></div>