Abstract

Safaliba is an Indigenous Ghanaian language spoken by 7–9,000 Ghanaians in a nation-state of 29 million people with 73 indigenous languages, none of which are spoken by a majority of Ghanaians. Government schools in Safaliba towns and villages are mandated to utilize Gonja and English instructional reading materials from the Ghana Education Service and the Ministry of Education. Gonja is nothing like Safaliba from a morphosyntactic and semantic point of view, making it difficult for most young Safaliba to learn to read. Recent indigenous activist endeavors have disrupted mandates in two Safaliba primary schools in the largest Safaliba town, Mandari, and have begun teaching children to read in Safaliba. The purpose of this paper is to explore Safaliba community awareness of the grassroots moves to school children in Safaliba reading and writing. The study includes ethnographic data from field notes, photographs and 75 interviews with Safaliba subsistence farming families. Findings present a view of community language awareness for Safaliba literacy in the schools as a positive move. Moreover, the study presents a strong, inspiring snapshot of situated community activism in a language struggling for recognition in Ghana’s postcolonial educational language policy.

摘要

Safaliba是加纳人的土著语言，在9900万加纳人的民族国家中，有2900万人使用73种土著语言，而加纳大多数人都不说。萨法利巴镇和乡村的官立学校受权使用加纳教育服务处和教育部提供的Gonja和英语教学材料。从形态句法和语义学的角度来看，Gonja并不像Safaliba，这使得大多数年轻的Safaliba难以学习阅读。最近的土著激进主义者的努力破坏了萨法利巴最大的城镇曼达里的两所萨法利巴小学的任务规定，并开始教孩子们在萨法利巴读书。本文的目的是探索Safaliba社区对于Safaliba读书和写作中基层上学儿童的意识。该研究包括田野记录中的人种学数据，照片以及对Safaliba自给自足农业家庭的75次访谈。调查结果显示了社区语言对学校中Safaliba扫盲的认识是一项积极举措。此外，该研究以一种在加纳的后殖民时期教育语言政策中难以获得认可的语言来展示了社区激进主义的强大启发性快照。