Examining ethnolinguistic tensions through Family Language Policy among bi-ethnic Nigerian families.

• In Event: Diverse Perspectives on Language Planning and Policies

Proposal

As a post-colonial nation, Nigeria has experienced significant struggles in the aftermath of its colonization. The British invasion and subsequent exploitation left lasting scars across national institutions. In particular, during colonial times, ethnolinguistic groups --Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba--were favored by the British Empire due to their perceived political significance over other ethnolinguistic groups such as Urhobo, lgala, Fulfude to mention a few. This favoritism impacted language dynamics within Nigerian, creating a complex system that involved the devaluation, classification, and reclassification of linguistic groups premised on Western colonial logics. Consequently, the status of languages was affected in ways that influenced the organization of education.



Navigating Nigeria's language policy landscape is challenging due not only to local power dynamics and ethnic tensions resulting from the country’s colonial history but also the impact of globalization through the dominance of the English language discourse in education (National Policy on Education, 2013). For example, Yoruba has emerged as one of the major languages in educational debates. This situation is compounded by English’s influence as a language in education as well as minoritized languages’ rights across educational debates.



To address historical language injustices resulting from colonialism, as well as to soften political tensions across ethnolinguistic groups, the current version of Nigeria’s language policy, as stated in the National Policy on Education (NPE, 2013) sought to recognize the three dominant languages in the country—Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba—by granting their speakers equal status and protection. There are 515 languages in Nigeria with Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo as the major languages after English serving as another official language. The policy stipulates that if any of these main languages serves as the dominant language within a particular territory, it should be used as the language of instruction in the first three years of schooling. Subsequently, the instructional language would be English with an ethnolinguistic group's language taught as a subject apart. While French and Arabic are also taught as subjects from Grade 4 (NPE, 2013), “the policy does not specify what should be done in cases where the local community is bilingual or multilingual” (USAID, 2021, p.6)



This study adopted a decolonial linguistics framework (Makoni et al., 2022)) to center the research within the Nigerian context. Because multilingualism is considered the “norm” in many African nations (Bamgbose, 2022), the complexity of language practices and politics requires researchers to disentangle the forces at play through a more situated approach to multilingualism vis-à-vis seeing citizens’s authority as “sociolinguists” (Rymes, 2020). Specifically, this research focused on Family Language Policy (FLP) in the Nigerian context, as FLP remains an under-explored dimension of language research within Nigerian multilingualism scholarship. FLP involves close attention to the complex interactions and tensions surrounding household language use, thereby affording researchers an intimist view of language as power (Fairclough, 2014).



To date, most research on FLP has focused primarily on migrant contexts in the so-called Global North (Lomeu-Gomes, 2018). Hence, there is a pressing need for envisioning scholarship that can address the unique complexities of FLP in nations considered peripheral to those locations where multilingualism is treated, mainly as exceptional though as banal as it may be. The study of multilingualism employing tools and perspectives from post-colonial nations like Nigeria requires culturally responsive approaches to the specific conditions that shape multilingual discourse in these regions. In response to this need for a more context-sensitive approach to FLP in multilingual sites, this study, part of a longitudinal ethnographic project in Southwestern Nigeria, aims to explore Nigerian bi-ethnic families' language practices raising children bi or multilingually. Specifically, it focuses on three bi-ethnic Yorùbá-Igala families whose language practices demonstrate aspects of national language policy discourse that influence ethnolinguistic identity and national language ideology.



To analyze the bi-ethnic families I studied, I drew from Barakos and Selleck’s (2019) description of “elite multilingualism.” Elite multilingualism represents a globalization trend that places value on the social capital of specific languages. Additionally, I draw on Ruiz's (1984) language as a resource orientation to determine the extent to which Yorùbá-Igala families' practices appear as investments families make to influence their children's language habits, which are also motivated by English's status encouraged in the developmentalist and human-capital framework of the national education policy addressing language in education.



I adopted a community-situated approach to multilingualism study Nigerian FLP whereby knowledge of the three bi-ethnic families' language practices was co-constructed without relying solely on datafication, which is colonial by exploiting human lives through data (Milan & Trere, 2019). That means I also included myself as a participant observer. The families involved in this study were personal acquaintances of mine with whom I shared a friendship lasting over two decades. I visited them twice a week for four hours between November 2022 and January 2023 using my conversations on their decisions around FLP adoptions. I also observed their children’s activities while at home. I also had follow-up visits in the summer of 2023 and virtual conversations weekly.



Findings reveal that FLP is influenced by geographical location and the position a family language occupies within the sphere of national politics—e.g. Yoruba’s status as a prestigious language over other minor languages, given the number of speakers. Parents emphasized languages’ association with ethnolinguistic groups viewed as possessing greater social capital, thus linking heritage discourses to socioeconomic prestige while also being influenced by English as a neoliberal language facilitating access to Western societies’ field of knowledge production. These findings suggest that children's identity formation is subjected to overlapping heritage and economic advantage discourses, which can, and often do, contradict each other.



The findings of this study contribute to the advancement of FLP research in three principal ways, alerting researchers to the enduring presence of coloniality, which according to Mignolo and Walsh (2018) “it is not over but rather all over.” That is, the findings of this study:

Attune researchers to knowledge production's cultural and contextual situatedness, which is more contradictory than expected.

Highlight the interplay between affective and materially oriented connections to heritage language and global English discourses.

Author

• Yetunde S Alabede, Michigan State University