States of Languages and Languages of States: Natural and Unnatural Language Spread in West Africa

African states are notoriously multilingual. Few states have actively rationalized language within their borders. ‘Neutral’ European languages have not penetrated widely. This linguistic diversity is widely seen to have a negative impact on economic growth and democracy across the continent. It is assumed that citizens are thus blocked from communicating and participating – connecting with each other and with government – while governments are less able to project power and engage with their citizens. This should therefore inhibit the deepening of democracy. And yet many African languages have spread. Some have spread far beyond the borders of a single state, becoming regional lingua francas, some have spread widely within their home state, becoming a common language among citizens, while others have remained tightly associated with their ethnic core. Probing general patterns for these distinctions, I group them into ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ advantages for languages. Natural advantages would be association with an urban center, location at an ecological divide or trade crossroads, and surrounding of smooth terrain. Unnatural advantages would be spread through war, significant use as an educational medium in areas outside the home region and colonial boundaries wider than an ethnic core. I have chosen two clusters of states in West Africa within which to look at how natural and unnatural factors contribute to language spread and containment (Cluster 1 is Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Western Mali and Cluster 2 is Ghana, Togo, Benin, Western Nigeria).Within these clusters, one can see large languages that have spread across country boundaries (Hausa), those that have spread widely within a single state (Wolof), and those that have remained relatively closely tied to an ethnic ‘core’ (Akan). We generally only have anecdotal or impressionistic notions about the spread of certain languages, but few comparable sources of data. I rely on three sources to obtain a more reliable spread variable: First is Ethnologue, which provides for many smaller languages information regarding whether its speakers are proficient in other languages, whether their languages are vigorous or being replaced by another. Second are country census documents, which often ask respondents their proficiency in first and second languages. Third is the Afrobarometer Survey (2008), which asks respondents the languages they speak well. These sources can be used to physically map the spread of languages within the clusters. My own prior research gives me information on the historical use of these languages as media of instruction, and other scholars have detailed colonial boundaries in West Africa as well providing measures of ecological distinctions and roughness of terrain.This paper is an initial foray into a new project assessing the causes of language spread. Unlike most treatments of language in politics, it is not concerned with the ease of governance or the morality of language preservation. It is more curious about the assumption that governments actually wish to play a strong role in language governance. The goal of the paper therefore is three-fold: 1) to begin to map and assign causal priority to the variables affecting language spread; 2) to claim the weakness of education in relation to other variables; and 3) to offer some reasons for this weakness that go beyond simply criticizing African school systems – in fact to assert that their ‘failure’ may a itself be a deliberate choice on the part of self-serving governments.