A Study Of Medium-of-Instruction Policies In South Africa, Nigeria And Tanzania From The Perspective Of Language Conflict

Nearly half a century after the independence of the African continent, the trauma of colonization is still haunting this land. Most Sub-Saharan African countries are linguistically mosaic and have inherited the language hierarchy from the colonial period. Under the influence of the ideology of monolingual state-building, relationships between former colonizers’languages and indigenous African languages are locked in conflicts, especially in education. There the medium-of-instruction policy is still perpetuating the opposition and inequality among language groups. Previous literature, domestic and overseas, hasn’t treated this disharmony from in terms of conflict, thus lacking systematic analysis of linguistic facts. A careful examination of the question suggests a theoretical framework of language conflict. It consists of five elements:structure, dimensions, types, functions and regulation mechanism. The framework can show clearly that the medium-of-instruction policy can both soften and sharpen the relevant conflicts, revealing their practical and theoretical underpinnings.After a sociological analysis of the language problems in South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania, this study elaborates how their elites reinforce their privileged status by means of policy-making and dugs up the dialectical relationship between language policy and language conflict. Based on the panoramic presentation of the history of medium-of-instruction policies of these three countries, this study concludes that politicization of languages, colonization of mind, elite-model education and internationalization of language choice are the driving forces behind current language conflicts in African countries. The key to the regulation of language conflict is to set up a strategy that aims at increasing the empowering capacity of indigenous languages, by reversing the negative language attitude plays a key role. Furthermore, medium-term and long-term language planning and fully practicable language policies are also indispensable. To put it briefly, the combination of official intervention and individual practices seems to point a way for those conflict-harassed African countries.In conclusion, the potential disparity between exogenous and indigenous languages is fundamentally a manifestation of the unequal world order that accordingly creates the global language system in which the postcolonial African countries are unfairly treated. This study has a fresh perspective in topic selection, analysis perspective, theory construction, findings and implications and intends to narrow the research gap in the studies of language conflict and language policy, in the hope of serving some help to that end.