Metaglossia: The Translation World

On connaissait les poupées « ethniques » aux traits afros, comme la Barbie noire de Mattel. Plus fort, une entreprise britannique propose des poupées qui parlent des langues africaines. L’idée, permettre aux enfants de conserver un lien avec leur culture d’origine, via le langage.

Elle s’appelle Ama et parle le twi, le ga, l’ewe et le krobo, langues parlées au Ghana. Sa mission ? Initier les enfants, à partir de trois ans, aux langues de leurs parents.

L’argument se veut pédagogique. Selon le quotidien britannique The Guardian, Chris Chidi Ngoforo, le fondateur de la société Rooti Creations, à l’origine des poupées, aurait eu l’idée de ces jouets en voyant l’incapacité de ses filles à parler l’igbo, sa langue maternelle, parlée au Nigeria. Rooti Creations affirme en effet que la plupart des enfants issus de la diaspora africaine ne parlent ou ne comprennent pas leur langue maternelle et qu’ils seraient également nombreux dans ce cas-là en Afrique. D’où l’idée de cet outil éducatif.

« Comment vas-tu ? »

Pour autant, pas de quoi prétendre, bien sûr, faire des enfants d’authentiques petits bilingues. Avec des phrases comme « Comment vas-tu ? », « Je vais bien, merci », le niveau de vocabulaire reste basique. Néanmoins, les poupées proposent plusieurs langues d’un même pays et divers pays sont représentés, comme le Ghana, le Kenya, l’Afrique du Sud ou encore le Nigeria.

Au-delà de l’aspect didactique, l’idée est aussi, toujours selon la firme, de donner une image qui se veut plus réaliste de la beauté noire, auxquelles les petites filles africaines peuvent plus facilement s’identifier. Comme l’avance l’entreprise, « (nos poupées) ont des nez plus larges, des lèvres plus pulpeuses, de longs cheveux bouclés et elles existent dans différentes variations de noir. »

Les poupées sont actuellement proposées à plusieurs magasins du Royaume-Uni et d’Afrique. Et les responsables sont en discussion avec des fournisseurs pour s’implanter sur le marché français.

Abake Adenle is a quantitative analyst who lived alternatively between the US and Nigeria whilst growing up. Now based in London, Adenle has developed a mobile app, SpeakYoruba, aimed at teaching children of the African diaspora the West African Yoruba language.
How we made it in Africa asked Adenle about the African diaspora, the Yoruba language, and the steady inclusion of African languages in the ICT arena.
How did the idea for SpeakYoruba come about?
I came up with SpeakYoruba primarily as a way to help my young nieces and nephews develop basic Yoruba language skills. Having grown up in the States learning Yoruba from my parents I understand the difficulties of learning a language ‘out of context’. Watching them grow up in the diaspora, I wanted to create something that would remove the ‘work’ from learning Yoruba. I wanted to develop an app that was educational and visually stimulating and that makes the Yoruba language engaging, accessible and fun.

NIGERIAN DEVELOPER CREATES APP THAT TEACHES YORUBA LANGUAGE
August 22, 2012 · by supersanusi · in News
Nigerian based mobile content developing company Aja.la have just let us now about their new iOs app SpeakYoruba. Like the name implies, SpeakYoruba’s aim is to teach users how to speak the yoruba language in a fun, non-intrusive way. The app which teaches words and phrases via flash cards and puzzles.

Here are pictures of the app and a demo video:

My May 13, 2012 column titled "The Arabic origins of common Yoruba words" elicited interesting reactions. These reactions can be categorized into three: outrage that I dare suggest that Arabic has any influence on the Yoruba language, claims that the presence of Arabic words in Yoruba is linguistic evidence of the age-old myth that the ancestral provenance of Yoruba people is actually traceable to the Middle East, and contestations of the accuracy of the Arabic etymology of some of the Yoruba words my article highlighted.

The first reaction isn't worthy of a serious response because it is inspired by visceral, knee-jerk, and pity-inspiring ignorance. Every living, progressive language in the world borrows from other languages. Any language that stops borrowing will sooner or later die. That's an enduring truth about languages. Borrowing isn't suggestive of weakness; it's mere linguistic self-preservation. After all, English, the world's most widely spoken language, is also the world's greatest beneficiary of loan words from other languages.

As for the suggestion that the presence of swaths of Arabic words in Yoruba is indicative of the Middle Eastern origins of Yoruba people, nothing could be more ridiculous than that. First, for historical reasons, Arabic loan words started to appear in Yoruba only from about the 15th century at the peak of the Trans- Saharan Trade. Before then, there was no shred of linguistic evidence that Arabic and Yoruba had had any relationship.

Second, the Middle Eastern myths of origin that most Nigerian ethnic groups cherish about themselves are basically nineteenth-century fictions that British colonialists helped to popularize in order to create collective identities among our disparate ethnic and linguistic groups. Like all myths of origin, they have no basis in truth.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, 45, says Yoruba is the most popular African language for Wikipedia, with 29,000 pages. The Swahili Wikipedia version is second among African languages with 23,000.