The aim of this exercise is to raise awareness among participants about power relationships and language use.

Procedure

1. Explain to participants that they will receive a handout with four stories about attitudes towards language. The first story is from a novel by a Nigerian writer, the second concerns the Irish language and the third and fourth are about the languages of Native Americans. The handout below is given and the passages are read aloud.
2. Participants are invited to work in groups of four for 20 minutes. They are asked to read the passages again in the group and to respond to the following questions:
   • What strikes you about these stories and what initial comments would you like to make?
   • What do you see happening in the four passages and why do you think this is happening?
   • Do the passages remind you of any similar experience you or others have had regarding language? Do you see anything like that happening today?
3. When the groups have had a chance to discuss the questions the large group is reconvened and feedback is taken from the groups.
4. Then the question is put:
   • In your own context are there languages which are gaining in strength and languages which are growing weak? Name these languages. How do you account for this?
5. Participants may discuss this in pairs and then share with the large group. It would be useful for the facilitator to record the responses so that the whole group is informed and patterns may be observed.

Time: 1 – 1 1⁄2 hour
Materials: Copy of handout for each participant, flipchart and markers.


HANDOUT – WHOSE LANGUAGE COUNTS

Papa was staring pointedly at Jaja. “Jaja, have you not shared a drink with us, gbo? Have you no words in your mouth?” he asked entirely in Igbo. A bad sign. He hardly spoke Igbo, and although Jaja and I spoke it with Mama at home, he did not like us to speak it in public. We had to sound civilized in public, he told us; we had to speak English.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, (2004) Purple Hibiscus, Fourth Estate: London,

In a work called "A Treatise Containing a Plain and Perfect Description of Ireland" published in 1577 Richard Stanihurst tells a story about a woman in Rome who was possessed by what he called a babbling spirit. This demon-spirit was able to speak all the languages of the world with one exception, Gaeilge (Irish). Stanihurst explains that the Irish language was so coarse, so barbaric, so obscene and so difficult that even the devil was not able to speak it.
Alan Titley (2004) ‘Beir leat do shár Gaeilge!’, Dublin: Coiscéim,

A few years ago, I spent part of a warm afternoon in Tucson, Arizona in conversation with a Native American woman…She had grown up speaking two of the languages of that area, and was just old enough to have attended one of the notorious BIA (Bureau 0f Indian Affairs) boarding schools, which as late as the early 1970s operated a policy of explicit and efficient oppression of Native American languages. She spoke to me of the techniques used in her school to put pressure on the students to abandon the languages they had brought with them from their home communities. Some were brutal and obvious…Others were more subtle – making sure that speakers of the same language had as little opportunity as possible to be together in classrooms and dorms…(and) encouraging traditional animosities among different groups and so on…The message was…you and your community are not good enough for the modern world; we shall remake you in our image.
James McCloskey, (2001) Voices Silenced, Dublin: Cois Life Teoranta, p. 37-38.

In the difference of language today lie two thirds of our troubles…Schools should be established which children should be required to attend; their barbarous dialects should be blotted out and the English language substituted.
1868 United States Federal Commission document about making peace with the Plains Indians.