Every real nation has a national language. Such a language gives citizens a sense of identity and cohesion.
Like a thread woven back and forth in different directions, it ties the nation tightly together, giving it strength.
Liberia stands naked before the world as a would-be nation without a national language. It lacks a clear and thoughtful language policy.
This gives the country a brittle fragility that was made worse by decades of war.
Like a street-corner drunk, the country is left staggering between three poles: First, there are a multitude of indigenous languages, none of which is spoken by 50 percent or more of Liberians.
Second, there is standard English, which is touted as the official language but used effectively by very few.
Third, there is Kolokwa or Liberian English, a lingua franca that is the most widely spoken. It employs words derived from many languages, including English, but using a non-English grammar.
Despite Kolokwa’s national scope, it has never received the serious consideration it deserves from policy makers or scholars. Why? Liberian English violates some of their pursuit of “purity,” it threatens their power, and it rankles their emotions.
Some Liberian intellectuals reject Kolokwa precisely because it is a pidgin or creole language, born out of the melding of many into one.
These ethnic fundamentalists feel overwhelmed by the inexorable expansion of this “bastard” tongue.
They sit pining for a linguistic purity that never existed, while offering no solution to the nation’s current language conundrum.
Meanwhile, nationalists in other societies long ago embraced local lingua francas as national tongues, including Swahili in East Africa, patois in Jamaica and Krio in neighboring “Salone.”
The first Liberian political party that tackles this issue in its platform is likely to win an outpouring of support from Kolokwa speakers.
Although rarely stated in public, a more visceral reason why many educated Liberians reject Liberian English stems from its association with urban slum dwellers.
For the over one million poor people pushed into Monrovia by the war, Kolokwa functions as a “mother tongue,” or their principal, if not only, medium of regular communication.
This is in contrast to rural villagers, who can retreat into an ethnic language when not in the marketplace, and educated Liberians, who use Standard English at home.
Acknowledging the close association between one’s primary language and class status, some uneducated slum dwellers now refer to themselves as “Kolokwadians.”
Viewed objectively, Kolokwa is the one true national language. It is spoken in all large towns across the country, so it is national in scope.
It is national also given its spicy blending of terms from various other languages.
More important still, it is the only medium through which people of various regions and classes are able to communicate with each other.
The Liberian government’s treatment of Kolokwa today is like a well-to-do parent who refuses to legitimize a child born out of wedlock. Neither the child’s existence nor its strong resemblance to the father can be erased simply by withholding legal recognition.
Withholding recognition from Kolokwa does nothing to strengthen the official status of Standard English. Instead, it leads Liberians to treat Standard English and Kolokwa as the same language or as points along a continuum, when the two are distinct languages.
In the absence of a language policy, what prevails in Liberia is a state of linguistic anarchy: On the one hand, Kolokwa-speakers are hired to teach Standard English in schools. On the other hand, literacy skills are unavailable in Liberian English, the majority language.
A sensible language policy would enshrine Liberian English as the national language. Along with such recognition, resources need to be allocated for studying the language, codifying it, and developing a standard way of writing it.
This should be followed by a literacy campaign aimed at teaching adult speakers how to write it.
Kolokwa could be elevated without in anyway demeaning Standard English. English could retain its status as the official language for classroom instruction, as well as government record-keeping and international articulation.
Teaching adults how to write a language they speak is cheaper, faster and more efficient than trying to teach them to write a language they don’t speak, like Standard English.
Having the grammar and vocabulary of Kolokwa codified will also make it infinitely easier to teach Standard English.
Classroom language teachers would be able to lead students systematically from their known language (Kolokwa) to the unknown one (Standard English).
That can be achieved by highlighting differences between Kolokwa and Standard English, thus, making learning easier and clearer.
The payoffs would be many and powerful. Literate adults will be able to record their financial transactions and creative ideas.
They also will immediately gain the ability to communicate with relatives, friends and business contacts across the country. This would release tremendous human synergies that currently remain dormant, pent-up and untapped.
In addition, being able to write transforms people’s lives in ways that are powerful yet hard to measure.
For example, adults who are literate in Kolokwa will be less inclined to dismiss “book people” and education as useless.
By experiencing the power of literacy themselves, they will gain a deeper respect for literacy in standard English and the power it holds to unlock for their children even more doors beyond the boundaries of Liberia.
If Liberia continues without a language policy, it will be because wise and prudent people have chosen to do nothing. Instead of decrying the failure of politicians to solve national problems, it is past time for creative thinkers to promote sensible policies without running for office.
Together, let us reclaim Liberia for our children and their children’s children. Among those empowered with Kolokwa literacy skills are Liberia’s many equivalents of Amos Tutuola (Nigerian pidgin novelist) or Bob Marley (Jamaican patois songwriter).
C. Patrick Burrowes, Ph. D. is the author of Between the Kola Forest and the Salty Sea: A History of the Liberian People Before 1800. The book, which took 30 years to research, is available from www.knowyourself.press