Israel Houghton is ‘Spot On’: English is a Local Ghanaian Language

I am writing today's issue from Cantonments, where I am spending the weekend in the house of a Minister of State. It is not an extraordinary place; I think I can afford to build a house like that in Kasoa or Oyibi or Swedru. Well, a house is not just brick and mortar put together with shiny roofing at the top; the location of a house determines its value and price, and sometimes the quality of the individuals who occupy it. The kids in this Cantonments house do not speak any local language. Actually, they cannot speak any Ghanaian language at all; not even Ga, their mother tongue. Their father speaks almost all the major Ghanaian Languages, including Ga, Twi, Bono, Fante, Hausa and a bit of Dagaare. The lingua franca in the house is the English language. The parents speak to the kids in English, but between mum and dad, it is either Fante or Ga, and in most cases a masterful combination of both languages interspersed with English.

If a child born to two Ghanaian parents in Ghana cannot speak any of his country's many local languages, what do we call such a kid? He hears people around him speak various languages which are unintelligible to him. The only language he knows is the English language, and that is his medium of instruction. That, perhaps, makes English his local language. When you instruct him in Ga or Fante to come for ice cream, he does not show any signs of incomprehension at all. In less than three minutes, he would feign total unintelligibility when you instruct him in the same local mediums to put the computer off and go to bed. In fact, sometimes they are quite convincing in their denial of the linguistic reality around them.

It is not only modern Ghanaian kids who are living this linguistic pretense; their parents are the biggest culprits. We are used to deploying the English language as the most appropriate tool for official communication purposes. It is the language of international commerce, global diplomacy and the international press, especially in the English speaking parts of the world. We have taken advantage of the utilitarian and open door policy of the language to make it even more useful in situations where the local languages are deemed 'inadequate'. So we are also quick to tag our Ghanaian languages as local while English remains our official language. Often, we make efforts to achieve great proficiency in English than in any of our local languages.

Foreigner language experts find the multicultural and multilingual milieu of Ghana very interesting. They admire our ability to code-switch between languages, even though they find our newspapers terrible, especially the poor English we write. The most recent foreigner to comment on our language situation is one of America's Gospel sensations-Israel Houghton. In one of the interviews he granted a radio station during his visit to Ghana for the Adom Praiz Gospel concert, Mr. Houghton shocked his interviewer when he declared that English is a Ghanaian local language.

The journalist had asked the musician if he could speak any Ghanaian language, whereupon the American dignified his question with a revelation that woke some of us from a long slumber. We would not like to visit the old debate of the merits of making one of our local languages a national language. Many experts have argued that it would not change anything. Others provide that it will unite us and also help us do a few things better, especially we also take practical steps to make that local language the medium of instruction in basic schools up to a high level. Not many of us have thought about the local position of the English language. To many of us, English is foreign.

Like many other children, the kids in this beautiful Cantonments house do not think English is a local language, even though it is the first language that comes 'natively' on their lips, in the same way that Fante and Ga come to their parents–naturally. And frankly, are we bothered that our kids are not able to speak our local languages? We are happy that they are proficient in English and are able to correct us when we mispronounce some English words. My kids still laugh at my pronunciation of 'cucumber' and 'hippopotamus.' When they make high grades in English, we congratulate them and sometimes buy them gifts to encourage them. Who really cares if a child gets a low grade in Twi or Ga at the end of the term?

If English is a local language in Ghana, then we are doing a terrible job with it. Let's be honest: most of us struggle with our register and parallelism, and sometimes basic things like the parts of speech. Some of our students are not sure which form of the verb to use when they are confronted with a sentence that ends with an objective pronoun or a collective noun. If it is true that local radio stations have more patronage and listenership than those who broadcast only in English, then it sends us back to the drawing table to work on a few things. On the other hand, if Mr. Houghton had meant to question our preference for English, when Twi and Ga and Ewe are the languages that come naturally to us, then the American may have succeeded.

Mr. Houghton may have also exposed another irony in our efforts to localise the English language. The truth is that while English may be 'local' to us, we admire Mr. Houghton's 'foreign' way of speaking the English language. The result is the laughable acquisition of what has come to be called LAFA (Locally Acquired Foreign Accent or FALA (Foreign Acquired Local Accent). Canadians laugh at my forced 'African British' accent. In England, I had been asked where I got my strange accent from. In Ghana, I sometimes speak like a ventriloquist, trying hard not to mispronounce certain common words. Whenever a man sounds like another, he is neither natural nor local; he is lost.

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin
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