The Challenges of Language Standardization: The Case of Gamo
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Date
2018-01
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Article 3.5.1of The Education and Training Policy (1994) of the Federal Democratic Republic
Government of Ethiopia has granted citizens with legal policy grounds to use their native
languages as mediums of primary education. This legal initiative has resulted in the introduction
of many local languages to education and other official settings. The placement of the languages
into the new domains has created opportunities to develop and standardize them. Gamo is one of
the languages, which, due to such policy changes, has received orthography and is introduced as
a medium of instruction in schools. This research tried to investigate the social challenges faced
in the standardization process of the Gamo language. It argues that as a language newly
introduced into different domains, Gamo has to be standardized to fulfill the newly assigned
social roles. There is a pressing need to establish a standard language that fits the attitudes and
demands of the Gamo society. A standard language of Gamo would effectively play various
social roles if the users participate in the standardization process by forwarding their views in
different settings. So far, we do not have sufficient information about the social attitudes and
needs towards the standardization of Gamo. The research, hence, endeavored to fill in this gap by
providing valuable data about the real attitudes and needs of speakers of the language at the
grassroots level.
The research tried to address the following questions; which dialect is used as a base for the
standard norm of Gamo and what criteria determined the selection? What are the main
challenges that the standardization process encountered? How do the norm selection decisions
interplay with the actual social needs and attitudes of the speakers towards Gamo and its
standardization? And, how can Gamo be standardized best? In order to find answers to these
questions, the research adopted a mixed data collection method and employed questionnaire,
interviews, focus group discussions and document analysis. The findings revealed that “the
standard form of Gamo” was mainly based on the Dache dialect, which is one of the dialect
variants of the language spoken by the majority of the population. Other dialects like Kucha,
Ochollo and Dorze, also shared with Dache most of the words collected from the standard
language, but the Ganta dialect shared only a quarter of the words analyzed. The majority of the
respondents had positive attitude towards Dache to serve as a standard Gamo. They believed that
Dache can serve best as a base to the standard norm since it is spoken and understood by the
majority of the society identified as ethnically Gamo, and can keep social unity and integration.
However, there was a strong interest reflected by many participants of different dialect speakers
to see some features of their respective dialects accommodated in the standard Gamo. In fact,
some morphological and lexical features of those dialects were rarely used in the texts analyzed
so far, but that did not please the users since the inclusion was very random and lacks
consistency of application, i.e the dialect features were often replaced by the standard forms. On
the other hand, the majority of the participants’ conviction, from the five dialect groups, was that
words from Ganta cannot be included in the present standard Gamo. There was a concern that if
features from divergent dialects are included in the standard form, the written norm might result
in confusion and misunderstanding for others in communication. The degree of dialectal
variation, procedures followed to standardize the language, and attitudes held towards using
Gamo in wider public settings were considered to be the major challenges of standardization in
Gamo.
Based on the findings, the research concluded that the norm selection technique followed in the
standardization of Gamo was monocentric. The study considers that the adoption of a polycentric
multidialectal approach in the establishment of standard Gamo is one of the basic factors to
achieve successful language standardization. Particular features of Kucha, Ochollo and Dorze,
and other dialects not included in this study as well, should be studied further and should be
introduced progressively into the written form to be part of the standard norm of Gamo. On the
other hand, trying to entirely mix Ganta with standard Gamo is impossible due to the prevailing
linguistic Gap and may pose a new challenge to norm acceptance. Instead, pending the
development of an independent standard to divergent dialects of Gamo, selected words of Ganta
can be introduced into the current standard. That makes the standard norm impartial to the
speakers and may enable the respective Ganta dialect speakers to develop a sense of ownership
of the language of education.
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Keywords
Language Standardization