The Swedish Ambassador Staffan Herrström on Saturday 21 February attended as a Guest of Honour the celebrations of the International Mother Language Day at the University of Dar es Salaam. At the event seventeen books were being launched as a result of over eight years of Swedish support to the Languages of Tanzania project, as part of the larger research cooperation support to the University of Dar es Salaam
- I am proud that Sweden is a partner to this project, both as a contributor of own research results as well as in its funding capacity through Sida, said Ambassador Staffan Herrström.
- The preservation of Tanzania’s linguistic resources is part of our common endeavour to preserve our cultural heritage. Languages represent people’s struggles to manage the environment; they encapsulate the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the community, and act as vehicles in the continuous search for knowledge, said Ambassador Staffan Herrström.
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Background
Since UNESCO proclaimed the International Mother Tongue Day in 1999 to celebrate language diversity and multilingualism, it has become clear that languages, which form part of the identity of individuals and peoples, are key to the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals. The Embassy of Sweden has joined initiatives by committed scholars of the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) to preserve Tanzania’s rich linguistic heritage. Languages represent people’s struggles to manage the environment; they encapsulate the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the community, and act as vehicles in the continuous search for knowledge. A large number of national languages (L1s) other than Swahili are widely used as media of communication, especially in rural areas. Many of these L1s are small and just spoken by a few thousands.
The Tanzanian government acknowledges the linguistic diversity of the country and refers to this heritage in the 1997 Culture Policy document (“Sera ya Utamaduni”) which urges and encourages people and institutions to write in, collect [material for], study and protect L1s, translate from these languages into others, and to produce grammatical descriptions (vitabu vya sarufi) and dictionaries.
The project “Languages of Tanzania” (LoT) was born eight years ago in response to the world-wide concern about the loss of many languages and to the 1997 “Sera ya Utamaduni”. It has been implemented by linguistic scholars at UDSM in cooperation with Swedish colleagues from the University of Gothenburg and funded by Sida. The project has produced important publications including the trilingual dictionaries and wordlists that take stock of the lexical inventory of Tanzanian languages and supplemented by Swahili and English equivalents. For the first time a comprehensive linguistic atlas (launched February 21) records the distribution of all Tanzanian L1s and the spread of Swahili. A particular output is the documentation of the Vidunda, an earlier unwritten language spoken by approx. 10,000 people in Kilosa District.
For further details about the LoT project see:http://www.african.gu.se/research/lot.htmlhttp://www.lot.udsm.ac.tz/