Dreams and Realities: Developing Countries and the English Language

English and development in Eritrea

Chefena Hailemariam, Sarah Ogbay and Goodith White

Introduction

A number of chapters in this volume (e.g. Williams 2011, Chapter 3 this volume)

reiterate the currently held view of development as encompassing both economic

growth and human development, with economic growth as one means by which

human development can be achieved rather than an end in itself. Djité (2008)

notes that the concept of human development has become progressively wider in

statements made by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and now

includes not only education, health care and good governance, but also issues such

as empowerment, sustainability, co-operation, culture and language, together with a

recognition that human development is concerned not just with individuals but also

with how they interact in communities. Djité points out that: ‘language constitutes

the common thread that links all of these aspects together’ (2008:175). In its 1996

and 2000 reports, the UNDP warned that the imposition of a dominant language

in the name of nation-building could be seen as a culturally repressive form of

development leading to the destruction of other cultures and the favouring of an

elite, and called for a ‘three-language formula’ for multilingual states, which would

allow for mother tongue use in education and government, as well as a national

lingua franca and an international language (UNDP 1996, 2000; see also Laitin 1992).

In Eritrea, this ‘three-language formula’ can be seen in operation, but it appears to

be working in a different way to that described in a number of the other chapters

in this book, and if English is the ‘international language’ in this trilingual system,

its role in development is harder to define in the light of the particular economic

and social conditions in the country. We will argue that in addition to, and in many

cases rather than, fulfilling instrumental needs such as employability, international

collaboration, accessing information and international mobility (Coleman 2010) it

is acting in a more nebulous, less easily described fashion as a channel for global

cultural flows (with their attached values and practices), as a means of lessening

isolation and linking local and diasporic Eritrean communities, and to fulfil future

aspirations as much if not more than current needs. We will argue that the impetus

for learning English is happening more as part of an individually motivated, bottom-

up grass roots movement rather than at a macro governmental level. We will also

show that the connections made by individuals between learning English and their

own development differ from the connections they make between development

and the country of Eritrea. read more