Publicação
A reflection on the umbundu corpus planning for the Angolan Education System: towards the harmonization of the Catholic and the Protestant orthographies
| Resumo: | In Angola, the government has been trying to implement the teaching of autochthonous languages into the education system. The problem this research work seeks to explain in this context is that Umbundu, a native language of Angola, is written in various main standard orthographies: the Catholic Standard Orthography (hereafter, CSO), the Protestant Standard Orthography (hereafter, PSO), the Jehovah Witnesses Standard Orthography (hereafter, JWSO) and the State Standard Orthography (hereafter, SSO). Two important questions to the problem of this research were considered. The first one is ‘What factors have been behind the appearance of various orthographic systems for Umbundu?’ The second is ‘How to harmonize the orthographic systems of Umbundu so that they can respond to the need to write it in simpler and ameliorated ways resulting from consensus of the users?’ To answer the questions above two hypotheses were proposed. The first is that the encoders, having not all been, neither language specialists nor Umbundu native speakers, took advantages of their political and social positions in the colonial epoch and decided to encode the language according to the intellectual capabilities that they had. The second hypothesis is that by exploring the maximum out the various orthographical systems of the world – containing graphs which lack in the Portuguese alphabet – the Umbundu writing system could be made more apt for the needs of the education system. In order to collect the necessary data for the study, a triangulation approach was considered, so that a questionnaire for teachers/trainers and another for members of churches and common users of Umbundu were used. On the other hand, a documents analysis exercise was carried out focusing on the texts from the bibles, on excerpts of the Umbundu coursebook used in State schools and on samples of the translations of the respondents. In general, the research has concluded that, on the one hand, the Umbundu orthography is made of different standards, mainly according to each religious group and, on the other hand, the State has proposed a relatively different orthography without training teachers to use it, making most of these professionals teach Umbundu according to their religious tradition. The general suggestion is to involve language related specialists, language grassroots and governmental agents and get them work out an orthography that represents the harmonization of the Umbundu orthography for the education system. |
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| Autores principais: | Jimbi, Botelho Isalino |
| Assunto: | Corpus planning Education system Harmonization Language planning Umbundu orthography Planificação de corpus Sistema de educação Harmonização Planificação linguística Ortografia do Umbundu Humanidades::Línguas e Literaturas |
| Ano: | 2023 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | tese de doutoramento |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade do Minho |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho |
| Resumo: | In Angola, the government has been trying to implement the teaching of autochthonous languages into the education system. The problem this research work seeks to explain in this context is that Umbundu, a native language of Angola, is written in various main standard orthographies: the Catholic Standard Orthography (hereafter, CSO), the Protestant Standard Orthography (hereafter, PSO), the Jehovah Witnesses Standard Orthography (hereafter, JWSO) and the State Standard Orthography (hereafter, SSO). Two important questions to the problem of this research were considered. The first one is ‘What factors have been behind the appearance of various orthographic systems for Umbundu?’ The second is ‘How to harmonize the orthographic systems of Umbundu so that they can respond to the need to write it in simpler and ameliorated ways resulting from consensus of the users?’ To answer the questions above two hypotheses were proposed. The first is that the encoders, having not all been, neither language specialists nor Umbundu native speakers, took advantages of their political and social positions in the colonial epoch and decided to encode the language according to the intellectual capabilities that they had. The second hypothesis is that by exploring the maximum out the various orthographical systems of the world – containing graphs which lack in the Portuguese alphabet – the Umbundu writing system could be made more apt for the needs of the education system. In order to collect the necessary data for the study, a triangulation approach was considered, so that a questionnaire for teachers/trainers and another for members of churches and common users of Umbundu were used. On the other hand, a documents analysis exercise was carried out focusing on the texts from the bibles, on excerpts of the Umbundu coursebook used in State schools and on samples of the translations of the respondents. In general, the research has concluded that, on the one hand, the Umbundu orthography is made of different standards, mainly according to each religious group and, on the other hand, the State has proposed a relatively different orthography without training teachers to use it, making most of these professionals teach Umbundu according to their religious tradition. The general suggestion is to involve language related specialists, language grassroots and governmental agents and get them work out an orthography that represents the harmonization of the Umbundu orthography for the education system. |
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