Use and Teaching of English in Kenya

The Use and Teaching of English in Kenya

One cannot consider Kenya as an essentially monolingual society in which English is learned as a second language. ESL (English-as-a-Second-Language) is more likely to be ETL (English-as-a-Third-Language) or even EFL (English-as-a-Fourth-Language).

There are more than 70 tribal groups in Kenya. The 11 largest ones comprise 92% of the total African population. Sixty-six percent speak one or the other of the Bantu languages (Kikuyu, Kemba, Meru, Gusii, Lubya, Mijikenda) in the Central and Western regions; 15% speak a Niholitic language (Luo, Masai, Kalengin, Turkane) in the Western and North-Western regions; and 3% speak a Cushistic language (essentially, Somali) in the North-Eastern region. Of these 11 groups, the Kikuyu and Luo are the most numerous. Altogether, about 75 languages are spoken in Kenya.

In order to communicate among themselves, Kenyans and other East African peoples (such as the Tanzanians) have adopted a lingua franca (called by some "nobody's language"), viz. Kiswahili (a.k.a. Swahili). Kiswahili is essentially a Bantu language which contains an enormous Arabic vocabulary as well as some Portuguese, Hindi, and English loanwords. It is the language of trade, newspapers, and courts--to the extent that English is not used. It is taught as a second language in the schools. In 1971, Kiswahili became the only official language of Kenya (as it already was in neighboring Tanzania). At independence (1963), English h

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ons and of diphtongination on the phonemic and some intrusive vowels (i's in consonant clusters or nasals before phonics) and the syllable-timed rhythm (with few weak forms) on the supraphonemic level are most obvious features" (Schmied, 1990). "On the lexical level we find some East Africanisms, mainly loan words from Kiswahili, in common use, although their number is certainly limited (about 100)... Syntactic features are least noticeable on the morpho-syntactic sides which compare to British Standard English, the omissions of articles, different categorisation of count or non-count nouns, generalisation of question tags ('isn't it?), and redundant pronouns (in subject and relative functions)" (Schmied, 1990). "Specific discourse features can also be considered. Some 'ritual greetings', with an extensive use of 'How are you?', seem to reflect African languages (and of course culture) more than English, whereas other forms reflect rather formal, and even biblical, styles from the old colonial and missionary school tradition in East Africa" (Schmied, 1990). In Kenya, the differences among language groups are very striking. Yet, there is rather good cross-cultural intelligibility of East African English--a greater problem fo

Category: Foreign - U