Bari as an endangered language in the capital city of its homeland
Presenter(s)
Affiliation
Topic
Bottom-up and top-down language policy and planning
Type
Papers
Abstract
This paper will discuss the ecological status of Bari, an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in Central Equatoria State in South Sudan by about 1 million people, particularly in Juba, the capital of the country, which has a population of about half a million people today. Juba was traditionally a small Bari village, but during the civil wars in fought in Sudan in 1956-72 and 1983-2003 between the Arab government of Khartoum and the Africans of the south, Juba was one of the few areas which the Khartoum government continuously controlled as it carried out a program of systemic genocide against the African populations of the hinterlands, which ultimately killed about 2 million people, and as a result large numbers of African refugees moved to Juba to seek safety, including many who did not speak Bari. As things developed, a creolized form of Arabic known as Juba Arabic became the everyday languages of the streets in Juba, used by not only non-Baris but also an increasing number of Baris. Thus Bari became endangered in the capital city of its homeland (and the capital of South Sudan, which became independent in 2011), a situation parallel to that of Catalan in Barcelona, French in Montreal, and Luganda in Uganda during and after the Idi Amin regime (see e.g. Mather 2014, Soler and Erdocia 2016). Since 2011, I have been traveling to Juba once or twice a year to work on language development projects with indigenous NGOS focused on Bari and a number of other languages, more than 20 trips altogether, and I have observed and discussed the ecological situation of Bari there at length with local language activists. In my presentation I will report on my experience working with the Baris, particularly with regard to top-down and bottom-up approaches to revitalizing their language.
