Guinean Minister of Public Service Cirilo Djaló spoke, representing the holder of the Education portfolio, at the opening of a seminar to present a feasibility study on introducing national languages and Creole in the Guinean education system.
The country’s Guinean government and the UNESCO delegation jointly organize the seminar.
As former Minister of Education, Cirilo Djaló urged the entities involved in the education sector to accelerate efforts to create linguistic standards for Creole and national languages that should be introduced in the school system.
“No country has been able to develop based on an educational system in which teaching is exclusively provided in a language that the majority of the population is ignorant of because lasting development is possible only when accompanied by an educational system in which the beneficiary communities take ownership of it,” Djaló noted.
The Guinean Minister of Public Service noted that Africa currently has as one of its main challenges the problem of the use of national languages in the education system, namely at the level of the mode of use.
Guinea-Bissau, stressed Cirilo Djaló, has no policy for national languages, and status is only reserved for Portuguese, the official language.
“At the legal level, only Portuguese, the official language, has a defined status, being at the same time the language of education at all levels, the language of administration and justice, the language of the written press, and the main language of the audiovisual.”
“However, on the sociological level, despite the great prestige conferred by law, the Portuguese language rests on very narrow social bases,” said the governor of Guinea-Bissau.
Cirilo Djaló also noted that, in the process of acquiring knowledge for students, while the national languages do not have a defined status and the proposed alphabet is yet to be approved, Portuguese ends up being used only in the classroom.
“This communicative function is largely filled by Creole and the other national languages, which paradoxically have no official status and whose proposed alphabet has not been officially recognized so far,” stressed Cirilo Djaló.
With information from Lusa