Your language doesn’t go far

Night literacy class in Ghana, photo courtesy of Paul Federwitz

A Christian from a smaller ethnic group in northern Ghana told me that he told the district pastor of his church that he was enrolled in a literacy class in his language. The pastor responded that what he was doing was useless because he could not go far with his small language. If he traveled even a short distance he would quickly be outside the area where the language is spoken, so it would not serve him any more. According to the pastor, he was leaning a skill with very limited range.

Any psychologist will tell you that a person only learns to read once. Its just like math – if you learn it in any language, you know it. The skill of reading can be transferred to any language with much less time and effort than learning the skill in the first place. So enrolling in a literacy class in any language will give a person a skill they can use in any other language. Being able to read will go a long way, even if the language won’t. So the pastor was focusing on the wrong thing – language instead of literacy.

Woman teaching literacy class

Besides, it is the end that matters not the start. A primary school education cannot take you far, but you cannot get more education without it. It would be silly to think that primary school education is worthless for those who get high school diploma’s and university degrees. Literacy in a small language might not get you far in one sense, but in another it can be the start of something that goes a long ways. Tens of thousands of primary school dropouts in Ghana have gone to literacy classes in their small languages, gained skills, then returned to school with success becoming nurses, teachers, pastors and even a university lecturer!

In addition, there are tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians who have had their lives transformed through reading the Bible in their languages, even though they never went to school. That wouldn’t have happened if they had not enrolled in a literacy class in their small language. Then there are the many Ghanaians who would never have even considered the claims of Christ and the Gospel except they enrolled in a literacy class and then read the Bible in their language.

But the pastor’s point about the language is true. The language is only used in one small part of Ghana which is an even smaller part of the world. The usefulness of a language over large geographic areas is important for commerce, politics, etc. Nevertheless, the pastor has another problem. His own language, while many times larger than the smaller language, is a very small language by world standards. Yet he reads the Bible in his language because people who speak a really important language like English or German came to Ghana and did not think his language too small or trivial to translate the Bible and teach people to read. They did not dismiss his language as one that wouldn’t take people far.

It turns out that people often think that languages smaller than theirs are too small to be worth it but their own language is worth it. An ethnocentric viewpoint like that does not square with God’s own sense of mission. He could have easily dismissed us because being human doesn’t take you far in this universe.