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Mauritius Headlines |
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AllAfrica News: Mauritius
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All Africa, All the Time. |
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23 Lions Called to Camp
Some 23 players of the national football team have been called to camp in preparation for the upcoming encounter against the Mauritius Island next September 4.
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The First Hundred Days - Different Viewpoints, Different Perceptions
This week, our guests have been invited to comment on the first hundred days of the new government. One of them sees it as "forlorn and in sulky mood", another uses a nice sporting metaphor to introduce a hymn of praise for it. The others fall somewhere in between... and even add a touch of humour to the debate.
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Euro Crisis - Funding Private Deficits with Public Money
When Finance minister, Pravind Jugnauth, called a press conference Friday last to announce an Economic Restructuring and Competitiveness Programme (ERCP), he took everybody by surprise. The press, the opposition, the export processing sector, the tourist industry, the SMEs and the opposition were taken by surprise by this Rs 12 billion stimulus package, the third of its type since the recession broke loose, followed by the euro crisis.
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L'Express of Mauritus |
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Lexpress.mu
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Lexpress.mu : politique, économie, tourisme, société, sports, culture, événements. Egalement des interviews, analyses, forums vous offrant la possibilité de réagir à l’actualité. |
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BBC News |
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BBC News - World
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The latest stories from the World section of the BBC News web site. |
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05-Sep-2010
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Home
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Club M indoor sports activities are now CLOSED for the Summer.
It has been an exciting and a very successful year 2009/2010 for us at Club M. We would like to thank all our members and friends for your support and help.
Without you, there will be no Club M!
Have a great summer! See you in Fall 2010.
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THEY’RE SPEAKING OUR LANGUAGES |
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THEY’RE SPEAKING OUR LANGUAGES
PEOPLE IN MAURITIUS ARE USED TO A MIX OF CULTURES, AND MANY SEE CANADA AS A BILINGUALISM MODEL
3 Jan 2010
The Montreal Gazette
THEY’RE SPEAKING OUR LANGUAGES
BY LORRAINE MALLINDER, FREELANCE
PEOPLE IN MAURITIUS ARE USED TO A MIX OF CULTURES, AND MANY SEE CANADA AS A BILINGUALISM MODEL
It’s a paradise of azure lagoons, swaying sugar cane fields and dramatic mountain formations that has survived the tumult of colonization by two of the world’s biggest language rivals – France and Britain – to emerge with a linguistic dexterity so natural it seems effortless.
Yet, modest at heart, the tiny island nation of Mauritius shrugs it off.
Daniella Police-Michel, a professor of French at the University of Mauritius, says the multilingual, multicultural nation wants to follow the Canadian model of bilingualism. “Why would you want to do that?” I ask. I can’t help it. Ever since I immigrated to Canada (for the bilingualism), I’ve kind of noticed that language is a vexed issue.
But rather than wading into the quagmire that is Bill 101, let’s get back to Mauritius.
The Indian Ocean island was put on the map last year when novelist JeanMarie Gustave Le Clézio, a francophone with joint French and Mauritian citizenship, won the Nobel Prize for literature.
On receiving his honour, he paid homage to his “petite patrie,” the land of his ancestors, where he had spent part of his childhood.
“Mauritius is a small, independent nation which receives no subsidies for French culture and which, despite this, is fighting for the survival of the French language,” he said.
He was right in most respects, except for the bit about the fighting. It’s just not the Mauritian way.
Theirs is a tolerant and cosmopolitan outlook, which has enabled not only French and English but a host of other tongues to thrive. Examples include French-derived Creole, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Arabic and Cantonese, to name a few.
The island’s sociolinguistic makeup is complex, a result of successive waves of immigration from Europe, Africa, China and the Indian subcontinent. The island’s 1.3 million citizens speak Creole, a spicy concoction of 18th-century French and African languages spoken by the early slave population, and use French and English in formal contexts.
Indo-and SinoMauritians, who make up 68 per cent and three per cent of the population, respectively, have also brought their ancestral languages into the mix.
Fresh off the boat from the north of Scotland in the 1980s, I was in for a shock. My first impression of my classmates at Loreto Rose Hill, a convent school in the middle of the island, was that they all seemed to be unnaturally talented.
In Scotland, my French lessons consisted of leaden attempts to order croissants and chocolat chaud from a bored classmate pretending to be a waiter. At the age of 14, these essentially francophone Mauritian kids were studying Shakespeare.
I should have known. My mum, who had grown up in Mauritius, spoke perfect English, French, Creole and two dialects of Chinese – Hakka and Cantonese.
In the small town of Nairn, in the Scottish Highlands, where we’d lived before moving back to her homeland, she might as well have been a Martian. Mauritius, as it turned out, was full of Martians.
The vast majority of Mauritians are educated in English at state-funded schools, a legacy of a century-and-a-half of British rule that preceded independence in the late 1960s.
In my day, we studied mathematics, geography, science and the like from prim, old-school textbooks. Reading those tomes was to be transported to a distant era of received pronunciation and high standards.
But, once in the school yard, my new friends would gab away to each other in Creole. The strange words pronounced in thickly coated accents would bubble in my overheated head: ban dimoune (people – from the French “du monde”), guette li (look at him – from the French verb “guetter”) and asterla (now – from “ŕ cette heure”). I imagined meanings that mostly turned out to be wrong.
Sometimes, they would turn on the sophistication, switching to French whenever a bit of formality or class was called for – conversations with teachers and other parents and flirtations with prospective boyfriends fell into this category.
My classmates Diana and Marjorie furtively read jauntily named magazines like Jeune et Jolie and French translations of Canadian Harlequin books held at an angle under their desks. My intellectual pal Audrey devoured the French classics.
This attachment to the language of Moličre was – and still is – nurtured by the media and the entertainment industry. Today, 90 per cent of the national print, Web and broadcast media in Mauritius are in French, says Annabelle Arekion, in charge of francophone affairs at the Ministry of Culture. Consumption of domestic media is supplemented with broadcasts piped in from neighbouring Réunion Island, a French department. Back in the ’80s, we received the rodent-eating-alien series V – dubbed into French.
As if all this wasn’t enough, many would speak their ancestral languages at home, which they sometimes had the option of learning at school. I was offered the choice of Hindi or German as an additional language.
Anxious not to muddle myself at a time when I was grappling with French and Creole, I thought I might be safer sticking with a European language, a choice I now regret. German declensions were the last thing I needed. Hindi could have proven an unlikely but interesting choice.
Students these days are actively encouraged to take up languages that aren’t in their cultural makeup. It’s all part of a growing campaign to build on the island’s multilingual culture, ensuring that languages like Mandarin and Hindi, spoken in the world’s emerging economies, are accessible to a broader public, Police-Michel says.
Embracing the trend, Arekion, a Catholic Creole, is sending her primary school age daughter to Hindi lessons.
Now, the purists among you may fear all this might lead to total chaos, or at least the prospect of speaking many languages badly. It’s true that, a couple of years after my arrival as a monolingual Scot, I spoke terrible German. But my French and Creole were pretty decent.
Maybe it was Madame Lew’s thorough explanations of quadratic functions and simultaneous equations in French and English; she would flip from one to the other while furiously scribbling numbers and symbols on the board. Her lessons were vigorous exercises in mental gymnastics.
Or it could well have been Madame Jankoo’s rather explicit warnings about things we shouldn’t be doing with boys – all in French, as there was no textbook, with the earthier explanations in Creole. It all seemed far too spicy to miss. I made sure I got translations from my pals after class.
In any case, by the time I left Mauritius at age 16, I’d acquired an aptitude that would remain with me for life.
Taking the easy option, I went on to study interpreting and translation. Later, I worked as a journalist in Brussels, the tongue-tied European capital with its own jargon-laden lingo adapted to the European Union’s 23 official languages. I met lots of talented linguists, but I always remembered the place where it had all begun for me, where multilingualism came as naturally as breathing.
Mauritius has a history of remarkably peaceful co-existence among its cultures, but the handover from French to British rule, followed by the transition to independence, has inevitably caused some ripples over the decades.
If the French language still exists there today, it is partly because of British guarantees that remaining French colonizers would be able to retain their customs. But, as Police-Michel recounts, the French colonizers never gave up trying to re-establish a more official status for their language.
All of this was drowned out in the clamour for independence, spearheaded by the Hindu bourgeoisie in the 1950s. The Hindus – the island’s majority ethnic group, made up of Hindi, Bhojpuri, Tamil and Telugu speakers – effectively took over the administrative roles that had been played by the British, continuing to conduct the business of government in English and to maintain a predominantly anglophone education system.
There’s now a sense, however, that French needs to be given more of an official role, one that would reflect its importance in wider society.
It is here that Canada serves as a model. Police-Michel speaks of a growing interest in dismantling the compartmentalized bilingualism that has maintained English as the language of officialdom. Her ministry has recently begun offering modules in administrative French to public servants in the aim of redressing the balance.
Conversely, Bernard Saminaden, a French-language journalist with the Mauritian daily L’Express, argues that English should be given more of a cultural role. Children should be encouraged to read and speak more English outside school, he says.
“French will always be spoken,” he said. “Now, there’s an awareness that English needs more of a place.
“It’s not a fight. It’s a question of mastering another language that can be a passport to the outside world.”
However Mauritius balances out the mix, it will probably be with the same flair and elegance that have characterized its linguistic journey thus far.
As Saminaden said: “The strength of Mauritius is its tolerance, its ability to take whatever is good from all cultures. We are not dogmatic types who want to reject the cultures of old Europe.”
It’s a bittersweet notion that the very attributes that have created this state of linguistic grace are fuelling a growing diaspora to Europe and North America.
Mauritians’ ability to absorb different languages and cultures makes it easier for them to adapt to other countries, says Steve Juganaden, vice-president of the Montrealbased Association Québec Île Maurice, an expatriates’ group.
“We are open to the world,” he said. “Neighbours celebrate together, whatever their culture.”
From Montreal Gazette published on Jan 3, 2010
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.com features news,analyses,and roundups of events in and about Africa
The Angolan government has adopted a series of measures to restrict the import of a number of products with a view to protecting and boo s ting national production, the minister of State and Chief of Staff at the presid e ncy, Carlos Feije, said on Friday.
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Mauritius Trip - Holiday in the Gorgeous Country of South East Asia
Mauritius is gorgeous. Mauritius is fascinating. Mauritius is enchanting. Yes this beautiful country situated in the South Eastern Part of Asia is one of the most beautiful holidaying destinations visited by tourists from all the nook and corner of the world.
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AFCON 2012 Qualifiers: Cameroona s Benoit Assou-Ekotto Likely To...
Cameroon defender Benoit Assou-Ekotto, who has been reported ill after the arrival of the Indomitable Lions in Port Louis ahead of the Africa Cup of Nations qualifier against Mauritius, is feeling better and could feature on Saturday, according Boubakary Sidiki, a member of the team's medical staff.
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Coming Events |
17-Oct-2010: Annual General Meeting
Dec-2010: Xmas Party
31-Dec-2010: New Year’s Eve Party
12-Mar-2011: Republic Day Celebration
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