The Contribution of the Bantu Mother Languages to Tanzanian Socio-economic Development through Media

Abstract

The study of mother language has been given much attention on the extent of which the language can be used as language of instruction in schools Qooro (2003); Simire (2004); and Rubagumya (1996) just to mention but a few. The concern relating to various aspect of mother language such as mother language in Socio-economic development through media has not well explained. This paper intends to discuss the contribution of Bantu Mother Language to Tanzanian socioeconomic development through media. The objective of this paper was to show the extent of which media can use mother language to catalyze the social and economical issues in Tanzania. This study was guided by The Exploratory approach by Thornborrow (1998) as the theoretical framework. The study was a qualitative using several ethnic community languages that we refer as a Bantu Languages as the case study. There are only few countries in Africa, such as Tanzania, Ethiopia, Somalia and most of the Arabic speaking countries, which opted to develop their indigenous linguae francae to serve as national languages. If we consider the case of Tanzania, Ethiopia and Egypt, Kiswahili, Amharic and Arabic respectively, have been used as languages of education, trade and commerce. Both focus group and interview will be used as tools for data collection. The findings of this reveal that helpful in building a case to the language planner and policy maker on the necessity of officially allowing the use of mother language in broadcasting to the localities. Unless mother language is used in Radio Stations and other media, the socio-economic development in Tanzanian rural will be far from reality.