Director of MSU’s African Studies Center James Pritchett welcomes students to MSU’s 2010 Summer Cooperative African Language Institute, or SCALI, Sunday night at the International Center. SCALI is an eight-week international program directed toward learning African languages.
(Editor’s note: The headline of this story has been changed to accurately reflect that languages, not dialects, were the subject of the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute.)
Professors and students from across the country gathered Sunday evening at the International Center for a welcoming reception to the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute, or SCALI, which is being hosted by MSU this year.
The SCALI program is an eight-week educational language course that combines class time with extracurricular activities, which aim to immerse the student in the language and culture of an African area, director of the MSU African Students Center James Pritchett said.
Currently in its 18th year and second rotation at MSU, the course rotates around the country to approved universities for a four-year period. Each class studies one of 15 African languages, which can help students learn linguistics of a community and understand the communication styles between the people in that community, Pritchett said.
“It’s not an accident that the words communication and community have the same Latin root, ‘communitas,’” he said. “What is a community if it’s not people who talk to one another, speak the same language? I don’t think you could study a community unless you get to the communications part.”
With several languages as part of the program, professors have been put in training rooms for days at a time to certify the languages they are teaching, Pritchett said.
University of Wisconsin teaching assistant Kazeem Sanuth is from Nigeria, and will be teaching his native language of Yoruba to students in the 2010 SCALI program. Sanuth said the program helps students establish a global perspective of the world, and helps them to understand the language and how to function with that language in different areas than their own.
“One of the ways to really get into the heart of any culture is by speaking the language,” Sanuth said. “There is no language without culture. There is no culture without language. It means that the ability to understand and accommodate to other people’s culture.”
MSU alumnus Cody Perkins studied Swahili throughout his undergraduate years, and is currently studying Afrikaans. Perkins is hoping to finish the program and then conduct studies and interviews in Capetown, South Africa.
“This program is really great for a number of reasons, first it offers languages that most universities don’t,” he said. “I’m able to meet other graduate students and professors from around the country, it’s good to see what other type of work is going on in the field.”
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