BRONWEN ROBERTS/YH Sandra Sanneh shows off her collection of African pottery and books.

    Challenges like this one reflect the state of transition in which isiZulu finds itself. At Yale, a total of 15 students from both the College and the School of Graduate Studies are enrolled in the three isiZulu courses—Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced—offered this year. Sandra Sanneh, the senior lector who directs Yale’s Program in African Studies, teaches them all.

    Employing a faculty member specifically for isiZulu makes Yale a leader in the field. When Yale hired her in 1989, she was the only isiZulu professor in the United States to hold a multi-year faculty appointment. She now counts one such colleague: Audry Mbeje, at the University of Pennsylvania. “She has in five years or so become a valued colleague,” Sanneh said. “But until that time I was pretty much on my own.” Most isiZulu instructors in the United States are southern African graduate students, untrained in language education, who receive free tuition from state universities if they teach their native languages. “They might be studying engineering,” Sanneh said. “They’re not in a position to develop materials or to develop grant proposals.”

    With Mbeje and Zoliswa Mali, a linguistics graduate student at the University of Iowa, Sanneh has drafted the first national standards for teaching isiZulu in the United States. The U.S. Department of Education is publishing a volume on isiZulu, Kiswahili, and Yoruba, the three most widely taught African tongues, in a step that closer aligns them to the way most other languages are taught. “It doesn’t narrowly stipulate what you should do in each year,” Sanneh said, “but it lists what students at a particular level should be able to do and it gives sample scenarios.”

    Two weekends ago, as the volume was being edited, Yale hosted a conference for the Northeast Regional Consortium of Programs of African Languages. “A number of universities are looking to us for help in developing programs in African languages,” Sanneh said. Selease Williams, who recently became provost of Southern Connecticut State University and spent time in Sierra Leone, wants her university to start its own program. She and Sanneh are discussing ways to collaborate, perhaps through an interactive website. “We’re looking at the latest technology to see how it can help us,” Sanneh said.

    In her courses, Sanneh uses media technology to supplement traditional teaching methods. Her interactive course website, “IsiZulu Sanamuhla” (cls.yale.edu/zulu), features glossaries and videos with native Zulu speakers. She also incorporates South African media, from TV dramas to newspapers, to keep her students aware of contemporary culture and language. Similarly, Sanneh prefers TAs who are native speakers. This year, however, the graduate student with whom she has been working is studying in England, and there is no one to replace him.

    Students of isiZulu rely on such supplements not only because no isiZulu-English dictionaries are current, but also because few native speakers live nearby. “Learning Zulu is really complicated by the fact that there is no interaction with Zulu speakers or Zulu generally in the United States,” said Dara Young, SM ’07, a student in Sanneh’s advanced course. “You’re not going to hear Zulu on the bus the way you will Spanish,” she said. Young, like Halpert, has spent parts of two summers in South Africa, but she recalled hearing only a few native isiZulu speakers in the U.S.—generally visitors brought in by Sanneh. For this reason, Halpert takes advantage of the cultural materials while in South Africa. “My tendency is just to buy stuff to bring back so I can stay in contact with the culture and the language,” she said.

    Sanneh hopes to give students even better access to isiZulu through a new resource: an updated online dictionary. The primary isiZulu-English dictionary has not been revised since its second edition, in 1958. “Each example of the use of a word is from what a particular king or person actually said,” Sanneh explained, “and that may have been in the 19th century. But if you want to know what a word means when spoken by a 19-year-old today, it’s probably changed.” Halpert concurred: “You get these quaint and archaic definitions,” she said, “and a lot of words that are part of daily life aren’t in there at all.” Words associated with recent events, such as the liberation from apartheid, do not appear at all.

    Thus, with Professor Hlengwa, a retired isiZulu professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, Sanneh plans to write grant proposals to create a comprehensive online Nguni dictionary. Nguni tongues are one of two main kinds of southern African languages, and they include isiZulu, isiXhosa, Siswati and siNdebele, languages roughly as alike as Portuguese and Spanish. “But currently it’s difficult to see the similarities, because there is no dictionary,” Sanneh said. Even the current isiZulu dictionary (isizulu.net) is basic and limited. A new dictionary would benefit speakers in both West and South Africa, where university students, many of them English-speakers, also learn isiZulu as a second language.

    This online dictionary is one way that Sanneh, through language, educates Yalies about a culture distinct from their own. Similar to French students learning about Paris through song, isiZulu classes learn about southern African propriety through ukuhlonipha, the linguistic code of etiquette. “Linguistic etiquette is a very big part of the Zulu culture,” Sanneh said. “There is a whole alternative lexicon of language of respect which must be used by junior members of the community.”

    Her efforts have been successful. This summer, she directed Yale’s Fulbright-Hays isiZulu summer program in South Africa, where her students used lessons learned from class. While traveling, they stopped at a gas station and entered the convenience store. The cashier, an isiZulu speaker, asked Sanneh how her American students knew to be so polite: they had received the things he passed them with the right hand, the left hand holding the rest, and they had thanked him in a full sentence. “Those were tiny things,” Sanneh said, “but they were immediately noticeable.”

    As with language programs such as Arabic, whose instructors have gathered a kind of cult following, the isiZulu program instills in students a sense of community extending beyond the classroom. “Since starting Zulu, my interest in South Africa has only grown,” Young said. “I’m writing my senior essay on South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s,” a project that she won a Bates Scholarship to research this past summer. Taking isiZulu has introduced her to the sub-group of Yalies who are interested in Africa. “Very few people take African studies courses and even fewer take African languages,” she said. “So it feels like most of us know each other. At a school as big as Yale, its nice to find a group of people who share a real interest with you.”