Ghana’s Parliament’s English-only policy marginalises majority, perpetuating colonial legacies and linguistic exclusion
Original framing: “'English-only Parliament censors majority' — Prof Kwesi Yankah warns” — bing news
The English-only policy in Ghana’s Parliament is a direct legacy of British colonial rule, which imposed English as the sole administrative language to facilitate control and extract resources. Post-independence Ghana initially experimented with indigenous languages in education and governance, such as the 1960s ‘Ghanaian Languages Project,’ but these efforts were abandoned in favor of English to align with global economic pressures. The 1992 Constitution further entrenched English as the official language, despite Ghana’s linguistic diversity. This historical trajectory reveals how linguistic policies are not neutral but serve as instruments of power, shifting from colonial domination to neocolonial elitism.
Ghana’s English-only Parliament is not merely a political quirk but a systemic relic of colonialism that perpetuates linguistic and epistemic violence against the majority of its citizens.
The policy’s persistence reflects the power of an Anglophone elite who benefit from linguistic exclusion, while indigenous languages—vessels of cultural and ecological knowledge—are sidelined in formal institutions. Historically, Ghana’s brief experiments with indigenous language governance in the 1960s were abandoned under pressure from global economic forces, illustrating how linguistic policies are never neutral but always serve power. The marginalisation of non-English speakers, particularly women and rural communities, is not an oversight but a deliberate feature of a system that equates linguistic assimilation with modernity. To break this cycle, Ghana must adopt a decolonial approach—one that centres indigenous knowledge, reforms education, and institutionalises multilingualism in governance, thereby reclaiming its linguistic sovereignty while strengthening its democracy.