By: Charles Mensah
I did not grow up thinking about language as a development problem. I grew up thinking about language as a school subject you passed or failed.
My MA studies in development communication (including a course on indigenous communication and development) changed my perspective entirely. I kept running into one question I could not dismiss: when we design solutions for our communities, what language are we thinking in? And does the language shape the solutions we arrive at?
The more I sat with the question, the more unsettled I became. Because the answer appears to be yes.
There is a theory in linguistics called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In plain terms, language does not merely express thought. Language shapes thought. The words and structures available to you in a language influence what you notice, what you prioritise and what solutions you reach for. If this holds, then the language of development planning is not neutral. It pre-selects certain solutions before a single community conversation happens.
Ghana operates in a development space where two languages shape professional thinking: English (L2), the acquired language of formal work, and indigenous local languages (L1), the mother tongues of everyday life. The problem is not the existence of both languages. The problem is the cognitive constraints both create, constraints we rarely acknowledge.
THE L2 TRAP
Ghana’s official development discourse happens almost entirely in English. Policy documents, donor reports, programme evaluations, and strategic plans, all in English. On the surface, this looks like practical efficiency. Dig a little deeper, and a more troubling picture emerges.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o understood this long before development practitioners did. In his 1986 book Decolonising the Mind, he argued that the colonial imposition of European languages was not a minor administrative decision. It was the most effective tool of cultural domination. When a people adopt a foreign language as their primary medium of formal thought, they begin to see themselves and their world through that language’s cultural frame.
English is not a neutral container. English carries assumptions. English has a specific history of how problems are defined and how solutions are structured. Concepts like “sustainability,” “civil society,” “governance,” and “beneficiary” are not universal. Western intellectual traditions produced these concepts, and the logic of those traditions lives inside them.
When Ghanaian development professionals engage these concepts in English, they do not borrow vocabulary alone. They often borrow the problem frame. And borrowed problem frames produce borrowed solutions.
Take the concept of “community participation.” In a Western development framework, participation means attendance at meetings, representation in formal decision-making structures and consultation processes with documented minutes. Design a community participation plan in English, and you get exactly that. Design the same process through a lens rooted in local social structures, where authority, obligation, and collective decision-making operate differently, and you get something completely different. One produces a box-ticking exercise. The other produces genuine buy-in.
I have sat in enough project design workshops to know how consistently we default to the first approach. A community faces a specific challenge. The workshop, conducted in English, produces a logical framework with outputs, outcomes and impact indicators. The language shapes the thinking. The thinking produces a plan. The plan looks surprisingly similar to plans produced for communities in other countries with different histories, social structures, and values.
That is not a coincidence.
THE L1 TRAP
At this point, you might expect me to argue the solution is simple: go back to your indigenous language. Think in your mother tongue.
I wish the solution were that straightforward.
Here is what decades of colonial policy and deliberate neglect have done to Ghana’s indigenous languages. They stripped them of their technical registers. They kept them alive in homes, markets and religious spaces but excluded them from classrooms, boardrooms and government offices. The result: most local languages in Ghana lack the vocabulary to engage in technical development conversations.
Try discussing climate finance, project risk management or inclusive policy design in most indigenous languages, and you will hit a wall quickly. You will find yourself switching back to English for technical terms because the words do not yet exist in your mother tongue.
This is not a failure of the language. Languages grow when communities invest in them. English did not always have words for “algorithm” or “carbon offset.” Those words were built because communities decided English needed them. Ghana’s indigenous languages have not received anything close to equivalent investment.
So here is the real problem. Working in English means thinking within a foreign cognitive frame. Switching to an indigenous language means losing the technical vocabulary to think precisely about complex problems. Caught between two incomplete systems, you default to English and lose the cultural depth.
THE BIFURCATED MIND
This split produces a consequence we consistently underestimate.
The most culturally resonant thinking, rooted in local values, social structures, and ways of knowing, happens in indigenous languages. The most technically developed thinking happens in English. These two rarely meet in the same professional space. What we get are development solutions designed with technical rigour but without cultural depth.
They pass the logical framework test. They fail the community acceptance test. Communities do not reject them because the solutions are poorly designed in accordance with international standards. They reject them because the thinking behind the solutions never truly understood how the community sees the world.
When you change the language you think in, you change what solutions become possible.
WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE
I am not arguing that Ghana should abandon English. This position is neither practical nor productive. I am arguing we need to treat the relationship between language and development thinking far more seriously than we currently do.
Three shifts need to happen together.
Education policy must prioritise mother tongue instruction in the early years. Research across multiple countries consistently shows that children who learn to read and think in their first language develop stronger cognitive foundations. Ghana has experimented with mother tongue education policies before. The implementation has been inconsistent and half-hearted. We need to move from inconsistent experimentation to genuine commitment.
We also need to actively develop technical registers in indigenous languages. Linguists, academics, development practitioners, and community knowledge holders need to collaborate to build the vocabulary needed for complex development conversations to take place in local languages. This is not about romanticising the past. This is about equipping our languages for the future.
And development practitioners need to examine the frameworks they import and ask honestly whether those frameworks fit. “Community engagement” in a Western context is not the same as in a Ghanaian context. The words sound identical. The practice differs substantially. Accepting foreign frameworks without scrutiny means accepting their assumptions about how communities work, what progress looks like and who gets to define it.
Open minds do not require borrowed frameworks. Ideas from elsewhere are welcome. Uncritical adoption of them is not.
Ghana does not need to copy anyone’s development model. We need models emerging from our own ways of knowing, social systems, and languages. We have enough capacity in this country to build those models. What we have lacked, for far too long, is the institutional courage to try.
The writer is a Development Communications Consultant
