Mozambican police interviews: The interaction between official language and legal pluralism

Abstract

Part 1 | Researching police and asylum investigative interviewing (2013), among all languages spoken in the country (around 20), the most-spoken Bantu languages are Emakhwa (spoken by an estimated 27%) and Shangaan (spoken by 11.3%).If Robinson's criterion is considered, neither language would claim to be the majority language.The relatively high percentage of Emakhwa speakers places Mozambique somewhere in the middle of the scale of linguistic diversity.Despite this, there is no doubt that Mozambique is one of the African countries with high linguistic diversity.Indeed, the latest census held in Mozambique in 2017, despite not being itself a pure language census, suggests that the above percentage of Emakhwa and Shangaan could be higher at the present moment, where the population of Mozambique is estimated at 30,832,244 as for 2021, according to official figures released by the country's National Institute of Statistics. 1 The study adopts a qualitative research design with aspects of a descriptive research methodology.Findings indicate that suspects who adopt linguistic and discourse strategies, such as code-switching and negative transfer from their mother tongue into Portuguese, Mozambique's only official language, are more likely to self-incriminate.Moreover, to resolve conflicts, Mozambican police often adopt methods that are highly influenced by Customary Law techniques.We propose to demonstrate here how aspects of Customary Law could usefully be adopted into Mozambique's judicial system, and more urgently, to show the country's need for a more inclusive language policy, given that more than 90% of the population have an African language as their mother tongue. Language policy in MozambiqueNeither the Mozambican Constitution adopted at independence in 1975, nor its revised 1978 version, provide a clear statement of the country's language policy (Lopes, 1997a).Even the 1990 Constitution and its 2004 (most recently updated) version fail to clarify the role of the Mozambican African languages in terms of language policy.(República De Moçambique, 2004:7; see Appendix for the original Portuguese version).The language issue in the Constitution of the Republic is enshrined as follows: Article 9 (National Languages) The State shall value the national languages as cultural and educational property and shall promote the development and growing use as vehicular languages of our identity.

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