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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 0-9

The Inventions of African Identities and Languages: The Discursive and Developmental Implications

Author: Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Organisation: Pennsylvania State University
Publish Date: 2006
Country: Africa
Sector: Globalisation
Method: Foresight
Theme: Public Good
Type: Other publication
Language: English
Tags: African languages, Indigenous languages, Colonialism, Postcolonial eras, Multilingualism, African language construction

The essay begins by examining the racial, representational, geographical, and historical conceptions of African identities, then it considers the challenges of conceptualizing African languages in the colonial and post-colonial eras. It interrogates the contestation between the colonial and indigenous languages and their respective capacities to carry the weight of Africa's social thought and modernist dreams, to act as communicative media for African culture and aspirations for scientific and material development. The central argument of the essay is that empowering African languages requires, first and foremost, recognizing and empowering the multiple identities of the speakers of those languages, and breaking the unproductive dichotomies between language use and educational language, indigenous and European languages, and "official" and "vernacular" indigenous languages. Multilingualism is a reality in much of Africa, not simply in terms of the proficiency that many people have in African and European languages, but in terms of the proficiency they have in several African languages in which mixed language forms and code-mixing among these languages characterize communicative practice as people encountering each other from different ethnic, class, and cultural backgrounds seek to create new identities out of their engagements. The processes of creating new identities through old and new languages are etched deep in the historical and cultural landscape of this ancient continent.
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