Language Planning and Ideologies in Postcolonial Africa

Abstract

Determining the role of language in the socioeconomic development of the African continent has been ubiquitous in the debate over the language question in postcolonial Africa. This chapter discusses the ideologies that have buttressed policymakers’ thinking about this problem, focusing on the ideology of decolonization (which was expected to emerge through vernacular language education) and the ideology of development grounded in what Blaut refers to as the colonizer’s model of the world (which was expected to emerge through internationalization, the precursor to globalization; The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. Guilford Press, 1993). The main argument in this chapter is that, in postcolonial Africa, attempts to promote the indigenous languages in the higher domains (including the educational system) have failed. Inherited European ideologies, especially the ideology of the nation-state, continue to prevail in the debate over the language question throughout the continent, much as they had in the colonial era. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.