Investigating the opportunities and challenges for African languages in public spaces
An introduction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11182227 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rosemary Wildsmith-Cromarty (0000-0002-1770-6873, University of KwaZulu-Natal, corresponding author), Colin Reilly (0000-0001-5236-1041, University of Essex), Seraphin Kamdem (0000-0002-4482-9764, University of London) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 9 |
| Pages | 765-772 |
| Publication date | 2023-10-21 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0143-4632 • E-ISSN: 1747-7557 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/01434632.2023.2222105 |
| OpenAlex | W4382073221 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 29 |
This introduction to the Special Edition provides a rationale for the inclusion of the selected articles. We begin with a consideration of various factors that led to the marginalisation of African languages, including the hegemony of English, colonialism and ensuing language policies that still hold today. Such policies proclaimed languages exogenous to the continent as official languages for formal public discourses, including the education domain. This led to the low visibility of indigenous languages in such domains. European missionaries also contributed to this by imposing Western linguistic frameworks on the continuum of African languages such that they became separate, named and bounded, which is counter-intuitive to the heteroglossic, multilingual realities of language use in African indigenous communities. We then examine the expanding role of African languages in response to technology, social media, globalisation and more responsive and dynamic language policies. The articles in this Special Edition cover language policy and language in education; language and identity negotiation in contexts of migration; language use on social media platforms; language and the workplace and language use in advertising. These contributions reveal that the multilingual reality of Africa’s language ecology is increasingly visible in many domains
Comprehension approach · Foreign language · Hegemony · Indigenous · Indigenous language · Language education · Language industry · Language planning · Language policy · Languages of Africa · Linguistics · Multilingualism · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sociology of language · Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies · Multilingual Education and Policy · Second Language Learning and Teaching
Advertising as a Site of Language Contact
Translanguaging in mobility
Language Planning
Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts
Language Decline and Death in Africa
Pedagogical translanguaging
Chapter 1 Naija
Kwaito's Promise
Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages
Multilingualism in cyberspace
Qur'anic and Ajami literacies in pre-colonial West Africa
Literacy inequalities in theory and practice
Language learning and teaching in South African primary schools
Liliema
Enhancing visibility of local African languages in South Africa through learning to read
Language and employment in Ghana
Translanguaging spaces and multilingual public writing in Zambia
Migrant identities in multilingual contexts
Discourse Strategies (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 1)
Plurilingual Pedagogical Practices in a Policy‐Constrained Context
The Lost Script of the Bagam
Language Ecology in Multilingual Settings. Towards a Theory of Symbolic Competence
Indigenous language capital and development
The only language we speak really well
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |