Linguistic situation of Francophone African countries:
the case of Senegal
Since independence in the 1960s, African states have struggled to develop their economy. However, because of the repeated failures of their projects and strategies in the ...
Linguistic situation of Francophone African countries:
the case of Senegal
Since independence in the 1960s, African states have struggled to develop their economy. However, because of the repeated failures of their projects and strategies in the field, they have difficulty, even to this day, to establish a solid foundation for sustainable development that would improve the living conditions of their populations. Also, the language problem in Africa is one of the fundamental obstacles that hinder these states' development efforts.
As is well known, the difficulties associated with languages in Africa are mainly due to the gap between official language policies and public language practices. The European colonial language stands as the only legitimate medium for governmental communication and school education, while indigenous languages are mother tongues for most of the African population. Therefore, neither the European language nor aboriginal languages do not ensure fluid communication at the national level, which means that the majority of local speakers remain outside the political, administrative and economic arenas of their country.
In order to achieve sustainable development, each Francophone African country needs a language policy that allows indigenous languages to function as a vehicle for social and cultural communication, maintaining French as a second language for inter-African and international communication. Such a policy, which implements a complementary "partnership" between French and African languages, would ensure a balanced and harmonious coexistence of these languages.
It is from this perspective that I intend to examine the sociolinguistic situation of Senegal from the eve of independence to the present day, and discuss related issues as well as the desired orientations of the language policy.
In the first chapter of this work, I carry out a general description of Senegal's sociolinguistic landscape to set the context for the discussion that followed. Here are approached, around the notions of "official language", "national language" and "indigenous language", the situation of language use in Senegal and the linguistic consciousness of Senegalese speakers.
In the second chapter, I trace the evolution of Senegal's linguistic policies from the 1950's to the present through the three successive periods of government and analyze their respective sociolinguistic contexts. I am also interested here in the activities and works of different NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and civil societies that replace the State in the field of promoting literacy and national languages.
Finally, in the third and last chapter, I attempt to evaluate, by looking into census data, the evolution and current state of the French-speaking population as well as the quality of French language education in Senegal. I then analyze the lexical, syntactic and phonetic-phonological features that characterize Senegalese French, before offering some thoughts on the future of French in Senegal.