Language Policy and Implementation in Africa: Panacea for Afrocentrism and Africanity

Abstract

The paper attempts to explore language policy and its implementation as panacea for blurred Afrocentrism and Africanity. The language issues in Africa form a basic content and context in the continent which has many languages, ethics and religions. Thus, many countries in the continent are multilingual, heterogeneous, pluralistic, multicultural, and multi-religious. Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Portugal, colonized Africa, later leaving their respective languages behind in the colonies. By that, African languages had contact with the colonial languages, such as English, French and Portuguese, which remained exogenous which with more prestigious roles and status than African indigenous languages. The foreign and colonial languages continue flourishing in the African soil and characterise the continent as a diglossia community thereby making a majority of Africans victims of backlash, code-mixing, code switching and anomie, and leading to the shift in, loss and death of the African indigenous languages. Without any feeling and act of linguistic nationalism, ethnocentrism and Afrocentrism,  This paper is foregrounded in theoretical and empirical studies on language planning, policy and implementation across four African countries colonised by Britain and France and therefore attempts to provide pragmatic measure for enhancing Afrocentrism and Africanity.