Linguistic Policy in Africa: The Colonial Past to the Global Future

Abstract

Since the emergence of nation states, language has played an important role in the construction the nations. As Ernest Renan said (1997), were it not for the power of the state to segregate, select and sort, the national community would hardly exist. If the state is the realization of the future of the nation, it was also a condition for the existence of one. The state uses national language as a tool to exercise its power, including symbolic power, when faced withmany conflicts and negotiations. Our goal is to analyze language policy in African countries, after the independence process in the 1960s, and especially to discuss the choice of European languages as official in new nations. How-ever, in this analysis we cannot forget the vast ethnic and linguistic diversity ofthe continent, in a increasingly globalized world, where english, especially due to its economic bias, has emerged as a global language.