An Afrocentric Approach To Language Planning

Abstract

Afrocentrism, as an ideology committed to the liberation of African people from the destructive grips of the West, involves the displacement of the European mode of thinking and being, and its replacement by concepts, attitudes, and behaviors in tune with African values and the ultimate interest of African people. Asante (1990), who deals more specifically with Africalogy, the implications of Afrocentrism for research on African people, suggests that it is necessary to abandon ethnocentric and racist systems of logic and, therefore, to place the undiscussed in the center of discourse (p. 140; italics added). The present article seeks to contribute to the Afrocentric debate by raising some usually unaddressed but nonetheless critical issues for African people within the particular academic discipline of linguistics. I will deal more specifically with planning, a subfield of sociolinguistics. My focus on that particular field is dictated in great part by the relationship between planning studies and the so-called Third World. Indeed, planning studies developed in the 1960s as a result of the emergence of new states in Africa and elsewhere. Its aims were to address what was seen as the language problems of developing nations (Fishman, Ferguson, & Das Gupta 1968). Language planning itself, however, was simply the more recent application to the domain of of techniques and practices of social control intricately linked to the rise of Western modernity (Escobar, 1992, p. 132). Two of the major assumptions of such activities are that human beings and nature are tools that can be