Literacy and Multilingualism in Africa (original) (raw)

A sufficient review of literacy and multilingualism in their full complexity in a continent as immensely and densely diverse as Africa is simply unachievable within the scope of an encyclopedic article if it were not for the relative marginality of Africa in global scholarship. With the exception of South Africa, Africa is not at the forefront of discussions in socio-and educational linguistics. This marginality, however, is greatly undeserved: African sociolinguistic realities are among the world's most complex and there is much to gain if it could inform literacy and multilingualism research more generally. In fact, this peripherality has recently been a productive source for a radical revision of some of the metropolitan epistemologies about multilingualism and literacy. Literacy and multilingualism in Africa does not form a unified field of research and is approached here rather as a field of practice. As such this field presents a K. Juffermans (*) Faculté des Lettres, des Sciences Humaines, des Arts et des Sciences de l'Education,