Senegal: The Emergence of a National Lingua Franca

Abstract In addressing the relationship between language and national identity in the African context I take the term national identity to have two different meanings: the first of these is a population’s relationship and sense of belonging to a nation-state, and the second is the identity of an individual nation-state within the international world order. Based on the first meaning, Senegal can best be described as a predominantly Wolof-speaking nation, while on the international scene it is a francophone state. The African nation-state is in itself a relatively recent phenomenon, dating in most cases from the early 1960s when African colonies were granted independence from European colonial powers. Clearly, contemporary African states did not grow out of pre-existing indigenous political structures: their boundaries are artefacts of rivalries and negotiations between the European powers who eventually exerted political and economic hegemony over their respective colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.