Texting and African language literacy

Mobile communication has become an important part of everyday life in Senegal, and text messages have turned out to be highly multilingual. So far Senegalese language policy has supported the use of the official language, French, in education and in writing in general, while the majority language, Wolof, has dominated the oral sphere. As SMS texts tend to include use of Wolof and other African languages as well as French, the question is whether texting will pave the way for African language literacy practices. The aim of this article is to study texting’s potential impact on the status of African languages as written languages through the investigation of SMS messages written and received by fifteen students from Dakar. Ethnographic tools have been used to collect text messages in Wolof, Fulfulde and French, as well as English, Spanish and Arabic, and also data on the context of communication and on the writers’ and receivers’ interpretations of the use of different languages. The analysis shows that African languages are given different roles and values in texting, being used in monolingual messages, in functional codeswitching and in mixed code messages.