Un observatoire du plurilinguisme pour le développement de l’enseignement bi-plurilingue en Afrique

International audience In Francophone Africa, French is usually the sole language of education. African languages are sometimes taught bilingually with French but the number of students concerned remains very low. African languages are often the subjects of linguistic and cultural teachings, but they are almost never vehicular languages. French is highly valued by school and society and at the same time it is criticized for its colonial origin and its educational monopoly. In this text, we shall first discuss the current linguistic situation and the alternative sometimes proposed of replacing French with majority languages. We shall then defend a bi-multilingual French / African mother tongue education and we shall quickly review the issues and difficulties that it will inevitably generate. One of the essential problems is that of terminological neology: African languages will have to accommodate thousands of words that will profoundly modify them. But the lexical transfer must also be done the other way round from African languages towards French, otherwise there will be whole sections of African culture which will be difficult to speak of in French. The most plausible demographic projections predict eight hundred million to one billion French speakers within thirty years, with an overwhelming domination of Africans. A sound bi-multilingual language policy could help create a culturally rich and diverse Africa-centered Francophonie.