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Considering heteroglossia in language and development in Sub-Saharan Africa

The research question in this study was to examine how languages in Sub-Saharan Africa could be harnessed for social and economic development. Its theoretical framework is provided by postcolonial theory within a postmodernist analytical framework taking account of historical disjunctures, ambiguities and continuities in postcolonial policy discourse . It also considers their impact on national policy frameworks and the implications for social and economic development during a period of globalization and shifts within the labour process, the emergence of new economic markets and changed labour market needs. The study is underpinned by Bourdieu’s concept of linguistic capital exchange within linguistic markets and is extended to evaluate the validity of the notion of ‘language capital’ in local and international ‘language’ markets. Methodologically it is a conceptual-theoretical study based on critical discourse analysis derived from Foucault’s theory on power/discourse, framed by Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, interpreted here within a sociological framework. The focus is on addressing a concrete social problem: the impact of language policy choices on under-development throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. The study is macro-level, using an inter-disciplinary framework to analyse the complex ways in which languages interact with everyday life, economic development and opportunities. The complex language ecologies of countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa are considered and the emergence of indigenous language markets and their economic potential in cross-border trade. The study examines the creole Langala and the evolution of the sub-cultural code ‘Sheng’ in Kenya, its widespread adoption by the youth, its harnessing by social healthcare agencies and its growing potential as an urban and cross-border trading language. The study argues for the official acknowledgement of ‘Sheng’ and corpus planning in order to harness such subcultural codes popular amongst the youth as a means of facilitating regional development. It was disseminated at a conference at the University of Khartoum, Sudan, 2013.