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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: D27a-01. To panel D27a.

Title of paper:

Author:

Abisoye Eleshin (University of Lagos).

Long abstract paper:
It is without any doubt that most African Languages, in the precolonial period were not more utilized orally. It was the coming of the colonialists that facilitated the reduction of African languages to written form. Although, various African colonial governments made some attempts to codify some African languages through the institutionalisation and development of their orthographies as well as the codification of the languages, yet, the colonial languages were given a much higher official status. As such, colonial languages were used for documentations of official and religious correspondences. In Nigeria in general, and among the Yoruba in particular, English was employed to facilitate all forms of diplomatic transactions. The consequence of this has seen the incapacitation of Yoruba in the area of speaker-ship and usage in diverse fields, especially in the different academic fora. Following this background, this study is an attempt at creating models for the reconfiguration and strengthening of African languages in order to be able to meet up with the demand and present realities of African studies. Suggestions on how to achieve this includes terminology development in various academic study areas; introducing models and strategies of translation, and especially machine translation; elevating the status of the languages and revisiting their codification processes. This study will enable the reflexivity of African languages in line with the culture and general worldview of the African people, which the foreign language has been struggling to achieve. It is expected that the outcome of this attempt could proffer solutions to some of the epistemology and semantic issues facing African studies.

Keywords: Codification, Orthographies, Models, Reconfiguration, Terminology Development.

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