Africa: challenges of multilingualism

The book presents a collection of papers in English, French and German, which touch on a wide variety of cultural, political, and educational ramifications of multilingualism in Africa. Apart from the general introduction, all contributions stem from African scholars representing their inside perspective on matters. The contributions refer to sociolinguistic situations primarily in Benin, Kenya, Mali, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan and Togo. They deal with aspects of language contact and language change, language empowerment and protection of linguistic diversity, linguistic landscape and language legitimization, regional integration, HIV/AIDS communication, and language issues in education from primary to tertiary level. A special sub-focus is on the teaching of foreign languages such as German in Africa. The book contains 12 contributions in English, three in French, and two in German.