African Englishes and Multilingualism for the Transformative Development of Postcolonial Africa

This open access edited volume brings together a team of linguists to explore how indigenized varieties of English and multilingualism interact with the holistic transformation of Africa. Contributors discuss the transformative development vision for Africa with a focus on ex-colonial languages, indigenized varieties and indigenous mother tongues. In doing so, they explore linguistic evolution and developments towards endonormativity, investigate the correlation between the Africanisation of English and transformative development, the indiginization of medical terminology in HIV/AIDS consultations, the interactions of Romance languages with local English varieties, and resonances between decolonizing multilingualisms in Singapore and Africa.

Going beyond traditional emphases on economic and industrial progress, the authors gathered here ultimately develop new analytical frameworks that align with African realities and priorities and ultimately promote the decolonisation of the African minds, which remains a work in progress.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Aloysius Ngefac is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Yaounde I, Cameroon. He is the founder and general coordinator of TRANG (Transformative Research and Networking Group). He has published several books related to his research interests in sociolinguistics, world Englishes, postcolonial pragmatics, creolistics, transformative research, and transformative development.

Gratien Atindogbe is Professor of African Linguistics at the University of Buea, Cameroon. He obtained his PhD from the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research includes phonology, language planning, language acquisition and sociolinguistics.

Paul Zang Zang is Professor of French linguistics at the University of Yaounde I, Cameroon. He has published widely on the contribution of linguistics to the emergence of nation-states in Africa. He is coordinator of the Ifacam projects (Inventory of lexical particularities of French in Cameroon) and one of the pioneers of studies on spoken French in Cameroon.

Thorsten Brato is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Regensburg and the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research interests include structural nativization in Ghanaian English, phonological acquisition of English as a second language in Cameroon, diachronic World Englishes, and English in West Africa.

Jakob R. E. Leimgruber is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Regensburg, Germany. His research interests include world Englishes, language planning and policy, sociolinguistics, and phonetics.