Language Endangerment and the Challenging Issue of Multilingual Education in Sub-Saharan Africa

While it is true that by the end of this century the world will have lost most of the more than 7000 languages spoken today, it is also true that Africa will be one of the regions most affected by this phenomenon. Most African languages are still only passed on orally, and their survival seems to be a utopia. In recent years, the preservation and promotion of national languages and cultures has been enshrined in many African constitutions. This is reflected in some cases in the tentative introduction of experimental curricula in elementary schools in which a number of national languages have been proposed as the Medium of Instruction (MoI) together with the de jure and/or de facto official language(s) of the country (e.g., Burkina Faso, Mali, Kenya, and Nigeria). Although this concatenation of determinants seems reasonable and welcome from a theoretical point of view, the aim of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive overview of the current status quo, examining some experiments and trying to understand their impact on the preservation of small, unwritten languages. It will be discussed whether and how the integration of national languages into the formal education system is really the right way to go if the goal is to slow down the decline and possible death of African minority languages in the near future.