ABSTRACT
In the context of linguistic imperialism in West Africa, this chapter proposes to go beyond two ideological processes: the imposition of French on the one hand, and the invention of language as a discrete entity reinforcing a principle of homogenization and hierarchization aimed at inventing both ethnicities and languages, on the other hand. While this vast process of enregisterment has allowed for control, administration, governance, colonization, and manipulation, it has nonetheless not been entirely successful in Africa. It is then a question of re-founding a sociolinguistics of practices from a perspective based on language heterogeneity without any reference to the notion of “langue” (and all its derivatives like system, dialect, code, and so on). To provincialize the order-of-language, this text aims to considering linguistic imaginaries (Houdebine, 1996) and metadiscursive regimes (Kroskrity, 2000) as they occur at the heart of daily interactions, allows for a processual approach to language practices rather than a categorial one. Thus, starting from African language practices opens a radical rethinking of the ways of approaching language in general.
