ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with identity, language planning, policy and implementation in Africa. It seeks to create an important understanding of the historical, sociopolitical and economic context within which government agencies and other stakeholder bodies have taken language planning into account when developing economic and development policies within the contemporary global reality. The chapter also examines the role of African national and local governments in contributing to such language planning and economic growth through service delivery in languages that the populace understands and that best reinforce identities. The challenge as posited in the chapter and elsewhere is how the people find ways of creating a mutually inclusive linguistic environment where African languages can prosper together with English, thereby creating a market-driven bottom-up approach to language planning. It is important to create economic functions for African languages so they can be used in the mainstream, whether in a bank loan application process or for the purposes of trading.
