At the same time that many African colonies became independent nation-states in the 1950s and 1960s, a new discipline that reconceptualized language as social practice emerged in the US. I will argue in my talk that the two processes were meaningfully connected, and in ways that neither sociolinguists nor historians of decolonization have yet accounted for.
As hitherto colonized territories became independent, fundamental questions about the relationship between language and society emerged together with the pressing need to manage language use in government, education, media, and other areas of public life of these new states. This opportunity electrified scholars from various disciplines who used the perceived “language problems” in Africa both to advance theoretical and empirical work that helped a new discipline emerge and to offer policy-oriented advice that was intended to help Africans build politically cohesive and economically prosperous nation-states. My talk places the emergence of sociolinguistics and its subfield of language planning after 1945 in the triangular global context of the Cold War, decolonization, and development thinking.
Zooming in on one of the first conferences held by the US-based and Ford Foundation-funded Committee on Sociolinguistics in 1966 and the publication of its proceedings in 1968 (“Language Problems of Developing Nations”), my talk at the same time wants to make a broader argument for the importance of language within global history – a field of research where language both as an object of study and as lens of analysis has been intriguingly absent.
Christoph Kalter, Professor of History at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, is the author of The Discovery of the Third World. Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950-1976 (Cambridge UP, 2016), and of Postcolonial People. The Return from Africa and the Remaking of Portugal (Cambridge UP, 2022). He is currently working on a project tentatively entitled Building Nations, Making Worlds, Creating Subjects: European Languages in Postcolonial Africa, ca. 1955-1980.
