LILIEMA: a sustainable educational programme promoting African languages and multilingualism according to the social realities of speakers and writers

ABSTRACT

In recent (socio)linguistic research there is a growing awareness that rural, small-scale multilingualism as the most widespread communicative setting across the globe. Yet, literacy programmes accepting and incorporating this diversity are non-existent. LILIEMA is a unique educational programme currently based in Senegal that addresses the need for enabling learners to use their entire repertoire, nurturing, and validating local knowledges and sustainable multilingualism. This article focuses on the participatory methodologies at the heart of LILIEMA (Language-independent literacies for inclusive education in multilingual areas), born from a collaboration between professional linguists and local teachers, transcribers, research assistants and community members. We explore how the cultural knowledge of local participants and ethnographic and qualitative sociolinguistic data jointly contributes to our thick understanding of the social environment for literacy and how it can make African languages and multilingualism more visible. Furthermore, used methods allow to describe fluid and potentially ambivalent multilingual speech events based on different perspectives motivating choices both in terms of languages ideologies and linguistic practice. LILIEMA pursues the objectives to support and enhance the use of (multilingual) literacy, strengthens languages and linguistic awareness and fosters self-confidence in all sectors of life by creating innovative spaces for small and locally confined languages.

KEYWORDS:

• Small-scale multilingualism
• Senegal
• inclusive literacy
• linguistic repertoire
• linguistic awareness

Notes

1 Primary ethnic and linguistic identity are generally based on patrilineal descent. However, knowledge of the affiliated culture and/or language are not an absolute necessity (see also Weidl 2018, 303).

2 Language names are given in their English versions but names do vary widely in local interpretations and appellations.

3 For more information on our Covid-19 campaign see https://liliema.com/liliema-covid-19-campaign/.

4 These projects were the VW Foundation DoBeS grant project “Pots, plants and people – a documentation of Baïnounk knowledges systems” led by author Friederike Lüpke, with Alexander Cobbinah, as PhD researchers and an ELDP pilot grant and AHRC doctoral fellowship held by Rachel Watson. Both later joined Crossroads project “At the Crossroads – investigating the unexplored side of multilingualism” funded by the Leverhulme trust and led by Friederike Lüpke. Author Miriam Weidl joined the research team at the beginning of the Crossroads project. In these projects, the European researchers worked with transcribers and community researchers, among them the authors or the present paper Alpha Mané, the former president of the LILIEMA association who sadly deceased in 2021, and Jérémi Sagna.

5 Joola languages are mutually intelligible to different degrees, the allocation of speakers or lexemes to one Joola language is often a matter of scale and perspective.