https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1013-2221
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ABSTRACT
The challenge of ‘linguistic imperialism’ prevails in Africa, perhaps to a greater extent than in other non-Anglophone areas, because African countries are often plurilingual and pluricultural. By default and design, English becomes a lingua franca. This scoping review investigates the use of languages other than English in open-access academic publications originating from Africa. The review quantifies the use of African languages in academic publications from 2010 to 2020. Four African databases are surveyed: African Index Medicus, African Journal Archive, African Journals Online and SABINET Open Access. A total of 670 journals were scoped. This article finds that only fifty-seven journals allow publication in languages other than English. From these journals, between 2010 and 2020, only twenty-six articles appeared in an African language. The Google Scholar site reports the highest citation for articles written in the aforementioned African languages is one.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Availability of data and materials
The datasets used and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
Notes
1 Sabinet was established in 1998 to showcase African journal content online. Sabinet was the forerunner to The African Journal Archive (AJA), launched in 2010. It is a repository of journals from Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Journals included in AJA adhere to internationally accepted accreditation and peer review standards. Sabinet Online and AJA have been integrated (Malan, Citation2013). According to Rosenberg (Citation2002), the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) recognised the lack of visibility of research from the African continent among local and international scholars. Therefore, INASP was responsible for establishing African Journals Online, an aggregator platform with journals from thirty-seven African countries. Finally, The World Health Organization (WHO) and The Association for Health Information and Libraries in Africa (AHILA) were responsible for establishing the African Index Medicus database. This was an initiative to collate ‘regionally-generated biomedical information’ (Atani & Kabore, Citation2007). The database was intended to redress the issue of access to health information produced on the African continent and/or by African researchers.
2 A prior study by Naidoo et al. (Citation2023) analysed the use of South African official languages in journals on the Sabinet database. The finding was that between 2000–2020, only sixteen articles were written in the indigenous African languages of South Africa. The present scoping review investigates Open Access journals. Therefore, the same results do not replicate in the present study.
3 The visibility of Afrikaans is interesting. Hollywood actress Charlize Theron’s comments about Afrikaans being a ‘dying language’ are debunked in the AJA and Sabinet databases analysis. Afrikaans, a language spoken by 13.5% of South Africans, has two dedicated journals. Articles written in Afrikaans also appear in seven other journals. Afrikaans, which has its origins in Dutch and Netherlands, is not considered an indigenous African language in this analysis, as this article focuses on languages that have been deliberately marginalised. https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/entertainment/charlize-theron-afrikaans-backlash-south-africa-intl-scli.