Language Policy in West Africa

This book provides a new perspective by examining the language policies of Ghana and Burkina Faso and supplements existing studies on language policy in West Africa. The study reports the social attitudes of Ghanaians towards the French language and whether or not there is the need for their country to adopt a pragmatic national language policy that enforces its vicarious teaching and learning in schools, as a way of linguistically empowering the country and thereby making it fully reap the economic, political and socio-cultural dividends offered by 21st century regional and global trade. The study combines phenomenology and naturalistic inquiry as theoretical frameworks and uses the business tool of benchmarking to compare the language policies of the two countries. The methodological crowbar with which the study is pried and crafted is a mixed design in which qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis procedures are used. The study should add to West Africa's intellectual capital and serve as a significant reference to policy makers and researchers in Language Policy.