The Acting Executive Secretary of the African Academy of Languages, ACALAN, Dr. Lang Dampha Fafa has disclosed the academy’s plans for the coming year.

According to him, ACALAN will among other things be focusing on engineering of African languages.

He made this known in an exclusive interview with CEOAfrica over the weekend following a successful harmonization workshop in Kampala.

“What we do at ACALAN is to try to implement the visions and mission of the African Union. This year our focus has been on language standardization and empowerment, next year we shall be instrumentalizing these languages and promote their presence in the cyber space, we might even call it language engineering. We will promote African language in the cyber space, develop keyboard in African languages after empowering the languages, adding value to them, harmonizing the writing systems, creating terminologies for them to be able to use them more effectively as languages of instruction in our education system according to the Language Plan of Action for Africa, LPAA.

“These language engineering will go on next year, and I am glad to say ACALAN has successfully convinced the member states of African Union through the Ministries of Culture, Sports, Youth and Education to adopt January 24th to 30th as the ‘Week of African Languages’, whereby everybody will come together in Africa to commemorate, celebrate, plan, and develop language policies so that we can continue empowering and developing our languages because without these we will go nowhere,” he noted.

Dr. Lang further revealed that the academy’s focus area for the coming year will also cover language policy development, advocacy on the use of the harmonized orthographies, developing the linguistic atlas of Africa –  at least to finalise the ECOWAS chapter, adding that it will be an implementation year for African languages.