African Ajami: The case of Senegal

Abstract

African societies are often said to be of oral tradition and are characterized, from this point of view, by the languages of their former colonizers. So, they are qualified as French-speaking, English-speaking, or Portuguese-speaking. This gives the impression that these peoples did not write their languages before European contact. But, it is well known that Africa is very much related to the East in terms of history and geography. It had traded with Arabia for more than three millennia. This relationship could not be without cultural exchange. Indeed, Africa has integrated Arabic language and writing into its communication system as Europe has done with regard to Latin. And it would be interesting to try to show the source of this use of Arabic script in Africa and to determine its chronology. In what follows, we analyze, from the history that linked Africa to the East, the process of adopting Arabic letters to write some African languages in general and the Senegalese one particularly. We will study the modalities of this codification, the extent of its appropriation by the population via traditional or imported education structures and its place in Indigenous communication systems. Then we will try to evaluate the effects of the substitution of this codification by the one based on Latin graphic at the institutional level.