Multilingualism, Multilingual Voices and Dialects in Europhone African Literature

A Case Study of Le Mandat by Sembene Ousmane

Abstract

Multilingualism, a principle of sociolinguistics, which involves the use of many languages within a discourse has become a central motif in African fiction, including francophone African novels. Existing studies on multilingualism on Europhone African novels have largely dwelt on literary analysis with little attention paid to the sociolinguistic features in them. This study was therefore designed to examine multilingual voices and dialects in Le Mandat by Sembene Ousmane. Voices deployed in the novel include cultural, bureaucratic and social voices: while Wolof language was discovered to have been used in conjunction with the French language, other international languages were also deployed, which include: English, Arabic and Italian. All these were used in the selected novel to foreground multilingualism in both native and international languages, while ensuring Attrition does not affect the native language- Wolof.  Data were collected from Sembene Ousmane’s Le Mandat, purposively selected due to dominance in multilingualism. The data were gathered from dialogues in the selected novel, while Bakhtin’s theory of diglossia and Myers Scotton’s theory of Codeswitching were adopted for the study. Data were subjected to sociolinguistic analysis. Cultural, bureaucratic and social voices were deployed to resist linguistic assimilation, oppression of Africans by their fellow Africans as well as showcase and resist social inequality in Africa.