IN THE QUEST FOR A LANGUAGE COUNCIL OF EASTERN AFRICA: AN IDEALISTIC FUNCTIONAL JUSTIFICATION
Keywords:
Language Council of Eastern Africa, integration, language ecology, supranational, East African community, The East African Community Languages Permanent CommissionAbstract
With the world becoming a global village today, it is normal to attempt to make every development initiative to involve as many states as possible. Collective effort brings more strength which in turn makes it easier to handle common problems. Language problems which are universal and cross-national can be handled better if states that are close to one another (economically, politically geographically) merge their efforts and resources for this purpose. This is why nations of the European Union handle, among many other issues, their linguistic and language problems as one front. This is the responsibility of language specialists, experts and researchers. To be effective and successful, however, such efforts need to be consolidated and coordinated. This paper argues for an ideal Language Council of Eastern Africa (LCEA) and outlines the linguistic objectives and justifications for such an institution in view of the linguistic ecology of the region. In the core of the paper, the main tasks of handling linguistic issues on various fronts are exonerated. This paper contributes to the substantial and growing corpus of research literature that explicates the inextricable relationship(s) between language on the one hand and regional integration and development on the other.
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