Guerra o pace delle lingue ? Esiti delle politiche linguistiche dalla colonia alla post-colonia subsahariana francofona

The sub-Saharan Africa is a very complex space from a socio-linguistic point of view. In particular, the francophone area is a region characterised by multilingualism and by exogenous diglossia, a distant contact between distant languages that share the same status. The assimilationist French colonisation policy imposed a foreign language, and by that it often determined conflictual situations and reclaiming situations among the coexisting languages. This contribution’s aim is to investigate, with mainly a sociolinguistic approach, the ambivalent collaborative and competitive relationship between the coexisting languages in the francophone sub-Saharan area and in Senegal in particular.