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French language and social ascension in colonial Africa

Thursday, March 31, 2022 17:00

Café scientifique with Cécile Van den Avenne.
As part of the month of Francophonie and in cooperation with the University of Helsinki, a series of workshops is organized on the theme “Multilingualism and Francophonie: Spaces, interactions and language modalities”.

Institut français de Finlande
yrjönkatu 36 00100 Helsinki
room

The French Institute will host the French sociolinguist Cécile Van den Avenne on Thursday, March 31 at 5:00 pm on the theme of the practice of the French language and social ascension in colonial Africa. Starting from the observation that the diffusion of the French language was the object of a consensus while remaining reserved to a French-speaking elite, she will review the path of some Africans, famous or forgotten, for whom the access to the French language was the possibility of a social ascension in their own society and beyond.

The conference will be held in French and will be followed by a discussion with the public.

Cécile Van den Avenne: Cécile Van den Avenne is a director of studies of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), after having been a professor at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 and a lecturer at the ENS in Lyon. Her work in sociolinguistics focuses on language practices in situations of colonial contact in West Africa. She is notably the author of De la bouche même des indigènes. Echanges linguistiques en Afrique coloniale (Vendémiaire, 2017) and recently coordinated a special issue of the journal Langue française (2019) with the title “Français d’Afrique. En Afrique. Hors d’Afrique”. In Finland, she collaborates with the University of Helsinki and the University of Åbo Akademy.

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