Languages occupied a privileged space in early issues of Africa. Their role and scope in the imaginations and interactions of Africans of that time is less certain. We know that many of the African languages whose names we are familiar with are yet another “invented tradition” – an object featuring prominently in the colonial library that bears little resemblance to the adaptive ways of speaking characterizing the continent. While anthropology has discarded the assorted concept of ethnicity and now mainly studies how ethnicity and cultural heritage, far from being an exclusive category of being, are constructed, and feature among many social indexes contextually deployed, African linguistics remains divided. Urban sociolinguistics, embracing the new multilingual turn of the discipline, describes variation and fluidity in new registers, but sees them as a result of recent, globalized “superdiversity”. Descriptive linguists working in rural areas, a few exceptions notwithstanding, adhere to the grammar + dictionary model that distils variable language use into a fixed code. It is an artefact of this disciplinary and geographic division that rural areas are seen as being inhabited by monolingual ethnolinguistic groups, code-switching and multilingualism as urban and expanding, and that a dichotomy between European and African languages not born out in fluid language use is upheld.
Drawing on ongoing research on rural multilingualism in Western and West-Central Africa, I intend to turn this picture on its head. Introducing the many creative ways of “languaging’ (within or beyond imaginary bounded codes), their social indexical functions, their dialectic relationship with the named reifications we call languages, and the relational positioning inherent in them, I also hope to build a bridge to African social science research. An understanding of the multiple and relational choices Africans exert through speaking and in naming languages, in their sociohistorical contexts, might put African languages back into Africa, and enrich linguists, historians and social scientists likewise.