North-East Region Consortium of Programs in African Languages Conference

This year’s NERCPAL Conference at Howard University in Washington DC focuses on the commodification of African languages and cultures. With this theme, we ask you to think critically and creatively about the concept of commodification by examining how and why African languages and cultures can be discussed in monetary terms. The concept of linguistic markets views all languages as being important provided they are packaged well and presented to the right audience. We invite you to consider the place of African languages in the diaspora and the continent and show how speakers of these languages and the students we teach have repackaged African languages to give them value. We encourage participants to problematize the issue of language commodification by considering concepts such as language preservation, maintenance, vitality, identity and how African languages and cultures have been reimagined and reshaped by entrepreneurs as well as traditional language scholars, loyalists, and advocates in the 21st century.  We welcome scholars, language practitioners and stakeholders from all disciplines and backgrounds to submit their work and contribute to this important debate that can reshape and reimagine the curricula that language programs pursue. 

We believe that African languages matter and they are essential to forging critical understandings of the world and are necessary because they represent the voices of more than a 1/3 of the world’s languages.